by E. Cleveland
Mom: We’ll figure it out. Stop stressing so much!
It’s obvious that my sister never expected me to bring anybody. She just assumed that would never happen. She decided it was so impossible that I could potentially show up with another human being that the very idea is sending her into another pre-wedding melt-down. That shouldn’t make me smile. I need to stop smiling. Griz’s thick, dark hair and brown eyes hide behind my eyelids. Haunting every blink. It would easily be worth one thousand hard-earned dollars to see my sister’s reaction to him. I can see her jaw going slack and that stupid pity-mixed-with-superiority look she always gives me would melt into something else. Maybe even envy.
My fantasy, my rules.
Fantasy. That’s all it is. Yep, that wipes the smile off my face pretty quickly. Knowing that tomorrow I need to get back to my family with some kind of excuse, tugs my smile down at the corners. I frown down at my phone screen, reading through my family’s texts like a lurker in a comment section.
Dad: so now you go from no bf to bringing some guy home? And your mother is saying you guys will be sharing your old room. With some guy we’ve never even met!
Mom: of course they are. Don’t be so old-fashioned, Jerry. Even you and I shared a room before we were married and that was a million years ago!
Bridezilla: Ew! Mom, no!
The little puke emoji she added sums up my thoughts pretty well.
Dad: it’s not old-fashioned to want to meet your daughter’s bf. I’m with it. I’m woke
Mom: I don’t know what “woke” is, but I know you’re not “with it” so I doubt you’re “woke” either. And, get over it, Clementine. How do you think you and your sister were born?!
Bridezilla: Ugh. Just because you had sex doesn’t mean I want to think about it. Anyway, Hattie, get back to me on his name, will ya!?!
Mom: have sex. not past tense. Present.
Dad: all the time!
My sister put an entire string of those green-faced emojis across the screen, and I have to agree. I put the phone down, even though I’m sure I could scroll for another ten minutes. I stare at the screen like I just watched the girl from The Ring crawl out of it. Not because of my parents boasting about their sex lives, although, maybe a little from that too, but mostly it’s because...
What the fuck am I going to do?
What am I going to tell them? I’ve got to come up with some kind of excuse that doesn’t sound like a lame lie. Unless... How does the witness protection program work? I’m not ruling anything out just yet. Faking my own death and starting my life over in the Alaskan bush might be on the table too. I haven’t decided yet. I push the phone across my desk and lean back in my comfy computer chair.
“Not tonight.” I shake my head and force myself to focus on an entirely different problem.
I’m not texting my family back tonight. They shouldn’t expect me to call after the bachelor auction anyway. My eyes slide over the options on my screen. I’ll have to deal with my boyfriend-lie in the morning. Right now, I need to pray that I still have some money left on my Visa so I can get this sofa bed for my big, fat date-lie.
I sort the searches the same way I’ve been judged my entire life…by weight. After that word-salad I spewed back at Oliver’s about how heavy it is, I’ve gotta make sure it’s not something like my fifty-pound Ikea couch. It takes a while, but I finally find something. I wanted the sofa bed to be inexpensive, heavy, and cute, but I only got the first two. I crinkle my nose at the flower pattern. Even though I like lilies, it’s so ugly. It’s like the birth control of sofa beds. It reminds me of every sofa I’ve ever seen in a basement with paneled walls.
Not my favorite. It’s heavy though. I sigh, shaking my head. This should be a wake-up call if anyone has had a wake-up-call moment before, right? I’m officially spending almost two hundred bucks on a sofa bed that looks like you should only sit on it if you’re wearing corduroy pants, on top of my thousand-dollar bid.
I put it in my online shopping cart and type in all my information. I’ve bought a few things from this website now, and it’s always the same story when they get to my apartment: they only deliver to the entrance of the building. When my Visa goes through, I do a little dance in my chair. I finally grab my mug and sip my much-cooler tea.
My gaze falls back to my phone, but I quickly pull it away. My little smirk pulls my lips back up in the corners. Griz is still so clear in my mind every time I blink. I realize I’m just holding my eyes closed longer and longer to see his face. To see his lips.
