Winger

Chapter Sixty-Two

I CALLED MY MOTHER FROM the airport.

Well, to be honest, I called home hoping I’d be able to talk to my dad, but no such luck.

RYAN DEAN WEST: Hi, Mom. It’s me, Ryan Dean.

I know. I’m an idiot.

MOM: Hi, sweetie! Are you back from Seattle?

RYAN DEAN WEST: I’m at the airport in Portland.

MOM: Did you have a good time, Ryan Dean?

RYAN DEAN WEST: It was the best weekend ever, Mom.

MOM: Oh.

I thought she sounded . . . sad? Awkward pause. Very awkward pause.

MOM (cont.): Is everything . . . okay, Ryan Dean? You sound different.

I can’t believe it. Is she actually crying?

RYAN DEAN WEST: Are you crying, Mom?

MOM: I’m sorry, baby. You just sound so grown up all of a sudden. Did you and your girlfriend, you know . . .

Please, someone, kill me now.

RYAN DEAN WEST: No!

MOM: Well, did you get the package I sent? Did everything work the way the booklet said it would?

Sniff.

Why is it a guy can have an entire conversation with a girl and it’s like she’s hearing something entirely different from what is coming out of his mouth?

RYAN DEAN WEST: Mom. I am not calling to talk about sex.

This was so creepily disgusting. Here was the one person in the world with whom I would never want to talk about the one thing I think about constantly.

RYAN DEAN WEST (cont.): I’m calling to ask you to FedEx me a new pair of running shoes. I lost mine on the island.

MOM: Oh. I’m so sorry, sweetie.

She sounded crushed.

RYAN DEAN WEST: It’s okay, Mom. They were getting too small anyway. I gained ten pounds and I’m two inches taller now than when you saw me in September. I need size ten-and-a-half. Nikes or Asics, okay?

MOM: Ten-and-a-half? Ten-and-a-half?

She started crying again.

Crap.

Chapter Sixty-Three

TWO THINGS KIND OF HIT me when I saw Chas and Megan get off the flight from Los Angeles together.

First, they looked like they were tired of each other, like an old married couple who’d gone on too long of a vacation together and did not have fun; and, second, I was kind of jealous that Chas got to spend the weekend with Megan.

I know that’s stupid.

Does that make me a bad person? No matter what Joey said, I wasn’t ever going to be able to stop thinking of Megan Renshaw as smoking hot, and in some ways she was more accessible to me than Annie.

I’ll be honest. Seeing her coming off the plane and realizing I was jealous of Chas did make me feel terrible about the whole situation. And I thought, maybe I just felt that way because in some ways I was convinced that Annie was going to throw me away again. Maybe Joey was right that Annie didn’t want to get hurt, but, goddamnit, neither did I. So maybe I just looked at Megan as some type of five-out-of-five-sizzling-white-hot-crescent-wrenches on the Ryan Dean West Safety Net Tool Chart.

I still felt bad, though, and I grabbed Joey by the collar while we were waiting at baggage claim and whispered, “Joey, tell me to grow up again.”

And he said, “Ryan Dean, grow the fuck up.”

’Cause he saw how I’d been looking at Megan.

You know, there’s this lesson in cheesy stories that says be careful what you wish for, but I was never one for cheesy stories, much less morally condescending messages, so it was kind of like dying and going to that special place with Great-Grandma and that two-dimensional Chihuahua of mine when pissed-off-at-Megan Chas grumbled that he wanted to sit in front so “Asswing can sit in the back with the other two girls.”

Yeah. Whatever, Betch. Call me a girl. Call me Asswing. But, for a two-hour car ride, my legs would be simultaneously touching the legs of Megan Renshaw and Annie Altman, and I fully believed that would precipitate the all-time lowest blood-pressure reading north of Ryan Dean Westworld’s metal- detector-tripping equator.

And then again, there was still that unopened bottle of piss, too, so call me whatever you want.

Do things like that explode? I wondered, since I’d never actually kept a bottle of piss around for more than three days—tops—before.

And I was also fully aware of how incredibly stupid I can be at times like this, so I told myself (or, Ryan Dean West said it to the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island) that I’d better just shut up, keep my eyes forward, and not cop any obvious feels.

Yeah, right. Okay, to be honest, I can abide by the limitation of obviousness, but the “feels” part was a done deal as far as the Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island was concerned. Oh . . . and eyes forward? Are you kidding me? So that meant shutting up. Hmm . . . That was probably out too.

We got all our stuff loaded into the SUV and piled in.

The back windows immediately fogged up. I felt myself beginning to sweat. I slipped my shoes off and kicked them under the seat, quietly contemplating the beauty of that hump in the floor, which allowed me to touch Annie’s foot with my left and Megan’s foot with my right.

Suddenly, I found myself in a battle of epic proportions, pitting good and pure Ryan Dean West against the crazed urges of the Humping Wild Boy of Bainbridge Island, who, undoubtedly, had been somehow infected from the saliva of that sex-starved gay pug dog and, as a result, felt a helpless compulsion to hump anything with a pulse.

I am such a loser.

I didn’t even make it out of the goddamned parking lot.

RYAN DEAN WEST: Stop trying to play footsie with two girls at the same time. You’re getting mud on my socks.

WILD BOY OF BAINBRIDGE ISLAND: I can take them off if you want. You know how I feel about wearing