Authors: Mimsy Hale
Struggling for words, for coherency, for anything, he sputters, “The… the sex, the…
all
of it.”
“Don’t you see? That’s
exactly
what I’m talking about!” Aiden shouts, shocking Jake into finally scrambling to his feet. The last time he saw Aiden this mad, anger rolling off of him in almost palpable waves, was from three thousand miles away, over a grainy Skype connection.
“You’re my best friend; of
course
it means something!” Jake shouts back, looking Aiden straight in the eye. “It means
everything!
”
“Then why not just say it? Jesus, who taught you not to love?” Jake’s mouth falls open, and Aiden barrels on, “Was it Brad? Or Max? Was it
me?
What happened to you that made you so terrified of how you feel?”
“Is that really what you think of me?” Jake asks. “You think I’m just some heartless asshole who doesn’t give a shit about you?”
Aiden’s expression softens. The lines in his forehead and around his mouth smooth out, but all wrong, as if he’s drooping instead of coming back to life.
“I don’t know what I think anymore,” he says, his voice softer than the wind Jake hears whispering past the windows. “This really is just a road trip thing for you, isn’t it?”
What if? What if I tell him everything, offer him my bruised heart in exchange for his? What if this is the moment that could begin something new, something wonderful, something that doesn’t ever have to end?
But that’s the thing,
Jake thinks, watching the hope grow brighter in Aiden’s eyes the longer he stands there.
All good things have a shelf life—why would we be any different? We have rules for a reason.
“We had a deal, Aiden,” he finally says, dropping his gaze to his feet. “What happens on the road trip—”
“Stays on the road trip. Yeah, I remember,” Aiden interrupts, his voice low and dangerously controlled. His shoulders slumping, he turns toward the bedroom, but seems to think better of it at the last moment. He approaches Jake as if scared he might run away, and stops when they are only inches apart. Two fingers beneath Jake’s chin force his gaze upward to meet Aiden’s eyes, and Aiden says, “See, the thing is, I don’t believe you. We both forgot about that stupid fucking rule, and I’m glad. And you can be as stubborn as you want about it, but I
know
what you feel for me is more than ‘best friends.’ So until you tell me what you’re not telling me, I’m not giving up and I’m not going anywhere. It’s out there now, and you can do whatever you want with it.”
With that, he rocks forward and kisses Jake tenderly—as he might at any other time, as if he hasn’t just fractured the fundamental building blocks of Jake’s entire universe—and then walks away without looking back.
Splintered, shivering and lost, Jake just stands still until he loses track of how many minutes it’s been.
11,207 miles
Chapter Nine
Day Eighty: Utah
Once Aiden has parked in the sparsely populated lot at the far end of Sunset Memorial Gardens, he scrubs a hand over his face, retrieves the small bunch of daisies from the dashboard and reaches into the glove compartment for the small box of his grandfather’s ashes.
Arthur Thomas was born and raised in Moab, where he was married at eighteen to his high school sweetheart, Rose Dixie. When she and Arthur were both twenty-four, she passed away from what would later become known as cervical cancer. Afterward, with ghosts around every corner and no children to support, Arthur left Moab for Richmond, Virginia, to work with a construction company and start a new life.
In his will, he asked that a small portion of his ashes be scattered at Rose’s grave.
It doesn’t take long for Aiden to locate the plot on the map by the entrance, and, though the cemetery is mostly dark, small lamps set in the ground at intervals keep him on track. Aiden finds the grave and sets about brushing the leaves and debris from the faded stone. His heart aches—with no siblings or children of her own, Rose’s grave has been all but forgotten. He runs his fingers over the grooves and depressions of her name, then lays the daisies at the foot of her headstone and gets back to his feet.
“Hello, ma’am,” he says. “My name’s Aiden. I’m Arthur’s grandson.”
Standing at the grave of a woman he never knew—that even his mother never knew—Aiden buries his hands in his pockets, at a loss for what else to say. He feels almost like a traitor to the memory of his own grandmother.
“He asked to be brought back to you,” he finally says, drawing the small wooden box from his pocket and turning it over in his hands. “We weren’t expecting it, but you should—you should know that he passed away peacefully, and he wasn’t in any pain.”
The corners of his eyes sting and he tips his head back, blinks up at the sky. “I guess you know that, though, if you’re up there,” he continues, his voice almost a murmur. “Maybe you could tell him that I miss him every single day. And that we called the RV Leona.”
At that he falls silent, remembering the taste of cider and sugar on Jake’s lips while meteors streaked by. He shakes his head, loosening the memories before they have a chance to take hold, and digs his phone out of his pocket. Clutching the wooden box tightly in his other hand, he scrolls through his contacts to
Mom,
and hits send.
“Hi, honey,” Alice answers after the fourth ring, and the brightness in her voice makes Aiden loosen his grip on the box.
“Hey, Mom,” he says. “How’s the weather?”
