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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 2 years

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North To The Future [Chapter 8: Crash And Burn]

The year is 1999. You are just beginning your veterinary practice in Juneau, Alaska. Aegon is a mysterious, troubled newcomer to town. You kind of hate him. You are also kind of obsessed with him. Falling for him might legitimately ruin your life…but can you help it? Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose known only as the Ice Fisher.

Chapter warnings: Language, alcoholism, addiction, murder, discussions of sex, actual sex (18+ readers only), near-death experiences, health crises, hospitals, questionable tattoos, trout with Trent.

Word count: 6.7k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

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“He broke up with me.” Kimmie hasn’t taken a single sip of her Miller Lite. She’s staring right past you and Heather, her eyes glassy puddles shimmering with reflections of multicolored Christmas lights. It’s Monday, December 13th, and Dale’s stereo is playing Queen’s Thank God It’s Christmas. You’re in the usual booth and waiting for the boys to get off work. Outside the frosted windows is an ocean of darkness punctuated by narrow aisles of murky streetlight luminescence. “He actually broke up with me.”

Heather snaps her fingers in front of Kimmie’s face. “Uh, Kimmie, Earth to Kimmie, yeah, can you give us a little more exposition, please? When exactly did this happen?”

“Yesterday,” Kimmie says, slightly more present now. “He’d been weird since the hike, super depressed, super boring…he wasn’t even interested in doggie style, and he loves doggie style!”

“Boundaries, Kimmie,” Heather pleads.

“So he called me to come over last night and I went to see him and he was…like…sitting on his couch with his hands folded in his lap like it was a freaking job interview. And he explained that he thought I was totally great and that we’d had a lot of fun together but now he had to break things off for personal reasons.”

“Wow, personal reasons, wow,” Heather muses. She doesn’t turn to look at you, but she does kick your boot under the table. You pretend not to notice.

“Wow,” Joyce echoes wryly, flipping a page in her current fantasy novel. There’s some stately prince on the front cover: crown, sword, shield, long flowing hair like a river of white gold.

“I don’t even care that much,” Kimmie realizes as she’s saying it. “I mean, it was nearing its expiration date anyway. I’m going to get back together with Brad, Aegon’s going to presumably resume sleeping his way through Juneau…or maybe try out taking a vow of celibacy, who knows, he’s been very monkish the past few days. He can be fun sometimes, and I like him, and I wish him all the best, but there’s no future for us. I just realized that he’s the first guy who ever broke up with me instead of the other way around. It feels…not great!”

“Congratulations, you’re a mortal,” Joyce says, not looking up from her book.

“So you wouldn’t care if Aegon got with someone else?” Heather asks Kimmie innocently. This time, you kick Heather. She winces but bites back a hiss of pain.

Kimmie considers this, finally taking a swig of her I’m-a-cool-girl-who-likes-hockey-and-trucks beer. “No, probably not.”

I won’t do it, you vow to yourself with false stoicism, imagined iron you wish you were really made of. I won’t date him, I won’t sleep with him, I won’t fall in love with him. And yet part of you already knows it’s too late. Part of you knows this as if it’s been inked to your skin like the scrawled, secret entries of a journal.

Ursa Minor’s front door bangs open, and what you see when you turn to look doesn’t make any sense. Rob and Trent—both dripping wet, their hair plastered flat to their heads, their boots squeaking on the hardwood floor—rush inside. There are shouts and gasps and people leaping up out of their seats to get a better look. Trent is carrying something over one of his lumberjack-broad shoulders. He kneels to throw it down onto the floor. It’s Aegon: limp, bluish, unconscious.

“Someone call somebody!” Trent bellows. He’s staring down at Aegon in panic, in terror, not knowing what to do. Beads of water run down his face. “An ambulance or 911 or a helicopter…or…or somebody!”

“Got it!” Dale says, darting for the phone behind the bar. Kimmie is shrieking. Joyce is trying to calm her down. And by then, you’re on the floor beside Aegon feeling for a pulse on his carotid. He doesn’t have one. He’s cold and he’s silent and he��s medically dead.

“He fell,” Trent says franticly, helplessly. “We were bringing the boat into the harbor and he got tangled in a net and fell overboard. I pulled him out, but he was underwater for a while and we couldn’t…we couldn’t wake him up…”

“Aegon?!” you scream, shaking him, slapping him across his icy, vacant face. “Aegon, wake up, wake up, please wake up!”

