Page 29

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

IT’S NOT THAT Ryan was expecting Louie to still be fast asleep next to him when he wakes up in the morning. Louie always gets up early, only it’s even earlier than that when Ryan crawls out of bed.

Ryan grabs some clothes off the floor and shuffles into the kitchen. He doesn’t find any of Louie’s clothes, only his green suit jacket.

“Louie?” Ryan calls.

Clearly, Louie isn’t home. A glance at their pile of shoes by the front door tells Ryan that Louie went out for a run. Okay. That’s nothing unusual. For a second, he was worried that Louie might be having some regrets about last night.

Ryan makes himself a cup of coffee and starts cracking eggs for omelets because there isn’t much he can do until Louie gets back and they can have an actual conversation. They can’t pretend it didn’t happen; Ryan won’t let Louie do that to him again. He seemed okay last night, at least, but Ryan knows full well that things tend to look different in the morning.

He grabs his phone to check the scores for last night’s Western Conference games but gets distracted by the Cardinals’ group chat where the guys are asking Louie if his brother is okay.

Ryan’s stomach roils .

It has to be bad. The guys wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t.

Louie replied an hour ago, saying he hasn’t heard anything yet. Ryan takes a deep breath and checks Twitter. Sometimes Twitter knows too much, but this morning Ryan doesn’t mind at all. He searches Bastien Hathaway and immediately finds a clip from last night.

Ryan watches it twice, sick to his stomach. It’s a clean hit, which somehow makes it worse. Total accident. But Louie’s brother goes into the boards headfirst and he drops to the ice like a sack of potatoes. Ryan can tell, even on his small phone screen, that Bastien passed out before he even hit the ice.

“Shit,” Ryan says.

In the video, Bastien gives a thumbs-up as he’s stretchered off the ice, so at least he was awake, but that doesn’t mean much. Bastien’s team posted a statement last night saying he’d been taken to the hospital and was being evaluated.

Ryan waits for the sound of Louie’s key in the front door.

It doesn’t take long, except it takes an eternity.

Frozen to the spot, Ryan abandons his attempts at breakfast and glues his eyes to the kitchen door, the same door they bumped into last night while Louie was kissing him breathless. Like Ryan said, things tend to look different in the morning.

Louie appears, hair messy, cheeks red from the cold. “You saw.”

Ryan nods. “Do you know—”

“I don’t know anything,” Louie says. “Mom and Dad flew to Saint Paul this morning. Dominic just called me and he doesn’t know much either. I think they’re mad at both of us.”

“Your parents are mad at you because…?”

“Because I didn’t go home this summer and shut them out and then invited Dominic for our home opener. And now they’re shutting us out and not telling us anything.”

“That’s fucked up,” Ryan says. He’s been saying that a lot and it’s starting to lose all meaning .

Louie shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.” He laughs. “Nothing I do matters.”

“That’s not true.”

“No, it is. I scored a hatty last night and it doesn’t matter. And I know this is messed up, but I had one good thing happen to me and…” Louie snaps his mouth shut and takes a deep breath. “Nothing matters.”

Sometimes, Ryan wants to shake Louie. Not that it’ll help. What he’s saying comes from a place deep inside him. It’s not that nothing matters. It’s that nothing he does will ever matter enough for his dad.

“Louie,” Ryan says, “your dad is never going to see you. And maybe your brother will always be a little bit better than you. But that doesn’t mean you’re not good. You still matter. And…” Oh, Ryan is so about to ruin a good thing. But Louie needs to hear this. “I know this is tough. Something awesome happened and you thought maybe this time your dad would be proud of you. And now it’s all about your brother again. It’s okay to be jealous that he’s hogging the spotlight.”

“He’s not—no. I’m not—”

“You’re jealous,” Ryan says. “It’s fine, it’s just me. I get it. I see you.”

Louie throws up his hands. “Well, I don’t want you to.”

“Too late for that,” Ryan snaps. “What, you think I’m judging you because you’re having ugly emotions? Because you’re not perfect in every way?”

“Aren’t you?” Louie asks quietly. “Judging me?” he adds when Ryan doesn’t reply right away.

“No, I’m not. Newsflash, Louie: nobody’s perfect. Not even you.”

Louie leans back against the wall, eyes closed. “I can’t do this right now.” He shakes his head. “He’s not hogging the spotlight, he’s… what if this is bad? What if he’s really, really hurt? And it’s… for the past few years, all I wished for was that he’d stop being so damn amazing all the time. And guess what happened.”