It’s late. Stretching out as I stand up, exhaustion pries my mouth open into a big yawn. I’m used to late nights at the paper, but they don’t come with an exhausting emotional rollercoaster ride. I’m beat. I’ll deal with my family and the other side of this craziness tomorrow.
Tonight, I can let it go.
6
Cheesy Pornos
Griz
Head down, shoulders rounded, I’m like an ox dragging a tiller through mud. I snort my breath out, and it hangs in the air. That’s power skating sessions at the Witch’s Tit. If the beast-mode workouts don’t kill you, hypothermia might. It’s sweat-freezing-to-my-fucking-face cold in here.
The air burns my lungs as I muster every fiber of muscle in my body to push as hard as I can. My legs are on fire as I push off on my blades, skating up the arena, rapid-fire. Even with Player and Blaze both hanging onto ropes attached to my waist, dragging like lifeless sacks of potatoes behind me on the ice, I’m still the first to reach the end.
“Fuck yeah!” I pump my fist when I cross the red line at the end. I do a backwards skate that’s like doing a Moonwalk dance while dabbing. “I am on fire.”
Coach Wilson’s whistle sounds like a songbird on steroids. The sound blasts through the empty arena. “Griz! I said no fucking victory dances at Powerskate. You just earned yourself another partner.” He points past me. “Phillips, get over here. Lay down and grab one of Player’s legs and one of Gucci’s. Yep, you got it.” He nods approvingly as my teammate does what he’s told. “All right, show-off.” Our coach gives me a half-cocked smile. “Let’s see you earn a fucking victory dance now.”
The shrill tone he blows out of his whistle gives us our start. For a second, I’m just skating in place. The weight of the extra guy feels impossible to move.
“Dig deep, Griz!” Player calls out.
“Come on, man. You got this,” Gucci chimes in.
Finally, my blades chip into the surface of the rink. The hot air puffing out of my lungs hangs around me like a steam engine. Go ahead and call me The Little Engine That Could because I strain every muscle fiber in my body, especially in my burning legs, and manage to get some forward momentum.
I give it my all. It’s slow-going, and I’m dripping with sweat, panting hard by the time I make it to the end, but I do make it. There’s no victory dance for me this time. Dead last is the spot I earned. You’d never know it from how the guys are clapping for me and going on. Even Wilson is shaking his head with a reluctant grin on his face. I don’t think he expected me to make it.
“All right, good. That’s what I want to see more of. This right here.” He points at everyone on the ice. “You guys are more than your own individual NHL dreams. I don’t give a shit about what your hockey stats are at the end of the year if you put yourself above the team. These are your brothers. Support them. Lift them up. And if any of them need to be brought down a peg or two,” – he points right at me – “I’ll make them drag something the weight of their own egos up and down the ice until they learn.” He says it with a smile, but I know he’s dead serious. He blasts his whistle again. “Hit the showers, boys. Good effort,” he yells as we clear out.
I head into the locker room. Guys are buzzing past me, but I’m in no hurry. Small rivers of sweat are running over my skin. With how notoriously cold this arena is, I’ve never worried about heat exhaustion before, but I feel like I’m about to become a medical mystery. I’m boiling. Grabbing
my phone from my locker, I slump onto a bench, lean over and take a minute to cool down. After pulling all that dead weight up the ice, I’m beat.
I groan at the text messages waiting for me. There are eight messages, all from one person: my mother. She’s insisting that I fly back at spring break to spend it there. I know her heart is in the right place. At Christmas, she kept fretting and fussing over me. I think she took my almost-daddy news hard, but not because she’s upset for herself. One day, mom’s gonna spoil the fuck out of whatever grandkids come her way. Her anguish isn’t from losing a grandchild in her life that was never hers to begin with.
