“And I believed him. Every single word. I thought — this is it. This is real. This person actually sees me and wants me and we're going to be okay." I close my eyes. "And then later he's telling someone on the team I'd been making him uncomfortable." I open my eyes. "The blue room is the thing I can't shake. Because he meant it. When he said it, he meant it completely. I know he did." I look at Jamie. "That's the part that really destroyed me. That you can really mean something and still do what he did. Like everything that happened to me after, all those terrible things, meant nothing at all. I thought he really did love me. I feel so fucking stupid."
"I’m not going to pretend I understand how you felt," he says. "But you were brave. Braver than I could ever be. You put yourself out there just because you wanted to be seen. To be loved. What he decided to do with that was not your fault." He stops. “Just don’t make excuses for him anymore, Rhys. Please. It’s notyour fault,” he repeats, and that last one is what gets to me.
Jamie is looking at me like a door cracked open just a tiny bit somewhere inside him. I hope it doesn't close. I want to keep it open.
After a while, he starts talking again. "My dad," he says. Eyes back on the ceiling he loves. "He had a very specific idea of who I was supposed to be. What I was supposed to want. How I was supposed to want things." A pause. "He didn't believe in soft. Didn't allow it. My mom wasn't allowed to comfort me when I fell down, when I was upset, when I needed it. You get up. You keep going. Nobody makes a fuss." He's very still. "I barely got to talk to her outside of hockey games, even when I was little. She was just, gone, always in her head at home. And I spent most of my life trying to be exactly what he wanted. Giving him everything I had. And I don't think he ever once told me I got there. He didn’t let me—he made me feel like—like who I wanted to be was wrong."
I look at him. At the lump in his throat. At his hands flat and still, clutching the duvet. At the set of his face that is not careful right now, not even close, and I don't think he knows how much he's showing me. Or even cares anymore.
"Jamie," I say.
"It's fine."
"It's not though. You were just a kid. You needed love too."
A beat. Longer than the ones before.
"No," he says. So quiet. "It's not okay."
"I wish I'd met you when we were kids," I say. "Like six years old. Before any of this. When we both started playing hockey." He looks at me. "I think things would've been different for you. If I was there."
"Yeah?" he asks. Hopeful in a way that breaks my fucking heart.
I look at him. "I would've been really annoying, though,” I tease.
"You're really annoying now."
"Yeah, but, you would've been used to it by now. Completely immune. Life would be so much easier for you."
"I would've liked that anyway." He doesn't laugh. Just stares at me with this new look in his face. Like the idea of it — of having someone in his corner to protect him before everything, someone who cared about him and would have been soft with him — landed somewhere very real. "I think I would've looked for you."
Everything in me goes still.
"What?"
He shrugs like he didn't just say something completely insane. "You always find me now. I would have found you then."
My heart actually stutters.
Jamie doesn't seem to notice.
I just lie there and look at him in the midday light and think about a version of Jamie Nash who grew up with someone showing up for him. Who didn't have to build all those walls. Who maybe laughed a little more and flinched a little less. Who was happy.
Who could love me.
I think about how much I would have liked that kid.
How much I like this version anyway. Even with all the walls still up. I just need to get better at climbing, because the view up there is so wonderful, so beautiful, it’d be worth it a million times over.
We don't say anything after that.
The early evening light moves across the ceiling slow and golden and outside someone is laughing about something and in here it's just us and two people who have let their guard down at the exact same time and are both done pretending they haven't.
At some point he gets up and orders food. Real food, an actual meal, which means Jamie Nash downloaded a delivery app today and used it for me. We eat cross legged on his bed with the TV on low, something playing that neither of us is watching, our knees touching in the middle because it's a small bed and neither of us moves away from it. We talk about nothing for a while. Easy nothing. The team. Blake.
At some point the TV gets louder and we actually start paying attention. Some action movie. Not a good one. The kind where every problem can apparently be solved by driving a car through a building. We make it maybe twenty minutes before I start talking over it.
"No chance that guy survives."
