by David Connor
Chapter 9
Kyoko was gone after refusing a sendoff. “We’ve said our goodbyes.” The evening had been quiet. Neither teen had been in touch since before dinner. Milo had stayed at the house, mostly upstairs, and Tom Alan had wandered the town until he showed up with the cats around ten.
“They wouldn’t settle,” he said, standing just outside the door with a light drizzle falling, the carrier in hand with two squirming balls of fur inside. “I guess they’ve gotten used to sleeping here.”
“They can stay,” Erika said. “So can you. Come in.”
“I’m sorry.” Tom Alan apologized to Billy even before going up to Milo, before even closing the door. “You were right. I…I have no right to stick my nose into Kiki’s love life. We’re skating partners, she and I, and that’s where it should end.”
Erika wasn’t too keen on that pronouncement.
“Well…we’re…we’re more than that.”
“Yes. We are.”
“But still, I’ve been way out of line.”
“I said some pretty shitty stuff back, stuff I’m really sorry for, too—Tom…Alan. I’ll do better with that. I’ll do better respecting how close you and Rika are,” Billy said.
“Thanks.” Tom Alan turned to her. “I got stuff in my head.”
“What kind of stuff?” She usually knew without asking. “Surely you and Milo—”
“Stuff I could deal with better,” he said, looking anywhere in the kitchen except at her or Billy. “We’re all happy to have you two back together. I hope I can make it up to you and make you feel welcome, Bill…if I’m still welcome.”
“Of course you are.” Erika took the crate from him and freed Flip and Twizzle. “Mother wants you here. You know that.” They hugged, Erika and Tom Alan for a long time and Tom Alan and Billy barely three seconds.
“Is Milo sleeping?”
“Wake him up,” Erika said. “If he is. I doubt it. He’s worried. He’s been waiting for you to call.”
“Hey.”
Everyone turned toward Milo on the stairs.
“Hey.”
“I missed you.”
Tom Alan smiled. “In four hours?”
“In a minute, 20,160 of them are going to be hell,” Milo said. “They’d be intolerable, Skater Boy, if I thought you wouldn’t be here when I got back.”
“I’ll be here,” Tom Alan said. “Let’s go upstairs. You need some rest.”
Milo had to be on the five A.M. train. Billy had to be at Irina Mischen’s rink before that for cleaning, and Erika and Tom Alan would hit the road not long after he finished for a long day of training.
“Come on.” Milo reached for Tom Alan’s hand. Tom Alan took Erika’s.
“Let’s peek in on Etsuko first,” he said.
“She missed you, too.” Erika led the four of them through the living room. “She fussed when I put her down. I think she’s gotten used to having three daddies.” Erika stopped in her tracks.
“It’s okay,” Billy squeezed her hand. “She has…and I don’t want that to change.”
Etsuko awoke long enough to smile at the four of them, then, after kisses, she was out again. Parting at the foot of the living room stairs, Erika and Billy headed for her bedroom, while Tom Alan and Milo headed up.
“Good night, Kiki. I love you.” He kissed her on the cheek.
“I love you, too…both of you. Good night.”
“See ya in the morning, Hockey Puck.”
A one beat chuckle came from Tom Alan. “Go ahead.” He bumped Milo with his hip. “Give him a kiss.”
Milo did, on the forehead. He had to yank Billy down to him by the front of his shirt to do it.
“None from you?” Billy asked Tom Alan, his expression a cross between smartass and pathetic.
“Just not there yet,” Tom Alan said with a faint smile. “But sleep well—and again—I’m sorry.”
Twenty minutes later, Billy’s books were spread out on the bed. He hadn’t studied much though, and seemed far more interested in what was going on in the other room—or more to the point, what wasn’t. “They’re not fighting.”
“Nope.”
“I wonder if they’re banging.” He was pressed to Erika, looking over her shoulder toward the heat vent.
“Maybe.”
“It’s their last sure thing for a while…unless Tom Alan goes down there.”
“It won’t be easy, with us competing the next two weekends.”