Ryan gapes at him. “You’re not actually saying—you can’t make someone get hurt with your thoughts.”

Louie looks at him. That look says, Yes, I absolutely believe my brother got hurt because of my thought crimes .

Ryan tries to reach for him, then remembers too late that Louie isn’t much of a hugger. Louie is faster anyway, his hand coming up to keep Ryan at an arm’s length.

“That’s bullshit, Lou.”

“Look,” Louie says. And just like that, this conversation becomes about last night.

Ryan doesn’t know how. Maybe it’s the way Louie’s face changed that tipped him off. Deep down, he knew Louie wouldn’t jump into this with him. Louie doesn’t jump; he calculates his steps. And what he’s doing right now is called taking a calculated step back.

“I’m sorry,” Louie says in response to whatever is happening on Ryan’s face. He doesn’t really have any control over it. He won’t even try.

“Don’t…” Ryan takes a deep breath. “You don’t have to apologize.”

“I feel like I wasn’t honest with you.”

“Except we’ve never had a conversation about this, so you didn’t even have a chance to be honest. It’s fine, don’t worry. I know how it goes. This isn’t my first rodeo.”

Ryan isn’t the kind of guy people want to spend the rest of their lives with. Casual sex? Dudes love casual sex with Ryan. And Ryan’s great at casual sex. But everything beyond that is a no. Even the thing with Kaden wasn’t an actual relationship that was going anywhere.

He’s being unfair—Louie’s going through it right now. Ryan can’t hold that against him and he knew from the start that being with Louie, in whatever way, wouldn’t be straightforward. The more he learns about Louie, the more endearing he finds him. Louie is smart and Louie cares about what he says to other people. He’d never tell Ryan that his dad will never be proud of him. He’d be so much kinder. Louie is good. He’d never go out of his way to hurt someone.

Ryan wants to hug him so badly and it stings a little that he’s not allowed. That he’s not wanted .

At least Louie had the guts to have this conversation in person, although Ryan still wants to crawl into a hole and die, so maybe a text would have been better. Maybe Kaden did him a favor and Ryan didn’t even realize.

“I, uh…” Louie shuffles his feet. “I asked Liam if I could stay with him for a bit.”

Ryan looks up. “What? Why?”

“Because…” A shrug finishes that sentence.

Except it doesn’t tell Ryan shit. Whatever happened to finishing your sentences? “You’re… moving out?”

“I’m not moving out, I just need a break from—”

“Me,” Ryan finishes. That one stings a whole fucking lot. “I see.”

“No, not you. Just… all of this.” Louie shifts again. “I think I… I finally made the roster and I’m doing great. I’ve been working for this for years and I can’t get distracted.”

“By me,” Ryan says, since Louie won’t say the quiet part out loud.

“By my feelings for you,” Louie says. “You get it, right? That it’s important to me that I don’t screw this up?”

“Yeah, of course I get that.”

“And you get that this isn’t about you.”

Ryan only nods. It’s probably at least a little bit about him. But the whole it’s not you, it’s me thing never gets old, does it?

“I really am sorry,” Louie tacks on.

It’s not that Ryan doesn’t believe him. It’s not that he’d do anything differently. But he did it again. He ruined another good thing.

Ryan should have seen Liam coming.

Liam gives it three days, then he sits down next to Ryan while he’s shoveling chicken and rice into his mouth after practice.

“Wanna tell me why you and Lou are fighting?” Liam asks. No hello , no how are you , no isn’t the weather nice today ?

“Not really,” Ryan says, then shakes his head. “We’re not fighting anyway.” In fact, they had an invigorating chat about the Ravens’ mega-lethal power play in the locker room just now. People who are fighting don’t have chats, invigorating or otherwise.

Things didn’t blow up in a big way. They just kept going, but differently than before. Ryan is starting to wish things had blown up in a big way because that’s a real ending. This is something akin to torture. Every day, he resists the urge to poke at it and find a way to blow it up anyway because it’ll hurt less in the long run.

“Right,” Liam says, “he just showed up at my house because he likes me better than you.”

“Yeah, that’s probably it.”

Liam sighs. “I’m too old for this, just so you know,” he says. “Is it about a girl? That would be very stupid.”

“It’s not about a girl.” Ryan rolls his eyes. “Come on.”