Heather is next to you. “What can I do?”

“Help me get his wet clothes off. Hypothermia.”

She yanks at his boots, his socks, his jeans. “You know how to do CPR, right?”

“Yeah, on a dog!” Still, you have to try. How long can he go without a pulse until he’s braindead? Four minutes? Five? The cold might buy him extra time, but not much. Minutes. You rip off his red flannel shirt; buttons go careening across the wet floor. As you place your palms over his heart, you notice—fleetingly, dazedly, like sloshing through a dream—that he has a scattering of scars on his chest, gashes and punctures and knicks…and two tattoos. There is a dragon spiraled around his right collarbone. Just below his left, there are three words written in light, graceful cursive: I’m a killer.

You start chest compressions. How many am I supposed to do on a human? Ten? Twenty? You can’t remember. You’re sobbing; you aren’t sure when that started, but it’s in full force now. Heather mops the tears from your face with her sleeve so you can see.

He’s going to die, you think. He’s going to die lying on the floor of this bar in his boxers, and he will never tell me anything again, and he will never see his family again, and he will never get better. The channel killed Jesse and now it’s killed Aegon too.

“Is he dead?!” Kimmie yelps from across the room. “Please tell me he’s not dead!”

Heather hurls back: “You’re going to be dead if you don’t shut up! Let her work on him!”

You tilt Aegon’s head back, lift his chin, pinch his nose shut. Then you exhale into him. You can taste the dark ancient salt of the sea on his cold lips…but beneath that there is rum as well. He shouldn’t have been drinking that much at work. He doesn’t usually. What’s different? What’s been bothering him? But you think you know the answer to that.

There’s nothing, nothing, nothing…and then Aegon’s chest rises and he rolls onto his side, choking out torrents of seawater and gasping for air. People are cheering and chattering, but you barely hear them.

“Oh my god!” you cry out, and if you were sobbing before now you’re properly bawling, breathless and hysterical. It’s uncontrollable, you can’t seem to stop. You cling to Aegon as he shivers violently and peers around with half-open, profoundly confused blue eyes, warming him with your own body heat, turning his flesh from blue to white to pink.

“Go get coats and stuff to warm him up,” Heather says to Trent, shoving him away. And you do actually need coats…but also, you think, Heather is trying to get rid of her brother. Because it should be obvious to anyone what’s going on here; it should be obvious to anyone that you’re in love with this white-blond man on the floor who not so very long ago was a stranger.

“Hey, hey,” Aegon rasps, pawing clumsily at your face as if to comfort you, almost poking your eyes out in the process. And then he asks, with genuine confusion: “What the hell are you crying about?”

You start laughing, tears still streaming down your cheeks. “You, idiot. I’m crying about you.”

“I’m fine, Appletini,” he croaks. “Shh. Shh. Stop. No crying.”

“I thought you were dead, I thought…I thought…”

“I’m not that easy to kill,” Aegon says, his eyes dipping shut. Outside in the blackness somewhere, there are sirens whirling. Trent returns with an armful of coats and together you pile them on top of Aegon, burying him in a tomb of L.L.Bean and Patagonia and The North Face. “Trust me. I know.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Obviously, the hospital won’t let Aegon have rum and Cokes. He pushes his morphine button almost constantly, even though the doctors and nurses tell him he’s already maxed out. They began by keeping Aegon overnight for observation, and then he developed pneumonia, and then the first type of antibiotics didn’t work and they had to play roulette until they found one that did. Now it’s a full week later—December 20th—and Aegon is finally feeling like himself again and is due to be released tomorrow. Sunfyre has been staying with you and your parents. He loves it, he gets constant attention and enjoys gazing out the window to see if his new best friend the cow moose will show up. Meanwhile, Trent has convinced his boss Rusty—another high school classmate of your parents, another hulking bearded specimen of the enmeshed Juneau ecosystem—to let Aegon keep his job despite the extended leave; Trent even managed to get Aegon paid time off for the first five days. This is all rather heroic of him. It makes you feel bad for thinking he might be a serial killer. If Trent knows that Aegon was drunk on the job, he hasn’t mentioned it to anybody.

