Authors: Mimsy Hale
“What did you get?”
“Something for you.”
“Really?” Jake asks. “What is it?”
“Surprise,” Aiden tells him, swinging the bag in his free hand. “Do you wanna see it now?”
“Ugh, let’s not talking about
seeing things,”
Jake says with a shudder, retrieving the keys to the RV from his pocket and unlocking the side door. He turns around as he climbs the first step and leans down to kiss the corner of Aiden’s mouth. “Come on. We’ve got a movie to watch and a Misery-Mart to suffer.”
Aiden hesitates, sparing a single glance back at the storefront.
With everything that I am,
he thinks. Somehow, he is imbued with more resolve than ever. Weighing the bag in his hand, he idly muses that perhaps, rather than having bought the paperweight to honor an old memory, he claimed it to anchor a memory soon to be made.
9,976 miles
Day Seventy-four: Montana
“Hey, Aiden?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re pretty much fulfilling every single lumberjack fantasy I ever had right now.”
Aiden laughs as he wipes a forearm across his forehead and then swings his axe to rest on his shoulder. “Lumberjacks, huh?”
Jake smiles coyly, burying his hands in his pockets and descending the cabin’s front steps. “We watched the
Wolverine
movie together, remember?”
“Well, sure, but I just thought that was a Hugh Jackman thing,” Aiden replies.
“It’s
always
a Hugh Jackman thing,” Jake says, “but in that particular instance, it was also a lumberjack thing.”
Aiden laughs again, and bends to retrieve the last small log from the pile he’s been working his way through for the past half hour; as he swings the axe over his head and brings it down to split the log clean in two, Jake watches the muscles of his back and shoulders flex and contract beneath the thin cotton of his black T-shirt.
“How are you not freezing right now? I feel colder just looking at you,” he says.
“Manual labor, working up a sweat, all that jazz,” Aiden says, and he swings the axe one last time to bury it in the stump. He picks up the log basket and crosses his arms through the wicker handle, carries it up the steps to the porch and nods for Jake to follow.
“I don’t think I’d ever get used to this view, you know,” Jake murmurs at the top of the steps, moving closer to Aiden and feeling the heat that pours off him in waves. “Thank you for showing me.”
Aiden’s arm slips around Jake’s waist and pulls him closer as they stand on the porch, gazing out at the sun setting behind the mountains. Aiden smells of sweat and cologne and nature.
Their drive up yesterday was brutally long but beautifully scenic, the hardship offset further by the fact that they have another two nights to spend in Aiden’s father’s log cabin. After falling into bed, watching
Big Eden
and sleeping a solid twelve hours, they both woke up refreshed enough to spend their day on a long walk, taking in the picturesque views and frigid mountain air.
The cabin is 760 square feet of country charm, the likes of which Jake can only imagine finding in Montana, and even the exterior has him itching for a light meter and a handheld camera. On the porch is an oversized wooden rocking chair Jake categorically does not picture himself sitting in while Aiden goes out for a run through the woods five, ten, fifteen years from now. Through the unassuming green front door is a small living room that leads to a rustic kitchen, in which all the appliances are concealed by panels that match the cabinetry. Upstairs is a loft bedroom with a tiny en suite.
No cell service, no Internet and only local stations on the television. At the beginning of the trip, Jake thought this would be two days of board games, nature and hell—now, he knows he couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s perfect.
“I have something for you,” Aiden says, his warm lips grazing Jake’s ear. “For both of us, actually.”
“Lead the way,” Jake says, shivering, and follows him inside.
As Aiden stacks a few logs in the open fireplace and sets the kindling aflame beneath the grate, he says, “So… don’t be mad.”
“Don’t give me anything to be mad about,” Jake quips, removing his coat and perching on the arm of the chocolate brown leather couch.
Aiden chuckles weakly. “I got us some pot.”
“Why would I be mad about—wait. Where did you get pot?”
“I went out to stretch my legs while you were in the shower yesterday morning, and I noticed a bunch of guys—”
“Tell me you didn’t.”
“In the parking lot, and one of them called me over—”
“Aiden, tell me you did
not
get us Misery-Mart marijuana.”