“You never know,” Liam says. “Did he sleep with your sister?”

“What?”

“Did you sleep with his—wait, I don’t think he has a sister.”

Ryan stays very still. For a second there, he thought Liam was going to ask if Ryan slept with Louie’s brother.

“Do you have a sister?” Liam asks.

“I have several,” Ryan says. “And Louie didn’t sleep with any of them as far as I know.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Liam asks. “When you kids fight, it’s always because someone stole someone else’s girlfriend or because someone slept with someone else’s mom.”

Ryan almost chokes on his chicken.

“He just doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d sleep with someone’s mom,” Liam goes on.

“You need to stop saying that,” Ryan says. “I was really enjoying this food.”

“Did you—”

“Really?” Ryan interrupts. “I mean, seriously?” Liam is just saying all that to get Ryan to spit out the truth, but the truth is even worse than Ryan fucking someone’s mom. Well, not worse. Just—more complicated.

Ryan thinks back to the conversation he had with Liam and some of the other guys at that bar about having a gay teammate. It didn’t go as planned but it also didn’t go badly, exactly. Ryan sighs at his rice and says, “I’m kinda gay, you know?”

Well, shit. Well, fuck. Okay, then. He said it. Didn’t happen the way he wanted it to, but when does it ever?

Liam’s brow furrows. “Did Louie have a problem with that? Is that why he moved out? Because if that is it, I’ll have a talk with him. That’s not okay.”

“Oh, uh, no,” Ryan says. “He’s known for a while.”

From a few tables over, Waldo is glancing at them. Did he overhear that? Jesus. Shit. This is not how Ryan was going to do this. But he never does it the way he was going to. It always slips out in the worst moments.

Waldo looks away again, distracted by Nick, who’s sitting down with him.

“Don’t worry about them,” Liam says. “Actually, don’t worry about anyone on this team.”

“Come on,” Ryan says, “there’s always someone.”

“Well, if there is someone, I will deal with it,” Liam says, smiling serenely. “If Waldo isn’t faster.”

“Why?” Ryan asks. “I mean, why do you care?”

“Why should I not care?” Liam says easily. “My daughter would call you a dum-dum for this, you know?”

“Ugh, she’d probably be right.”

Liam, lips pressed together, nods sagely. “Come over for dinner?”

“Probably not the best idea,” Ryan says.

“Maja will be very disappointed. She said, ‘Papa, you need to invite Rah-rah over for dinner and if he says no, I’ll cry all evening’.”

“She said all that, huh?” Ryan asks .

“Of course she did. I’d never lie to you.”

“Rain check?”

“Fine,” Liam says and leaves to get himself something to eat.

Maybe Ryan needs to stop trying to find another Carrot on the Cardinals. Maybe his Carrot can be a father of two who calls you a dum-dum and invites you over for Swedish meatballs.

Ryan really wishes he could have said yes to dinner. The house is so fucking quiet without Louie there and Ryan is still bad at being alone.

“Everything okay?” Waldo asks from behind Ryan when he’s on his way to his car.

Ryan jumps a foot to the left. Totally snuck up on him. “Yeah, why?”

“Lee had the serious face on,” Waldo says.

“Yeah, no, it’s…” Ryan shrugs. “I came out to him. Weirdly. Over lunch. And I guess now I’m coming out to you weirdly in the parking garage.”

“Came out as in…” Waldo trails off and waves his hand at Ryan. “Came out?”

“Yeah,” Ryan says and side-eyes Waldo. “I think he offered to kill someone for me if they’re mean about it.”

“I’m not being mean about it, I promise,” Waldo says and claps Ryan on the back. “That’s why you asked the other day, hmm? About gay teammates?”

“Yeah,” Ryan says. Why lie? It’s obvious.

“Wait,” Waldo says and stops walking. “Is that why Louie isn’t staying with you anymore?”

Why does everyone think that? Louie would never. Except Ryan was also wary before he really got to know him. These guys have been in and out of locker rooms even longer than Ryan; they’ve heard it all.

“No, it’s really not,” Ryan says. “He just needed a break from me. I get kinda annoying.” It’s not even total bullshit. Ryan doesn’t understand why it matters. They’re not actually fighting and they’re not bringing bad vibes to the ice .

At this point, he just wants to go home, lie on the couch for the rest of the day, and mope.

Waldo narrows his eyes at him. “I don’t believe you. But okay.”