Authors: Mimsy Hale
The cab arrives just as Jake is looking up SeaTac live departures on the laptop, checking for flights back to Maine. The earliest isn’t until midafternoon, and now that he’s made his decision he needs to be gone as soon as possible, so instead he brings up the details of an earlier flight to Anchorage—April and the band are heading straight back to Brunswick on Christmas Day, after all. Maybe he can hitch a ride with them.
Standing at the door to the RV with his suitcase in hand, Jake takes a long last look, whispers, “Goodbye,” and leaves.
He’s calm for the entire journey to the airport, even when he realizes that he left flight details open on the laptop and Aiden’s papers strewn across the bed. He’s calm all the way through the process of rebooking his flight and paying the transfer fee, even when his credit card is declined and he has to pay with most of the cash he has on him. He’s calm for the ten minutes he waits to board with the other sleepy passengers on his 3:30 a.m. flight, even when April responds to his text by calling him and yelling at him until he tells her, “My flight gets in at six, so we’ll talk about it then.”
It isn’t until he hands over his boarding pass and turns toward the concourse that it all catches up with him—he hasn’t been calm; he’s been
numb—
and all it takes is one word.
“Jake!”
He wheels around at the pained voice calling his name from across the gate lounge. Of course it’s Aiden’s. The expression on his face is pure torture
—I can’t do this to you anymore,
Jake thinks—and it seems like one of those awful, clichéd movie moments, the ones in which the music has been building to a crescendo and suddenly dies the moment the two leads see one another again, as if everything can be solved in the quiet simplicity of eyes meeting across a crowded space.
The lyrics branded into Jake’s mind, however, don’t die.
Am I ready to risk being happy? Feels like I’ve been moving the mountains. Does my future exist outside you?
Eyes filling with unwelcome tears, Jake shakes his head—imperceptibly to begin with, but harder until the hope in Aiden’s eyes darkens into something that makes Jake’s gut solidify into a knot so heavy, it feels like setting down roots in the worn carpet of Gate Fourteen.
He ignores the screaming of his every cell, the muscle memory telling him to move toward Aiden and push him into a future that isn’t Jake’s to decide. Aiden takes one step forward, Jake one step back. Another—
I’m sorry—
and then another—
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—
and then the fire in Aiden’s expression is nothing but an image burning behind Jake’s eyelids as he sprints down the concourse.
14,257 miles
Day Ninety-nine: Alaska
Aiden has had his notebook open for nearly an hour, writing and scribbling and writing and tearing out pages until finally he just writes,
Fuck everything.
After underlining it twice, he pushes the notebook away and rubs a hand over his eyes. It’s nearly five a.m., and he’s exhausted. But with the torrential downpour of rain battering the RV, not to mention the anger thrumming in his veins, there’s no way he can sleep. In all his life he’s never experienced such rage—not at Roberto Mancini, not at Jake in Chicago or Minneapolis, not even at his own father. The only thing keeping him from going postal and trashing the RV is the memory of his grandfather that lingers in every square inch of the place.
Now that Jake is gone, there is too much silence. The air is too static. Some of his things still hang in the closet, and he has left behind his toothbrush, and there is some leftover lasagna in the refrigerator; but these are all traces of a love now lost. For the first time, Aiden imagines, really imagines, what his life will be like without Jake, because Jake was right; they won’t recover from this. But that isn’t what makes Aiden angriest—no, it’s the fact that when he imagines his life without Jake, he sees nothing.
Aiden’s phone, vibrating on the table, pulls him from his thoughts. When he picks it up, he sees April smiling up at him from the screen.
After a moment’s hesitation he answers, “Hey, Flower.”
“Hey,” she says quietly. “Um… are you okay?”
Aiden snorts. “Who the hell does he think he is?” he spits out, under no illusions that April is in the dark. “He keeps me hanging for months, fucks somebody else to try and get me out of his system or
whatever
the hell that was, and then when he finally gives in like it’s some big chore, he up and fucking leaves the day before my birthday.”
“Jesus, Aiden,” April whispers, and in the background Aiden can hear the sound of a door closing. “What happened?”