“I tell you right now, if I was mad at you…if you were pissed at me…I’d still at least try something.” Billy rolled flat on his back and sighed, as if he wouldn’t be getting any for two weeks either.
“We can,” Erika said. She reached for his soft dick and started kissing his neck.
“We don’t have to. This is nice. And I’m a little bit worried.”
“It’s no fun when mommy and daddy fight.” Erika tried to make light, but she agreed. “The kids start school tomorrow.”
“You know, Kensuke’s not such a mouthy asshole all the time, Rika. I swear, he’s not. It’s like there’s a switch. I’ve never seen him like he was this afternoon.”
“I believe you.”
“I hope it wasn’t me…the confusing way we treated him last night…buddy versus child.”
“Well, he’s not a child.”
“No,” Billy said.
“But I do get the impression he could use some…guidance off the ice. I’d guess it’s mostly about Jesse. Feelings…Men would rather yell, and fight, and isolate than talk about feelings.”
“Even Tom Alan.”
“We’ll be there for him,” Erika said, “whatever’s going on.”
“I blew it pretty fast—with Tom Alan and Jesse, last night and again this afternoon. We could have kept our pants on and celebrated with Gatorade. Then maybe no one would be mad. Maybe Jesse and Kensuke would have even made up.”
“Nothing brings people together like hockey?”
“You bet. Come ‘ere.” Billy picked up his phone. “I watched Fisher’s speech again today, and then went on the GLAAD site and PFLAG and ACT UP…I Googled ‘gay’, and once I got bored with the X-rated stuff—”
“I hope you favorited some we can watch later.”
Billy chuckled. “That sounds hot.” His upturned lips went the other way. “Are we weird?”
Erika laughed. “Who cares? But like Milo said, no one is wholly unique. We’re surely not the only male-female couple on the planet into watching gay men have sex. Watching two women go at it is supposed to be the ultimate straight guy’s fantasy. What’s the difference?”
Billy kissed her throat. “So, I gathered all this information about what we should know, and say, and do, and act like. It’s funny. In high school, I joined this diversity committee, or tolerance group, or anti-hate coalition…Thing was, no one could even come together to agree on a name. The faculty advisors, they were the worst. ‘I hate having the meetings so early in the day.’ ‘I hate this room they stuck us in.’ ‘I will not cite that writer in our mission statement, I hate his work,’ ‘Well, I think you hate women,’ ‘Because you hate men.’”
“They really said all that?”
“They did, and louder than they thought. I looked to my best friend, Pamela, and said ‘I don’t think two people who hate so many things should be trying to teach us about tolerance.’”
“Nice.”
“We left—and several others followed. The whole committee broke up after about a month. I wonder if those two teachers were smart enough to get the irony of it all. Hate, hate, hate…” Billy was stroking Erika’s hair. “How many times have I seen your short program now? It still makes me think. That ‘Sticks and Stones’ thing is total bullshit. Words hurt…and they stay with you sometimes. Mrs. Parker, she taught Art, right? I never took drawing. I’d’a been all over that if they’d’a brought in nude models…either gender.”
“I bet.”
“Now Mr. Schwabb, I had him for senio
r English. We had to do this ten-week combined project in two classes, English and History, where we, as a fictional character, were a part of an actual historical event. I wrote myself onto the 1980 Miracle on Ice Olympic hockey team. I was fucking pumped. Check this out.” Billy took Erika’s hand. “Right…” He moved it around. “Right there. You feel it?”
“Maybe.” There was a lump, she thought.
“I went down on the ice head first on day three of ice hockey and Jason Greenia’s stick thwacked me right there.”
Erika took her hand away.
“I don’t know if that had anything to do with why I can’t remember where to put a comma, but Mr. Schwabb didn’t just comment on that. ‘I hate your opening paragraph,’ he’d write. ‘I really hate your plot twist,’ ‘I can’t tell you how much I hate your main character.’ All that scrawled in red on every fucking paper ya get back doesn’t really foster creativity when time comes for the next draft. Dude was definitely smarter than me, but I ripped holes in every damned sheet of paper I started over on, babe, by erasing so much.”
