#scenebreak
I was back at the heavy bag around midnight. This time the garage door was closed and my pissed-off-at-the-world station on Spotify played on the speakers, not my ear buds. I ran through practice sequences, but the more I thought about Monika’s visit, the more I just punched the shit out of the bag.
“Nice shorts.” Hadn’t heard Dad come in. He cut the volume on the music, but let it play.
One more really, really hard upper cut that hurt all the way to my shoulder and I turned around, forcing myself to joke. “Are you just getting in now, young man?”
He still wore the cheap suit, but now it was rumpled and the tie hung out of a pocket. He grinned a lopsided grin. “Dragon jousting took longer than expected.”
Wait a minute. He meant it. “You’re out job hunting at midnight?” Without even thinking about it, I walked over with my hands extended so he could unfasten the gloves.
He stared at the gloves as if they might bite him.
I froze. “Dad, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean. . .” It was something I’d done a million times. A total reflex. I turned away and grabbed the end of the Velcro in my teeth.
His hand on my shoulder turned me to face him. We stood like that for a few seconds. Normally, no big deal, but Dad hadn’t touched me, or anyone else, since the accident.
We stared into each other’s eyes.
The moment passed without anyone dying.
As if to make light of it, he cuffed me upside the head before taking a glove and yanking the Velcro strap. “I checked out a couple of bars to see if they need security.” That explained his late arrival. “I’ll find something.” He undid the other glove, directed me to sit on a box and threw a towel around my bare shoulders, wiping me down.
There’s that cliché about a lump in your throat?
Really hard to talk around.
He knelt in front of me and started at the tapes on my hands.
I cleared my throat and picked up my jeans. “Front pocket.” I shook them at him. “I made some money for us. Here.”
“How’d you do that?” He pulled out the hundred dollar bill.
“Local dance team. I did some coaching.”
“That’s great, Ethan. Really. But that’s your money.” He tossed the jeans to the side and went to work on the tapes again, forcing a smile. He didn’t fake those as well as I did. “I hear there’s a Starbucks now. That should buy you a coffee, right?”
He moved through the old cool down routine of working out the cramps in my hands and shaking out my arms. The contact started to feel normal again.
Deep breath.
He pulled the towel onto my head, dried my hair and wiped the sweat off my face. “Tell me about your day.” The towel fell around my neck as he stepped behind me to work out the knots in my shoulders.
I cleared my throat again and a water bottle appeared in my face. I took it and drank. With Dad finally starting to act like his old self, the news that’d brought me back to the punching bag was even harder to tell him. “Monika’s in town.”
The rubdown stopped. “What? Why?”
“She found a sponsor. Full ride out to New York for eight months to train for Blackpool.”
I imagined what his face looked like: shock and trying really hard to be supportive. “That’s great,” he lied a little too enthusiastically. “Where will you live?”
“Timeshare. She has the whole thing figured out.”
“She always does. Who’s the sponsor?”
“I didn’t look.” I waved at the folder lying a few feet away.
“So. . . why aren’t you jumping up and down doing fist pumps?” He picked up the folder and sat on a box in front of me. “This fixes everything, doesn’t it?”
A couple months ago there’d been shouting matches about how much he’d fucked up my life. Good times.
“Ethan?”
How long had I been silent? Deep breath.
He grinned. “Ah. . . there’s a new girl.”
My cheeks felt hot. Damn Nordic genes. “Kinda. . . maybe. . . I don’t know.” I wiped my face with the towel. “And what about you? I can’t just leave you.”
He examined the papers. “You do not pass up a chance like this for. . . me. . .” All the emotion drained from his face. He looked up at me. “You really don’t know who the sponsor is?”
I shook my head.
He seemed to consider his options but knew I’d figure it out sooner or later. He handed me a single sheet of paper with a header I immediately recognized: Dad’s gym.
“Wait. . . you?” I read further. It wasn’t Dad’s gym, anymore, but it was still up and running.
The new owners were offering me six figures to train?
What the hell?
Then I made the leap: the new owners were the same people who’d sued Dad and ruined our lives. They couldn’t be trying to help me out. They were paying me to move across the country, away from my dad. They had to be doing it expressly to hurt him and Monika had to know what it would do to him. I was all he had left.
“That bitch.” I crumpled up the paper. “That fucking bitch!”
Instantly on my feet, I slammed a fist into the bag as hard as I could. Everything Monika’d said suddenly made sense. I snatched the contract out of Dad’s hands and threw it into one of the garbage boxes. “No way.”
“Ethan. . .”
“No!”
He rose to his feet, rumpled and sad in his cheap suit that didn’t fit well because they don’t make off-the-rack cheap suits for guys that big. He’d always been the strongest guy I knew, until they went for his throat and he’d just rolled over out of guilt.
I wouldn’t roll. “No.”
How could we talk about this when we never talked about that?
He crossed his arms, which is probably how the suit got wrinkled in the first place. “Okay. . . you were already in a mood before you knew who was making the offer. What the hell happened?”
So I told him. Some of it was hard to say. “The crap she said about Katy. . . and about the studio.” I stared at the floor. “And about you.” I had to take a couple of breaths. “It’s all shit I’ve thought, too.” I felt his eyes on me and couldn’t look up. “But I was wrong about all of it.” I forced myself to meet his gaze. “Maybe it is a crappy studio and maybe they can’t dance for shit. . . but Katy’s a better person than Monika.” I looked away. “They’re all better people than me.”
