23. Riley
CHAPTER 23
RILEY
Boston is a serene, beautiful white in the middle of winter.
We don’t play their minor team often except for in preseason and the playoffs, and I’ve never had a reason to make a social call, so I’ve never seen it like this before. Usually we’re here when summer has faded into fall with multicolored leaves littering the pavement.
All it took was one phone call. To a number I could never bring myself to delete, but who had sat in my contacts collecting cobwebs, messages encased like polaroid pictures at the bottom of a shoe box.
The diner is nice. Retro. A white and light blue checkered floor with a pink neon glow that almost makes it feel like you’ve stepped into a fifties movie. It’s soft. Theatrical. Like someone put meticulous care into the space. Not just slapped together to make a quick buck on ambience.
It’s no wonder Matty picked a place like this. It’s somewhere he’d feel at home, I bet.
He’s fussing with a waitress at the counter, carrying a tray of two milkshakes and cheese curd fries, laughing as she makes distinctive gestures with her hands at his retreating back.
Matty slides into his side of the booth, the bright blue of his hearing aids catching one of the fluorescent lights above.
The milkshakes come in those blooming flower shaped glassware, the ones with skinny bases that widen at the top, with an unhealthy swirl of whipped cream and a pointed cherry at the tip.
He picks the stem out of his shake and pops the fruit in his mouth, a wide smile showing him pinching it between his teeth.
“You look tense,” he says around it, closing his lips to bite down and pull the stem free. “I’d invite you back to my apartment, but I’m not too keen on poisoning you with black mold.”
I laugh, because as out of my element as I feel—as I’ve felt for months—Matty’s humor is familiar. Comforting.
“You look healthy for someone living in toxicity.”
He does. Truly. He’s put on weight since I saw him last. Some meat and muscle on his bone where he used to be all wiry and lank. The years of hormone therapy have filled him in, given life to the body it once felt like he only tolerated.
His long, black hair is twisted into a bun at the top of his head, and his brown eyes watch me with the same curious intensity they always have. There’s even some scruff covering his cheeks and chin.
“It’s the injections. They give me superpowers.”
We both chuckle, Matty grabbing our food and divvying it off the tray, then holding it out to that same waitress who walks by.
“Thank you, Hannah,” he says, holding his palm to his mouth and then dropping it down. He does something else with his fingers I don’t understand.
She scrunches up her face and replies with her free hand, and then the two of them break out into smiles as she walks away.
Matty catches me watching and leans his elbows on the table, wrinkling his button nose in my direction.
“That’s Hannah. She’s deaf. Been teaching me sign language for a couple years. Helps when I gotta turn down the world a little bit.”
He fiddles with one of the hearing aids but doesn’t switch it off or turn it down.
When he fell through the ice that day—underwater for who knows how long until I found him, nearly frozen and not breathing—he came out with damage to his ear drums. Something about the pressure and the temperature.
One ear lost about seventy percent, the other just under fifty. He used to obsess over the numbers. Every doctor's appointment was met with frustration when the tests didn’t show improvement.
Once upon a time, he tried explaining to me what this new world sounded like, but no matter the image he painted, it was lost on a knucklehead like me.
“Thanks for finding time to see me.”
His eyes soften, and he lays his hand out on the table: palm up; an offering.
I don’t take it, my own damp and trembling.
“I was starting to lose hope you’d ever reach out.”
When I frown, he averts his eyes and reaches for his shake. “That sounds more desperate than I intended.”
With a quick swipe to wet my lips, I shake my head and say, “Matty, you know that this isn’t?—”
“Riley.” He flexes his fingers on the table, grabbing my attention, but I still don’t take them. “I miss my best friend, alright? Sue me for thinking you might get over yourself long enough to remember that.”
In any other circumstance, I would be offended, but Matty says it so easily. With a smile fit for a child. A joyful innocence.
“It hurt, you know. You leaving.”
That smile doesn’t fall, but it sobers, and he leans his chin on his fist.
“You left me first.”
He’s right. I’d mentally and emotionally checked out of our relationship weeks before he packed his bags and made the move to Boston. Before he’d even asked me to go with him.
I think I started disappearing the moment I pulled him out of the water.
“You deserved better than that.”
“I did. I do. Doesn’t mean I don’t forgive you, though.”
Hearing that shouldn’t make me misty eyed, but even turning my head to the window and watching the snow doesn’t ease the burn.
“You’ve been holding onto his hurt for a long time,” Matty says, voice soft, and when I look at him he’s dragging a curd covered fry through the whipped cream of his shake.
“I don’t forgive as easily as you do.”
He cocks his head, blinking owlishly in my direction. “Are you still angry with me?”
I drag a hand through my hair and lean back in the booth, bringing my full attention back to Matty. “Christ, Matty, no. I’ve never been mad at you.”
Frustrated with him, sure, but mad? I can’t think of a single true fight we ever had. Playful disagreements. Arguments where one of us needed to step away to cool down and recollect. Not true anger, though.
“I was angry. When you told me you wouldn’t do it.”
I look at him, and he’s got his food pushed aside to lay his arms on the table with his cheek resting on them.
“I was angry when I woke up in that hospital room and all you did was smile and pet my hair.”
Little transgressions that add up like building blocks. Or maybe like Jenga, causing it all to come crashing down.
“You didn’t tell me you were a virgin,” I say, surprising him. “That made me mad.”
“ That’s what ruffles your feathers? The fact that I got you into bed, took your dick, and didn’t disclose that it was my first time until you were inside me?”
“Honesty and trust are important to me. I felt like you used me to get it over with.”
