Breaking the Ice

twenty-two

When Jason dragged me out of my house at the ass crack of dawn to get breakfast, I left my phone at home.

To be honest, that was a mistake. I didn't realize it in his car on the way there, when I talked about aftercare for his wrist while the crutch urgent care had given him rattled around, neglected in the backseat. But I did once we sat at our usual booth at Café com Leite and Jase invited Harper—who was still on the clock, by the way—to sit with us, leaving me stuck third-wheeling their flirting with nothing to do.

In their defense, the place was pretty quiet this early in the morning and Harper's coworkers shot her knowing looks and offered to cover for her. They did so in some brisk Portuguese alongside some other gibberish comments that made her flush to the tips of her ears. She was a sweetheart, with curly black hair that she had clipped back into a sloppy bun and big, brown eyes like a doe's. It was cute to watch her turn Jase into a puppy under the spell of her sugared, accented voice—for the first five minutes, at least.

Eventually, I decided to call it quits and just take my coffee to go. Jase had the decency to look a little hesitant letting me leave just to hang out with Harper, but I remembered what he had told me last night about finally finding a girl who he liked for more than just her body. After shaking Harper's hand, I just waved off Jase's guilty look, paid for myself at the counter, and left.

I wandered the midtown streets with my hands in the pockets of my flannel slung over a sweatshirt—my leather jacket was missing again, presumably at Beau's—just thinking. My thoughts had been running a million miles a minute, but I took a moment to breathe.

My phone was sitting in the bottom of my nightstand, filled to bursting with notifications from Beau about God-knows-what. Should I reply? If I did, I knew I'd be weak. There was a risk in seeing him: even with our decision to keep it quiet, people could still find out. Was I ignorant in not conceiving that until now, was I not careful? Of course not, we'd almost been caught once—twice? Again at Friendsgiving, maybe more I'd forgotten or that had gone unnoticed, and I was naïve to think that we could just keep skidding by on almosts. Was I being too quick to make this decision now, though? Maybe the adrenaline was just getting to me. But I had a feeling my fears were justified.

I remembered when I found out Ted was disowned and kicked out of his house. It was when I still worked theater tech backstage and around the time I had been closer to the cast and crew of the production. The gossip had spread like wildfire, about his parents bringing up anti-LGBT suggestions in PTA meetings and select members of the football team throwing Ted around, banging him into lockers and calling him choice slurs. The normally collected and fun Jeremy had been a guilty wreck backstage at every rehearsal and then every show, wiping his tears before his cues and running to the bathroom during halftime to vomit up his stress. Sometimes he would creep out the back door by the lighting booth where I worked and meet with Ted behind the thin walls.

"I'm sorry," Jeremy would say. "I'm so, so sorry, Teddy."

And Ted would just sob quietly, sputtering these tiny little hiccups that splintered my heart. I had never seen him cry before: not when he tore his ACL during warmups before a game, not when he missed a winning play for the semis on the field, not when he was called out of class because his Grandfather died. But here he was, brought to tears over a stupid mistake.

Sure, maybe now he seemed comfortable in his sexuality, but I'd seen the shattered pieces of the the depressed, insecure Ted underneath it all, the one who lost everything for his identity. How did I expect to be alright with rejection if even big, strong Teddy Mason fell apart at the seams?

I was a mess and my coffee was cold by the time I stood on my doormat, swiping mud off the bottom of my shoes. I decided to just go in and study to take my mind off of everything, drown myself in calculus so I could spend my next week of Thanksgiving break getting plastered at parties instead of reviewing for midterms. Or, maybe I could crash at the gym, work the stress out through sweat, then pick up lunch at the Mexican place nearby.