It’s the pity in her eyes I can’t face. I know she wishes she could protect me from pain. Around campus I’m a big, old grizzly bear, but to my mom, I’m still her boy. I hate seeing that look in her eyes, tattooed to her face, that pain that all parents feel when they have no choice but to helplessly watch their children struggle. I love my mother dearly. I’ve punched more than one face for calling me a mama’s boy as a kid. Now, I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks. There are worse things than a guy loving the woman who gave everything to raise him right. However, I can’t spend another week at my parent’s house with them hovering over me, looking at me with pity and worry. It’s awful. I’d rather stay at Hector House and enjoy a quiet week alone than that.
Scrolling through mom’s messages, each one more insistent than the last, I’m not really sure how I’m going to break that to her. This isn’t getting solved right now. I shove my phone into the front pocket of my hockey bag, separated from the main compartment of sweaty gear.
“Griz, that was something to watch.” An enthusiastic first-year guy we call Rookie slaps my shoulder padding, literally patting me on the back. “You’re a beast, man. A beast.” He has to yell over all the noise. Lockers are slamming, and there are already a couple showers running in the next room. He moves to a bench across from mine and starts getting his gear off.
“Thanks. I figure at least one senior guy needs to start pulling their weight on the team, soooo…” I smirk, knowing full-well that I’m whizzing a fully-baited fishing line until it plops right next to Player’s head.
“Is that what you got out of what the coach was saying?” Player swallows the bait and chirps at me from across the room.
Rookie looks from me to Player and back again. It’s funny how Rookie and Player got their nicknames for the same reason, really. Player got his because - what feels like a lifetime ago, before he practically married Kaylee - he used to get around.
A lot.
Every guy on the team has had their fair share of wild nights with bunnies. I’m guilty as fuck. We all are. Player used to make it look like a sport though. A sport that he dominated, sweeping up all the gold medals in bunny-fucking. Now he’s reformed. A one-woman man. I never thought I’d see the day, but now it’s hard to imagine him any other way. He didn’t just change when they got together. He transformed or did some kind of metamorphosis shit. He went from being a tadpole, swimming in a river of pussy, to a wise old frog sharing a lily pad with his girl.
Rookie is the exact opposite. It started out as a placeholder nickname because nothing really stuck to the guy. With most of us, there’s something that sticks out about them in the first few weeks on the team. Maybe it’s something easy, like how Canuck is from Canada. Maybe it’s something embarrassing, like how Gucci filled a chick’s designer purse full of puke one night at the bar. Or maybe it’s something physical, like in my case. They say I’m like a big, old grizzly bear. With Rookie, there was nothing. Nada. He was just this gray-man, blending into the background of life. Anytime we’d try to think of a name, we came up empty-handed.
Until the night at Oliver’s. We got the newbies absolutely ripped on shots, and he got shit-faced. Like confess-all-your-secrets kind of wasted. That’s when he admitted he’s still a virgin. That’s all it took. New life was breathed into the nickname Rookie, and it stuck permanently.
“Yeah, that’s what I got out of it.” I smirk. “Blah, blah, Griz is the best on the team, blah.” I imitate Wilson’s voice.
“Funny, ‘cause what I heard was, ‘Griz, your ego is six hundred pounds.’” He does his own impression of the coach, and even I laugh.
“You gotta catch your second wind, man.” Canuck is already out of his hockey gear, stripped down and walking into the steam clouds hanging outside the showers. “Don’t you have a sofa bed to move today?” He doesn’t wait for my answer. He disappears into the fog, getting in while the water is still hot.
“Oh, shit. I forgot. It’s your auction date today.” Gucci looks up from his duffel bag, where he’s shoving all his padding.
“Date?” Player waves his hand, dismissing the word entirely. “What I’m going on is a date. Dinner and an opera, that’s a classy fucking date.” He points at me. “Griz is a hired hand for the afternoon.”
“That don’t mean a thing.” Blaze cuts into the conversation, completely bare-ass naked. He always seems like he’s oblivious to his own nudity. I have never met a man who is literally so comfortable in his own skin. He runs his tattooed hand over his wild beard. “Player, you’ve got no chance of getting any pussy on your night.”
“No shit.” Player frowns. He’d take a couple bullets before he’d cheat on Kaylee.