He gawks, mouth hanging open as it slowly forms into a grin. “Or maybe I was so into you, maybe it felt good to have someone touch me the way you did, that I didn’t want you to freak and back out.”
Because Matty’s anatomy is different. I knew it going in, but that fear of rejection that’s so deep seeded in him, I can see where he’d want narrative control. Something he has so little of.
“I was angry that you asked me,” I grit out, hating the way the guilt tastes on my tongue. “To move. To uproot my life.”
“You resented me.”
“I think I still do.”
His eyes widen, lips parting with a whooshing exhale. Hurt lines his dark irises. “Why?”
“Because you moved on,” I say with an exasperated huff. “You went on with your life like we never happened. Like I never forced you into the closet with me for years.”
Matty is a sweet, playful man, but he is also a fierce one. His eyes ignite like a roaring bonfire, and if I had a single ounce of self-preservation in my body, I probably wouldn’t meet that stare head on like a challenge.
But this is Matty.
His lips tip up just the slightest at the corners.
“Riley Nathanial Easton. I was in the closet long before I became involved with you. Maybe it was for being trans instead of liking dick, but I had a pretty damn cozy spot in there. I never judged you for not being ready just like you did the same for me.”
He takes a deep breath, but before I can speak, he holds up his hand.
“What hurt was you telling me you wanted to come out, got my hopes up, got me excited about being open in public, and then you always took it away at the last second. It felt like being rejected over and over again.”
I can recall the smile on his face as he held my hand—squeezed my fingers to the risk of losing circulation—and I recall the way it fell, briefly, before a plastic one took place, and he took his hand away.
“We don’t have to,” He’d tell me, and like the coward I am, I always took the out. When it was never an out in the first place; It was Matty seeking reassurance. That I wanted to be public with him.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter, because I don’t know what else to say.
“I already forgave you. That’s the thing. All of this … whatever this is living in your head, it’s done. It’s over. The door is closed but you won’t stop jiggling the handle.”
“I came out,” I blurt way too loud like an idiot, but other than a few quick glances, no one pays us any mind. “To my team. To my family.”
Matty’s smile is so big, so genuine, that for a moment that little lick of fear disappears. “Fuck yeah!”
“I have a boyfriend—had, have, it’s unclear—a guy on the team. His names Griffin, and he’s a fucking shit but I … I love him, Matty.”
Our eyes meet, and Matty offers his hand again. This time, I take it.
“You deserve to be happy, Riley.”
“Do I?”
His fingers close over mine, stopping me from yanking away and retreating.
Back when I first joined the Hornets, dating wasn’t on my radar. It was something Matty and I sort of fell into.
Just like we sort of fell into being roommates. And best friends. Lovers who existed under covers and in lingering touches while I went off to practice and he went to rehearsal.
Happiness is fleeting in the sports world. Old wounds wear new paths on scar tissue until they flare up and leave you on the verge of ruin.
We were kind of like that. Puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit but that had been chiseled down to resemble the holes in each other. Only for those parts of ourselves to tear new wounds that we’d patch and mend until more cut through.
Matty was my heart while hockey was my soul.
I needed them both.
That day, I did CPR on my best friend—on the only man I’d ever loved—and when he finally gasped that first clean breath, I should have thought that this is it: this is the man I’m going to spend my life with no matter what anyone else thinks.
That plenty of players balance hockey and love; what’s stopping me from being one of them?
What I actually felt was the burden of our secret growing heavier on my shoulders.
The realization filled my lungs like the water coming out of his.
I could mourn him, but I couldn’t love him.
Not the way he deserved.
“I didn’t love you enough.” I drop my chin to my chest, wishing he didn’t have to hear the words but knowing I need to speak them.
“Bullshit,” Matty bites the word out like a bullet. “And look at me when you talk. You know I lose words sometimes.”
“Sorry,” is all I get out before he continues.
“There is no competition. No measure of love and commitment that says this other guy won and I lost. We fell apart, Riley; that shit happens. You can’t let one failed relationship haunt you for your entire life.”
I don’t know how to stop. How to be okay with being happy.
“We were good. Together. Me and you. You were the first person I ever fell in love with. The first person to accept me, no questions asked. You gave me a place to stay when I couldn’t cut it on my own. You paid for my surgery with your NAPH savings. You loaned me your family, your home, so I could heal. I will always be grateful that I got to have you in my life.”
I grip his hand, hold it hard.
“I love you, Riley, but be honest. We fell out of love with each other—if in love was ever what we were—and stayed together because we knew each other were safe. You were my security blanket, and I was yours. There’s nothing for you to feel bad about.”
The breath trapped in my lungs skitters out, and before I can be bombarded by the emotions overcoming me, Matty scoots out of his side of the booth and slides into mine, wrapping his arms around my shoulders and pulling my face to his neck.
“You need my permission to be happy?” he whispers into my ear as I soak his faded I Prevail t-shirt. “Be fucking happy. Be happier than anyone on the goddamn planet. You find that man, and you tell him how much you love him. If I find out you let him go, I really will haunt you this time.”
My laugh is a wet sound, but there’s a lightness that falls over me, that lifts the weight keeping my heart heavy, and each new breath in feels like that first burst of sunshine after a storm.
I pull myself free to grasp at his cheeks with shaking fingers, drawing our mutually wet eyes together.
“I love you, Matty Nichols. I will always fucking love you.”
He smiles in that vibrant way that I used to swear was my reason for opening my eyes some mornings, and it fills me with peace. Peace and longing for the man I gave my heart to after. Who patched me up and who bore my battle wounds so I didn’t have to face them alone.
“Now go love someone else more.”