Page 41 of After the Rain

I looked at these two people who'd spent countless weekends helping me strip paint and install flooring, who'd listened to me process my divorce and figure out how to be a single father, who'd never judged my increasingly elaborate plans for a house that was supposedly just an investment property.

The truth felt like a splinter I'd been carrying under my skin for weeks, painful but too deep to ignore any longer.

"I kissed him," I said finally, the words falling into the silence like stones into water.

Jazz nearly choked on her beer. "Holy shit. Cooper's teacher? The guy who looks like he stepped out of a magazine for sensitive intellectuals?"

"Ezra. His name is Ezra." Even saying his name out loud made something in my chest tighten like a screw being turned. "We were at the river park coincidentally, and I... I kissed him."

"And?" Kane prompted gently, setting down his beer with the careful attention of someone preparing for important information.

"And then I panicked like a fifteen-year-old who'd just been caught sneaking out, and I haven't been able to look at him since without feeling like my entire world is doing that thing where you're on a ladder and it starts to wobble."

Jazz set down her beer and leaned forward, her expression serious now. "Okay, let's unpack this. First question, and this is important: did he kiss you back?"

The memory hit me like walking into a room where someone had been burning cedar—Ezra's soft lips, the way he'd melted into the kiss for just a moment before we both came to our senses, the rightness of it that had terrified me more than anything I'd ever experienced.

"Yeah," I said quietly. "He did."

"Second question," Kane said, his voice carefully neutral in the way that meant he was being extra thoughtful. "How do you feel about that?"

I laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Terrified. Confused. Like I've been living in a house for thirty-eight years only to discover there were whole rooms I'd never seen."

"But how do you feel about him?" Jazz pressed, leaning forward like she was conducting an intervention. "Forget the panic for a minute. When you think about Ezra, what happens in your chest?"

I closed my eyes, letting myself remember the way Ezra moved through his classroom with such quiet confidence, the patience in his voice when he worked with Cooper, the way his whole face transformed when he laughed at something unexpected. The easy domesticity we'd shared that day at my house—cooking together, reading stories, moving around each other like we'd been choreographing that dance for years.

"Like I want to know everything about him," I admitted. "Like I want to understand what makes him laugh and what keeps him up at night. Like I want to build something with him that I've never wanted with anyone else."

"Including Sarah?" Kane asked.

"Especially including Sarah." The admission felt like removing a load-bearing wall—necessary but terrifying because you weren't sure what would collapse. "Being with Sarah always felt like performance. Like I was an actor who'd memorized his lines but never understood the character. But with Ezra... it feels real in a way I didn't know was possible."

Jazz was quiet for a moment, processing this revelation like she was calculating load requirements for a structural beam. "Wade, can I tell you something? As someone who spent most of her twenties in small Oregon towns where being a Black lesbian contractor was about as welcome as a termite infestation?"

I nodded.

"There's no timeline for understanding yourself. I had my first crush on a girl when I was fourteen, but I didn't have the vocabulary or the courage to understand what that meant until I was in my twenties. Some people know their truth at five, some at fifty. There's no wrong age to discover who you really are.” Jazz said.

"But what about Cooper? What about my business, my place in this community? What about the fact that I was married to awoman for fifteen years and thought I was straight until three weeks ago?"

"What about it?" Kane asked, his tone matter-of-fact. "Wade, being married to a woman doesn't disqualify you from being attracted to men. Sexuality isn't a test you pass or fail—it's something you discover about yourself, like learning you're good at carpentry or that you hate brussels sprouts."

"But everyone will think I was lying to Sarah, that our whole marriage was a sham?—"

"Everyone will think what they're going to think regardless," Jazz interrupted. "The question is: what do you want? Not what's safe, not what's expected, not what makes other people comfortable, but what do you actually want your life to look like?"

I looked around the master bedroom we'd been working on, seeing it through new eyes. The space I'd unconsciously designed for partnership, for morning coffee shared in the reading nook, for quiet conversations before sleep, for the kind of intimacy I'd been building toward without understanding what I was hoping for.

The room suddenly felt like a confession I'd been writing without realizing it.

"I want to see where this goes with Ezra," I said finally, the words feeling both terrifying and inevitable. "I want to understand what I'm feeling and what it means. I want to stop being afraid of who I might be."

"So what's stopping you?" Kane asked.

"Mrs. Garrett and her campaign against him. She's convinced that Ezra is somehow inappropriate with students because he's gay, and she's been building a case against him. If I pursue this, I could make things worse for him professionally."

Jazz's expression darkened like storm clouds gathering. "That fucking harpy. Sorry, Kane, I know you don't like the language, but that woman is poison."

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