“The movies and TV shows lie.”
“Okay…”
“They make chasing someone through an airport look a shit-ton easier than it really is,” Aiden says, his words trailing into an almost hysterical laugh as he begins to pace the length of the RV. The anger surges up in him anew and he can’t dam it up anymore; he has nowhere left to redirect it, so he lets loose. “They wouldn’t let me check in using my ticket to Anchorage, so I had to buy a goddamn ticket to Nebraska just to get through security, and then getting through security took forever, and for what?
“For nothing; it was all for fucking
nothing,
because I caught up to him and he
still
left!” Aiden exclaims, voice rising. “And do you want to know the worst part? I don’t get it. Nothing happened! I went to hang out with some friends. He was happy when I left, and now he’s just gone. So I guess that’s it. It’s over. What happened on the road trip will stay on the fucking road trip after all.”
“Aiden, what the
fuck
is going on?” April asks.
“I was hoping you’d tell me,” he says, waving his free hand and letting it drop to hang limp at his side. He stares through into the bedroom, just able to see scraps of paper strewn across the end of the bed. “I guess Jake found the lyrics for a song I’ve been working on and he just took off, says I shouldn’t let him hold me back from my dream—which apparently he knows
so
much better than I do. He says he doesn’t want to get in the way of me making music.”
“Motherfucker,” April says. “That fucking
idiot;
I can’t even believe him sometimes.”
“Pretty much, yeah. And—actually, no, this is the worst part: it’s just like him to take off right before a storm hits. Everything out of SeaTac is delayed and I can’t do anything, so I’m just sitting here like a fucking loser,” Aiden says. “Is he with you?”
“His flight gets in at six,” she says, “and I’m the asshole who said I’d go pick him up. To be honest, I’m tempted to fucking leave him there.”
“Don’t do that,” Aiden says automatically—even with his blood boiling. Sighing again, he says, “You’re his best friend. He’s gonna need you.”
After a pause, she asks, “And what about you?”
“What do you mean, what about me? Game’s over, I might as well go home,” Aiden says.
“Excuse you, but no. That’s not what’s going to happen,” April says. “No, that is not the Aiden Calloway I know—”
“April.”
“You two fucking love each other, okay? And it’s more than that; this has been going on for years and I’ve seen it, fucking everyone has—”
“April.”
“And you and Jake are the only ones who have this habit of not seeing what’s right in front of your dumb-ass faces.”
Aiden drops heavily onto the couch, his exhaustion finally getting the better of him. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he says, “April, I’m so fucking tired. I’m tired, okay? I’m tired of putting myself out there, I’m tired of waiting and being patient, and I’m tired of chasing after him when he’s given me no reason to. I mean, honestly, what am I even still doing here? I should have just cut my losses and turned the fucking RV around as soon as I got back.”
“Was it worth it?” she asks. “All the putting yourself out there, all the chasing. Did it make you happy?”
Aiden bites down on the inside of his cheek, exhales slowly and wishes he hadn’t picked up the phone.
Without waiting for an answer, she continues, “You love him. That’s what you’re still doing there.”
“I wish I didn’t. I wish that none of this ever happened.”
She scoffs, and he pictures her tossing her hair over her shoulder and tilting her head to look at him from under her eyelashes, one eyebrow raised knowingly. “No, honey, you don’t. So what are you going to do now?”
Aiden casts his gaze around the inside of the RV, at the inescapable traces of Jake everywhere, and then closes his eyes against it all. “Maybe I should go back to Brunswick. See if we can talk this all out when he gets back.”
“Talking about your
feelings?
What a world,” she deadpans.
“Well, what would you suggest?”
“You’ve still got that ticket to Anchorage, right?”
“No,”
Aiden says. “I mean—yes, I do. But I’m not chasing after him anymore. If he wants me, he can come fucking apologize.”
“Oh my god, you’re both as bad as each other!” she exclaims, exasperation so clear in her voice that he feels as if she’s just taken him by the ear. “Maybe if both of you had just stopped being such guys about this whole thing and actually, you know,
talked
to each other from the start, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now.”
