Chapter 14 #2
Could I have gone to that game? Probably.
But I just wasn’t ready. It was partly that I still felt like shit all the time.
The glare and noise of a jam-packed hockey stadium wouldn’t have been easy on me.
But that wasn’t the whole problem. For the first time ever, I was reluctant to face my teammates.
If I walked into the room, they’d look at me and remember that the last time they saw me I was screaming Rikker’s name.
A smarter man would talk this over with Rikker, and ask if there had been any further discussion about me.
Rikker would probably remind me that paranoia is one of the many symptoms of concussion.
He’d say that I was being ridiculous. That these were my friends.
And by the way — who fucking cares what they think?
Well, I did, unfortunately. And I was always going to care. When I walked out of the room, I didn’t want them whispering about me. I didn’t want anyone to look at me and think sick.
Paranoia was a symptom of being Michael Graham.
The Thursday before Rikker’s big game, my mom decided to take the train to Manhattan to have lunch with my sister. “She can only take an hour and a half for lunch,” my mom said, rolling her eyes. “But she promised not to check her messages every two minutes during the meal.”
We’d just come back from statistics class, and I dumped my backpack on the dorm room floor. “You raised quite the brood, Mom. You’re keeping company with either your bitchy daughter or your grumpy, dopey son.”
“I love you both equally, all the time,” she winked at me.
“Even during statistics class?” We’d gotten ornery at each other a half hour ago, when she’d had trouble keeping up with the formulas the professor had written on the whiteboard.
Mom tucked her phone into her purse and prepared to leave.
“Even then.” She looked at me, her face serious now.
“I don’t mind all this, Mikey. I like that I have this extra chance to take care of you for a little while.
” She took two steps and hugged me. “You’re still my baby, you know.
If my baby needs me to draw the Z and T distributions on graph paper, I’ll do it. ”
Oh, man. Watch the concussion patient get emotional. Again. I had to swallow hard a few times before I could choke out, “Thanks, Mom.”
She let go of me and went to the door. “I’ll bring you some dinner when I come back. Okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Then she was gone, and I was alone for the first time in a week.
I sat down on my bed and pulled out my phone. Rikker answered on the first ring. “Hola, Miguel,” he said. “How’s the head?”
“Not bad,” I said. “What are you doing right now?”
“Voy a la clase de Espanol.”
“Okay. What about after that?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Well, Mom went to the city to hang out with Lori,” I said, feeling excited for something for the first time in a week. “Come over. I’ll get us some lunch.”
“That’s cool. I could pick something up,” Rikker offered.
“No, I got it. What else am I going to do with the next hour? It’s really boring to be me.” I still couldn’t read, and if I looked at a screen for more than a couple of minutes, I got a headache. I wasn’t even supposed to exercise much. Having a concussion made me into a waste of space.
“Okay. I’ll be there. I don’t have practice today, either.”
“Really?”
“Really. Coach gave us the day off. He says he wants us rested for tomorrow night.”
“I can help with that. All I do is rest.”
“You’re hired. See you in an hour.”
I bought meatball subs for lunch, because I remembered that Rikker had always loved those back in Michigan. (In Connecticut, though, subs are called “grinders” for some reason.)
Rikker came through the door whistling at a quarter past twelve.
We clobbered our lunch while Rikker caught me up on the hockey gossip.
Coach had Trevi playing defense. And Pepé the French kid?
We all knew that his surname name was Gerault, because it said so on his jersey.
“The revelation this week? His real first name is actually Pepé.”
“No shit!” I laughed. “I thought it was just a joke.”
“I know, right?” Rikker wadded up his sandwich wrapper and tossed it into my trash bin.
“Two points,” I said automatically. Then I yawned.
“Do you need to sleep?” Rikker asked.
“Not necessarily,” I said, because I didn’t want him to go. Though I’d already complained to him how weird it was that I couldn’t make it through the afternoon without a nap.
“You look beat,” he said. “Lie down, G. I could use a nap too.”
I didn’t know if that was true. But if I didn’t close my eyes for a little while, I’d only get a headache.
So I set the alarm on my phone for three o’clock, just in case.
The train ride back from New York took an hour and forty-five minutes.
My mom couldn’t possibly walk through the door before three or three-thirty.
