Chapter Twenty-One
LEWIS IS checking the plant app to make sure he isn’t mis-watering any of Tad’s plants when his phone rings. “Hey!” he says, even though he didn’t actually look to see if ‘Best Husband Ever’ was the one calling.
“Hey.” Tad’s voice hits Lewis’s ears like an embrace. “Can you talk?”
“Yes! Yeah. Definitely. I can talk. I’m home now. I mean, I’m at your apartment. I’m doing the nightly rounds.” Lewis is babbling. He’s also grinning like an idiot. It’s so amazing to hear Tad’s voice.
There’s a breath of laughter on the phone. “How are the plants?”
“Well, I don’t think I’ve killed any of them yet, so, good?” There’s a muffled sound on the phone, like wind, or maybe Tad breathing hard. Lewis tightens his fingers around the phone. “Are you okay? You sound out of breath.”
“That’s just wind. I’m outside.”
“Outside?”
“Don’t want my mom listening at the door.”
Jesus. “Aren’t you cold?”
“I mean, yeah, but it’s fine. I go camping in the winter.”
“You’re crazy,” Lewis says, but he’s grinning.
It sounds like Tad’s smiling too. “You’re missing out.”
“Well,” Lewis says casually, “maybe if you want to take me camping in the winter, it wouldn’t be so bad.”
There’s a pause. Should Lewis not have said that?
“I would, if you really mean that,” Tad says. “I love winter camping. It’s… magical.” He scoffs. “Sorry, that was cheesy. So how was Friendsgiving?”
“Oh, it was good. Matty—I mentioned Matthew, right?—came up from DC, so that was pretty cool. And Ofelia has a new boyfriend, very bro-y, but he seems nice. You might not remember Ofelia from the bachelorette party?”
“I don’t remember much,” Tad says sheepishly.
“That’s okay. She’s nice but we’re not close. You know what I was thinking, though—you’d probably really like Ava. You might not remember her, either.”
“Er….”
Lewis laughs. “Don’t worry about it, she’s quiet. I feel like I’m talking too much. I’m definitely talking too much. Tell me about what’s going on up there? Are you okay? Everything’s… okay?”
He’s not quite sure what he’s asking. His tone kind of says, you haven’t been put in conversion therapy yet, have you?
Tad makes a noncommittal noise. “We don’t have to talk about me.”
Lewis’s stomach churns. “Okay, but see, that just makes me think we really need to. Seriously. Is everything okay? You’re not… I mean, you’re… safe, right?”
At the low rumble of Tad’s laughter, Lewis flushes, feeling stupid. But Tad says, “God, you’re sweet. I’m fine, really. It’s just painfully awkward. I’m sorry I’ve been so horrible about texting, by the way. There was… an incident, and I just—I should’ve said something, but I wasn’t sure how to like, say it in code.”
“An incident?” Lewis asks uneasily.
“Ugh . God. Okay. So, you know how you sent me a heart last night?” Tad’s voice pinches. “When I got up this morning, I left my phone in my room, and my mom came in to like, tidy up.”
“Like a turn down service?” Lewis asks, amused at the idea of his own mother doing something like that.
“Yeah, she’s… whatever. Anyway. When I came out to the kitchen she said….” There’s another pause, and Lewis has a feeling Tad’s drawing a fortifying breath. “She said ‘Lewis is an unusual name for a woman.’ And I was obviously like, what the fuck are you talking about. I mean, I didn’t say ‘fuck’—anyway, she said she just happened to glance at my phone and she saw your text. Which is bullshit, she totally looked at my notifications, and it was stupid of me to not clear them before I left the room—”
“Um, hey, Tad, that’s like… not normal behavior for a mother towards her adult child?” Mortification sweeps through him. Awesome, he’s insulting Tad’s mom—that’s totally the right move with a guy he really likes. Every son loves hearing his mom get dragged. “I mean—um, shit.”
“No, you’re right.” Tad sounds morose. “But it’s how she is. Anyway, I said you were an author I was giving some extra help to at work.”
Lewis looks out the window. The Henry Hudson Bridge is lit up, a steady stream of cars crossing. “Sorry. I won’t text anymore.”
Silence from the other end. Lewis would wonder if Tad hung up, except he can hear the crunch of footsteps. “I don’t want you to stop texting,” Tad says. “I just have to be more careful.”
“I’m sorry if I made things harder for you.”
“Stop apologizing, Lewis.” Tad sighs. “It feels like I’ve been here days. And I haven’t even talked to my brother yet. He just started dating some woman who lives in the city, apparently, and he’s visiting her this weekend. It’s practically all I’ve heard about, by the way. Tad ”—his voice gets high-pitched—“your brother found a nice girl on Tinder. Why can’t you do the same?”
Lewis laughs. “My mom tells me to stay off dating apps. She says Grindr’s for fuck boys.”
“Oh my god, does she really say fuck boys?”
“She totally does.”
Tad cackles. “I want to meet your mom.”
“Well, it doesn’t take long to get to Weehawken.”
“ Jersey ,” Tad says, his voice dripping with theatrical disdain.
