Authors: Mimsy Hale
“Jakey—”
“He could fix
anything,
” Jake goes on, eyes opening and sparkling with memory. “Do you remember when you brought over your mom’s cuckoo clock, after your dad and Matt had that epic fight?”
“God, it was in pieces. I don’t think I’d ever seen her that mad,” Aiden says, suppressing a shudder as he recalls the look of apoplectic rage contorting her features.
“That was the week before the storm,” Jake says quietly, and tucks his head under Aiden’s chin. “I sat with him while he was working on it. He was wearing that hideous Christmas sweater that Grandma sent, you know, the one with the reindeer that looked homicidal? The heat was broken and we were freezing our asses off, but when I asked him why he was working on the clock first, he said, ‘Son, if a lady needs something she loves fixed and you can fix it, you fix it.’”
Eyes stinging, Aiden blinks up at the sky and holds Jake just a little tighter.
“Sometimes I wonder if he could fix me,” Jake says. His light, almost joking tone sounds completely forced. The words pinch Aiden like ill-fitting shoes, and he sits them both up, takes Jake’s hand and laces their fingers together.
“You’re not a cuckoo clock,” he says, trying to keep it easy, but he can’t help adding, “You’re my Jake.”
Jake blinks, and in the next second his arms are wrapped around Aiden’s neck and he’s kissing him as though his life depends on it, just as he did all the way back in Florida and has done so many times since. Aiden gives it all back, holds onto Jake’s waist and pulls him closer, his tongue sweeping along Jake’s bottom lip. Despite the heaviness of what they’ve just been talking about, something loosens in his chest and new energy blazes in his veins; he’s started to live for these moments when it seems he manages to say exactly what Jake needs to hear.
“Ugh. Fucking Idaho, man,” Jake says when he pulls away.
Aiden puts a hand on his knee. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“What?”
“I’d say ‘promiscuous’ rather than ‘ho,’ that’s all,” he says, trying and failing to keep a straight face. “Though I guess ‘Idapromiscuous’ doesn’t really have the same ring to it. And kids would forever be misspelling it on tests.”
Jake rolls his eyes, but Aiden can see that he’s fighting back a smile. It relaxes him a little; the gravity of what just happened hasn’t escaped him. Jake hardly ever speaks of his dad, and on the rare occasion that he does, he never mentions the storm that took his life. Everything about this day so far has been somewhat unsettling, but that most of all, and Aiden wonders what the next curveball might be.
“How long ‘til they get here?” Jake asks, and Aiden checks his watch.
“Forty-five minutes or so,” he says.
Jake curls into him, pushing him to lie back again with gentle fingertips. “Thank you,” he repeats, and then, “Maybe it isn’t so bad here after all.”
“D’you wanna stay for a while?” Aiden asks unnecessarily, just so he won’t blurt out the wash of love that constricts his throat and squeezes tight around his chest.
“Can we?” Jake asks. “It’s kind of comfy.”
Aiden smiles, nods and kisses his hair. And although it’s not completely true, he says, “We’ve got time.”
10,939 miles
Day Seventy-eight: Wyoming
“Hmm… are you starting to feel better?”
Jake arches his back, hissing pleasantly as Aiden’s fingernails scratch over his hipbones. “I’m still fucking sick of driving, and Kathy Bates is still a fucking liar,” he says, his words coming out the slightest bit slurred.
“But are—you starting—to feel better?” Aiden repeats, carefully punctuating his words with his rocking, back and forth. Jake is buried to the hilt inside him, and Aiden looks down at him with an expression that says,
I’m accepting none of your bullshit today, Valentine.
“Yes. I’m—
fuck—
definitely feeling better,” Jake answers, and this, coupled with the languor three beers have brought to his limbs, finally makes it all drain away: frustration that they’ve run out of coffee, with no decent beans to be found anywhere; anger at the GPS for having led them astray and dumped them on the outskirts of a forest near Rock Springs; the constant, dull ache that has plagued his lower back for days.
All that is left is Aiden, tight and slick and burning hot around him
—angel—
gorgeous as he leans back to plant his hands behind him on Jake’s thighs—
you must be an angel, sent here just for me—
and rolls his hips agonizingly slowly.
