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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

RYAN IS GOING to lose his entire mind. He’s kind of losing his entire mind already. Maybe he lost his entire mind a week ago when Louie kissed him in his childhood bedroom, with rain-drenched strands of hair sticking to his forehead and his lips cold from the run back and his fingertips burning hot against Ryan’s cheek.

Louie’s right there in the kitchen, putting together lettuce wraps that are slowly turning into just salad because he keeps ripping the lettuce, cursing softly under his breath every time.

They’ve been back for a week.

They’ve been quietly, peacefully existing together at Ryan’s house.

And neither of them has said a word about the kiss.

Ryan, in an attempt to not ruin a good thing, told Louie that Pennsylvania was basically Vegas. Except the state of Pennsylvania isn’t big enough to swallow up something as monumental as your teammate kissing you. On the mouth. With his mouth. And tongue. There was tongue. There were wandering hands. And Ryan told him it was okay to forget all about it.

He was worried about the look on Louie’s face. It was a strange cocktail of wonder and regret. Ryan drank it all in and decided to make things easy for Louie. That, of course, entailed making things harder for himself, but it was all in the spirit of finally having a normal season. When Louie makes the team in the fall—and that’s a when, not an if—he’ll stay with Ryan and they’ll be roommates and they’ll be friends and that is where it ends. There won’t be any break-ups, there won’t be any hard feelings.

Ryan will not ask Louie why he kissed him. The way he sees it, there are two options: either Louie has been suspecting that he’s bi and wanted to make sure and Ryan conveniently happened to be there, or he just wanted to kiss Ryan. Both of these options are terrible, horrible, no good at all. So Ryan will write the kissing off as some weird summer fluke.

Considering Louie’s life so far, this was probably the first fun summer vacation he’s ever had. Which is pretty horrifying, now that Ryan thinks about it, but Louie must have been drunk on the freedom of it all. He wasn’t home, no dad to nitpick, no brother to compare himself to, just dozing in porch chairs and eating the snacks Ryan’s mom made and going for walks on dirt roads and listening to distant thunderstorms while they were falling asleep.

To Ryan, it was perfect. Including the kiss.

The kiss he told Louie to forget about. Because he wanted to protect him.

Clearly, clearly, he’s going through something. He’s (badly, adorably) making lettuce wraps, for fuck’s sake. When he told Ryan he was bi, it was delivered without emotion. Just another thing he had to deal with like he deals with anything else, with hockey, with lettuce wraps. Silent stoicism.

Ryan asked him if he was okay. Louie said no. And now Ryan keeps hearing that soft little no. Day after day, it bounces around in his head, draws his eyes back to Louie.

“I don’t think this is working,” Louie says and looks up at Ryan. He wipes at the hair that has fallen into his eyes. He doesn’t put product in it, so it’s just soft and floppy. Perfect to sink your fingers into.

Ryan clears his throat. “It’s fine. Just put it in a bowl. ”

“I think I… wrapped too hard,” Louie mumbles.

“Chop it all up,” Ryan says.

“And throw it in a Dorito bag?”

“Not saying no to that.”

Louie shakes his head at him and moves to grab bowls from the cupboard by the sink and he’s not exactly wearing the tightest sweatpants, so they ride down and—Ryan looks away. He can’t stare at the dimples low on Louie’s back, he’s better than that.

“I can go to the store and grab tortilla wraps,” Ryan says to the floor.

“This is fine,” Louie says and scrapes the wraps into two bowls. “Sorry.”

“I like salad.” Ryan takes his bowl and shuffles away to the dining room table, which they started using after they came back without even talking about it. Louie ordered them dinner and when it got here, he put out plates.

To Ryan, it was just another sign that something was off, but now he actually likes it. When he lived with Carrot, they never ate at the table. Ryan isn’t sure Carrot is aware of the table as a concept.

“You don’t,” Louie says and joins him, his bowl meeting the table with an emphatic thunk. “You think salad is a side.”

“I mean.” Ryan spears a bit of chicken with his fork. “This at least has chicken in it. That’s not a side.”

Louie’s eyes narrow. “Stop trying to make me feel better.”

“Fine,” Ryan says. “I hate green things. They’re bad. Ew. Can’t believe you’d make me food. Terrible of you.”

Something not entirely unlike a smile makes an appearance on Louie’s face before he starts eating his lettuce wrap disaster.

“Enjoying the show, hmm?”

Ryan has been caught. Not literally. Liam, who appeared next to him out of nowhere, has no idea what Ryan was thinking about.

