Chapter 13 #2
Puck wordlessly goes through the same routine they did countless times back at Emory: They walk Mia over to the bed, help her undress, then bring over a pair of makeup wipes to clean her face, taking extra care to remove every last atom of eyeliner from her lids.
There’s an intimacy to the ritual that harkens back to a better time in their friendship.
Mia stays silent, but coos with delight when Puck brings over an enormous pajama shirt from the dresser to pull over her head.
“So comfy,” she says, and Puck just smiles ruefully, laying her back down before they get up to fetch some water for her nightstand.
If only they had been here for her. If only Mia could listen to reason. But, God, she’s always been so bad at taking advice.
When they return with a full glass, Mia looks up with big needy eyes. “Tuck me in, Puck?” And she laughs at the internal rhyme. “Tuck Puck, Puck tuck.”
Puck leans down to pull the covers up to Mia’s chin and she takes advantage of the proximity to plant a big kiss on their cheek.
“I love you, Puck,” Mia says, but it doesn’t sound like something Puck is hearing in the present; no, it sounds far away, like an echo from a life that is no longer their own.
Love. When is the last time they heard that word used in a real way, not as a cudgel hurled between oiled-up twentysomethings on a game show?
When was the last time someone said it to Puck and they truly felt it, all four letters of it?
It didn’t always feel good, Puck remembers.
Sometimes love in its early stages felt like pain, a yawning void in the middle of you demanding to be fed.
In theory, the direction is supposed to reverse at some point, the love giving as much as it takes.
But Puck doubts they’ve made it that far—and wonders whether they ever will.
Something has gone wrong in their life, they suspect, now that an expression of affection so freely given between friends sounds like an alien language.
But that won’t stop them from returning Mia’s gesture—and meaning it.
“I love you, too, Mia,” Puck says, kissing her on the cheek before leaving the room, looking forward to the quiet contemplation of their walk back to 444.
But what they find outside instead is Damon, who’s making a habit out of startling Puck in hallways. He looks tired, but clear-eyed. Apparently, the men didn’t go quite as hard in Asheville as the women did, or at least Damon kept his wits about him. Phil is probably blacked out somewhere.
“Hey, how was boys’ night?” they ask. “Did you all do body shots off some strippers?”
“No,” Damon says, too fast, like he’s guilty of something, even though Puck knows from Robyn’s itinerary that the guys went to a virtual reality bar—a rare concession in Mia’s anti-gaming policy. The only skin the groomsmen saw tonight was computer-generated.
“Relax, I was joking,” Puck assures him.
“Oh, I know,” Damon says, then changes the subject, skipping straight past the pleasantries. “I was just coming by to check on her. How is she?”
“Drunk,” Puck reports. “But she’ll live, Dr. McLeod.”
The genuine anguish on his face suggests he’s in no mood for jokes. This is not Damon McLeod, SVP of something or other in the family business. This is a boy who’s out of his depth.
“No, I mean …” Damon starts to say, trailing off, then starting over. “Look, Puck, I know we haven’t talked much since college, but you know her really well. Maybe better than anyone. Is she doing OK? I’m worried about her.”
Puck could twist the knife and tell him what Mia said about Zander.
But they shouldn’t right now; they’d rather Damon see incontrovertible proof than hear it secondhand.
Indeed, so far, this is reading to Puck like one of those situations where they should just keep a Homewreckers contestant talking until a useful nugget comes spilling out.
There’s a reason therapists ask so many goddamn questions and provide so few answers.
“What do you mean?” Puck asks with as much earnestness as they can muster.
Damon looks past their head, like he can’t make eye contact with Puck if he’s going to say this. “I don’t know. I think she’s happy with me, but it’s still so hard to believe this is happening. You remember what it was like back at Emory, right?”
“You mean when you were eating Chex Mix with chopsticks so that you could keep your controllers clean?” Puck asks. “Yes, I do.”
