The Men Next Door

Ch 28 - Luca

Me and Brooks had a short-lived tradition of celebrating Christmas in the stands of Madison Square Garden. As a kid, I always spent the holiday watching hoops on TV with my pops, and dragging my friend to a Knicks game against his will was my way of carrying on the tradition.

I don't know why I bothered, really — I rarely made it back upstate anymore, and my folks refused to visit the 'cesspool of a city' — but Brooks and I never had anything better to do. His family festivities had passed away with his grandparents, and I wasn't going to hole up in a house with 21 other Marinos, so basketball was always a welcome distraction.

And then Bella came along.

The year we met her, I was planning to put the tradition to rest altogether. Brooks was obviously going to spend time with his girl, Addy was back home in Connecticut, and everybody else I knew gathered around an evergreen with glitter-wrapped gifts like something out of a fucking Hallmark movie. I felt like a loner, if I'm honest, but even I wasn't desperate enough for entertainment to sit alone in a sea of 20-thousand people... so watching the Christmas Day game from home seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to celebrate Santa's arrival.

And then Bella came along. Again.

Throwing a wrench in things was kind of her speciality, and if she didn't have a corporate job, she'd probably open up shop as the world's most unpredictable mechanic. Jam up the shit that was already working just fine, but somehow keep a smile on your face while she steered you toward a breakdown.

Alright, maybe that was a tad dramatic. She never steered me toward anything I didn't want her to. I just forgot to buckle in when we headed down Love Triangle Lane.

Road signs? Cars? Wrenches? Where the hell was I going with that?

Oh, right.

Basketball.

Campbell felt bad for stealing my holidate and decided to take me to a game to make up for it. Well, maybe 'take' isn't the right word. She forced me to go to a game with her and Brooks, let's say. As a 'Christmas present.' Their loved-up presence was a shitty gift, but I couldn't turn down a freebie — even if it was just an olive branch poorly disguised as a candy cane — so I pulled an ugly sweater over my head and hoped for the best.

The good news was me and Brooks were back to being besties, so I didn't have to worry about any angst on our end. Our conversation about Carlo was my last straw with Adderall — the shit had been making me more and more irritable for years — and I called my doctor about quitting it the second I cooled off that day. The withdrawal symptoms made me even more of a dick, but Brooks was willing to sit through the punches like a heavyweight champ.

The angel of a man even spent the night on my couch when the suicidal thoughts hit on day five.

Now, it was day nine, and I was finally starting to feel a little more like myself again. I was looking forward to a good matchup, the muscle aches that had been plaguing me night and day disappeared right on time, and me and Campbell even made some friendly bets on the stats sheet on our way to MSG. Everything was going well. Dandy. Cheerful, you could say.

And then the halftime buzzer sounded.

I don't know what came over me when I heard the shrill noise — the ghost of Christmas future, maybe — but I suddenly had a strong urge to get something off my chest. And I had limited time before the players came back to the court, so I dove right into it. No beating around the bush; no trying to sugar coat things. It was time to come as clean as the drug test I bought on day four, just because I could pass one for the first time in ages.

"Bella, I need to tell you something," I said, leaning forward to peek around Brooks.

She looked over at me in surprise, and I couldn't miss her boyfriend's lips settling into a hard line between us. The whole exchange made the Luca inside my head roll his eyes across the fucking the globe, but at least the Luca everyone else could see was able to contain himself by then.