Page 16

Story: Call It Home

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

SOMETHING ABOUT LOUIE’S bed is really weird.

He rolls over to see what time it is and bumps into something soft and squishy.

That’s—he blinks.

Gustav.

“Ugh,” Louie says and sits up, expecting to find Ryan on the other side of Gustav, but save for the stuffed bear, the bed is empty.

Morning has started to crawl into Ryan’s room, but the world is only just waking up. Louie sits up, considering the comforter that is slung around him like he’s the filling of a calzone.

He slides out of bed and tugs the comforter back into place.

Ryan’s bathroom door is open, but the light’s off, so he’s not in there. The house is quiet as Louie sneaks into the hallway and checks the kitchen. Also dark, equally empty. He squints at the living room, where Ryan’s phone is sitting on the end table by the couch.

Louie approaches as quietly as he can, peering over the back of the couch.

There he is.

Wrapped into the cheap blanket he got at Target, not the nice fluffy one Louie always uses. Doesn’t look like he’s cold, though. He’s grabbed about five pillows and has made himself comfortable. Has he been here all night?

Louie doesn’t remember falling asleep. Ryan made him listen to a few songs and he must have dozed off during one of them. Louie will leave Ryan be; the couch is more comfortable than some beds he’s slept in, so Ryan will be okay. Once again as quietly as possible, Louie retreats, puts on his running clothes and heads out, down the street.

In the few weeks that he’s lived here, he’s learned the names of their immediate neighbors. Like on most mornings, Mrs. Horowitz is walking her labradoodle. Louie waves at her as he passes. Ryan told him, about two weeks after they’d moved in, that he once saw Mrs. Horowitz stop and look at Louie’s butt. She probably wasn’t, but Louie’s also too embarrassed to turn around now and check. What if the nice 70-year-old lady is checking out his butt?

When he gets back to the house, the smell of something fried hangs in the air. Probably Ryan making himself a breakfast bagel. He eats so much bacon. Ryan would probably tell him that every other week is not actually “so much”, but Louie eats bacon maybe once a year, so he doesn’t look at it the same way.

“Hey,” Ryan says when Louie comes walking into the kitchen. “Sleep well? In my bed?”

Louie was about to answer. Really. Except Ryan is cooking in a towel and nothing else. “Did you run out of clothes?”

“Listen, I could have just put my dirty underwear back on, but I didn’t,” Ryan says.

“I’m so proud of you.”

“Hey, easy on the sarcasm,” Ryan says, pointing a whisk at Louie. “Anyway, I hope you didn’t need to do any laundry today.”

He didn’t. When he went to Springfield, he picked up all of his dirty clothes and washed them as soon as he got back, so now he has way too much underwear and socks.

He glances at Ryan and his tiny white towel. Maybe he should go out and grab some boxers for Ryan. And a shirt. Seriously, he doesn’t have any shirts? How? Louie’s eyes get caught on a thin silvery scar just under Ryan’s collarbone that he’s never noticed before. Probably because he doesn’t usually look very closely at Ryan’s chest.

Louie turns away and grabs the blender. He was actually going to jump in the shower. He doesn’t know why he did that. He’s been feeling weird since he woke up in a bed that wasn’t his this morning.

“Strawberry?” Ryan asks with that hopeful tone Louie has come to know very well.

Louie was going for mango, but it doesn’t really matter. “Okay,” he says. He pats the top of the blender. “I’ll just shower first, yeah?”

“Sure,” Ryan says.

Louie gets some water from the fridge, which was what he came into the kitchen for in the first place, and leans against the counter. “You know,” he says, “you could have woken me up.”

“Please,” Ryan says and starts scrambling the eggs he’s cracked into a bowl.

Ryan won’t open a Michelin star restaurant any time soon, but he knows his eggs and he knows his grilled cheese. Even though he puts so much butter on there. Louie can’t even think about it.

He kind of wants one right now.

“It’s fine,” Ryan goes on. “Honestly.”

“You didn’t have to sleep on the couch,” Louie says. He should just let it go. It’s not like he wants to argue about this, but it doesn’t sit right with him.

“Eh…” Ryan shrugs. “Didn’t wanna, uh…”

“I get why you thought you had to,” Louie says quietly. He still wishes Ryan would stop waiting for him to turn out to be some kind of douchebag. He doesn’t say that out loud because he knows exactly why Ryan is waiting for him to turn out to be some kind of douchebag.

“I—” Ryan shakes his head. “Yeah. Well. ”

Louie has never really spent a lot of his time thinking about dicks.

He didn’t expect that he’d ever start thinking about dicks.

And he doesn’t know why his conversation with Ryan comes back to him while he’s in the shower but—

Okay. Louie knows he isn’t—

No. He almost tricked himself into thinking he’s not normal, but what’s normal anyway?

He’s not the kind of person who’ll just jump into bed with someone he’s just met. He likes to go out on dates first. Actually, all the girls he ended up dating were his friends first. Dominic says Louie is demi and he’s probably right about that. He let Dominic explain it to him once and it made sense, so Louie accepted it as a fact and moved on with his life. He does like to get to know people and he wants a connection. Yeah, that’s him, that’s fine.

