17
STEFAN
The truth is: I always knew I loved my best friend Ryan.
The other truth is: I didn’t realize how much.
After our “fun”, it was awkward as fuck. I’m not going to lie. I don’t remember cleaning up. I was so spent after—whatever it is we just did—that I fell asleep soon after, still gripping my cock and still wet and sticky from my cum, which had quickly turned cold.
Neither Ryan nor I said a word to each other.
Awkward as fuck, like I said.
When I finally open my eyes, Ryan has already gone off to work. The sun has ignited the sky, and the house is so dead quiet, I can hear distant dogs barking in someone else’s backyard.
First thing I do is take a shower. I push away all the thoughts that try to drown me. I really don’t want to answer any questions. I don’t want to explain anything. I don’t want to even know what last night meant—not now, not yet, maybe not ever.
Right now, I just want to be clean.
That’s what I tell myself while the shower roars around me and the scalding hot water pours down my sticky body.
Clean.
In the kitchen, there’s a tiny note scribbled out on a green sticky on the refrigerator from Ryan telling me there’s hard-boiled eggs in the fridge and cinnamon rolls in the microwave.
The note makes me feel funny, like I try to picture Ryan after he woke up, saw my naked, messy body, then took his own shower and got dressed, came to the kitchen, and wrote me this note.
Still taking care of me.
What was he thinking as he wrote it? Did he wonder what the hell possessed me last night?—or him? Did he speculate on life’s purpose? Was he making lists in his head of what he’d need to do when he went into the office?
I peel the note off the fridge and cast it into the trash bin, then help myself to two of the eggs and a roll. Afterwards, I decide to go on a little neighborhood jog. I haven’t even hit up the gym since I got into town last week, so getting my body going feels like the right thing to do. Especially after having gotten my body going in a different way last night.
I really hope my selfish, experimental need didn’t just fuck everything up between me and Ryan. That wasn’t my intention at all. I just needed to … see.
I needed to know if there was something in me that could truly love him in that way.
When I close my eyes, I can still feel his tongue down there.
I’m so fucked.
Another half hour later, I’m in my gray joggers and a loose yellow tank top. I quickly shove my ear buds in, pocket my phone with all my pump tunes on it, then head off to get lost in Ryan’s strange neighborhood.
And to think it all began with a sore neck last night.
And a kiss.
And my ass.
I was stone sober, too. I knew what I was doing. I wanted to try it. All of it. I needed answers.
The problem is, I don’t know if I have any more answers than I did before the kiss. In fact, all I have are twenty more questions.
Maybe that means twenty more kisses to figure those out.
My heart flutters at the thought.
I’ve been straight my whole life. Girls, girls, girls. But I knew that my heart held a special place for Ryan. It always did. Even after our fallout senior year, I knew I loved him more than any other friend I had. The day we had our fallout, the first thing I did when I got home from baseball practice was close myself up in my bedroom and cry all of the tears I’d held in. My dad knocked on my door and, through it, asked what was wrong. In my most level, totally-not-crying voice, I told him that nothing was wrong. He left me alone, and then I cried the rest of my tears in silent, choking sobs, not wanting anyone to know.
Secrecy. That was my friend, always.
Even with Ryan.
There was always something … special … about us. Everyone knew it. Everyone except me—until that day.
I keep jogging and keeping my breath even. I turn the corner and start down another street. Trees and front lawns and houses pass by slowly as I go. An old man waters his front garden, then looks up and squints suspiciously at me as I jog by. In another lawn, an enormous dog is leashed to a fittingly enormous tree, and he just lazily lifts his head and watches me pass. There’s a woman with curly white hair watering her garden, and she peers over the shoulder of her pink blouse when I pass, her eyes narrowed.
I’m a stranger in this neighborhood. I don’t belong.
Yet I keep moving my feet. Running. Running.
Always running … but from what?
Turning onto another street, I catch myself thinking about all my exes for some reason. I think about the way girls taste. I think about how many breasts I’ve had in my face. I think about the sexy look in a woman’s eyes.