“I got you something,” Aegon tells you when you get off work. It’s just after sunset, the last whisps of pink and lilac dusk vanishing from the sky. Things have been slow at the vet clinic as Christmas draws near, which is good in that you can leave early and visit Aegon more often. It’s bad because you’re less busy, less preoccupied; you have all the time in the world to think about him. Aegon is propped up in bed on pillows—his hair slicked back from his face, his eyes sleepy and racoonish—and wearing a hospital gown that’s too big for him. You can see his collarbones and his tattoos, though you’re trying very hard not to stare, to wonder. He points to the table beside his bed. There’s a bouquet of blue roses lying there.

“For me?!”

“For the person who literally brought me back from the dead? Yeah, I don’t think it’s too extravagant.”

You give him one of the hot chocolates you bought from the hospital cafeteria. It’s not as good as his, obviously, but it’s better than nothing. He clutches the Styrofoam cup with both hands, steam rolling up into his face. He inhales the scent, closes his eyes, sighs deeply with a smile. “I hope they aren’t stolen,” you say about the roses, only half-kidding.

“They’re from the gift shop. I dragged myself down there after lunch. They really weren’t that expensive, I think the cashier gave me a still-attached-to-an-IV discount.”

“Was she cute?”

“She was eighty years old.”

You laugh and sit down in the chair beside his bed, sipping your own hot chocolate: thin, watery, weak. You admire the roses, threading velvety cerulean petals through your fingers. “I love them, really, but I wish you wouldn’t buy things for me. I know you’re chronically short on money. And I am somehow skeptical that you have health insurance. Do you have health insurance?”

He grins toothily. “Nope.”

“Aegon,” you lament.

“It doesn’t matter. They’ll bill me, I’ll never pay, it’s all made up.”

“You might need a halfway decent credit score one day.”

He shakes his head. “I’m never going to try to get a mortgage. I’m never going to apply for a job at a bank or a law firm. I’ll be fine. I’ll live in a tree if that’s what it takes.”

You rest your palm against his cheek and then his forehead, checking for fever. His skin is warm but not hot, pale but not bloodless. You can feel his eyes on you, trying to catch your gaze like a hook through a fish. You avoid them.

“How do I look, vet lady?”

“I’m not really qualified to evaluate humans.”

“I don’t want to get better.”

Now you do stare at him, direct and mystified. “Why?”

“I’m worried you won’t be nice to me anymore.”

You chuckle, relieved. “I’ll still be nice to you, Aegon.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

A nurse pops into the room, young and springy and jovial like a kitten. She must be new; you don’t recognize her, and you’ve been here a lot. “Good afternoon, I’m just swinging by to take your vitals. I see you’re scheduled to go home tomorrow, how exciting!” The nurse squints down at the chart she has pinned to a clipboard. “Aegon…?”

He smirks long-sufferingly. “It’s Greek.”

“It’s lovely!” the nurse recovers. She measures his temperature and heartrate and blood pressure, his reflexes and his oxygenation. He passes all inquiries with flying colors. She congratulates Aegon on his recovery and flits off to tend to more needy patients. You think of the nights you’ve spent curled up in this chair, listening to Aegon’s labored, rattling breathing and watching blooms of flare-hot crimson fever creep across his face. You think of how much it’s going to kill you to lose him someday. You find yourself staring at his tattoos, ink that someone else put there in some other city, remnants of the life he had before.

“You can ask,” Aegon says. “I’m sure you’re wondering.”

You set your hot chocolate on the table and move closer to him, ghosting your fingertips over the words: I’m a killer. He jolts a little, although not in a bad way, not in an unwelcome way. He doesn’t lean away from you. In fact, he leans in. “What’s up with that?”

“Would this be an awkward moment for me to confess that I’m the Ice Fisher?”

You smile. “You have to admit that it’s a little weird. There’s a killer on the loose, you have a tattoo that says you’re a killer, I think any reasonable observer would have questions.”

“Kimmie didn’t.”

“Reasonable observer, I said. Reasonable.”

“It’s not a confession. It’s a Johnny Cash lyric.”

“Really? Which song?” You know a fair amount of Johnny Cash thanks to your dad’s extensive vinyl collection. You skim through his discography in your head: Walk The Line, Ring Of Fire, Get Rhythm, Folsom Prison Blues, I Got Stripes. You can’t remember any of them having that line. It circles around in your skull, only sounding like Aegon’s voice: I’m a killer, I’m a killer.

“I’ve Been Everywhere,” he says. “It’s a cover, actually. Some other guy did it first. But I didn’t know that when I got inked. And I loved Johnny Cash’s version when I heard it. It was like my theme song.”