Nick and Louie are on the ice. The ice the Cardinals usually practice on. Summer’s almost over and informal skates are starting. In Hartford, it’s Nick who gets everyone together as soon as it seems acceptable. Nick, and with him Louie, have been skating, training all summer long, but the fact that they’ve moved back to the rink in Silver Lakes means the new season is approaching at breakneck speed.

And Ryan can’t stop watching Louie. That’s what Liam caught him doing. He caught him watching Louie. The show , as Liam called it.

Last season, Louie was good. He played well. He deserved to get called up. But the guy who’s on the ice with Nick right now is a different player. He moves differently, passes differently, and he’s smiling. The laser focus is the same, but last season’s Louie never cracked a smile while he was on the ice. Probably thought people (his dad) would say he’s not taking hockey seriously.

Ryan will not be so arrogant as to suggest that he did this by telling Louie not to go back to Boston. Louie made his own choices; Ryan didn’t make him do anything. But he may have played a part and he’s glad he did.

“Nick has been texting me all summer,” Liam says, amused. “We do have an open spot on our line.”

“You think Nick wants Louie full-time?” Ryan asks, even though the answer is currently on the ice and having a lively discussion by the goal.

Liam clears his throat and does air quotes when he says, “Lee, you have to come to the rink today, this is going to work, I feel it.” He shakes his head. “Like Nick will be the one making that choice.”

“Pretty sure Coach listens when Nick has a request,” Ryan says.

“Nick is very accommodating,” Liam says. “He’d never actually request that sort of thing. I guess he plans on convincing Coach the conventional way.”

Liam doesn’t tell him what the conventional way is and gets on the ice. Presumably, Nick’s plan is to convince Coach with sheer on-ice chemistry. Louie already played with Nick and Liam for a few games last season and it worked out for them, but now Nick has also spent all summer teaching Louie how to find him in every corner of the rink. Those two are tuned into each other and Ryan highly doubts anyone else will stand a chance at this point.

Good for Louie. He’s ready for this.

Ryan lets them have the ice a little while longer, not so much watching the three of them but following Louie around the ice with his eyes. He tries to snatch the puck away from Liam, who promptly puts him into a headlock and pulls his practice jersey over his head.

In the meantime, Nick sweeps the pucks out of the net, smirking at Louie and Liam, who are still wrestling. He comes over to the bench to grab his water bottle, raising his eyebrows at Ryan.

“Just admiring your work,” Ryan says.

Nick glances at Louie, who seems to be trying to evade the fighting lesson Liam wants to give him. “I didn’t do anything.”

It’s very Nick of him.

Ryan shrugs. “You gave him a chance.”

“Because he deserved one,” Nick says. “He’s the one who showed up every day.” His lips twitch. “You showed up every day, too.”

“He made me,” Ryan says. He would have shown up for training even if Louie hadn’t been a pain in the ass about it, but he may have taken a few more rest days.

“Uh-huh,” Nick says, like he knows that Ryan, even though he complained a lot about getting up early, looked forward to training or skating with them every day.

Nick puts his water bottle down and skates away. Ryan gives himself another second, breathing in deeply. The closer they get to next season, the more antsy he gets. It’s like he’s vibrating on the inside. He’s not worried about making the roster, but he can’t stop thinking about whether or not Louie will stay.

He doesn’t know what would be worse—Louie staying with him and being around all day, every day, or Louie going back to Springfield and leaving Ryan on the Cards all by himself .

Ryan is at least sort of friends with Nick and Liam, but he’s not friends with them the way he’s friends with Carrot and Slaw. Those two knew (know, actually) that Ryan is extremely-not-straight, and Ryan just doesn’t see himself telling Nick Rivera that he loves dick. Sorry, Nick, but that’s not happening.

Liam is a solid maybe on the coming out agenda. He’s nice and he loves the boys, but he’s also such a dude. Ryan picks at his stick tape to give his hands something to do while he has his crisis.

“Rah-rah,” Liam shouts, grinning at him, “get your ass out here.”

Ryan slowly clambers over the boards. He’s not making any decisions today. Or this week. He grabs himself a puck and starts doing tricks. It was always one of his favorite parts of warm-ups when he was in high school. He stopped doing them in Toronto after his first game when some reporter called him a show-off. When Nick and Louie started practicing lacrosse goals, Ryan started playing around with pucks. He throws one as high up as he can, catches it, does it again, goes higher and higher until he loses the puck and has to chase after it.

That’s when he notices Louie watching him from across the rink.

Ryan picks up the puck and nods at Louie. Then he tosses it. Louie, being Louie, catches it on the blade of his stick without much of an effort.

Ryan wants to kiss him on the mouth. Fuck’s sake.