100 Days (32 page)

What they have is love of a kind; Aiden can see it now. Yet still he waits, because it’s all he knows how to do when he has put the object of his affection on a pedestal and he waits for the descent, the press of a kiss that tastes like love, the vowels and consonants that will spell it all out. And really, what reason does he have to think they will? History just repeats itself for Aiden Calloway—at least where his unrequited crushes are concerned. He had mooned over Peter Groves, one of the guys working at the Subway on Pleasant Street, for the en­tire summer before his internship. He worshiped the guy and never did a goddamn thing about it, because how could anyone reach so high as to touch an idol?

Do you honestly believe that this is just a road trip thing?
he wants to ask as he follows Jake through the last hallway and out into the foyer. Aiden watches Jake’s fingertips trail along the wall just as they trail along his own skin in the dark clutches of night and wonders,
What if we’d met in another life? What if I were different, braver, more sure that I’m worthy of you? What then?

“Gift shop?” Jake asks innocently when Aiden catches up with him. “I’m thinking a shirt from this place might not be so bad.”

“Yeah?” Aiden asks, his mood brightening.

“Just this once.”

Later, long after darkness
has fallen and they’ve glutted themselves on one another, Aiden leaves Jake sleeping. Unable to drift off, he pads out into the living room in socks and pajama pants, pulling on his hoodie as he goes; the nights are turning colder.

He switches on the radio, leaves it on the first station he finds and drops into the chair behind the seats. He catches up on the news and replies to a few emails, none of it distracting him in the way he wants it to. Every minute or so, his eyes drift to the half-closed bedroom door, and he realizes just how lonely it can be on the road.

After a moment’s hesitation, he grabs his travel journal and a pen from his bag and flips to the first blank page.

I could probably use some advice, though I probably wouldn’t follow it anyway,
he writes, then chews on the tip of his pen as he considers his next words.
The thing is… I know that everyone’s been able to see it. How I’ve been feeling, how I’ve been
falling,
even if I couldn’t. I’ll probably have to get someone to clue me in to how they do that one of these days. But the point is that I really don’t know what to do about it, any more than I did the night I realized that… that I, Aiden Calloway, am in love with Jake Valentine.

He stops short, the rest of the blank page sitting there, taunting him as he considers the words he wants to vocalize but can’t—fear holds his heart captive, when it should be Jake. Aiden has
thought
them, over and over, at least once per waking minute since the meteor shower, but hasn’t spoken them. It was nice, at first, the thrill of something secret and new—old, he keeps reminding himself, but newly realized—to hold close, to keep just for himself. But what at first felt like a feather between his fingers now feels like a weight of responsibility and ruin around his neck.

For a while, I was doing okay,
he writes, halting after every other word.
I even kind of thought that Jake might feel the same, or at least be on the way to it. I mean,
god,
he told me back at Lake Calhoun that he’d thought he was falling for me, which was why he did what he did in Chicago. So it’s not like I’d be completely off-base, right? And all day Saturday he kept looking at me like I put the sun in the sky, and I was so sure that he was going to say
something.
But he didn’t. I mean… why would he fall for me anyway? He’s just… he’s everything.
Everything.

I talked to Hugh at the gig on Saturday night, and he told me that a few of them are forming a new band once the tour is over and moving to New York to see if they can make it. He wants me to go with them, sing and write, and the first thing I thought was,
“What about Jake?” Should I hold on? Should I wait, half expecting to get my heart broken? Should I just take this for exactly what we’ve said it is, take everything he’ll give me and let the timer run out? What should I do?

After Aiden dots his last i and crosses his last t, he closes the notebook and tosses it back into his bag. He stretches out his legs and arms; the deep ache and satiation in his limbs reminds him just how rough they got earlier, and despite the heaviness of what he just put into words, he can’t help but smile.

He reclines the chair, curls up on his side with his arm tucked up under his head and closes his eyes. But it’s no use—sleep eludes him, just as it did at the beginning of the trip, and writing hasn’t really helped. Idly, he wishes that Jake might wake up of his own accord and suggest making cocoa. Aiden can never get it to taste quite the same when he makes it.