“Sounds demoralizing.”
“I was…defeated, afraid to write anything. And angry. Ms. Alpert, the History teacher, she was cool and said stuff like ‘Page two really grabbed me. Grab me on page one.’ That made me want to try harder. Schwabb just made me feel dumb.”
“You never told me any of this before.”
Billy went back to stroking Erika’s hair. “Because maybe it’s harder to talk about than the whole bisexual thing. I never finished the assignment. I flunked. Almost a year later, Dad told me to get off the couch and get a life. I was a thug for a while—a good six months. Smoked a lot of weed, broke some windows, spray painted some public buildings…I got pretty depressed. Then, I finally went for my GED and enrolled in college. Dug out that old story and used some of it for the application essay, with the help of Coach LeDoux, who was Ms. LeDoux by then, assistant principal. She’s my angel whenever I need her. Screw you, Schwabb! I ended up in Lake Placid for real.”
He’d skipped several years in the timeline; that much Erika knew. He’d left out a period that was likely even more difficult to talk about. Infinitely so, she would imagine, as she found the scar with her fingertip—a series of them, really, some easy to feel, some that could only be seen all down one side, from armpit to hip.
“Then I met Booger…then you.” He kissed Erika’s cheek, and took her hand away. “Before that, college was off and on. It was tough at first, because Mr. Schwabb’s voice stayed with me. When I told Booger all this, he said Mr. Schwabb probably resented being stuck where he was, or maybe he hated boys because his youth was gone. That or someone treated him like shit once.” Billy added a pretty good British accent. “‘There’s never an excuse, but there’s always a reason. Bullies got bullied. Bullies are broken. That’s psychology.’ The worst part is, Peanut has him this year.”
“Yikes. Maybe he’s nicer now?”
“Naw. People don’t change.”
“That’s psychology?”
“That’s Frozen. Your daughter’s obsessed.”
Erika smiled. This—all of it—was intimacy exactly the way she wanted it.
“I think people are pretty much set in their ways, too. New ideas don’t usually break through. I like what Fisher did. Instead of trying to take down the Russian government with words, he went to the ones the bigotry was affecting and said, ‘You’re alright. We’re here for you.’ The only way to…influence people is maybe by living. Like, to my buds, maybe I’m the cool as fuck poster child for bi guys now, and they’re all, ‘That Billy Wahl, he’s a bit of alright.’”
Erika laughed into his muscle. “You’ve picked up a lot from Milo.”
“I guess.” He kissed her head, there on his shoulder. “I would never coach like Mr. Schwabb taught. You don’t empower yourself by devaluing someone else. I think that’s a quote or something.”
“Sounds familiar. And I agree. My papa was stern. Mrs. Mischen—tough as nails, but neither one of them chose degradation as an instructional tool.”
“I did name one of the fictional guys on the Russian team Dick Assholvich.”
Erika smiled. “Clever.”
“I mean if you’re seventeen, that’s kind of funny.”
“Or Milo at thirty.”
“Or the guy writing all of Will Ferrell’s movies.” Billy smiled for a moment, too. “Everyone you meet in life leaves their mark, babe, you know? Someone might be just one good or bad word away from making a major choice or a major misstep. Maybe Kensuke had a Mr. Schwabb last year. I want to leave a good mark, like Coach LeDoux, with Etsuko…with my brothers and sisters, especially Peanut…with Jesse and Kensuke, and all my kids.”
Erika kissed him. “I know you do. The fact Jesse’s so confident in his hockey skills, confident enough to go up against the guys, where he belongs, that’s because of you. Your actions speak louder than words.”
“Which kinda contradicts everything we’ve been talking about. Maybe words and actions speak at the same volume. I don’t know. Who am I to undo a cliché?” Billy ran his bare foot up Erika’s leg. “I think we should try to set up a meeting between Jesse and some men’s coaches.”
“I’ll pull whatever strings I have,” Erika said.
“I know some college recruiters. If we can’t go all the way to the Olympic level again, that’s a start.”
“Jesse’s texts—three of them throughout the day—were very friendly. He seems fine.”