“Cloudy with a chance of meatballs,” she quips, and though Aiden rolls his eyes, he can’t help but smile a little. “It was sunny this afternoon, but it’s cold. Nothing much to report. How about where you boys are?”
“It’s already dark here, and pretty cold.”
“And where is ‘here?’”
Aiden squares his shoulders and fixes his eyes on Rose’s headstone. “I’m in Moab.” After a few seconds have passed with no response, Aiden pulls the phone away from his ear to check that the call is still connected. “Mom?”
“Sorry, honey. I’m here.” Her voice quavers, and Aiden can almost see her slowly sink into her wingback chair by the fireplace in the living room. “So you’re in Grandpa’s hometown.”
“I’m at the cemetery. I thought I’d—well, I wanted you to be on the phone with me while I did this. I didn’t wanna do it alone.”
“Alone? Where’s Jake?”
“A yoga class in town,” Aiden says dismissively, adding, “we just needed a little space, that’s all.”
“You boys aren’t fighting, are you?” she asks.
“No, we’re not fighting. We just…”
“Aiden, you know I can tell when you’re lying to me.”
“I’m not lying, I just—I don’t… I don’t know what we’re even
doing
anymore,” Aiden says, the words rushing out of him like a breath held for too long. “I came clean with him two days ago, told him
everything,
and he just… he hasn’t said anything.”
“Oh, honey,” Alice sighs. “That boy… he carries an awful lot of pain around with him, you know that. And I know how much you might want to fix it, but sometimes you just have to be patient. He’ll get there.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“He will. You did the right thing in telling him.”
“How can you be so sure?” Aiden asks in a small voice; all his most deep-seated fears confront him at once.
The thing is that if he chooses the music, he can’t trust that Jake will follow him. He won’t just lose everything that they are, he’ll also lose everything they could be. He’ll lose the twelve-month lease on a shitty, shoebox apartment that they’ll both outwardly hate but secretly love, because when they move around, they’ll constantly be pressed up against one another, each touch still sparking a thrill. He’ll lose every possible future he’s imagined for himself with Jake by his side. He’ll lose his best friend, the one person with whom he shares everything.
The music won’t be worth it without him,
he thinks, drawing his shoulders up against the pervasive cold and the realization that nothing else will ever come close. This is not something he knows because he’s experiencing the first in a line of loves, but because he knows without doubt that the line consists of one person. Jake is Aiden’s first and last, and there’s nothing he can do to change it or fight it.
“Because I’ve known Jake since you two still had training wheels, and I know that he loves you with his whole heart,” Alice says, her assured tone cutting into his thoughts. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“I feel like we’ve wasted so much time already,” Aiden admits. “There were so many times when I could have—”
“Thinking like that isn’t going to get you anywhere,” she interrupts gently. “And look at how brave you were in telling him. My brave little soldier.”
“
Mom,
” Aiden whines.
“All I’m saying is that I’m proud of you. And Jake will come around, just you wait,” she says. “Now, you’ve got something to do for Grandpa. No more stalling.”
“I wasn’t—” Aiden begins, but stops as he realizes that stalling is at least part of what he is doing. He holds up the small wooden box, examining the intricate Celtic knot on the lid, carved by his own grandfather’s hand, and heaves a deep sigh. A breeze picks up, and he knows that it’s time. “Do you think I should say something?”
“Only if you need to, honey,” comes the soft reply, tinged with a deep sadness.
He carefully unlatches the small metal clasp on the front of the box and opens the lid, averting his eyes even in the darkness. He wants to say something, but he said all of his goodbyes on the day of the funeral with Jake’s fingers in the crook of his elbow smoothing the rough edges. The breeze picks up even more, and as he tips the box toward the ground by degrees, words from a William Penn poem he heard long ago come back to him: “For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.”
“I think Grandpa would have liked that,” Alice murmurs after a moment, her voice thick. “You run along now, okay? Go and find Jake, and tell him to give you a hug from me.”
Aiden nods and says, “Okay, Mom. Love you.”
“I love you too, honey.”
He hangs up with a heavy heart, pausing as Rose’s name catches his eye once more. He feels oddly sorry that he never knew the first woman to capture his grandfather’s heart. They had so little time together, but then, as Aiden’s grandfather once said, “I’m lucky that your Grandma turned out to be a love of my life. I’m lucky to have had two of those.”
Leaving the box on top of the headstone, he turns and makes his way back to the RV, feeling a little lighter for having closed the chapter completely.
Later that evening, when he has picked Jake up from yoga and taken in the flush high in his cheeks, the fluid grace returned to his body, Jake insists on taking over driving duty. It’s nearly three hours before he finds out where Jake is taking them, and as they step out of the RV in the middle of the desert, it occurs to him that his mother may have been right.
“One foot here, and the other here,” Jake directs him as they stand atop the Four Corners monument. The border of the circle that surrounds the meeting point reads,
Four states here meet in freedom under God.