“Yes, April, I get it. Okay? We’ve both been dumb as shit,” Aiden says, and then takes a deep breath and lets his indignation roll off of him. “So… you’re telling me to come to Anchorage.”
“I’m not telling you anything.” Her tone is far gentler this time, and he pictures her taking the seat next to his and squeezing his shoulder in that comforting way of hers. “I’m just saying that you already have the ticket, and I don’t think this is over until it’s over. And…”
“And what?”
“And maybe you should go play your song. The one you’ve been writing. And then… then do whatever you need to do,” April says. “I’ll be here for you whatever happens, you know that.”
“I know,” Aiden says. With a faint smile, he adds, “Thanks, Flower.”
After they hang up, Aiden trudges into the bedroom, fighting off a yawn and blinking to keep himself awake. Way too much has happened over the past few hours for him to process, too much to even leave space to care that Jake found his song. He brushes most of the scraps of paper off the sheets and watches them flutter to the floor, hating the fact that his anger is slowly dissipating and leaving behind a terrible, scarring ache—Aiden
misses
him, and what he hates the most is, if he’d known their last kiss would be their last, he wouldn’t ever have stopped.
He collapses onto the bed and stares up at the ceiling until it blurs. He sees himself in Philadelphia, shell-shocked, Jake curling into him and falling asleep; in West Virginia, frantic, Jake’s fingers twisting inside him. The rain hammers dully on the roof and the windows, and the taste of his single cocktail has long since turned stale in his mouth. He recalls Portland, disbelief, Jake promising him the world, and Bowdoin, comfort, Jake’s double-spritz of morning cologne never changing from one day to the next.
The sheets grow warm beneath his cheek, and he turns his head to look at the clock on the nightstand.
Jake, Jake, Jake.
He gropes around until he finds the lyrics he copied onto a clean sheet of paper in his neatest hand. He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out.
You win, Jakey,
he thinks bitterly.
I’ve officially got nothing left.
He folds the paper and holds it against his chest, his eyes close, and as he finally drifts into sleep’s lonely embrace, he thinks of Jake and wonders if, somewhere up in the sky, he’s doing the same.
I swear to god, when I get a hold of him,
Aiden thinks as he pushes his way outside and a blast of frigid night air assaults him.
First, he leaves. Then April reads me the Riot Act. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I’m so dumb that I decide to follow him. And then I get to spend the entire flight sitting next to a crying baby. On Christmas fucking Eve.
These are all trials for which he can shift at least a little of the blame to the storm over Seattle that delayed all outbound flights until late evening. He’d awoken to it around noon, the rain shot with sleet and hailstones that pelted the RV until he wanted nothing more than to bury his head beneath his pillow and go back to sleep. Instead, Aiden had given in to the tugging in his gut.
The one thing for which he can’t shift the blame, however, is his utter failure to pack anything appropriate for Alaska. Fissures in his self-trust had distracted him, and somehow he had made it all the way to the departure lounge before realizing that he’d packed only for warm weather. Which is why he is standing outside Ted Stevens International Airport dressed only in jeans and a button-down, freezing his ass off and cursing under his breath.
He yields three cabs to other harried-looking passengers before deciding that, in this particular instance, manners are for squares; he jumps into the next one that comes along.
“The Tap Root on Spenard Road, please,” he tells the driver, raising his voice over the country music crackling on the radio. The driver only grunts, and Aiden can’t exactly blame him for not launching into conversation. It’s Christmas Eve, after all; he probably has a family to get home to.
The ten-minute journey passes at a crawl, but finally they pull up outside an unassuming one-story building with red siding and the name of the bar in contemporary, swooping text to the right of the door. Aiden pays the fare, hands the driver a generous tip and retrieves his suitcase from the trunk.
The second Aiden sets foot inside, he sees Jake sitting at a small round table by the artfully weathered bar, watching April and the rest of the band onstage. His shoulders slump and, despite his immaculate outfit, his hair is standing almost on end, going in fifty different directions. Jake’s posture stuns Aiden; this is how Jake used to hold himself. It’s been less than twenty-four hours, and it’s as if he’s looking at an entirely different person.