Love Lessons (17 page)

That had been the last text, yesterday before the Philosophy Club. Not wanting to think about that anymore, Walter scrolled back further.

Are we going to Moe’s tonight?

Nah. Don’t feel like trolling. Unless you’re still shopping for boyfriends.

No. Let’s watch more D. Who. I need a Tennant fix.

Just not the Martha eps, please.

Gag. Donna Noble. Oh, I know, let’s watch the library one. River Song AND Donna.

And Tennant. I’ll leave the lube on your bunk.

You would not believe what I’m seeing right now. Whole Philosophy Club is trying to make a human pyramid in one of the studios. I don’t even fully understand why.

Not feeling the pyramid love?

Fuck no. I’m documenting for posterity. Will send a pic.

Maybe I should be a comm major. This econ course is going to kill me. From boredom.

I can send you nudie pics to keep you entertained.

Who of?

Who would you like?

Shit, prof eyeballing me. Gotta go.

Walter shut the phone without sending a text, grabbed the laundry basket and his duffel, and bugged out of the room. After packing the Mazda, he headed across campus to Lake Sharon, where the swans were huddled in a corner of the lake, heedless of the icy water, too wrapped up in each other. They were beautiful in the reflected lights of campus, and Walter stood a long time beneath the shelter of the campanile, watching them.

When he finally headed out of Danby, he didn’t put on any music, riding in silence all the way to Peoria. After a pit stop to hit the bathroom and grab a Starbucks, he scrolled through his phone and put on some Adele. A soft rain began to fall as she crooned about needing to make her partner feel her love, and somehow the double dose of melancholy allowed Walter to relax into his disquiet. It wasn’t that he knew home was going to suck, that he’d be enduring four days of his mother’s manic depression and his sister’s fits for attention. It wasn’t that listening to Cara talk about the wedding and pull further away from him and toward Greg alone was going to hurt. It wasn’t that he’d be lucky if his dad so much as called him, let alone met up with him for a coffee.

It was that he missed Kelly already.

Feeling slightly pervy but way too depressed to care, Walter reached behind him and fished in the laundry basket until he found one of Kelly’s pillowcases. Walter clutched it on his lap for a minute, then gave in and went full-on pathetic as he drew it up to his nose to inhale his best friend’s scent.

A voice in the back of his mind whispered that this kind of behavior went well beyond simply weird, that it meant something a lot scarier than being a pervert, but Walter pushed the voice firmly aside. He wasn’t mooning over Kelly. He wasn’t a pervert, and he wasn’t weird.

He was…sad.

Inhaling the pillowcase one last time, Walter clutched it in his hand and kept it there all the way back to Northbrook.

Chapter Thirteen

On their way back from his grandparents’ house on Thanksgiving, the Davidsons’ car broke down.

It became quite an adventure, calling Dick’s brother to get a ride back to the house and arranging a tow. When it was clear on Friday the car wouldn’t be fixed until the following week, however, things got interesting. How was Kelly going to get back to school?

“We still have my Datsun,” Dick reminded them as they sat around the table brainstorming.

“Yes, but then Lisa and I won’t have a car until you get back. And she has that church thing on Sunday afternoon,” Sue reminded him.

“Can’t we get her a ride?”

Lisa looked mortified. “We’re delivering baked goods people ordered for the fundraiser.”

“Surely they’ll understand the circumstances,” Dick said.

“Can the truck even get to Illinois?” Kelly hoped not. He wasn’t excited about being crammed into the tiny cab with his stuff flying loose in the back end.

“We could rent a car,” Sue suggested.

Kelly shook his head. “I might as well fly, for the expense.”

“But are there any flights because of the holiday?” Sue pressed. “And didn’t you tell me the airport was an hour away from Hope?”

It was. Kelly bit his lip. “I could ask if Walter minded picking me up.”

“That’s an awfully big inconvenience.”