“That’s very specific,” Damon says with a laugh that papers over how offended he might actually be. “But right. And Mia has always been, well, Mia.”
“You’re worried she’s still out of your league?” Puck asks him. “Don’t tell me your brother’s toast on the bus got to you. He’s an asshole, Damon, no offense.”
Secretly, of course, they hope what Peter said has been nagging at him all night, but they can pretend to be on his team for another minute.
Damon deserves happiness too, just not at Mia’s expense.
He also needs help getting back to the person he used to be, before his brother and family and the entire infrastructure of American capitalism corrupted him.
“Yeah, I guess it got me thinking,” Damon says, scratching the back of his head, where his cowlick used to stick straight up in college.
Surely Damon can’t be happy with his own transformation from soft trust fund gamer boy to food processing junior executive.
Everyone seems to get more honest late at night, when they’re drunk either from liquor or exhaustion, and it’s telling that Damon is feeling all this now.
Puck can afford to press a button—gently at first.
“Well, I wouldn’t be hung up on the past,” Puck says. “I mean, look at you now. You’re dressed like you make your deckhands fight each other for sport.”
Damon looks down at his shirt and his loafers, then back up at Puck, his expression serious. “This isn’t really me, Puck. You know that, right? We’re just not in college anymore. I can’t wear a Charmander shirt to my bachelor party.”
But why not? Puck wonders. What is it about heterosexuality that turns people who have all sorts of lovable quirks, hobbies, and interests into mindless fish swimming down the river of mainstream culture?
Damon was never Puck’s favorite of the group, but damn it, he used to like things.
Now he’s just another guppy riding the current.
“Lena had no problem with you being a nerd, apparently,” Puck points out, trying to sound playful while still searching for information about the short-lived relationship.
Damon looks uncomfortable with the subject, stammering through his response. “We were kids when we dated, Puck,” he says. “Besides, she’s dressing differently now too. Did you confront her about that?”
“No, because she’s not dressing for an imaginary golf course,” Puck says.
“I’m … figuring it out!” Damon protests, and it’s clear Puck has hit a nerve. He takes a breath to regain his composure. “I’m blending in, I guess.”
“There seems to be a lot of that going around,” Puck says, almost involuntarily.
Damon cocks his head. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
But Puck doesn’t have energy left to respond.
They can’t open the dam now because too much will come flooding out.
Mia is trying to act like a McLeod, Robyn is trying to look straight, Zander is trying to pretend he’s OK with all of this, Lena wants to act like she’s moved on, and Damon is even more insecure than Puck suspected. Can anyone here be fucking real?
Instead, Puck says, “I left Mia sleeping on her stomach with a glass of water on the nightstand,” injecting a tone of finality into their voice. “I’d check on her in an hour to make sure she hasn’t thrown up.”
They walk past Damon down the hall. He has his own issues to figure out, but it’s hard to have endless patience for a man whose own self-discovery requires abducting Puck’s best friend into an empty world of plenty.
He could have sorted out his masculinity without derailing everyone else’s lives to bear witness to it.
In about five years, maybe less, he will realize he’d still prefer doing Zelda cosplay to being a power player in the chicken world.
Or maybe he’ll abnegate everything that once made him him in exchange for a bigger office in the C-suite, cementing his own misery.
Whatever internal crisis he’s having will resolve itself one way or the other; and no matter what, he’ll be set for life.
But Mia isn’t marrying the Damon he used to be, and she’s clearly not thinking about the Damon he might become.
No, she’s marrying current Damon, thinking he’s a late-bloomer who finally grew up, not a boy trying to prove he’s a man when it’s perfectly fine for someone to be a boy if he could only care less about what the world thinks of him.
Puck has half a mind to turn around, say “Fuck the plan,” and unload on Damon to try to jolt him out of his pursuit of an impossible and unfulfilling ideal.
But when they turn the corner that leads to their room, they see Robyn standing outside their door again. She taps her wrist where a watch would be. Jesus. Can’t Puck get any rest tonight?