When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet. “Ethan. . .”
I looked at him.
The garage door opener jumped to life. I nearly wet myself. It had to be Auntie Mac just getting home from a late shift closing her restaurant.
Dad took my elbow and lifted me to my feet. “Sleep on it, Ethan. We’ll talk more tomorrow.” He gave me a gentle push toward the kitchen door as the headlights of Auntie Mac’s car flared at the bottom of the rising garage door. “You better get inside. You know she hates the way we run around the house in our underwear.”
I grabbed him in a quick hug. “I’m sorry I was such a douchebag about losing the money, Dad.”
He returned the squeeze, thank God.
I hurried inside.
five
What was the worst thing that could’ve happened to me the next morning?
No. . . worse than that.
Worse than that too.
How about hearing Boyfriend shout my name at the top of his lungs while he ripped the sheet off my bed? “I have a bone to pick with you, Foxtrot!”
That would be the worst.
I rolled to my feet on the opposite side of the bed, fists up, fighting my way to consciousness under the assumption the big goon had heard about the kiss I shared with Katy.
“What the hell?” I shouted.
He stood by the bed with a goofy gri
n. “Bro. . . birthday present? You promised?”
I relaxed. So. . . he wasn’t there to beat the shit out of me? What time was it?
His hands came up quickly and I dropped into a fighter stance, but he was actually shielding his face. “Speaking of bones, bro. Put that thing away before you put out somebody’s eye. Geez.”
Shitstix. I grabbed a pillow and turned my back to him. Give me a break. Seventeen. Nearly every morning was greeted with a salute.
“Ha-a-a, just messing with ya.”
Asshat. I threw the pillow at Boyfriend. “How the hell did you get into my room?”
He tossed the pillow on the bed. “Front door’s open, bro.” He fell heavily into a chair in the corner. “You said you’d help me get the perfect birthday present for Katy, remember?”
Rubbing one hand across my face to wake up, I picked up a pair of sweatpants. “I don’t recall saying eight o’clock in the freakin’ a.m. on a Saturday.”
He laughed and banged on the arms of the chair. “That is so big city.” He lifted his face and tried to sound snooty. “I don’t recall saying. . .” He laughed and banged the arms again. “Bro, I was milking cows, like, three hours ago. I sat outside on the porch for, like, an hour.”
I pulled on a t-shirt. “Did my dad, like, notice you?”
“Uh-huh.” I swear he bounced up and down in the chair like a coke addict, the powdered kind not the liquid. “He said to give you until eight and then knock myself out if you were still in bed.”
Nice. Dad was a dead man walking. Time to dig up the Mardi Gras coming out pictures from his college days and introduce them to Facebook.
“Okay, bro. . . I had the best f-ing idea.”
No. He really said “f-ing.” He really talked like that.
And he just kept talking. “So at first I was going to take you to the Mall and have you pick out some lame jewelry or something?”
“Really, Boyfriend?” I amped up the fake enthusiasm. “The Mall?” There was only one mall. It deserved a capital letter.
He waved a hand and made a face disturbingly similar to Katy’s cheerleader face. “Yeah, I knew you’d probably get a charge out of it, but it’s not my thing.” He stopped waving and looked like a puppy caught pissing in his master’s favorite shoes. “Nothing wrong with shopping, bro. Just not my thing.”
That’s right. He thought I was gay. Could this morning get any worse?
“But I know Katy would go batshit crazy if you taught me how to do that tango thing she does.”
I froze.
He’d managed to think of something that would actually work.
Aaaargh!
When you’re lost in the woods, never. ever. say, “Could be worse. Could be raining.”
He pumped a fist. “Booyah! Nailed it, right?” He jumped out of the chair and ran closer to me.
I flinched. If he hugged me, I’d have to coldcock him unconscious.
He held out a fist to bump. “I. . . am the perfect boyfriend.”
Reluctantly, I bumped his fist.
He winked. “I bet I get her to blow me on her birthday, knowwhatimean?”
My fist connected with his jaw before I even knew it was moving. Bam. Actually hurt my hand, too. I was used to gloves and tape.
“What the hell, bro?”
Quick. What Would Dad Do? “I’m sorry, bro, but I just can’t let you talk about women that way. This isn’t a locker room.”
Wait for it.
Wait for it.
His confusion changed into an oh-yeah-gay-dudes-are-practically-chicks expression. “Hey bro, I am so sorry. I didn’t mean. . . I didn’t mean a real blow job. . . it was. . . a metaphor.”
I held a finger to my lips and shushed him. “I can forgive you. Just remember that Katy is a lady, and I expect you to discuss her as such.”
I read fantasy novels. I got the lingo.
His hands came up and he nodded more than anyone should. “Lady Katy. Got it, bro.”
The bruise welling up on his cheek delighted me more than it should have.
Okay. . . teaching Boyfriend tango. There had to be a way to turn this to my advantage.
“Go down and get some coffee.” I needed a few minutes to myself to piss. Something told me he was the kind of guy who’d talk to me through the door. We weren’t that close. We’d never be that close.