“I don’t think he’d mind.” Kelly was pretty sure of that, despite their weird parting. He was starting to root for this idea. How fun would it be to ride back with Walter, even part of the way?

Dick frowned and fussed with his laptop a few minutes before looking up. “Didn’t you say your roommate lived in Chicago?”

“A suburb. Why?”

Dick turned the laptop around to show some airline listings. “There’s a red-eye on Sunday morning from Minneapolis to O’Hare. Four hundred dollars.”

It was a lot for such a short flight, but it would be only slightly more than renting a car, and that didn’t include gas and hotel and the general pain in the ass that was driving all the way to Danby and back again. It would also mean seeing Walter earlier and riding back to campus with him—all the way, at least from Chicago. The idea had Kelly both excited and anxious.

Sue looked doubtful. “I don’t know. It seems terribly presumptuous.”

“How?” Dick asked. “It’s not out of his way, one assumes. And then he’d have someone to share gas.”

“O’Hare is a big airport. I don’t like the idea of Kelly there on his own.”

Kelly balked. “Mom. Seriously.”

“Sue, I think you’re being a little overprotective,” Dick said.

Sue sighed. “I probably am. But I still don’t like this. I wish they could fix the car so it wasn’t an issue.”

They couldn’t fix the car, though, and the flight to Chicago was the only solution they could come up with. Kelly was charged with calling Walter to make sure the arrangement would be acceptable. He took his ring off and played with it in his palm, trying to keep his nerves distracted as he dialed.

“Kelly!” Walter’s greeting was brighter and more eager than Kelly would have predicted, and it made the butterflies the call had stirred do odd things inside him. “How’d your Mayberry Thanksgiving go?”

“It was good. Ate too much, fell asleep on the couch, played lots of board games with my cousins. You?”

“Ah.” The light went out of Walter’s voice. “It was okay.”

“Have you had a chance to see Cara yet?”

Walter cleared his throat. “No. We were supposed to do lunch tomorrow, but I think that’s getting ousted because of a wedding-prep thing.”

“Oh. God, I’m sorry. I know you were looking forward to seeing her.”

“Well, I was never too attached. They’re trying to please everyone, so they have about eighty Thanksgiving dinners to attend. And she really does need to pin the location down. She’s left it way too long. This is supposed to be some scouting mission at a bed-and-breakfast. Or something. Honestly, I’m trying not to get involved.”

Something about the phone amplified Walter’s tone, parsing out the wry wit and revealing a hint of sadness underneath. Kelly wished his dad had found a ticket for Saturday instead so he could hang out with Walter. Had he even looked for one? Kelly turned his dad’s laptop around and tucked the phone against his shoulder so he could type as he talked. “So, I’m actually calling because I have a favor to ask.”

“Sure. What do you need, Red?”

Kelly’s heart flipped a little as he saw not only was there a flight on Saturday, but it was a late-afternoon one and a hundred dollars cheaper. He dug his fingernail into the edge of his ring, tracing the smooth stone. “Well, I was wondering if there was any way you could give me a ride back to Hope.” He explained about the cars and the idea to fly to Chicago. “If it doesn’t work, that’s okay,” he added as he finished.

“Of course it’ll work. I’d love to come pick you up. It’s a dead boring drive by myself. When do you fly in?”

God, Kelly’s heart was beating so fast. Why was he so nervous? “Well, that’s the thing. I can get a flight on Sunday morning getting in to O’Hare at 7:30. Or…or I can come in on Saturday. That one’s cheaper and comes in at five in the afternoon. But that would mean I’d need to crash at your place, and I don’t want to impose—”

“You should totally come on Saturday. Not only would we not have to get up at the crack of dawn, but we could go out that night. Or not. I mean, if you’d rather stay another day with your family—”

“No, that sounds like fun, going out with you.” Kelly’s cheeks went up in flames. “I mean—so if it’s okay to come Saturday, I’ll book that one.”