“Ohhh, right, that’s the one where he lists all the cities he’s been to, like Reno, uh, and Chicago, and, uhhh…”

Aegon sings, deep but hoarse: “Fargo, Minnesota, Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota, Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma, Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma—” He breaks off with a coughing fit.

“Stop,” you beg, laughing. “Stop, you’re going to hurt yourself.” You trace the cursive letters lightly. I’m a killer. I’m a killer. “Kimmie never had questions about that?”

“I don’t think Kimmie really sees me. She just sees adjectives in the shape of my silhouette. But you…” He puts his hand over yours, pinning it to his chest. You can feel his heart under there somewhere, beneath muscles and bones and a pitch-black sea crawling with monsters that have evolved to live in the extreme gravity, in the depths: ghosts of the past and sirens of the future. He smiles. “You see a lot.”

“20/20, baby.” You study his scars. They’re random like a scatterplot, none large enough to appear life-threatening. “How did you get these?”

“Car accident. A long time ago.”

“Before you left Miami?”

He gazes absently out the window, where snow is falling. You can see it drifting down to the earth in the gloomy beams of streetlights. “Yeah.”

Now there are new lyrics bubbling up in your mind, not anything by Johnny Cash but Cake’s The Distance. No trophy, no flowers, no flashbulbs, no wine, he’s haunted by something he cannot define. And perhaps you know something about what that feels like. “Do you really think I’m a coward?” you ask softly. “I know you’re trying not to lie to me. So I’m hoping you’ll tell me the truth. You might be the only person who will.”

Aegon pauses before he answers. “I think a lot of people are cowards in one way or another,” he says diplomatically. “And I think that if that’s your greatest flaw as a human—that you don’t want to disappoint your parents, that you don’t want to hurt them, that you want to repay them for being so wonderful when there are people out there who beat and murder their kids—you turned out alright.”

You think of how easy it would be to rest your head on his bare, scarred chest and let him hold you. You think of how much you want that, want it in a sudden and ravenous and unbearable sort of way. “Thank you,” you whisper.

“No problem, Appletini.”

There is a knock on the door, and you jerk away from Aegon. You pick up your hot chocolate and slurp it as you sink into the chair. Aegon laces his hands together and wrings them. Trent walks in. “Sup, bro?!” he pipes cheerfully.

“Bro,” Aegon offers in return. They bump fists.

“You look like you’re feeling better.”

“I definitely am.”

“Still getting let out tomorrow?”

“Yup. Like a prisoner who made parole. Kimmie already offered to drive me home.” Then he adds: “Platonically.” Kimmie’s the only one in the friend group without a real job. Her parents are both university professors—you aren’t sure how none of the genius chromosomes made their way down the genetic Plinko board to her, but they didn’t—and she gets paid to be their ‘research assistant’…which means she works rarely and with no accountability whatsoever.

Trent’s eyes dart to you, to the blue roses, to you again, finally back to Aegon. He’s beaming, but there’s something hollow about it, like if you struck him across the face it would crack like porcelain. “Flowers, huh? That’s dope.”

“Yeah, I figured it was the least I could do since she saved my life and all.”

“She’s fantastic,” Trent agrees proudly, like he owns you. “In fact, that’s kind of why I’m here.” He turns to you. “I called the house and your parents told me I should check the hospital. I wanted to…you know, now that Aegon’s basically better and we all know he’s not gonna die…I wanted to take you to dinner tomorrow.”

“Dinner?” you repeat, stupidly, like you’re unfamiliar with the concept. “Tomorrow?”

“Yeah, someplace nice. Candlelight and fancy dessert, the whole deal.”

A date. That’s definitely a date. You stare at Trent. He stares at you. Aegon frowns at you both, pressing his knuckles to his lips. “Dinner,” you say awkwardly, but with more conviction. “Totally. Dinner would be nice.”

“Awesome!” Trent thunders. “I’ll pick you up at 8?”

“Sounds good!” you say with overcompensating enthusiasm. Trent swoops in for an unexpected hug—nearly spilling your hot chocolate—and gives Aegon a parting fist bump. Then he’s gone.

“I owe him,” you explain to Aegon, speaking quickly, nervously. “He saved your life, he fished you out of the channel like a goddamn salmon. He’s responsible for you keeping your job. He’s getting you paid time off. He’s been around the hospital a lot this week, he’s been so helpful, selflessly helpful…I can’t just tell him to fuck off after all that.” And then you say: “But it’s only dinner! Only one dinner!”

