Page 12 of Two for Roughing

“Huh?” Ketchup twisted in his seat, loosening his belt further.

What kind of road safety did they teach children in Victoria? Damir was not a good enough driver to compensate for reckless self-endangerment.

“Just remembered I have to call my mother,” Damir lied. He couldn’t admit he’d just now realized, two weeks too late, that Howard had learned how to flirt in the ten months since they fucked, and now he couldn’t take him up on it.

Ketchup eyed him suspiciously. “You love calling your mom. You spend hours talking in code—”

“Russian is not a code.”

“Whatever, keep your secrets. What do you say for hours? I can barely think of things to talk to my mom about for ten minutes on Christmas.”

Damir’s mother usually updated him on the neighborhood gossip, which took a solid hour. His parents lived in a massive apartment block in Moscow. They’d moved there from Kazan for work in their early twenties, and despite Damir having bought a mansion in the outskirts of the city when he signed his big contract, they preferred to stay in the cramped two bedroom where the halls always smelled of cabbage and spices.

He couldn’t blame them. They were among friends, among like-minded people, among other Muslims. If they moved out, they’d be lonely.

He certainly was, even with Ketchup living in his spare room and eating his food.

“You’re not thinking about idiot racists online again, are you?” Ketchup prodded. “Because if you are, I’m going to have to distract you, and no one wants that.”

“I’m not,” Damir promised. “Please don’t distract me. What do you want for lunch?”

“Oh, dude, can you make the egg thing again? With the peppers and the tomatoes?”

Damir ran a mental tally of the fridge. He should have all the ingredients for shakshuka handy. “Sounds good.”

“You’re the best.” Ketchup sighed happily and snuggled deeper into his seat after flicking on the seat heating.

Damir was good and stayed off his phone all through cooking and eating, pretending he wasn’t going back and forth between replaying the worst of Reddit comments and the best of Kilian Howard biting at his bottom lip. He would never admit as much, but Ketchup’s incessant chatter about his Discord buddy and their newest game was actually helpful. This was due to Damir’s fascination with how little shame Ketchup—a mostly grown man at twenty-two—felt about playing a game featuring a magic castle and a time-travel subplot during his downtime. Someone ought to study him in a lab.

“Hey, are you hitting the clubs with us tonight?” Ketchup asked. “Rocky said he needed a wingman.”

“It’s Friday,” Damir reminded him.

“Huh?”

“I have to go to the mosque.”

It wouldn’t take all afternoon, much less all evening, but Ketchup knew little enough about Islam not to question him. Damir had used the excuse before to great effect, and he found it worth a white lie or two to avoid being the only sober one in a group of hockey players.

“Oh. Right. Well, have fun.” Ketchup set his plate by the sink and wandered off to his room either to message the team about whatever misadventures they had planned or to get on Discord.

Damir cleaned up the kitchen, scrubbing and drying the pan and placing it back in the cabinet, putting the dishes in the dishwasher, and wiping down the counters. The handle of the dishwasher wobbled precariously when he closed it, which was worrying. Damir didn’t think it had anything to do with the machinery inside, but he didn’t know how to fix it. He ought to call a handyman, but he needed a few more days to be truly annoyed enough to make a phone call to a stranger.

The Islamic Center was a fifteen-minute walk away, which was why Damir had chosen it when he was drafted. His agent had suggested it might be politic, as a very visible Muslim, to be seen practicing. Damir had also picked it because the center ran a number of programs for children, women, and the unhoused, which left him feeling better about the large donations he made there. Damir hadn’t yet found a good way to subtly ask the Imam his personal beliefs about sexuality and gender. The public stance of all currently operating mosques in Chicago was either “the queers are sinners” or “we do not speak about homosexuality.” Choosing a venue that veered toward the latter was the lesser of two evils, but Damir would like to know his money didn’t support hatred for the LGBTQ+ community.

Damir took off his shoes in the entryway. There was a line for the washroom, as was the case most Fridays. His least favorite part of going to the mosque was being observed during the wudu. What if they thought he wasn’t thorough enough? What if they thought he looked stupid while washing his feet? Back in Moscow, it had been much easier to concentrate only on himself and his few friends and family members.

Here, Damir exchanged greetings with some people but had no one he felt close to. Getting ready for prayers in a room full of strangers made him self-conscious and annoyed about his own self-consciousness. He hurried through the ablutions and then found a spot amidst the other men and boys for the sermon. When it began, he forced himself to let go the irritations of the day: Reddit, Ketchup’s terrible mangling of the passenger seatbelt, the realization he had missed a chance with Kilian Howard, bending over awkwardly to wash his feet in front of a room full of other men who might judge him. When it was time for prayers, he was largely able to let his mind drift with the familiar words and familiar motions.

He wondered how his father was doing.

As a boy, before puberty made him awful, Damir looked forward to praying since it was time spent with Baba—a ritual they did together. Sometimes, Damir would ask questions: why these particular words, why these motions, could Baba help him understand this surah?

Baba always got a little smile when Damir asked, and then he would spout philosophical explanations such as “Allah needs to know we appreciate all he does for us.”

Damir never put much stock in the words. Allah was an abstract concept too far away for him to grasp, but he cared that Baba was proud of the questions he asked.

Then Damir grew older and busier. Praying every evening and every morning became praying on the weekends when Damir didn’t have hockey games, became not praying at all when Damir began to understand how many Muslims felt about his sexuality.