Chapter Fourteen #3
The ride to the restaurant continued in the same vein, with Luca squeezed into the middle of the family van, Chris on one side and Matty on the other.
Up front, Chris’s mother heaped him with praise for his performance, and his father criticized every life choice he’d made up to and including which team had drafted him.
“Does he know Chris didn’t control the draft?” Luca asked Matty in an undertone.
Matty shook his head and rolled his eyes. “In his world, Chris ought to have been drafted first overall so he could have gone to Montreal.”
“Maybe if he took an example from his roommate here and scored more goals, he would have been,” Chris’s dad barked without turning his head.
“I was drafted in the second round,” Luca pointed out.
“So, Matty,” Chris asked. “How’s university going?”
“Great. Midterms were tricky, but I’m doing okay in all my classes.”
Luca asked him what he was studying, and Matty managed to fill the remaining car ride discussing his future in mechanical engineering.
On Luca’s other side, Chris relaxed slightly.
He pulled out his phone and opened the team’s Instagram to watch the replays.
Wincing over Howie’s poor performance wasn’t better for his mental health than letting his family berate him, but Luca supposed it wasn’t worse either.
Whatever progress they’d made devolved when they got to the restaurant, and Mrs. Calabrese ordered the carpaccio.
“Had to take the most expensive thing on the menu,” her husband derided. “We’re not here celebrating you.”
“Dad, I’m paying,” Chris tried, but his words put fuel on the fire of his mother’s retaliation.
“Oh, and there you go making our son pay for dinner because you’re too cheap to do it. Why can’t you ever let us have a nice meal in peace?”
Matty groaned dramatically and buried his face in his hands. “Mom. Why do you always escalate?”
“Escalate? Mamma mia, you bring two sons into this world, and they can’t even take your side once!”
The way she said “mamma mia” was so over the top it made Luca snort into his glass of wine.
He would need several to get through this.
The things he did for love. Luca snuck a look over at Chris.
He stared down at the tiny plate the restaurant provided for the complimentary bread, cheeks flushed, mouth turned down.
It wasn’t fair on Chris. He saw his family once a season, and he loved them so much, and they behaved like this?
Under the table, Luca knocked his ankle against Chris’s.
Chris looked up and smiled at him. Thank you, he mouthed and then turned to his family.
“Enough,” he said in a perfect imitation of Tom Crowler last season when he’d decided to step up and be the captain the team needed.
Chris’s family was significantly worse behaved than a hockey team. They continued to bicker regardless.
“I said enough.” This time, Chris used his voice at full, booming potential, alerting several tables next to them.
Everyone fell silent.
“I get to see you one time during the season,” Chris said. “If this is how you want to spend it, that’s up to you, but I’m not going to stick around for it.”
Worry lines drew tight on his mom’s forehead. “If your dad could be reasonable—”
“If your son could stop being such an ungrateful—”
“It’s not ungrateful to want to enjoy the time I have with you instead of listening to you argue.”
Mr. Calabrese scoffed, but he looked away.
Good.
He should be ashamed that his adult son had to call him out for his behavior.
Chris cleared his throat. “I offered to pay for dinner, and I’m happy to do it.
Everyone here knows what I earn. It’s not a secret, and it’s not a problem for me to invite you when I’m here.
I’m also going to be taking over your mortgage payments, and when I’m here in the summer, I’m going to be renting my own place. ”
Mr. Calabrese snapped to attention. “Mortgage? You’re not—”
“Let me be generous. You don’t have to fight me on everything, Dad. I’m not trying to argue with you; I’m trying to show you how grateful I am for everything you and Mom did for me.”
Chris took a deep breath and pushed an unruly curl of hair out of his face.
The movement forced the top button of his shirt open, revealing a hint of chest hair.
He was always sexy, but right now, in a suit Luca had picked out and paid for, standing up for himself and holding firm, Luca could barely restrain himself from climbing into his lap and licking his throat.
Matty elbowed him in the side. He might lack Chris’s muscle tone, but not his strength. “You want a glass of water, man?” he asked in a whisper. “You’re looking a little thirsty.”
“Shut up,” Luca said, not taking his eyes off Chris and his parents.
Chris’s mom patted his cheek. “Such a good son,” she said. “I knew I raised you right. No matter what your dad and his mother—”
“Mom, no.” Chris pulled her hand away. “You need to stop that too. Stop using me to win fights with Dad. I don’t like being put in the middle.”