“Great. Text me the details, and I’ll be there to pick you up.”

Now the butterflies in Kelly’s stomach were doing backflips. Jesus, he needed to get himself under control. He hurriedly clicked through and booked the ticket, fumbling with his mom’s credit card. “Awesome. I will.”

“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then.” Walter sounded a lot brighter.

“Guess you will.” Kelly could feel the conversation closing off, and he found he didn’t want it to end. “Thanks again. This is totally helping us out.”

“Me too.” Walter coughed. “I mean, it’ll be nice to have something to do Saturday, and company on the way back.”

“Yeah.” Kelly wished it were Saturday right now.

“Great.” A pause. “Well, I should probably let you go back to your family.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Kelly shifted his grip on the phone. “Okay. See you tomorrow?”

“It’s a date, Red.”

Kelly’s whole body was hot this time, and he kept the phone to his ear a moment even after the connection was dead, closing his eyes and savoring the words. Finally he laid the receiver on the table and headed to the kitchen to tell his parents about the change of plans.

After the phone call, Walter vacillated between feeling eager for Kelly’s arrival and anxious about it. On the one hand, simply thinking about seeing Kelly had him feeling happier, and the idea of a night in Boystown with him was so delightful it made his body hum.

On the other hand, having Kelly stay one night, even spending most of it out of the house, meant exposing him to the toxic-waste dump that was Walter’s family.

The house itself was pretty lethal too, the more Walter thought about it, and as he dwelled on the matter Friday night, he realized he needed to de-dust the place or risk having Kelly get sick. In fact, as he did a walk through with an allergen/asthmatic eye, it became quite clear what he was going to be doing for the next twenty-four hours. The nice part was he knew exactly how to proceed from living with Kelly for almost three months. After scanning his mom’s cleaning supplies, he made a Target run and started in.

First order of business was his room. It was the only place Kelly could sleep, because the spare bedroom had become catch-all for Walter’s mom’s home businesses, much of which had been doing nothing but collecting dust. Walter figured he’d sleep in there, so he’d keep the door closed after doing a cursory clean.

Next was the bathroom he shared with Tibby and the bathrooms off the kitchen and family room in the basement. Theoretically they were mostly clean, but Walter wanted them to look decent, plus he remembered there was a mold thing too. He did a thorough job on the toilet rims, the faucets and the grout.

After that, Walter felt slightly lost. His mom had a cleaning service, so he’d expected the main rooms to be good, but when he did a deep-clean check he realized things weren’t remotely close. Sure, the oven knobs gleamed in the kitchen, but the curtains in the living and dining room were so full of dust even Walter sneezed when he shook them. Same for the top of the china cabinet. When he checked the HEPA filter on the vacuum, he about gagged. He wrote down the number on the part and went out to the stores again, but it took him three tries to find the right one. He very nearly bought a brand-new vacuum, but that felt a little excessive. It was just one night.

Still. He wanted it to be a good night.

Walter clipped on the attachments to the vacuum and got to work. He wasn’t sure suctioning off the curtains would do much good, but the alternative seemed to be hauling them all to the dry cleaners—which he considered but dismissed because he worried they wouldn’t be done until he had gone back to school. His mom was giving him odd looks enough as it was.

She came into the dining room as he climbed down from wiping off the top of the china cabinet, hands on her hips. “Walter, what are you doing?”

“Cleaning.” He shifted the stool and climbed up again so he could get the tops of a few picture frames, though he wondered if he should take them down and wipe the whole business off. “I know you have a service, but this dust-mite thing is serious. And honestly, given how much grit I’ve been finding, I think you should try a different company.”

His mom almost looked ready to laugh. “Walter, he’s here for
one night
.”

“I know. But I’ll feel like shit if he has an attack, and it doesn’t take much of this stuff to set it off.” He glanced over his shoulder and raised his eyebrows. “Besides, you want to try to tell me you’re annoyed at having free housecleaning?”