Aiden sighs, turns off all the lights and goes to sit in the cab. Resting both arms over the steering wheel, he looks out into the wooded clearing at the semicircle formed by the few other RVs and campers in the park. A group of people is gathered around the fire pit, all paired off. They have blankets wrapped around their shoulders and drink from red plastic cups.

Aiden watches one couple because the man bears a passing resemblance to Jake; the girl he’s with says something that makes him laugh, and he looks at her as though she’s the best thing he’s ever seen.

Aiden and Jake still haven’t found the time or place to have a campfire, and Aiden aches to know what it would be like, now that they are… whatever they are. Their campfires used to be legendary, all-night affairs that only ended when the embers died, and Aiden has always been entranced by the inherent romance of sitting by the dancing flames, speaking in hushed voices and with shadowed eyes. There is something intrinsically special about that aspect of their shared childhood, and Aiden longs to recapture it.

Exhaustion settles over him like a blanket of snow. He feels himself being slowly buried beneath it, the only light above him an unattainable one; he can reach up toward it, but the silhouette of his own hand eclipses the source of his warmth. He wonders what will happen to him and Jake if he decides to go to New York. Knowing what he now knows about how his absence during the internship affected Jake, he feels selfish for even considering it. But is it really so selfish not to want to be beholden to something finite? Then again, how can he give up everything they’ve discovered between them over the course of this road trip, not to mention all that he worked so long for?

A shuffling behind him alerts him to Jake’s sudden presence, and warm, sleep-heavy arms curl around his shoulders. “You should come back to bed.”

“What’s in bed?”

“Someone who won’t really mind if you wanna have sex half asleep.”

“I was hoping that’d be the case,” Aiden says, chuckling.

“It’s like one mind,” Jake says, squeezing his shoulders before straightening up.

Aiden turns, stands and drinks in the sight of Jake, relaxed as he so rarely is during daylight hours, his Henley and sweatpants rumpled and a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He looks far more inviting than the mess inside Aiden’s head, so Aiden leaves everything behind in the cab—the words, the music, the confusion—and simply lets himself be led.

8,519 miles

Day Sixty-seven: Kansas

“Aiden!” Jake calls at the top of his voice. It echoes in the stillness of the night. He shrugs, adjusts his backpack and carries on walking, taking left after left after left. Even with the somewhat comforting twinkle of stars above him and his flashlight in hand, the darkness inside the maze remains oppressive.

“‘Let’s turn off here,’ he said. ‘It’s a maze, it’ll totally be fun,’ he said,” Jake grumbles aloud, shaking his flashlight when it flickers. This has all the potential of a grisly horror movie: two very non-virginal boys lost in a maze in the middle of nowhere, separated because one of them insisted on racing to the middle for their Thanksgiving picnic. Why they couldn’t have it inside the RV, where it’s warm, and more importantly, safe, Jake doesn’t know. What he does know is that he is mostly powerless to resist those dumb puppy eyes of Aiden’s, even as he slowly but surely resigns himself to the inevitable end of what they’ve been doing. This is the beginning of a long, painfully drawn-out goodbye; they will always be best friends, of course, there’s no doubting that, but Aiden has the prospect of a new life waiting for him now, and Jake has no right to hold him back from it. He loves Aiden, so as much as the thought leaves him cold, he has to let him go.

Just as he reaches another dead end, his flashlight flickers and goes out. Jake swears under his breath and switches to the miniature flashlight he keeps on his key ring.

It’s too quiet so deep in the maze. Jake stops to weigh the benefits of listening to music against the ability to hear approaching serial killers; as he starts to take off his backpack, his phone rings in his pocket at top volume.

When he sees
Home
emblazoned across the screen over a picture of Charlie smiling—a fleeting, candid moment he snapped at a barbecue over the sum­mer when Eric, her best friend from college, was visiting—he answers it immediately.

“Hello?”

“Baby bro!”

Jake grins at Eric’s customary greeting. His infectious happiness makes Jake smile every bit as much as if he has just been wrapped up in one of Eric’s bone-crushing bear hugs.