Aiden stands, wipes his hands on his jeans and pulls a small plastic baggie from his pocket. He holds it between his thumb and forefinger, shaking it back and forth with a sheepish grin. Sighing, Jake holds out his hand and accepts the baggie, pulling apart the re-seal top and inhaling deeply. It’s pungent and rich, with a sharper tang than he’s used to. With no small measure of surprise, he glances back at Aiden, who waggles his eyebrows and says, “Good, right?”
Letting out another sigh, Jake seals the baggie and hands it back. “We need snacks and live music before I’ll even consider this. On principle.”
“Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much, but I already have that covered,” Aiden announces, and speeds off into the kitchen. Jake just stares after him.
“What do you mean, ‘already covered?’ How do you have live music ‘already covered?’” he asks, poking his head around the open doorway to see Aiden dumping a bag of pita chips into an oversized bowl.
“I’ve got a bootleg of a show at the KOKO from last year,” he replies, his words fast and excited. “There are a few bands I’ve been
dying
to play for you—this one band, Bastille? Holy shit, you’re gonna love them. I actually have a feeling that they’re gonna be
huge—
”
Jake silences him with a kiss, pulling back only when he’s breathless. He presses his forehead to Aiden’s temple and whispers, “Okay.”
“No, seriously, it looks like a face!”
Jake crows, looking at the map that hangs outside the cabin door and pointing at Montana’s western border. “It’s the
profile
of a
person,
Dan.”
“Do you think it’s a thing?” Aiden asks. “Like, do you think anybody ever gave it a name?”
“What, like Steve? The Steve side of Montana?” Jake suggests.
“The Steve side of Montana,” Aiden agrees.
Jake giggles and takes another toke on their second joint of their evening. “Why do we never play
Would You Rather
anymore?”
“Because it always ends with awkwardness or dick jokes,” Aiden reminds him, barely stifling a snigger as he takes the joint. The smoke is a thick cloud around them where they sit on the porch; it’s a still night, and the air is freezing, but with Aiden curled around him on the rocking chair and a blanket covering them, Jake doesn’t particularly notice. He doesn’t care at all, in fact.
“We played it all the time when we were kids,” Jake muses. He glances up at Aiden and slowly works his fingers into Aiden’s thick hair. His arms feel pleasantly heavy. “You need a haircut.”
“Do not,” Aiden says. He bats Jake’s hand away and sticks the end of the joint back between Jake’s lips. “Don’t you remember how long it was when we first met, how curly it used to be?”
“Mm hmm. It looked like a big, fluffy cloud. Like on that old calendar we found up in the attic.”
“Do you remember that day when we counted the squares and figured out our birthdays?” Aiden asks.
“Of course I do,” Jake replies, smiling at the memory.
The Saturday after they met, Jake and Aiden were in Jake’s attic looking through box upon box of books when they found a calendar from 1990. Jake counted along with Aiden, their fingers hopscotching across the squares, and they went from September sixteenth to December twenty-fifth three times to be sure. They got to one hundred every time.
“Do you get twice as many presents, then?” Jake asked him, thinking that it must be great to have a birthday on Christmas, but when Aiden wrinkled his nose, he wondered if everyone asked him the same thing.
“Nope. Mommy and Daddy get me one extra present that’s just for my birthday, but nobody else does.”
Jake thought that wasn’t very fair at all, and tried to remember to ask his mommy if they could get Aiden two presents in December, when they went shopping at the big department store with the pretty Christmas windows.
He tells Aiden all about this now, and Aiden smiles as he drags deeply on the joint. In the dim porch light, Jake watches Aiden’s eyes grow dark; Aiden taps Jake’s mouth once before leaning down and sealing his lips over Jake’s. It’s an addictive kiss, and Jake pulls the smoke out of Aiden’s mouth and into his lungs, his hands flying up to frame Aiden’s face. When he pulls back, he rests his forehead against Aiden’s, eyes closed, and lets the dizziness take him.
The rocking chair tips back and forth, back and forth, creaking under their combined weight, and
god,
Jake loves him so much. He loves Aiden’s every last cell, and reason only just edges out his wild urge to confess something, anything. He swallows hard, and says, “Tell me something you want.”
“To be in two places at once,” Aiden whispers, his right hand covering Jake’s where it has slipped to rest against the warmth of his pulse point.