But dicks? Those were never even on Louie’s radar.

Should they have been? He’s not sure.

He always knew exactly who he was and was comfortable with it, even when he didn’t have a label like demi to stick on it. He didn’t need to think any further than that. Maybe he should have anyway. Maybe he should have gone through the mental gymnastics.

Maybe then he wouldn’t have ended up here, in a house that he’s a guest in, in a shower that has revealed all its little quirks to him during the past few weeks, jerking off, thinking about dicks. The more he tries not to, the more dicks pop up in his mind.

He’d call Dominic because he knows a thing or two about this, but he can’t say the words “I can’t stop thinking about dicks” out loud to his brother.

He can’t say them to Ryan either.

Although it’s technically Ryan’s fault that Louie is hurtling down this road. It’s like he’s in a car with a cracked windshield and a missing tire. And it’s making weird noises. Brakes aren’t working. Louie is well aware that he’ll crash at the end of this, he just doesn’t know when and how .

Ryan didn’t turn him gay. It doesn’t work like that. The conversation they had just unlocked something at the very back of his mind and now Louie isn’t able to put it back.

He tries. Not because he doesn’t want to be bi or whatever the fuck this means. It’s distracting. It steers his thoughts into directions they shouldn’t be going. What he really needs to focus on is his game. Petrov is so close to coming back and when it happens, Louie will be going back to Springfield. The best he can do is leave a good impression.

He stays late at practice. He books extra ice time at a local rink that’s not too far from here. It’s the one Ida’s team plays at. Nick helps him out and gives him the manager’s number.

“You need to take a break,” Ryan says when Louie comes back after a two-hour session at the rink. “At some point. You just need to… chill.”

“Chill,” Louie repeats.

“Yeah. You know… sleep in, sit on the couch all day, eat food that is bad for you.”

“What if I don’t want to do any of that?”

Ryan’s eyebrows shoot up. Calling bullshit.

Louie sits on the piano chair. “Listen,” he says because sometimes he feels like Ryan doesn’t. “I’m not you.”

“I… yeah. Obviously.”

“No, clearly it’s not obvious to you,” Louie says, waving his hands at Ryan, who is subscribing to the whole couch-and-junk-food philosophy today. He’s got a beer open on the coffee table next to an empty burger box and a handful of leftover fries that have probably gone cold. “You’re good at hockey.”

Ryan’s frown only deepens. “So are you.”

“Maybe I am, but which one of us is playing on an NHL team?”

“Both of us are?”

“Are you being like this on purpose?” Louie snaps. “I’ll be back in Springfield in less than a week.”

Ryan sits up, fully committing to this conversation now. “You don’t know that.”

“I do. I know that.” Louie shakes his head. “Petrov is coming back. When he does, I go. That’s how it works. Ever heard of cap space? They can’t keep me, not even if they want to.”

“Well, yeah, but… you’ve been playing really well. I’d bet you’ll be back in no time if there are any other injuries.”

“That’s just it, isn’t it? If,” Louie echoes.

“Someone’s always injured,” Ryan says. “Come on. You’re not a bad hockey player just because you’re—”

“Clearly, I’m not good enough.”

“You’re just saying that because that’s what your dad has been spoon-feeding you all your life,” Ryan says.

He’s right.

That doesn’t make it okay.

“Don’t,” Louie says. Something in his chest feels weird. Too tight. Too hot.

“Why not?” Ryan asks. “You are good enough. You’ve been showing us that you’re good enough for weeks.”

Louie stares at the floor. He doesn’t want to hear any of that. “You don’t have to say all that crap to—why are you even saying all that?”

“Because it’s true.”

“It’s not, though. I’ll go back to Springfield and when the new season starts, I’ll work my ass off, like every year, and someone will pull me aside and tell me that they saw that I want it but that I’m just not ready yet. They’ll call me up a few times and that’ll be it.”

“You really believe that,” Ryan says.

Louie looks up and regrets it a second later because Ryan is looking at him with so much pity that it makes Louie want to throw up. “Just stop,” he says. “I—I’m gonna go to bed.”

“Lou.”

“What?”

“It’s, like, seven. Come on. I’ll give you my leftover fries. ”

“I don’t want your leftover fries,” Louie says. As soon as it’s out of his mouth, he realizes it was too loud and too harsh, but the tight, hot something in his chest is about to explode.

“Fine, go to bed,” Ryan says and he says it kindly and that makes it worse. “I just think someone should remind you that you’re not trash. Because you aren’t.”

“Why do you even care?”

“Uh, because I’m your friend and caring is kind of part of the whole friend deal.”

“Well, stop,” Louie says and stands up. “Just fucking stop. I didn’t ask you to care.”

If Ryan says anything else, Louie doesn’t hear it. He stomps down the hall and locks himself in his room. He doesn’t slam the door. Not his house, not his door to slam.

He doesn’t talk to Ryan the next morning.

He doesn’t even go to the rink with him.

Petrov is ready to rejoin the lineup and they’re sending him back to Springfield.