Jake runs his fingers up and down Aiden’s torso. There’s no rush—there never has to be. Having Aiden above him, riding him like it’s the thing he was put on Earth to do, makes him close his eyes and moan through his bitten lips.
There doesn’t have to be anything but this,
the voice in the back of his head reminds him. His hands trail down to squeeze Aiden’s hips—just once, just enough of a signal. Even if Jake were in full command of all of his faculties, he doesn’t think he would try to quiet the voice. He doesn’t even try to ignore it, simply sinks farther and farther into it to the very core of his pleasure, the crackling energy made just for them. It feels as if the brokenness inside him has been repairing ever since their first kiss; strands are slowly knitting back together in something he didn’t even know was torn until Aiden held it up in front of him.
“God bless Wyoming,
fuck,”
Aiden whispers. He drops forward and brackets Jake’s head with his forearms.
Breathlessly, Jake says, “I keep telling you, it’s not even a real place. It’s a state of mind.”
“Don’t think it was where Billy Joel was singing about, though,” Aiden quips, laughing on a ragged exhalation that disappears inside a moan, and
oh,
the feeling of that is two different kinds of wonderful.
“That’s
—Aiden—
that’s because… fuck, keep doing that…”
“Admit it, Jakey. Wyoming is real. Otherwise, where exactly
are
we right now?”
“North Colorado.”
“North Colorado is already a place.”
Not missing a beat, Jake chuckles and rolls his eyes, wrapping his arms around Aiden’s middle and rolling them over under the thick blanket.
“Really
north Colorado, then,” he says, kissing the tip of Aiden’s nose and bracing his knees against the floor of the RV.
“Fine, really—fucking
hell—
really north Colorado it is,” Aiden acquiesces. He hooks his legs around Jake’s middle, urging him closer, faster, deeper, until Jake feels as if they might fuse into one person. He surfaces, buries his face in the curve of Aiden’s neck and licks a sloppy kiss over his collarbone.
He’s spinning out. Aiden’s hands scrabble for purchase on his back, his shoulders, his neck; Jake pulls back and buries himself again with stronger movement and utter abandon. Always, the chasing—it’s always the chasing and always has been, but with Aiden, it’s running hand in hand toward something: running toward a horizon that they’re painting onto the sky; running toward the next ten years; running toward each other. It’s a lie that is too seductive, too easy to believe, too hard to resist.
“Sweetheart,” Aiden says, cupping Jake’s jaw, “get out of your head and come join me.”
Smirking down at him, Jake moves as if to twist out of his grasp but Aiden holds firm, eyes locked on his. Something shifts between them and Jake realizes that he’s close, right on the brink, as if he’s been falling with the ground rushing up to meet him.
“Eyes on me,” Aiden murmurs, his voice half-strangled as he arches and writhes.
Jake swallows. When did Aiden become this? When did he transform into this bundle of sex and want and arcane knowledge, sizzling with electricity that leaves Jake dizzy?
“Don’t close your—
fuck,
I’m so close…”
Jake isn’t just running, now; he’s
racing,
like his heartbeat, pounding Aiden into the floor and winding his hand between them to twist around Aiden’s length. He can feel himself crack, leaving shards behind as he moves harder, faster, pivoting and falling into the rich coffee brown of Aiden’s eyes until—
Breaking point. Both of them come, slack-jawed and silent, pulsing and trembling, a flatline and a shock back to life all at once. Flashes in Aiden’s eyes, light and dark, life and death, love and despair; everything Jake saw in him in Louisiana, and it’s too much. He collapses, his limbs shaking and spent, and he silently mouths those three painful little words into the bare skin of Aiden’s shoulder.
He carefully shifts them both onto their sides, curling into Aiden with a shiver—his hands are burning, yet freezing to the touch—and still buried inside him even as he softens.
“Shame we didn’t start this when it was still warm out,” he says quietly, glancing up at the ceiling. It’s too soon to look Aiden in the eye again. “We could have been doing this outside.”
“Still thinking about July fourth?” Aiden asks, tugging the blanket up under their chins.
“What about July fourth?” Jake asks. Slowly, wincing all the way, he pulls out and gets rid of the condom, then sits up to retrieve two more blankets from the pile on the couch—the heat is on, but it’s still cold. He heaps the blankets on top of them until they resemble something of a nest.
