Page 50 of Home Ice Advantage

“He doesn’t listen to me,” Ryan said, taking another bite of the last dish, which was uni ice cream with a golden corn puff. It wasn’t something he would ever have seen himself eating when he’d been growing up in Southie, but there were a lot of things he was currently doing that thirteen-year-old Ryan probably would have stared at, goggle-eyed.

“No?” Petey asked.

“Not at all.”

“Hmm.”

By the time they were done with dinner and had taken a cab back to the Strip, it was almost midnight; Petey had already broken off from the group to go, as he put it, explore the streets as an anonymous celebrant.

“Petey, are you gonna be okay?” Eric asked.

“I’ll be fine. I like to do this. Spend the night alone. Let the adventures come to me.”

“Adventures?”

“Don’t worry. Whatever happens, I’ll be on the plane tomorrow.”

Neither of them could convince him to stay, and, instead, walked together back toward the hotel. Ryan caught Eric doing it again, from the corner of his eye: ducking down to pick up a smooth white pebble from a gravel garden.

“Eric?”

“Yeah, bud.”

“What are you doing?”

“What?” Eric asked. He looked a little guilty, slipping the rock into his pocket.

“I noticed you do that in every city we’ve been in. Take a rock or a pebble or something. What are you saving them for?”

The Vegas Strip was chaotic on New Year’s Eve, even before the actual new year rolled around, with neon and flashing lights everywhere; people spilling in and out of the casinos and restaurants. With all of the chaos, Ryan only had eyes for Eric, handsome in his rumpled suit and messy hair. Eric pushed his glasses a little farther up his nose and sighed.

“It’s a Jewish custom, kind of...to put stones or pebbles on the graves of family members. These are for my father.”

“You pick one up in every city we go to?”

“That’s the thing. It’s not really amitzvahin the traditional sense. It’s just a custom. You can do it however you want, but I always felt like... I never got to spend as much time at home as they would have liked, and they never really got to travel with me. So this is my way of bringing the places I’ve gone to him. I go back to the cemetery whenever I’m in Montreal, and I talk to him about them.”

Ryan was warm and a little tipsy and very full from the meal, and there was a lump in his throat he couldn’t entirely describe. “What do the stones on the grave symbolize?”

“It’s just—I don’t know. There are all kinds of interpretations. That it’s keeping the soul in the world or keeping demons out. Sometimes it’s just practical. They last longer than flowers. Or just a reminder that we’ve been there.”

“That’s really...that’s really nice.” They were still walking, their arms bumping. Ryan wondered what would have happened if he’d hooked his arm through Eric’s.

Eric glanced sideways at him. “Thank you.”

“I never really visit my mom’s grave.”

“No?”

“I feel guilty,” Ryan said, the words coming out in a rush. “I never used to go home; you know? And I wasn’t there for her. I knew she hadn’t been feeling well, but I didn’t know she had been that sick. I didn’t get to spend more time...”

“I think once you get old enough, we all have our regrets with our parents. I never told my parents the truth about me, and I think about that every day. That he died not knowing who I really am. It just feels really shitty. They were so proud of me, but they don’t really know me at all, in some ways.”

When he had first taken the job and Eric had been such an asshole about it, Ryan would never have guessed that they would have had so much in common. Not in the obvious ways, of course—thank god Eric’s parents didn’t sound anything like Ryan’s dad—but the regrets, and the secrets, and the losses. Ericunderstood. He felt warm again, from his chest down to his toes, the warmth of knowing that he was talking to someone who got it.

It must have been New Year’s: the fireworks were loud and sudden, and Ryan jumped before he could catch himself. Eric was laughing at him, cracking up: his eyes almost closed when he was really amused, and Ryan wanted to grab him and shake him and probably also kiss him. They couldn’t do any of that in public. Instead, Ryan gave him a little shove in the arm, and Eric, still grinning, shoved back.

“My room or yours?” Ryan said.

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