“Easy,” Jake whispers back, “just straddle a state line. Tell me something real, something you actually want.”
Aiden sighs and drops his head, burrows into the hollow of Jake’s neck. “I want you to fuck me in front of the fireplace later.”
“Later is good,” Jake says. “I don’t know if I can do anything right now.”
“Me either!” Aiden exclaims, bursting into laughter that shakes his entire body. “It’s like my dick disappeared.”
“What do you mean it disappeared?”
“It moved. To
space.”
“Fuck, I’m so high that that actually made sense,” Jake giggles. He takes a deep breath and waves his hand, trying to collect himself enough to ask again. It’s no use, though; he’s done for. He clutches Aiden and they both laugh until they wheeze, until it’s been so long that he has to relight the joint before taking another drag. “Seriously, though. What do you want for your birthday this year?”
“Surprise me,” Aiden says.
“You hate surprises.”
“I like yours.”
“Okay,” Jake murmurs. “How is it only twenty-six days anyway? That’s less than four weeks.”
“Don’t,” Aiden says, his voice so low and commanding that it sends a frisson dancing up and down Jake’s spine. He stifles the impulse to break the tension by attempting to bounce Aiden on his knee or something equally ridiculous.
“Getting cold,” he mumbles, burying his face in Aiden’s chest and rubbing his cheek against his soft flannel shirt. It feels
amazing,
and Jake can’t help but let out a moan of pleasure. Aiden’s answering chuckle is a deep rumble in his chest, and oh, every sensation is like a miniature firework bursting beneath Jake’s skin.
Time slips by him as Aiden clambers out of his lap and bundles him inside, and before Jake really knows what’s going on, he finds himself stretched out on the couch, Aiden sitting cross-legged at one end with Jake’s head in his lap. Music is still playing from his phone, the sound amplified by the deep bowl into which Aiden has placed it, but the song has changed—he vaguely recognizes it as “Back Down South” by Kings of Leon. It’s sad, heavy and soothing, perfect for his sudden, inexplicable wave of melancholy.
Their zigzagging route around America is coming toward its final stretch. After leaving this cabin—a prospect Jake doesn’t want to think about any longer than is absolutely necessary—they will indeed head south, for the last time on this trip. He wants to stay here forever, bury this night in the soil of the flowerbeds lining the cabin’s backyard and let enough time pass for something to bloom, something that aches with beauty.
“I had a crush on you in senior year,” he blurts before he can stop himself, and just before he screws his eyes shut, he catches a glimpse of Aiden’s gaze settling on him.
“Told you I liked your surprises,” Aiden murmurs. “Your crush probably didn’t involve ice cream and hand-holding, though.”
“No, it did,” Jake replies, sighing as he opens his eyes. “I mean, it was before Brad, so…”
“Ah, yes. Brad the Great Deflowerer.”
“That’s not a word. And—”
“It’s totally a word.”
“And he didn’t
deflower
me; I wasn’t some blushing virgin.”
“Sweetheart, you barely even admitted to jerking off until you were seventeen.”
“So
not true.”
“It is! Why do you think I was so surprised when you told me your kill count?”
Jake snorts derisively. “I’ve said it before: this coming from the guy who was practically celibate before me.”
Aiden simply laughs again. He drops his head and gazes down at Jake through his thick eyelashes. “So, about that kill count…”
“Yes?”
“Who was the best?”
“That
is quite a question. Hmm, let’s see…” Jake teases, making a show of tapping his chin and looking thoughtful. He knows the answer, of course, but he also knows that Aiden is fishing for compliments. “Well, there was Brad, of course. I guess I have to look back and laugh, a little bit. But for a first time, he was… nice. It was nice.
“Then—well, you know about Nathaniel. Drunk, don’t remember much,” Jake continues, wrinkling his nose. “Edward was… mm, Edward was fantastic. And then… Max, obviously.”
“So we’ve covered the ones I know about,” Aiden cuts in smoothly. He shifts on the couch, his posture straighter, his eyes more attentive. The firelight licks over his skin and casts him golden, and Jake wants to say that it doesn’t matter, that none of it matters, because Aiden is here and he’s the only one that Jake cares about anymore.
But he’s started, so he’ll finish.
“After you left—literally the day after—I, um… I slept with Ethan.”