Then I think of Ryan’s, the way his eyes devour me when he thinks I’m not looking. It always excited me, noticing how much he … notices me.
I wish I had known him these past eight years and vice versa. He would have been there in the stands to witness my final game.
My final game … I’m so in the zone while I jog that the music in my ears literally turns into the roar of the stadium that fateful day when my career ended.
It ended with a slide into home. We won the game, but I lost everything.
Why did I come into home base so fucking hard and do this to myself? It was the angle, I think. Or maybe the sheer force. Or the slightly looser left cleat than the right one. I remember.
Or maybe the clumpy dirt beneath said cleats.
Or some dude in the front row whose odd hooting somehow reached my ears through all of the thousands in the crowd.
A million little distractions chased me in slo-mo as I darted for home. The worst of which was that weird way the shortstop on the other team looked at me, like he thought I was checking out his ass from first base or something. It made me think of all my other teammates and the weird looks I’d get from time to time.
Were they thinking things about me?
Was I?
Then I slid too late. The catcher was ready to take me out. My leg twisted and tore apart inside, but I wouldn’t know that until later. When I was sliding, I only knew something was wrong—excruciatingly wrong—but all I did was grit my teeth and bear the pain as my cleat hit that base.
“SAFE!”
My team screamed with victory. I screamed in agony.
Celebrations ensued, but I had nothing to celebrate except the end of my career. That seemed to be a strange concept none of my teammates understood. They were all so damned caught up in the excitement of ending the season on a high note that none of them realized I wasn’t celebrating with them.
Not many options to celebrate when you’re in a hospital bed being told all about the physical therapy you’re about to endure.
Fast forward to the first moment I visited home that summer and my mother coddled me while I pegged my way all over the house, the crutch sounding like I was squashing the life out of a cockroach every time I took a step. My brother Rudy kept giving me these looks all the time, like he wanted to tell me how sorry he was for what I was going through, but didn’t have the words. He seemed to hate himself for it, scowling and brooding around the house in spite of his good intentions.
But it didn’t match how much I hated myself.
After I was off the crutches, I flew back up to north Texas, met with my buddies, and we trained hard in the field. My leg felt different. I kept playing it cautious, slowing down when I felt the slightest pinch of pain. I couldn’t keep up. I had used to be a lightning bolt before that fateful slide home. After the injury, I was just a rumble in the sky that people ignored.
No one cowers from a little distant thunder; they’re stunned by the electric show of lightning before their eyes.
And my light was out.
“Baker, you’ll get better,” my teammates would assure me with their empty eyes. “Just push yourself. Train harder.”
The more I pushed, though, the more my damaged leg pushed back. It was like trying to run with lead in my thighs. It was like having three tiny adorable nieces and nephews clinging to your legs and laughing while you tried to walk.
Except you also hated them. And you sure as fuck weren’t laughing. And you wished them dead and gone.
Not quite how I’d feel about real nieces and nephews, if my brother happens to meet a nice gal and pop out some little ones.
It turns out that at one of the games I was supposed to play—but didn’t because I was busy enjoying my own agony in a hospital after my injury—a few important people were in the stands. Those important people saw my fellow teammate Adam on that field.
He was playing my position of shortstop.
The spotlight was on him that game—the spotlight that would have been on me, the spotlight I’d been waiting for.
I should have known he would be happy about my injury.
Adam was my fellow teammate who was as hungry to make it to the major leagues as I was. Despite throwing me friendly smiles and encouraging words, the truth was never lost on me: he was my rival, and if he had to take a lead pipe to my knee to advance his own career, he wouldn’t even flinch or lose a wink of sleep.
Looks like I did the job for him.
I’m still jogging through Ryan’s neighborhood, but I stop at an intersection, unsure which way to go. My leg is cramping up, but I choose to ignore it. I choose to fight through it.
You gave up, my dad’s voice taunts me.