“He didn’t text me. Maybe I should tell him I’m bi.”
“To earn points?”
Billy shrugged. “I had college buddies who drank to straight pride every June and I cheered with them. When I realized I hadn’t kept my bisexuality from them unintentionally…you know, just because it hadn’t come up or because I wasn’t with a guy at the time…that’s when that last line hit me: ‘For those wondering why there isn’t a straight pride day…’”
“‘Be glad you don’t need one.’”
“Exactly,” Billy said. “Maybe I didn’t tell you right away for the same reason.”
“Aww.” She caressed him, for reassurance and also because she loved being able to touch him again.
“It’s one thing to accept yourself; it’s another to worry about what other people think, even if we’re not supposed to. The minute I read that, it kinda clicked for me.” Billy sighed. “You know something, though. I still think Straight Pride T-shirts are funny as hell.” He whispered it, like it was something bad. “As long as the guy or woman wearing it isn’t some kind of hate monger—and it turns out not one of the dudes I hang out with is—if we all live by ‘Don’t be an asshole,’ maybe everyone gets a T-shirt and a parade.” He thrashed about some. “Except…someone would jump down my throat for that. You know they would.”
“Probably.”
‘‘A lot of people who claim to hate labels always have one ready. ‘There’s an addiction to rage these days, prevalent in epidemic proportions among the alleged most enlightened.’ I read that on a women in politics site the other day, talking about…How did Booger’s friend Rocky say it? Enemies dressed as allies, that’s what they were talking about.”
“Hmm.” Billy was rambling, but Erika didn’t mind. He was making up for all the conversations they didn’t have the first time around. Plus, his finger kept circling her nipple down inside the V-neck of her short, summer nightgown.
“Being kind is kind, everybody should be equal, and love is love, like me and you, Milo and Tom Alan, and…you and Tom Alan.”
“Billy…”
“I could see us all working something out.” His tone was lascivious. “Coming together.”
“What?”
“You know.” He pinched the sensitive tip, which made Erika inhale sharply and picture the word with a u. “We talked about it, remember? Back before you and Tom Alan got married.”
“Not like…”
“Not like what?” Billy put his mouth to Erika’s ea
r. “They can’t hear us, can they?”
“No.” The warmth and moisture of his breath there caused warmth and moisture somewhere else. “I assume they would have said if they could. I sing pretty loud in here sometimes. Why?”
“‘Cause I was just going to ask if you think this bed is big enough for four.”
She smacked him.
“Let’s see…Tom Alan, then you, then me, and then Fisher. Ooh.” He sat up, excited. “Maybe we could get a round bed…just for four-ways…so Tom Alan and Milo wouldn’t have to be so far apart. We could swap out your mother’s. With her in Japan, we could turn that bedroom into the sex den.”
“You wish.”
“Maybe.” Billy kissed her ear, and then put his lips to the silk where his finger had been. “I’d definitely let them watch us…in case you were wondering.”
“Two years ago, you wouldn’t even consider a three-way relationship, let alone four-way sex.”
“Nobody put that on the table,” Billy said. “You want the serious reason, though?”
“I do. At the time, you said it was an affront to marriage. Those were your exact words,” Erika reminded him.
“Yup.”
“You don’t feel that way anymore?” Billy pursed his lips. Erika kissed them, and then took the bottom one between her teeth. “You’re sexy when you’re thinking,” she said.
“You’re sexy all the time. What it was…We go to church, us Wahls, every Sunday, in numbers big enough to fill half a row of pews. Still, I don’t know how I feel about religion, right? Parents, them I dig, especially mine, and you were gonna—and don’t get mad at me. You and Tom Alan both said ‘I do’ when the priest guy…whatever he’s called in the kind of wedding you had…when he asked if you would forsake all others. You were going to say it in front of your father.”
“Yeah.”
“Your father decided right off I wasn’t good enough for you.”
“No way.”
“Rika…”
“Well, he never got a chance to know you. Mother approves.”
“I might not sign off on any guy Etsuko brings around either, I suppose. I’m sorry I made things more confusing for you back then.”