Page 45 of Flagrant Foul
I took a seat on the camping chair next to the one my dad was sitting on. There was a hole in it, which made it feel kind of like sitting in a hammock that wasn’t built to take my weight. I didn’t mind. It seemed fitting. After a while, my mom came out. “Want a cold one, baby?”
Up until that day, I’d never accepted an offer of alcohol from either of my parents. I guess I was trying to make a point. Be the better man. Rise above it. Some bullshit like that. Anyway, that day was different.
“Sure. Why not?”
The stupidest—or saddest—thing is that it made my dad so happy. I’d been signed by the Dogs earlier that year. An NHL fucking hockey team, yet my dad looked prouder of me when I took that first swig of the beer my mom handed me than he had when I told him about my contract.
We sat on the porch all afternoon and drank as my dad talked shit. At one point, the seat of my chair gave way, and I fell through it, landing on my ass.
We all laughed and laughed and laughed.
We drank until my mom, who is tall for a woman, looked small and fragile to me. Once beautiful, she’d morphed into a slip of a thing with stringy hair, and my dad, who is at least four inches shorter than I am, looked massive. Gargantuan and threatening. A creature frommy nightmares, even though he was smiling and having a good time.
When he used his hands to gesture as he talked, I crept into myself and felt the same instinctive urge to flinch I had when I was a child.
When they were so drunk they were barely aware of my movements, I went to bed. I was unsteady on the stairs and had to hold on to the banister with both hands and pull myself up. As I brushed my teeth, I leaned in close to the mirror and studied my face. I had my mother’s eyes. Bloodshot with tiny red veins that splintered across the whites, and I had my father’s mouth. Lips parted and sagging crookedly.
As I looked in the mirror, I saw my future clearly. I had two possible paths. One was darker and full of detail, filled with twists and turns I recognized. I knew the gravel and dirt on that path well. I knew every bump and where it would take me.
In many ways, it was a path that would have been easy to walk because I knew it so well. It felt familiar. Like home. It felt inevitable almost.
The other was hard. Unknown and unfamiliar. A clear, bright path that felt nothing like home. Nothing like me either. Not really. I didn’t recognize the pristine pebbles it was paved with, and I didn’t know what wasaround the corner. It was a path I was afraid of. The only thing that made it even remotely appealing was that I knew Nathan stood on that path, hand held out, as he waited for me to walk it with him.
Seeing him there, on the scary, bright path, soothed me, as it always did, but given the events of the day, it soothed me differently that day. More in some ways, less in others, but ultimately, it reminded me who he was to me.
He was the brother I chose, and if I chose that path, he’d be the only family I had.
I slept restlessly, head spinning, heart beating too fast. The next day, I woke up, rolled the button-down shirt I’d fallen asleep in into a tight ball, and threw it in the trash.
Then I walked out the front door and never looked back.
24
Sev Delorean
Teddytakestheapplewe’ve been tossing to each other to the sink and runs cold water over it, pausing to rub gently at spots that bother him. When he’s done, he throws it to me without drying it first. Tiny droplets of water rain down on my face.
I hold the apple in my hand and examine it for a moment, searching the fruity flesh for the perfect first bite. When I find it, I raise the apple to my lips. Before I’m able to bury my teeth into it, Teddy lunges in and steals the first bite.
He laughs as he does it.
It's something I used to do to him when he was a kid. It was a childish game. Something I did to amuse him, but it’s sweet and nostalgic and takes me back to afternoons spent in the O’Reilly’s kitchen, opening and closing the fridge, hoping that doing so would somehow miraculously change the contents to something we felt like eating.
Teddy chews thoughtfully, looking at the apple in my hand as he does it.
“D’you know…” he says when he’s swallowed. “When you used to do this to me, I used to lick up the juice running down my hand, so I could taste something your lips had touched.”
The admission is so innocent and sweet that it leaves me momentarily speechless.
I can’t stand how much I love it.
I love that he tells me these kinds of things now. At the same time, it breaks me to think how long he’s been like this. How long he’s felt like this about me.
And how wrong Nate was when he called it a phase and swore it would pass.
“Not just your lips,” he continues. “Your teeth and your tongue too. I loved it. I could swear it tasted better than normal apple juice because it had touched the inside of your mouth.”
That hits a little different. A little lower and harder.
