Page 8 of Top Shelf
He blinked at me, and it was clear he had no idea who I was talking about. Okay, yeah, I did not need to be lusting after this guy.
“Pretty in Pink, right?” he said.
Crisis averted. “Yeah. That’s him. He also made Ferris Bueller.”
“I’m aware of him. And no. Me and my brothers? Our names are a whole…thing.” When I blinked at him, he sighed again. “Both sides of my parents’ families were not thrilled with them dating.”
“Money thing?”
“Race thing,” he said, and I grimaced. I couldn’t relate. Not really. I was American with recent Welsh and, a bit further back, Greek.
“Ah. So…your dad is white?”
“Yeah. My dad is originally from Iowa, and he moved to Toronto when he got hired on as a professor of religion at the university. My mom’s family is from Pakistan. They moved to Toronto when she was, like, thirteen. My granddad took a curator job with the Royal Ontario Museum.” He heaved a sigh like he was tired of telling this story. “They met at a street fair a few weeks after my mom graduated. Neither of their parents approved the match, but they got married anyway. My dad suggested Anglican first names and Urdu middle names for their kids to appease both sides. It didn’t work. It was a whole thing,” he added, looking like that might be part of more trauma. “I have five brothers, so I think by the time they got to me, they’d given up caring what name to pick.Ferris Buellerwas probably on TV at the hospital the night I was born.”
“Could be worse. Your name could be Ed. Or Cameron.”
He laughed softly and rolled his eyes. “I guess.Anyway,” Ferris said, wringing his hands in his lap.
Yep. I was being fucking awkward. Again. I decided it was best if I changed the subject.
“I’m going to stop for a burrito on the way to the hotel. Are you hungry?”
He blinked at me, and yeah. I deserved that look. After a second, he smiled softly and shrugged. “I could eat.”
“You’re a growing boy,” I told him, and he flinched. Fuck me. “Man,” I clarified.
Ferris let out a small laugh and shook his head. “No. I get the expression. I’m autistic, but I’m not stupid.”
“If anyone calls you stupid, let me know. My knee might not work, but my fists do, and it’s been a while since I’ve been able to rearrange a face.”
“You sound like Colton,” he told me, then settled in his seat.
Was Colton his boyfriend? The name sounded familiar. Smarmy soccer guy, I was pretty sure. Well, fuck him. Even if that was probably the cockblock I needed for the afternoon.
He was thin.He was a goalie, so he didn’t need the same type of muscle other players did on the ice. He needed flexibility—legs limber enough to do the splits, which was also not something I wanted to think about because…yeah, no. I didn’t need any more ideas about this guy. As it was, I was going to jerk myself half-blind the moment he was away from me.
But the softie in me—a long-atrophied part of my nature that hockey and my injury had taken away—sparked back to life. I wanted to feed him. To wrap him up in a warm blanket. To make sure that no one made him feel less than the amazing man he was.
Which was bold of me to say about someone I barely knew, but something deep in my chest told me I wasn’t wrong about him.
He talked a lot and didn’t seem to have much of a filter, so by the time we got back to my room with two huge bags of food, I knew more about him than I did about my best friend, whom I’d met in third grade. Ferris hated his first name, loved his parents, took after his mom more than his dad, and was diagnosed autistic when he was a teenager.
He had always been the weird kid growing up, and he was a lot younger than his brothers, which meant he had no one to protect him from dickheads in school that made him feel like shit about himself. Oh, and he crocheted when he was nervous.
I found that out when we walked past the threshold of the hotel room door and he awkwardly shoved a pinkish blobby thing into my chest and said, “Here. I brought this for you.”
I held it in my hand and blinked down at the round, black, beaded eyes. “What is it?”Fucking hell, Quinn. Could you be more of a dick, please?
Ferris shuffled his feet and looked like he wanted to crawl under a rock at my tone. “It’s um. It’s…” He bit his lip, but before I could tell him never mind, that I loved it—even if I didn’t know what the fuck it was—he finished his sentence. “An axolotl.”
That didn’t help make it make more sense. It was clearly some sort of…lizard? It had weird fringy things on the sides of its face and a round body. “It’s…great,” I said slowly. What the fuck do you say when some guy you barely know but kind of want to fuck silly hands you something like this? “I hope it wasn’t expensive.”
He flinched. Okay. Not that, apparently.
“I made it,” he said very quietly.
I’d never had a foot fetish before now, but it might have been a good time to start because I was putting mine in my mouth a fucking lot today. “Oh. It’s…”