Then I lay down on my bed, and Rikker kicked off his shoes. We’d never napped together. In fact, he’d never been to my room like this, in the middle of the day. This was all brand new territory.
Rikker stretched out beside me, and then opened his arms. I went willingly, resting my head on his shoulder, wrapping an arm around his waist. He kissed the top of my head.
And then, as if one just wasn’t enough, he did it again.
And that made me irrationally happy. I’d had one of the shittiest weeks of my life.
But with Rikker pressed warm and solid against me, none of it mattered.
And here was another first — I’d never lain beside Rikker before without turning into an instant horn dog. But today I fell right to sleep.
Two hours later, I awoke in a panic to the sound of my room door opening. Startled, I sat up fast, spasming into damage-control mode. Even asleep, I was worried about being busted napping with Rikker.
But it was Rikker himself who came through the door. “Easy, tiger,” he said. “It’s just me.” He carried two paper coffee cups, one stacked on top of the other, balanced with his chin.
Taking a slow breath, I willed my heart rate back into the normal range. “Did you sleep?” I asked, my voice hoarse.
“Sure did. Just not as long as you. I brought you a double cappuccino. Hope you like it.”
“Thanks.” I took the cup from him, cracked the little sipping window and tasted it. “Wow.” It was milky and fantastic. So I removed the lid entirely and took a big gulp. “I guess the Italians know a thing or two about coffee.”
Rikker eyed me over the top of his own cup. “You never order these?”
I shook my head, struck by two things. In the first place, it was depressing that my own boyfriend didn’t know how I drank my coffee. When you only see someone in the dark of night, these are the little details that go missing. We had the relationship of a pair of vampires.
Even worse, I’d made it to age twenty-one without ordering a cappuccino. Because at some point during my ignorant youth, I’d heard somebody say that it was a girly drink. And I’d crossed cappuccinos off the list without a second thought.
That’s how I’d always done it. There were a thousand little decisions I made in service to hiding something big.
All my clothes were blue or gray or black.
(Except my hockey jacket. And there could hardly be a manlier piece of clothing.) My backpack was a plain color.
My bedspread was regulation navy blue. I lived by a weird, self-imposed aesthetic, focused on never appearing gay.
The result? Not only did Rikker not know my taste in coffee, I didn’t either.
Rikker made himself comfortable on my beanbag chair, and sipped his coffee. “How are you feeling?”
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. “Today I feel a little better. Finally.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said, kicking off his shoes. “What were you supposed to read next? I’ll take a shift, if you want.”
I swirled my excellent coffee, so that none of the foam would be left behind in the cup. “My mom would be pumped if you read a couple chapters of Roman history. She hates that book.”
“Pass it over,” he said.
With his feet propped up into my lap, he read to me for over an hour. Listening to the rough, warm sound of his voice, I felt happier than I’d been in a week. I’d needed this — a few casual hours with him. Just having Rikker in the room with me was like medicine.
Unfortunately for him, Mom was right — Rikker was reading from the least interesting book on earth.
Eventually he let it fall into his lap. “Fuck, G. Aren’t there any naughty bits in here?” He’d just read another stifling paragraph about Roman wall painting. “Can we skip to the part about the orgies?”
“I wish.”
“I’m pretty sure the Romans liked to get it on. What chapter is that?”
Pulling one of his feet into my hands, I gave the arch a squeeze.
He closed his eyes. “Do that again,” he demanded. Rikker was kind of a sensualist. He liked to be touched, even if it wasn’t sexual.
Maybe I’d be a sensualist too, if I weren’t so goddamn uptight.
I massaged both of his feet. And after a time, he picked the book up again and kept reading. I did a decent job of paying attention, closing my eyes to try to picture the ancient buildings that Rikker described.
I didn’t think anything of it when he removed his feet from my lap mid-paragraph. He kept reading, though, as my room door opened and my mother walked in.
“…in contrast to the three-dimensional Second Style. Yada yada yada,” he finished. “Hi, Mrs. G!”
“Johnny Rikker!” she said, walking over to kiss him on the cheek, before doing the same to me. She was holding a bag from the Chinese restaurant. “Have you eaten dinner?”
“Actually, I’m on my way to the dining hall,” he said, standing up to stuff his feet into his shoes. “My Spanish class has a language table once a week. And thanks to hockey, I’m usually a no-show.”