He has one foot in Arizona, the other in New Mexico. “Now, bend over—”
“Bend over?” Aiden repeats, one eyebrow raised.
“Stop being a pervert and just do it,” Jake says.
“I swear to god, if you take a picture of this,” he grumbles, but follows Jake’s instruction and places his left hand in Utah and his right in Colorado. “What now?”
“Now you enjoy the fact that you’re in not just two, not just three, but
four
places at once.” He lets the knowledge sink in and take root—he wanted to be in two places at once, and Jake has just given him four.
He stands, brushes his palms off on his jeans, turns to Jake and cups his jaw. He crushes their lips together and lets the kiss set his body aflame, and Jake kisses him back just as fervently.
And then, because he can’t not say something, he settles for five words that he hopes convey everything, whispered into Jake’s ear like a promise and a prayer: “Thank you. I love you.”
11,688 miles
Day Eighty-one: Colorado
When Jake slips quietly back inside the RV, he finds the living area empty. Sunlight pours in through window behind the couch, and he tiptoes across the beams spilling onto the floor as if he’s walking on broken glass.
“Aiden?” he calls, just as his eyes land on a note propped in front of the coffeemaker:
Went for groceries, back soon.
♥
Dan
He feels himself relax. The tension drains from his shoulders as he shucks off his jacket and takes his mom’s art journal from the inside pocket.
After they’d gotten settled at the campground just outside the center of Durango, Jake had slipped the journal out of his bedside cabinet and taken it with him on his walk into town. He was convinced that he had finally found the drawing he wanted to get as a tattoo—an anchor with a frayed rope—but when he arrived on Camino Del Rio and looked up at the unassuming
Tattoo & Piercing
sign over the door of Skin Incorporated, he kept on walking.
He spent an hour in Buckley Park, one hand clutching a venti pumpkin spice latté, the other leafing distractedly through the journal while he wished more than ever that he could just pick up the phone and talk to his father.
It’s nearly December ninth, Dad,
he thought, and lingered over the single drawing of his father that he never looked at if he could help it. He traced around the lines of his father’s thick, prematurely gray hair, and stared at the image of his slouched form. His father had his hands in his pockets and wore an old sweater as he stood gazing out of the living room window.
It’s been seven years, and Charlie says I have to let you go, and we’re selling the house, and I don’t feel ready for either. I never got to know you well enough to know that I’m doing anything right, or making you proud, or living like the son of the man I remember.
He turned the page, and his eyes landed on the drawing of him and Aiden as children.
What should I do, Dad? Did you ever feel so much for Mom that it scared you shitless? Sometimes I feel like I’m
just waiting for him to break my heart, because I don’t know if I can trust him with it. It’s like he’s holding it and I’m following him around with my hands cupped underneath his in case he drops it. So what do I do? What if I don’t want to go to New York? Would he stay for me? Would he give up everything, even though that’s the last thing I want for him?
And what if I did go with him?
He sighs now as the ache resurfaces, and heads for the shower. The water is almost too hot, but it pounds on his shoulders and back and chases the cold from his bones. When he steps out to towel off, he smiles at the unmistakable shift in the air that lets him know Aiden is back. He hears something fall to the floor, and Aiden swear softly; Jake shakes his head as he pulls on his softest pair of yoga pants and the T-shirt Aiden gave him the day they left Brunswick.
Aiden is sitting on the couch; his laptop is playing a haunting, piano-driven song and his fingers tap the melody against his thigh. Sunlight still pours through the window behind him, and it casts him in the same auburn halo that surrounded him thousands of miles ago, before the kiss that finally changed everything.
There is no describing how important Aiden is to him, for their story didn’t begin with a dropped pen or eyes meeting across a crowded room or bumping into one another on a busy street and spilling coffee everywhere—it began with two young boys who made each other feel a little less lost; two young boys who held each other together through thick and thin. Two young boys who should long have felt like brothers but never did. Jake returns Aiden’s smile as he looks up, his fingers still playing the keys of an invisible piano. Silently, Jake climbs onto the couch behind him, settling his knees on either side of Aiden’s hips and draping his arms around his shoulders. It’s comfortable, but something about it also makes Jake need more than he has allowed himself since Wyoming; he ghosts a kiss on the back of Aiden’s neck, peeks over his shoulder and watches the lines of muscle in Aiden’s arm shift as he mimics the piano riff.
Aiden’s arms have held him with tender strength and kept him safe for weeks; Aiden’s fingers have learned how to undo him and put him back together piece by shaking piece; and Aiden’s hands now hold his heart, flawed and fragile as it is. Jake finds himself mesmerized by the movement, fixated by the sudden, unexpected question of what else Aiden could do, if Jake will only let him.
When he shifts around to Aiden’s side, Aiden sets the laptop on the floor, then hooks his hands beneath Jake’s thighs and pull him into his lap. Music still permeates the charged air between them, and Aiden meets Jake’s kiss midway, his tongue sliding against Jake’s almost tentatively.