“Need some condoms?” Aegon teases, trying to make you smile. It works. “I have a box I’m not currently using.”

“I’m on the pill.”

“Good to know.”

“I doubt your condoms are horse-sized anyway.”

“Hey hey hey, it’s not about the number of inches, it’s about how you use them.”

“I’ve heard some very interesting things. About your inches, I mean.”

“Oh no,” he groans, covering his blushing face with his hands.

“I didn’t say bad things. I said interesting things.”

“I wouldn’t mind you knowing from firsthand experience,” he says with a sly little grin you can’t quite read. It’s playful, it’s sharp, it’s baiting, it’s sad.

“About what?”

“About my inches.”

You both burst out laughing, so hard Aegon launches into another coughing fit. You reach for him instinctively, pressing your hand to his chest again as if you can cure him, not a palm reader but a faith healer. A miracle worker. A professional fixer.

“You think it’s safe?” he asks, seriously now. “Dinner, I mean. With Trent.”

“I think he’d have a hard time strangling me in the middle of a crowded restaurant. And everyone’s going to know we’re hanging out together tomorrow night, he’d have to be more than stupid to kill me. He’d have to be all brainstem, like an alligator or a shark. Besides, he doesn’t want me dead.”

“I know. He wants you to be his wife.” There’s nothing to fill the uneasy lull but the pounding of your own heartbeat. “Call me,” Aegon says abruptly. “When you get home tomorrow night. So I know you’re okay.” So I know you didn’t get murdered. So I know you’re not at the bottom of a lake somewhere.

“What if it’s not until really late? I don’t want to disturb you while you’re recovering.”

He looks out the window: into the frigid void, into nothing. “Still call me.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Trent takes you to the Red Dog Saloon, Juneau’s idea of fine dining. You intentionally dress to look not-sexy: dark blue flannel (you’ve warmed to the fabric since Aegon wears it so much) with a T-shirt underneath, jeans, boots, minimal makeup, hair in an I-really-don’t-care messy loose braid. Trent doesn’t seem to notice that this isn’t supposed to be a date. He’s wearing a button-up maroon shirt and khakis. He chats away blithely as you survey the menu. He’s had the servers bring out candles to put on the table. He’s ordered craft beers for you both. You wrinkle your nose and shudder after each thick bitter sip, chasing the beer with desperate gulps of water. Whoever owns the Red Dog Saloon does not share Dale’s devotion to Shania Twain and Christmas music; the stereo is playing Savage Garden’s Crash And Burn.

“Ready to order?” the waitress asks, casting former-football-star Trent a flirtatious smile just in case he’s single. He is! you mentally shout, hoping for telepathy. He just doesn’t know it!

“Yeah,” you begin. “I think I’d like to try your brisket—”

“Oh no, no no no,” Trent says with a chuckle. He flips his hair; in your head, you hear a neigh. “They have a great special. Trout with risotto. How fancy is that?! I don’t even know what risotto is! We gotta try that. We gotta make tonight special.”

“Okay. Yeah. Sure.” You give the waitress a tight smirk as you hand her the menu. “The trout special. Two of them, I guess.”

“You’ll love it,” the waitress promises, tossing Trent another smile like a penny into a fountain. She takes both menus and disappears into the kitchen.

“So,” Trent says, drinking his beer. “I didn’t know you liked Aegon so much. I thought you kind of hated him, actually.”

You shrug, peering into the foam of your unwanted beer. “I don’t like to see anyone suffering. It doesn’t matter who.”

“That makes sense, I guess.”

“And you encouraged me to get along with him because you want him to stay in Juneau so he can be in your band.”

“Oh yeah, right. Okay, never mind. I was just…curious.” Another hair flip.

“Look, Trent…” You gather your courage like raking up autumn leaves. “We’re friends, right?”

He chortles. “Well, I’d like to think we’re a lot more than that.”

I bet you would. “But we never…like…we never put a label on it, you know?”

“Do you need a label?” he says. You had worried he might be mad; instead, he’s amused. You aren’t sure why that makes you feel worse. “Is that what makes it official, us using the words boyfriend, girlfriend, relationship, whatever?”

“Maybe those words don’t really apply to us, and that’s why we haven’t used them yet,” you try hopefully. “Like, if we were supposed to date, it would feel more natural for us to date. But maybe it doesn’t feel so natural, so we’re better off staying friends.”