“Not because of your girl,” Blaze cuts him off. “Because that professor doesn’t want you, man,” he explains. “She wants to feel impulsive and a classy kind of sexy.” Blaze points at me. “Your date, now, that could go somewhere.”
My jaw gets tight, and my shoulders pinch up. Blaze doesn’t know that I’m not doing anymore hook-ups. It’s not like I announced it. That’s not what’s got me tensing up. I force myself to get up and start packing my stuff into my bag. “No, Player’s right. She wants my help. That’s all.” I stuff my hockey shorts in and look up at him.
“I don’t think so,” Blaze answers slowly. He shakes his head thoughtfully. “I think your date is gonna be like one of those cheesy pornos. You show up, and Hattie’s the girl who needs a big, strong man to help her do something. You move the couch and she’s like, ‘What else are you carrying around that’s thick and heavy?’ Bow-chicka-wow.” Blaze starts imitating porn music. “Next thing you know, you’ve got your own sofa-bed-fuck story to tell.” He heads over to the showers.
“I don’t think anyone can top your sofa bed story,” Canuck calls after him, his hands cupped around his mouth, “but your mom and I are gonna give it a try.”
Blaze just lifts up his middle fingers on both hands and keeps walking. He disappears into the steam rolling around the entrance to the showers as a bunch of other guys come out. It looks like a good time to get an open shower. I hope there’s still enough hot water to ease my muscles before I go help Hattie move her couch.
Suds run down me as I wash up. Blaze’s stupid porn idea keeps popping up in my head. I’ve gotta get washed and get out before it makes anything else fucking pop up on me. No hook-ups, even if Hattie is looking for one, which she isn’t.
Right?
7
Big-Beard Feminist Face
Hattie
“Well, for goodness sakes, girl. How are you ever going to get that thing up to your apartment?” Mrs. Clark frets.
The big lump of ugly that maxed out my credit card would be impossible to miss even if I wasn’t sitting in the middle of it…especially since the delivery guy dumped it off the back of his truck and just left it right outside the elevators. Now the entryway to my apartment building looks like a hotel lobby designed by my Great-Nana. She would approve of the plastic wrap taped over the fabric for protection.
I’m still waiting for my date to show up. He’s late.
The plastic squeaks every time I lean over, straining to see out the entryway windows into the secure area where people buzz to get in. It tattles on me with a high-pitch squeal every two minutes. I guess I’m nervous.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Clark.” I smile at my well-in
tentioned neighbor. I feel bad that I’m adding to the permanent crinkle in her salt-and-pepper brows. “I have a friend on the way to help me move it,” I reassure her.
“Unless your friend is from the planet Krypton, I think you’re going to need more people.” She laughs at her own Superman joke. I manage to maintain the polite smile on my lips, but it’s getting harder. “No, but seriously…” The laughter stops abruptly, and her tone bounces straight back to worried. “I’ll just call my boys.”
“No, please. Don’t do that.” I stand up suddenly. My hands are open, and every part of me is imploring her to not continue down this road. “I’m sure they’re busy.”
“Oh, nonsense.” She waves me off and starts fumbling through the oversized tote bag dangling from her shoulder. “Have you met my boys? Donnie and Kyle?” She rummages through books, something that looks like a smaller purse, pill bottles and a lot of crumpled receipts, searching.
I have met her sons, not that I’m sure they’d remember me. They were both piss drunk, waiting outside the building for a cab. They had some kind of good cop/bad cop routine going. Donnie told me he wanted to slide his cock between my “sweet tits”, but the other brother stepped in, shutting him down.
I know it was Donnie because Kyle apologized for his brother, introduced himself and asked if I lived in the same building as their mother. At first, I thought he was being a decent human being. I quickly realized I set the bar too high when the apologizer tried to get my number. His true colors were on full display when I turned him down and walked away. “Whatever, you fat bitch. I wouldn’t fuck you with someone else’s dick anyway.”
I never bothered to ask the obvious questions burning in my brain. Things like: Whose dick? Where did you get this dick? And, why do you think I’d let you fuck me with this unexplainable, I’m guessing detached, dick you carry around?