She withdrew with a huff. Mr. Calabrese looked far too pleased she had been rebuked as well.
“What’s gotten into you?” Matty asked. “Don’t get me wrong; I love the new attitude, but where’s it from?”
Chris shook his head. “Nowhere. I should have said this years ago.”
His dad snorted. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s finally met a girl he wants to stick around. The only time a man tells his mother off is when he has another woman telling him to.”
What century did these people hail from? Luca knew they thought they were Italian, but their worldview predated Italy as a nation-state.
“No girl,” Chris said.
“Oh, I knew you would get along with Lisa—remember I met her at the farmer’s market?” Mrs. Calabrese asked her husband. “I gave her Chris’s number, told her she should give it a try even if he ‘isn’t dating.’” She exaggerated the air quotes with a roll of her eyes.
Chris closed his eyes. His fingers brushed against the back of Luca’s hand under the table, and Luca twisted his wrist so Chris could grab on if he needed to.
He did.
“I never met Lisa,” Chris said.
His mother’s face fell.
“I’m not going to meet Lisa. And I asked you three times to stop giving out my number to every girl you meet.”
“I only give it to Italian girls!”
“Well, I don’t want to meet any Italian girls. I don’t want to meet any girls at all.”
Luca swallowed. There it was. The truth he’d been ignoring every time he and Chris hooked up.
Chris didn’t want anybody. Not in the desperate, sweaty, bodily way Luca couldn’t seem to stop wanting him.
Chris wanted a friend to hold and cuddle sometimes.
He wanted someone to come home to, but he wasn’t interested in sex.
Luca had hoped he wanted romance because of his penchant for romantic films, but he had been kidding himself based on his own urgent desire to kiss Chris.
Hell, Luca could live without sex if Chris only wanted to kiss him every day, but Chris didn’t want to kiss him.
He didn’t want to kiss anyone, and if he was finally telling his mother to back off, he’d accepted his own asexuality.
Luca wanted to be happy for his friend, but first, he had to get it through his own thick skull that whatever they’d had was over.
Mr. Calabrese scoffed. “You’re twenty-three. You might think so now. But you’ve gotta settle down and have a family someday, kid.”
“No, I don’t.”
The notion appeared to be a shock to the whole table.
Chris pushed his chair away and dropped Luca’s hand. “Look, I know this is a lot for you to take in, but I’m not going to do things the way you want me to. The way you did them. I might find a partner someday—who knows?—but I’m not getting married, and I’m not having kids.”
Luca spared a thought for a future where he would be introduced to whoever Chris found as a partner, someone more compatible with his needs.
He would have to be so strong. Maybe by then, he’d have managed to get over Chris.
Maybe he’d have found someone else. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much as it did now.
At least he wasn’t alone in reeling from the words. Chris might as well have slapped his mother.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because it’s true, Mom.” Chris folded his arms. “I know it’s not the life you have or the one you want for me, but I really…I don’t want kids, okay? I have a fun time playing hockey with them, but I don’t want any. I’m not cut out for it. They stress me out, and I don’t think I’d be a good dad.”
“No one is born a good dad, son,” Mr. Calabrese said, definitely true in his case. “You learn on the job.”
“Well, I don’t want to learn, okay?” Chris looked first at his father and, when his father met his gaze, his mother. “I know you want me to be happy. But introducing me to every Italian girl in Québec will not change my mind.”
The food arrived before the discussion could continue. Luca had rarely eaten more tense tagliatelle al salmone, including at his nonna’s seventieth birthday lunch, when she revealed to the whole table and her startled husband that she knew about his affair and had all along.
He should introduce her to Chris. They would get along.
At the end of the meal, Chris asked for the check, and no one tried to stop him. In fact, his parents had hardly said a word in twenty minutes.
After he paid, Chris hugged them both. “I’m sorry,” he said.
For a moment, Luca was afraid he would take it all back and bow down to their pressure again.
Instead, he said, “I know I threw a lot at you tonight. But I realized I haven’t been happy with the way things have been, and I had to do something about it. Call me if you want to talk?”
His mother softened. “Of course, baby.”
While their parents brought the car around, Matty gave Chris an extra-long hug. “You did good, bro.”
“Thanks.” Chris sagged against him. “You don’t think they’re mad at me?”
“I think you deserve to be mad at them. And hey, uh. You were right.”