Now he puts his beer down and stares at you. The glass thumps against the glossy wood. He’s bending towards you, though you don’t think he’s even aware of it; he props his elbows on the table, his brow crinkling in bewilderment. And there’s something else in the lines of his face too. Anger. Indignation. Betrayal. “You want to be friends?”

“I didn’t say that,” you amend swiftly. “I just said maybe we’re better off as friends.”

He slaps his palm against the table—you flinch, hating that he has that power over you—and laughs in amazement. “I’m just…well, I’m shocked! You’re fine with kissing me, and watching movies in your bedroom, and hanging out all the time, and getting drinks together and playing pool and showing me off to your parents, but you’re horrified by the thought of calling it dating?! You’re too much, ladybug. You’re really too much.”

He's going to pretend he doesn’t see that I want out. And he’s going to keep pretending until he’s on his knees with a fucking ring from Zales. “I don’t think I’m looking for a relationship right now, Trent. With anyone.” Oh, and that’s such a goddamn lie.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

He studies you; but that’s too kind a word for it. His eyes flay you down to the bone. “I’m a good guy, you know.”

“I know,” you lie, nodding agreeably.

“You’re not eighteen anymore,” he says. “It’s not like you have forever to find someone to settle down with. I go to work, I’m popular, I’m presentable, I care about you, I take you on dates, I move your furniture around whenever you fucking ask me to, I’m a good guy. I get that maybe this is progressing a little fast for you, and we can slow down if that’s what you want. But I think it would be pretty stupid to give something like this up. Don’t you?”

It doesn’t sound like a question. It sounds like a threat. Don’t you? Don’t you? “You’re right, Trent,” you hear yourself say, like it’s someone else’s voice. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”

The waitress arrives with your dinner and—not so subtly—slips Trent her number. He makes a great show of ripping it up in front of you. The trout and risotto thing is great, actually. It’s not what you walked in wanting, but it turned out just fine. And maybe that’s what the rest of your life will be like too: other people making choices, you hoping you’ll like the taste.

After dinner and dessert—a Baked Alaska, another of Trent’s suggestions that are more like nonnegotiables—he drives you home in his massive rumbling truck. You talk innocuously about your vet clinic clients, dogs and cats and hamsters and reindeer, until you roll to a stop in front of your parents’ house. You begin your goodbye, opening the truck door. Cold December air floods in.

“Okay Trent, thank you for a lovely night—” He cuts you off with a kiss he didn’t ask for, a hand on your face that feels hot and smothering. You’re so stunned it takes you a few seconds to try to push him away. He ignores you until you shove him so hard he can’t pretend not to notice.

“What are you so worried about?” he demands, he implores, like he’ll fix anything if you just name it, like he’ll strike the nails with his bare hands. But he can’t fix what’s wrong. What’s wrong is that I’m in love with Aegon Targaryen. “Are you scared I’ll be bored of you once you give it all up? Are you worried about getting pregnant? Aren’t you on the pill? I saw the pack in your bedroom.”

You’re nauseated that he noticed, that he’s imagined you like that: naked, compliant, vulnerable. “Yes, Trent, but that’s for me, not for you.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

You tell him the truth. Not the whole truth—not enough to enrage him—but the crux of it: the spine, the heart. “I always thought I knew exactly what my life was going to look like, but now I’m…I’m…”

“Well this is what comes next, right?” Trent says. “You check the boxes for school and work, and then it’s time to settle down. Get married, buy a house, have kids. I’m ready to give you that. I want to give you that. Don’t you want it too?”

Aegon is going to leave, you think with steel-cold dread. Sooner or later, he’ll disappear to start over again in some anonymous new city. And what will my life look like then? What will I have when he’s gone? “I guess I just need some more time to figure things out.”

Trent nods, his jaw clenched tight, looking out into the darkness through his windshield. “I’m not criticizing you for waiting. I’m just wondering what the hell you’re waiting for.”

Inside the house is hushed and empty; your parents are enjoying a night out with your dad’s bowling league. They even took Sunfyre with them. You drag yourself upstairs, each step a mile. You brush your teeth—twice—to get the taste of Trent and craft beer out of your mouth. And then you stand in your bedroom surrounded by posters and magazines, surrounded by fantasies that you will never wrap your hands around. You glance at the box full of Jesse’s journals; you can see the cardboard edge of it poking out from beneath your bed. He’s gone, and he wasn’t perfect, in fact in many ways he was a curse, was a plague, was a monster. But I think my mom would give anything for one more day with him. After all these years, I still think she would.

