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“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Scotty’s voice drifted up from downstairs.
“Think that leaves my options pretty open,” George scoffed.
“Exactly.”
“Bye, Scotty.”
“Hang on, I wanna firm promise you’re gonna come see me in the off-season.”
“I’ll do my best.” Joq could hear in George’s voice he was trying to get Scotty out of there without committing to anything.
“You can bring your boy,” Scotty laughed.
“Get outta here,” George slammed the door.
Joq bristled. He could still hear Scotty laughing on the other side of the door before it drifted away. He felt hurt. He shoved that aside and seized on the anger. He marched down the stairs.
“What time’s lunch?” George asked as he jogged up, his hand reaching out and brushing Joq’s side as he passed him on the stairs.
“One.”
“Cool,” George went back into their room and closed the door behind him.
Joq tried to shake off the anger, the unsettled feeling. He really didn’t need to broadcast any bad blood with his parents in the house.
By the third time George looked at his phone at lunch, Joq’s mum said something. He’d seen her quiet surprise at the first look, the arched eyebrow at the second, and now he knew she was thinking it’d gone to straight up rude.
“Somewhere you need to be, George?” she asked and sipped her wine.
“No, sorry,” he put his phone down, smiled that charming smile. “Just drinks with some old friends last night for the birthday, getting spammed with night-after gossip.”
“Hmmm,” she smiled at him. On anyone else, it’d be a smile enamoured with his charm. Joq’s mum was immune; her smile told George he was skating on thin ice.
“Thirty-one,” Joq said to head that off. “Getting old.”
His dad laughed good-naturedly and started telling a story about when he was thirty-one, still coaching the national swim team. His dad could ramble, and tell a good story, and Joq smiled at him and relaxed. He glanced at George hanging on every word. George met Joq’s eyes and grinned, then looked back at his dad.
“Something else happened that year,” his mum said as he wound down.
“This one,” his dad beamed and rubbed Joq’s head like he was still a boy.
“A very pleasant surprise,” she finished as she looked at Joq.
George’s phone vibrated on the table. He picked it up.
“Sorry,” he said as he stood. “Excuse me, I better take this.”
And then he was up, strolling down the hall, his soft, “Hello,” wafting back to them as he went through the door to the games room and gym.
Joq’s mum didn’t bother to hide her sigh. It was full of everything she thought about the situation. Joq was impressed she could do that: make one noise and communicate so much.
Joq and his parents had managed to have only one fight his entire life. But it was the kind of fight that coloured everything that came after it if they weren’t careful to avoid the topic: him and George. His mum didn’t like George “keeping her boy in the closet” as she put it, while his dad, an ex-champion swimmer—lots of Gold in the Commonwealth Games, never making the podium in the Olympics—always tried to get her to understand George’s side. They’d had calm variations of this conversation since Joq moved in.
“If he loved you, he wouldn’t do that,” she’d say.
“It’s not that simple, Janice,” his dad would reason calmly. “You don’t get the pressure, living under a microscope like that. What’s private, you want to keep private. Keep as yours.”
“Oh, so I don’t know about the life of professional athletes, is that what you’re saying?” she’d counter.