I grit my teeth, pick a road, then move my damned legs.
I shouldn’t have gone to Adam’s celebration party. It was a stupid, stupid decision of mine to go. I thought I’d be the better man, congratulate Adam for making it to the major leagues.
I can’t say what I gave him was exactly a congratulations.
My parting from the baseball team isn’t a pretty story.
I remember the party that night, sitting in a room at his big house with my teammates everywhere. It felt like everyone was there, from the others’ girlfriends and wives, to even random friends of friends I’d never seen before. There were so many chicks and dudes everywhere, the faces were all a blur.
Or maybe that’s the eight-going-on-nine beers I had. Another bad idea I had that night.
And the tequila shots.
“You’ve had enough, man,” Pete—the annoyingly thoughtful, peacemaking one on the team—told me. “You’ve out-drank Adam, and he’s half Irish.”
Adam. Just the name made me see red—the red of his hair. Redheaded Irish Adam. Strapping, perfect, curly-haired Adam. The one who stole my dream out from under my limping leg.
The one who, for all I knew, celebrated my injury.
That’s the level of fucked-up my head was at.
I found Adam in the kitchen across a sea of silent, attentive faces. They were all listening to some story he was telling them, his voice full of that boastful gusto he was known for.
I don’t know what came over me. The alcohol gifted me a whole new set of mental capacities I didn’t know I had, and puzzle pieces fell into place before my eyes I didn’t know were swimming around in my head. It didn’t matter if my random conclusions about Adam made no sense to anyone else; it made sense to me, and it was enough to fuel my following actions.
“We sharing knock-knock jokes over here?” I called out with due obnoxiousness.
Adam lifted two superior, bushy eyebrows. Only a flicker of annoyance crossed his eyes at his story being interrupted—his story, which I wasn’t even listening to. “Hey there, Stefan.”
“Knock, knock!” I spat back. “So what the hell do we have going on here?” I asked everyone else, my eyes skimming over their faces and yet seeing none of them. “Adam telling you all how he’s got the biggest dick on the field now?”
He glanced to the left, then to the right, then said, “Stefan, you’ve had one too many to drink. Maybe you should—”
“Hey, I got a great story!” I cut him off. “It’s about a guy who slid home, and instead of ending up at the after party—plot twist!—he ended up in a hos—a hos—hospital room!”
My words slurred together. I spluttered stupidly.
I was acting like a childish little bitch. I had no self-control. I was an embarrassment to myself, to my soon-to-be former team, and to everyone who cared about me at all.
Couldn’t at least one person try to shut me up before I went and ruined everything?
“Stefan …”
“And before he could even lick his wounds,” I went on, “there was already a vulture—a big, loud, redheaded vulture—picking the meat off my torn and twisted leg. How about that?”
The kitchen was eerily silent. Even the music from the other room seemed to dampen. My words rang and echoed around me like they were vultures of another kind circling my head.
“Stefan, bro, no one’s picking at anyone’s meat. C’mon.”
“Bro.” I scoffed at that, stumbled into the kitchen island, then came around it to bring myself face to face with Adam. “Bro … That’s a funny, funny, funny fuckin’ word, isn’t it? Are we ‘bros’?” I was in his face now. I watched as each of my words made his eyelashes bat from the push of my soured alcohol breath.
Every time I said that word—bro—I felt a pang of hurt within me. Was I thinking about someone else?
Was I thinking about him?
Adam pasted an endearing, patient, condescending little smile on his flushed, freckled face. “Stefan, Stefan, Stefan.” He slapped a hand on my shoulder and gave me a little shake—which felt like an earthquake in my drunken state of mind. “We will always be bros. No matter what.”
Always be bros.
We will always be bros.
Isn’t that something I had said to Ryan Caulfield once? Isn’t that what we promised each other, that we’d always be bros?
I remember thinking about Ryan, realizing what I had lost, realizing the “bro” I had let go.
