Kiernan and Montana aren't looking for complicated in their Chicago summer, but somehow complicated has found them.
[co-written with @w1ldflow3r]
[extended summary inside]
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Within the first week Jed Montgomery and I had moved in together freshman year at Notre Dame, he'd put two pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream in our tiny mini fridge in the corner of our dorm room, and on a post-it note wrote IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. He had impressively neat handwriting for someone who could palm a god damn basketball.
Freshman housing generally stuck athletes together, even if they didn't play the same sport, and before I actually got to know Jed, I had to admit I was afraid he'd snap me in half one day. I was on the upper end of the roster in terms of size on the baseball team at 6'2" and 215 pounds, and yet he and his offensive lineman size dwarfed me.
But after I'd spent the first semester fucking around with a volleyball player named Kara only to find out she'd also been fucking around with my teammate, Jed sat me down in our dorm room and gave me his carton of emergency ice cream - cookie dough flavor. I'd decided that night that Jed was alright, and most likely not capable of snapping me in half. I also decided that night I was done fucking around, and I'd spent the rest of my college life getting good grades and hitting home runs.
Jed and I had lived together ever since, and nowadays he still stocked the fridge in our downtown Chicago apartment with emergency Ben & Jerry's and used his still neat handwriting to write out my Christmas cards to my business tax clients, since my chicken scratch might as well be a foreign language.
"What the hell was Em thinking?" I sighed as I dropped sideways into the black leather armchair in the corner of our open floor plan apartment. Over the back of the chair, I could see his hulking body rummaging through the freezer in the kitchen for his ice cream. A few colored pencil drawings of the sun and rainbows and our dog Rudy done by Jed's cohort of third graders were stuck to the fridge with random alphabet magnets. In a free spot on the chrome surface of the fridge, the letters were arranged to say DAYS WITHOUT INCIDENT. The first thing I did when we got back from Jed's date was change the number next to it to 0. Speaks for itself.
"It's alright," Jed grumbled. "I just feel really bad about leaving. You didn't have to be such a jerk at the end, you know."
"I wasn't being a jerk," I insisted. I swung my legs over the arm of the chair and sat up, swiveling around to glare at him over the back of the chair. "I was doing you a favor, Josiah. You were one political blunder away from being skinned alive." I paused and slapped my phone against my palm. "Do you really not know there's a state Senate?"
Jed shrugged and mumbled something that sounded like I don't know before flipping the lid of the ice cream carton open. I loved him to death, and we'd seen each other through a whole manner of bullshit over the years, but he'd taken a few too many hits to the head during his illustrious college football career. All the scuffs and dents on the shiny gold Notre Dame helmet he kept next to the trophies in his room were proof enough of that.
The sound of Jed scraping through the ice cream carton seemed to activate our English Mastiff Rudy, who'd been asleep in his giant plush bed we got from Costco at the other corner of the living room. He was only two years old, but he had the soul and temperament of an old man. My mom thought we were batshit crazy for keeping a 200 pound dog in our 900 square foot apartment, but he was perfect for us. Low energy, high affection.
