5. Ryan #2
My hand was steady when I slipped the key into our front door.
Shocking, since I drank enough coffee to power the electric grid for most of Rochester. The door creaked open. I stepped inside, toed off my sneakers in the foyer, and took a long, calming breath of warm air scented with cinnamon. Cinnamon?
“Hey,” Dad said, emerging from the dimly lit kitchen in his new scarlet macaw-patterned caftan and corduroy dad slippers.
I jumped slightly, twirling from the sight of my shoes on the floor to my father.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. I woke up in the night to pee and had a sudden hankering for those cinnamon rolls from the tube.
You know, the ones you liked so much as a kid? ”
“Oh, hey, yeah. I like those,” I replied, knowing full well he’d not woken up with a craving for cinnamon rolls. He’d been up this whole time. He smiled and ran a hand over his silver and red hair, his whiskers thick on his cheeks. “You waited up for me, huh?”
Caught red-handed, all he could do was shrug and smile wanly. “Maybe. Your text sounded upset.”
“How does a text sound emotional?” I asked as he padded off into our little kitchen where the warmth of a recently used oven filled the room with spices and radiant heat.
He placed a plate of buns on the round table, next to the stack of bills to be paid where Mom used to sit to eat.
The fourth chair was now a coat catcher.
“Call it parental telepathy,” he explained before going to the fridge for milk to fill two empty glasses waiting for the two percent. “You never work that late, not even when there’s an away game early departure. Want to talk about it?”
“Sure. Not much to talk about,” I said and sat in my chair facing the back door. Dad sat across from me, fluffing out his caftan before taking his seat. I picked at one of the warm rolls, not hungry in the least as I had pie with Lyle to soak up the gallons of coffee.
“Oh? Did you go clubbing?”
“No, no, I don’t club anymore.” He knew that.
That was his roundabout way of asking if I’d been in a bad place facing bad choices.
I poked at the roll on my plate, lifting my gaze from it to him.
“I did… I did this weird thing at work.” He cocked a red brow as he cut into his roll with a knife and fork, his dark eyes on me as I spoke.
“Okay, so I ran into Gideon Taftwell the other day at the mall.”
“Oh, Taft is a good guy. Good hockey player. Quiet but respectful.”
“He is, yeah, all those things. We had a pretzel and talked. Then he reached for me, totally innocent,” I assured him as both his brows winged up. “He wanted to wipe my face for cheese. Stupid me freaked out. Ran from the food court. It was just… stupid.”
“No, son, it’s a reaction to a big person moving at you too quickly. After that incident in New York with Walker, being leery of hulks is pretty normal.”
“Hmm, maybe so, but it was over the top. Anyway, I went back to find him. Dad, I told him about me being gender fluid. And he was totally cool. Like, he didn’t even blink. He just said that if it made me happy then he was happy.”
Dad smiled. “See, I said he was a good guy.”
“He is, nice, really nice. I helped him find a suit for the charity event. We had a really nice time. I think he could be a friend if he wanted to be, but then tonight I did this weird thing. I was… I was returning his skates to his stall when I… I sort of picked up an old hoodie of his in the stall and… I sort of smelled it.”
“Oh.” Dad looked befuddled. “Was there a foul stink coming off it? I know lots of those guys have shit in their lockers that smells like roadkill.”
“No, it smelled good. Like pine. Like him. I… think about him a lot now.” Using my fingernail, I scraped some cinnamon off the top of the roll and stared at it under my nail.
“I think of him in a romantic way, and that’s…
I know it was wrong to do what I did. Total loser sicko stuff.
I felt shitty about myself, down on myself for being such a stalker weirdo.
Then it was just there.” I glanced from my nail to my father.
“The need to get high. It came out of nowhere. Just BLAM! There it was. I’ve been doing so good.
It freaked me out, so I called Lyle and had coffee with him. He talked me down.”
“Good, oh good. I’m so proud of you,” he roughly whispered.
“Don’t be. I was sniffing some guy’s hoodie. That’s sick.”
“No, it’s not. You know what that says to me?” I shook my head as my gaze lifted from my nail to my father. “It says that you like Taft, and that you’re lonely, and that you wanted a moment of touch that made you feel close to him.”
“Sure, you can dress it up pretty, but it was uncool. I need to tell him what I did.”
“Did Lyle advise you to do that?”
“Yeah, sort of. I mean he didn’t come right out and say those exact words.
He advised me to think about confessing to Gideon about it so that I could ease the weight of my guilt for stepping over bounds.
He says the guilt leads to depression and that leads to bitterness about me and that leads to wanting to dull that pain. ”
“Makes sense. Lyle is a smart cookie. Whatever you do, Ryan, just know that I’m here for you. Always.”
“I know.” My throat felt thick. I stretched out a hand, and Dad took it, giving it a squeeze.
“Did you and Lyle have anything to eat with your coffee?”
“Yeah, but I could eat a roll.” It was a lie, yeah, and recovering addicts shouldn’t lie as it starts a chain of events that could lead to more lies and blah, blah, blah.
I’d heard all that psychology stuff in rehab, and in group every week.
But one white lie to the man who had plucked me out of the gutter and was still dusting me off wasn’t going to lead me astray.
The tiny untruth was the least I could do to make Dad happy.