A whole new storm surged into me, fueling my anger all the worse. “You must be so fuckin’ happy,” I spat at him, set off by his words, by my thoughts of Ryan, by everything. “You always wanted my ass gone. Now you got that wish.”
“No one’s happy about what happened, Stefan.”
He was even talking sense. Adam, the prick, was being the mature one. And yet there I kept going, lips flapping. “I know how it really was on that field between us. I know it. You know it. You, Adam, were nothing but a jealous little bitch.”
Adam grabbed a fistful of my shirt. I didn’t even budge as he brought his face closer to mine, rage in his eyes. For half a second, I seriously thought the tool was going to plant one on me. Then, in a voice deadly cold, he growled, “You’re gonna be a man right now, back down, and call a fuckin’ Uber. You are taking yourself home, bro.”
Was it the use of the word “bro” that was his mistake?
Or how close he got to my face?
Or the hand I felt gently gripping my wrist? It didn’t register that it could be my teammate Pete. Didn’t matter, either. I flipped around so fast and whacked my mystery wrist-grabber across his cheek so hard, I broke skin.
No, of course I didn’t apologize. Instead, I went for a more elegant approach: “The fuck you do that for, Pete??” I shouted.
Then Adam reached for me, and all sense of awareness was gone. I lost it. In front of everyone, I threw fists at Adam, furious, and I shoved Pete—who’d been the kindest guy to me since my injury—away with such force, a wine bottle flew off the counter. People screamed and others intervened. The rest of the team was on me in seconds, yet still I fought and hollered like a rabid dog.
Was all of this really my fury for letting Ryan go?
Did I really hate myself that much?
Somewhere in my descent to the floor, I saw myself sliding into home base all over again.
In the noise of yelling in that kitchen, I heard the roar of a stadium as I won the game for my team.
And then my face found the edge of the counter, and in grasping for something to hold onto, I took a bowl of pistachios shattering to the tile with me.
And there I was: a splatter paint work of pistachio shell art on a canvas of tile. I’m sure a bit of blood and spilled alcohol joined me, but not much else.
I was depleted of everything.
Rock bottom is a kitchen floor filled with nuts and your poor teammate Pete staring at you from the other side of the room like he doesn’t even recognize you—and he’s nursing his split-open cheek with a shaking hand.
Yeah, it wasn’t my best day.
And I don’t even like pistachios.
A very sudden, sharp pain in my knee jerks me back to the present. I fumble mid-stride on the sidewalk and catch myself before smashing face-first into the concrete.
I take a deep breath, shaking away all the memories.
But they keep swarming me like bees, buzzing in my ears. I can’t tell if it’s music from my ear buds, a roaring stadium crowd, or just noise.
Then, somewhere behind my eyelids, I see Ryan’s face. I see the look in his eyes right after I first kissed him last night.
I see the surprise. Genuine surprise.
The desire.
The urgency in his body.
And his hands.
How he looked at me like he was waiting to see what I’d do next, the same way he’d always looked to me since we were kids.
Except today, the imaginary Ryan behind my eyelids is the wise one with all the advice: “You will not drink through this one,” he coaches me, his voice strong. “I’m not picking your ass up again from beside the dumpster at Beebee’s. You’re going to get up. You’re going to jog back to my house. And you’re going to have a tall glass of water in my cute little kitchen.”
Okay, maybe I indulged a bit on that last sentence.
It does the trick of inspiring a ghost of a smile on my face. His words—even imaginary as they are—give me the strength I need.
The cramp subsides. The pain dulls to nothing. And I push myself off the pavement, blink several times, and clear my foggy head.
I’m not that angry guy at Adam’s big house with a vendetta against pistachios. I’m not the angry guy who got trashed after just a couple weeks of being in town because his dad got on his last nerve.
I’m not a broken thing.
“Get moving,” imaginary Ryan encourages me, his eyes bright and inspired, his spirit filling me with that camaraderie I always craved and needed and never failed to get from him.
I obey and move my damned legs.