“What are you doing in Brunswick? I thought you couldn’t make it this year,” he says.

“Ah, most of the fam’s down in Puerto Rico for the holidays, you know how it is. Thought I’d swing by at the last minute; Thanksgiving doesn’t seem right now without seeing you guys,” Eric says.

“And how does one just ‘swing by at the last minute’ from all the way across the country?”

“You get on a fuckin’ plane, that’s how. Anyway! Happy Thanksgiving!”

“Happy Thanksgiving,” Jake says, inhaling deeply and imagining that he can detect the faint scent of laundry detergent and American Crew hair wax on the cold night air. He pictures Eric in their worn-out living room, his linebacker build taking up two seats on the couch and his feet up on the coffee table no matter how often Charlie tells him to get them off. The image warms him a little bit. “Where’s Charlie?”

“Walking off dinner,” Eric says, with incredulity in his voice. Jake can see him throwing a hand into the air and making a face as if it’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard. “I mean, I’ve got a total food coma situation going on right now, and she had just as many helpings as I did. I don’t know how she does it; she must have hollow legs or somethin’.”

“How many helpings are we talking, here?” Jake asks.

“Eh… four, maybe? But it’s Thanksgiving! Eating crap tons of food is the whole point.”

Jake shakes his head, grinning, and sits down on the ground, taking off his backpack and leaning against the hedge. If he keeps walking without paying attention to where he’s going, he’ll only end up more lost.

“It’s really good to hear from you,” Jake says, and he means it. Eric has been a Thanksgiving fixture at the Valentine household ever since their dad died, when they sat around with Chinese takeout boxes littering the dinner table, not a smile among them—except on Eric, this larger than life, born and bred Californian, who looked at Charlie as though she was his favorite person. Somehow, by way of a bizarre and slightly concerning stand-up comedy routine that involved spraying his black hair white-blond and heavily outlining his hazel eyes in black, he managed to make them laugh out loud for the first time in two months. “How’s life in…
where
are you living now?”

“Oh man, you didn’t hear? I’m back home! Californ-I-A, baby.”

“That’s fantastic! Charlie said you were never really happy in Denver.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t,” Eric says. “Way too far from the ocean.”

“I know that feeling,” Jake says with a sigh, glancing up at his surroundings and feeling too contained. He traces patterns in the cold, hard-packed earth, closing his eyes and pretending that the dirt is the thick sand on Thomas Point Beach.

“So what the hell is up with this crazy-ass route you and the squirt are taking?”

Jake opens his eyes again, the moment lost. “What do you mean?”

“Charlie showed me the GPS thingy earlier and it looks like you guys are playing connect the dots on a map.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s a crazy-ass route. It just seemed like if we were going to cover all the states and be able to actually do something in each one, we should do the whole zigzag thing.”

“And you’re where right now? Kansas?”

Jake’s humorless laughter comes out in a puff of white. “Well, right now I’m sitting in the middle of a maze somewhere outside Wichita because Dan decided it would be great to spend Thanksgiving lost, cold and hungry.”

“Wait… who’s Dan?”

“Sorry. Just a dumb nickname I have for Aiden,” Jake explains, his face grow­ing hot.

“Gotcha,” Eric says. “You know, Charlie and I totally had a bet going once upon a time. She bet me twenty bucks that Aiden wouldn’t figure out that you had that crush on him in senior year, and she’s still winning.”

Biting his lip, Jake goes back to drawing patterns in the dirt. “She’s still so sure that we’re going to end up together.”

“She’s missing you, man,” Eric says. “She won’t say it, you know how she is. Might as well be British for all that stiff upper lip crap! But I can tell.”

A circle, a line through the circle, a triangle around the circle, a square around the triangle, another circle around the square and Jake loses track. “I’ve been meaning to call her. We… sort of had a fight, when I was in Ohio.”

As if he’s tiptoeing around whether to bring it up, Eric says, “Yeah, she told me about all this house stuff.”

Jake’s hand stops moving. “She did?”

“Yeah, we got to talking about the old days, you know how it is. Told me she wants to go back, but she’d have to sell the house.”

“Did she tell you all of it?”