“Um, hey, I wouldn’t talk, Upstate.”
Tad laughs again. “You want to know a thing I’ve done since I got here? It’s horrible.”
“Go for it.”
“I got my hair cut.”
That hits like a hammer. Tad got his hair cut? But Lewis really likes Tad’s hair. Those curls….
“What’s horrible about it?” Lewis asks belatedly.
“Um, well, I let my mom talk me into Sports Clips, for one thing.”
“Oh no.”
“Unfortunately, oh yes.”
“Is that why we’re not Facetiming?”
Tad laughs. “I didn’t know if you’d want to Facetime. I didn’t want to assume.”
“I like seeing your face,” Lewis says honestly.
There’s a garbled noise of frustration. “Okay—fine. Hold on.”
The line goes dead, and then an incoming Facetime call lights up the screen. And then—there’s Tad. Lewis’s chest heats—blazes—and he can’t catch his breath.
“Hey,” Lewis says.
“Hi.” Tad’s face is washed out and pale in the glow of his phone screen, but behind him is the orange illumination of streetlights. He’s wearing a beanie.
“I can’t see your hair,” Lewis points out.
Tad makes a face and pulls off his hat. Lewis tries not to look dismayed. “She wouldn’t stop cutting,” Tad says, so clearly Lewis failed.
“It looks good,” Lewis says quickly. It does. It’s short on the sides and a bit longer on the top, and Tad looks great. It’s not the haircut that’s bad, it’s the fact that Lewis is too into running his fingers through Tad’s hair and feeling it tangle, and those curls against his palms and how it feels when he gets a handful and pulls —
“It doesn’t.” Tad scowls. “You think it looks horrible.”
“No!” The idea of Tad thinking that Lewis doesn’t like how he looks and going home to his awkward house is kinda sorta intolerable. “I just… your hair is nice.”
Your hair. Is nice.
Christ.
Fortunately, Tad looks like he got something out of that. “It is?” he asks. There’s hesitant happiness on his face, like light shining through the crack under a door.
“Yeah, like. Your, um.” He waves a hand vaguely, which Tad probably can’t see. “I just like it. Touching it, and….”
“Pulling it?” Tad asks slyly, his mouth quirking up on one side.
“Maybe.”
The quirk at the corner of Tad’s mouth gets a little salacious. “So I should let it grow out again.”
“Yes.” God, has Lewis ever answered a question so fast in his life?
Tad’s pupils look wide, which makes Lewis’s cock twitch. Then, Tad sighs. “I’m going to get interrogated about why I was gone so long.”
“If you need to get back….”
“Yeah, I probably do.” Tad sounds miserable. Lewis doesn’t want him to be miserable, but the fact that it’s because they have to stop talking is a nice feeling.
There’s a silence, long enough for Lewis to wonder if they finally ran out of things to talk about. And if they’re out of things to talk about, then this will fizzle, or crash and flame out, and Lewis will be left angry and disappointed with himself. Again.
Then Tad says, “Oh my god, I stopped at this gas station on the drive, and they had the creepiest hot dog sign!”
Lewis laughs. “Pics or it didn’t happen.”
“Oh, it happened. I took one to send to you. This thing looks like it’s going to crawl out from under your bed at three in the morning and lie next to you until you wake up.”
“And then it murders you?”
“I don’t know, I think it just wants companionship?”
Lewis laughs again, and the conversation goes on the way it does with people you could talk to forever. Too soon, though, Tad comes to a halt. Lines tighten around his mouth and eyes. A furrow appears between his eyebrows, and his eyes focus somewhere in the distance. “This is my street,” he says quietly.
“Okay.” The disappointment pooling in Lewis’s chest is stupid. “If you need anything or just… I don’t know, want to talk… I mean, I’m sure you have other friends, but….”
Tad smiles, but it seems sad. “Thanks, Lewis.”
“For what?”
“Just, you know. Talking to me.”
“I like talking to you,” Lewis says.
They lapse into silence, putting off the inevitable moment when they have to hang up. “Say hi to Hetty for me,” Lewis finally says.
“I will. She’d probably like to hear your voice, but….”
“I get it.”
Tad looks happy, then sad, then nervous, and Lewis can’t parse the progression. With a resigned smile, Tad says, “I could stand outside all night talking to you.”
“I know this probably doesn’t carry the same weight, since I’m sitting inside in your warm and comfortable apartment, but me too.”
If there was a way to bottle laughter, Lewis would bottle Tad’s right now. He almost takes a screenshot, because Tad’s smile is gorgeous—but it won’t capture how Tad really looks, and it certainly won’t capture the way he’s making Lewis feel.
“See you on Saturday,” Tad says. “But hopefully we can talk on the phone again.”
“I’d like that.”
“Me too. I’ll let you know.”
Another pause. “Well,” Lewis says.
“Yeah.” Tad’s voice is quiet. “Bye, Lewis.”
“Bye, Tad.”
They stare at each other through the screen. Tad sighs again, looking heartbreakingly sad. He waves a little, and then the screen goes black.