“You told me you wanted to have sex outside.”
“There’s no way I said that. Not back then. How weird would that have been?”
“You did!” Aiden exclaims, his voice loud in Jake’s ear. “After the fireworks were done, don’t you remember? We were still squeezed into that lounger, and I saw Hugh and Lisa coming out of the bushes…”
“Right,” Jake says, nodding as the memory finally resurfaces. He’d been busy trying not to notice the fact that they were lying on their sides in a lounger made for one, and that Aiden’s dick had seemed half-hard in his pants. He knows much better now. “And you made The Face
,
and I told you to lighten up, and then you made The Face at
me,
and I said—”
“You said that you’d wanted to try it for a while. Just to see what it’d be like,” Aiden finishes for him, his fingertips ghosting the skin of Jake’s arm. “And?”
“Pretty damn perfect, I’d say.”
They lapse into quiet after that—or at least, as much quiet as there is to be had in a campground full of other vehicles and groups of people.
Then Aiden takes a deep breath and says, “So… there’s this guy I’ve been seeing for the past month or so.”
“Yeah?” Jake asks, inclining his head. “What’s he like?”
“Smart, funny, talented… so gorgeous,” Aiden says. “It’s been going really great, but lately… I’m just really confused.”
“About what?”
“About what happens next,” he says, and Jake’s heart speeds up. “We’re not… what we are is not set in stone, and that’s fine. It’s only been a month, like I said. But this great opportunity has come up for me, and it would mean me going away. I guess I’m just trying to figure out what to choose.”
Jake’s head is swimming now, the alcohol affecting him even more with his racing heart, and he’s suddenly overcome with desperation, reeling and dizzy from his ricocheting emotions. His mouth goes dry and he tries to speak, but words fail him.
“I want the music, but… I love you,” Aiden whispers, and just like that, the strands unravel.
I’m not ready,
Jake thinks. Fear breaks over him like the waves of a sea in the height of a storm and he’s gone again. Aiden is wrapped around him, but so far out of reach; he has instantly tensed at Jake’s obvious discomfort, and saying
anything
now is too much of an admission: Jake knows it, and he knows that Aiden knows it, too. So they lie there silently for a few moments, watching each other in the dim light, and Jake thinks,
It’s all over.
Abruptly—too abruptly for it to be the cold or the hard floor finally getting to him—Aiden moves away. Jake swallows, sits up and wraps a blanket around himself. He feels exposed, like a raw nerve expecting to be cut.
“You know, we’re
always
listening to music these days,” Aiden says, looking out through the living room window. “We used to be able to be quiet around each other, and now it seems like it’s this huge, scary thing.
“And do you know why that is, Jake?” he continues, fixing his gaze on him. It penetrates to Jake’s very core, as if Aiden can see through his every mask. “It’s because ever since we started this, we’ve stopped knowing how to talk to each other. Every word just feels like it’s loaded, now, and… it’s because we’ve always known that this is something bigger than either of us thought it was, but there’s so much riding on it that we both just kept our mouths shut and got on with it. But I—I can’t do it anymore.
“I’m in love with you.”
How can you love me after everything I’ve done, after Chicago, after all the time I forced us to waste?
Jake thinks, openly gaping at Aiden and pulling the blanket tighter around himself.
Slowly, cautiously, Aiden reaches for his hand. “Please say something.”
He might feel sober as a teetotaler, but Jake’s mind is still clouded by the alcohol, just enough to render him helpless against the urge to draw back. “Why now?”
“It’s not like you didn’t know,” Aiden says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and Jake’s eyes go wide.
How can he… he can’t know, he can’t, he
can’t… At his dumbstruck expression, Aiden adds, “You’ve known ever since Louisiana. I’m not the only one with a face like an open book, you know.”
Never has Jake wanted to run away from something so much in his entire life, but his legs are shaking against the floor and he can’t trust them, can’t trust anything now that the world is on its head. Desperately, he says, “I told you that it… that it meant something with you; can’t we just leave it at that?”
“You told me
what
meant something?” Aiden asks, his voice suddenly harsh as he gets to his feet, and both of them are naked and this is
so
not the way Jake wants this evening to end, but everything is exploding, out of his control.