The blue roses Aegon gave you are in a vase on your nightstand, right next to the phone. They’re already dying. And now your throat is burning, and your eyes are wet with tears, and when defenseless sobs rip from your chest there is no one here to hear them. I don’t want to protect myself from what it would have been like with him. I want to know.

You snatch up the phone, find the Post-it note with Aegon’s number written on it, call him before you have time to change your mind. When he answers, it’s clear you woke him up. His voice is slow and groggy. “Hello?”

“Can I come over?”

“Huh…?”

“Can I please come over? I need to come over. I need to come over right now.”

Now he’s awake. “Yeah, yeah, of course. Are you okay? Where are you?”

“I’m at home, I’m fine, I’m safe, I just…I just…” You swipe the tears from your eyes and take a long, trembling breath. “I just need to come over.”

“No problem,” Aegon says. He is puzzled, he is concerned…but you think a part of him is glad too. “I’ll see you in ten minutes.”

You drive your Jeep to his apartment building and park it—badly, crookedly, like he would—under a streetlight. The night is fiercely, brutally cold when you dive out into it. The full moon is an island; the indigo, star-flecked sky is an ocean deep with secrets and bones and wreckage, splinters of swallowed lives dissolving into the blue. Upstairs, Aegon’s door is already unlocked. He’s wearing a black Nirvana T-shirt and green flannel pajama pants, his hair disheveled. He’s also making hot chocolate.

“Hi,” he says casually, filling the mugs. He adds splashes of French vanilla coffee creamer—plus some 99 Whipped for his green mug—and swirls of whipped cream, then shaves on a generous dusting of Hershey’s chocolate. He gives you the blue mug. You take it in quivering hands. “You alright?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. I’m amazing.”

“Okay.” He waits, patient and watchful, sipping his hot chocolate.

You feel better after a few minutes tick by. Aegon’s apartment is serene and still. The tv is dark; there’s no music, no voices, no distractions. You can barely hear the screech of the Arctic wind outside. The only light turned on is the one in the kitchen; the rest of the apartment is shadows. The hot chocolate is warm, rich, comforting, safe. “How are you feeling?”

“Pretty great,” Aegon replies. “Normal.”

“Good.”

“Yeah.” He gazes at you, still waiting.

You finish your hot chocolate and put the mug in the kitchen sink. You take your hair out of your braid and shake it loose, surveying his apartment with aimless steps: his couch, his guitar, his litany of refrigerator magnets, his unmade bed. Aegon sets his mug down on the counter and crosses his arms over his chest.

“Appletini,” he says. “Why are you here?”

You turn back to him, but you can’t find your words. It’s on your face, it has to be; it’s in a language Aegon can speak fluently. You see the understanding flicker in his eyes like firelight: sudden, bright, exhilarated.

“Say it,” he prompts. “You have to say it, or I’m not going to believe you.”

You try, you really do try. But you can’t get the words to leave your lips. You don’t know how to put what you want from him into words at all. Anything, everything.

He smiles, softly like a whisper. “Me first, huh?” Then he begins undressing. He yanks his Nirvana T-shirt over his head—further tangling his hair—and tosses it across the room. He slips off his pajama pants, and then his boxers too. He’s standing there in the florescent kitchen light, flesh and ink and track marks and scars. “Okay, your turn. If you’re still interested.”

“I want you to do that part.”

He crosses the scuffed hardwood floor, his footsteps quiet. His fingers find the top button of your flannel shirt. His eyes are fixed on yours as he unhooks the first button, another, another after that. He leans in to press his lips to your throat, just beneath your jaw. Slowly, exquisitely slowly, he kisses his way down to your collarbone as he unfastens the rest of the buttons and gently pulls off your shirt, letting it fall to the floor. He slips his hands below the hem of the T-shirt you’re wearing underneath and lifts it away, his knuckles grazing your belly, your waist, your ribs, the lace of your bra. And then he cradles your face in his hands and kisses you with exceptional, reverent slowness, like you’re something that could shatter. You can’t reconcile this man with the sort of wild acrobatics that Kimmie had described. And then you’re not thinking about Kimmie at all. The past is a black hole, the future is an empty sky. There’s no room in this lightning-brief sliver of eternity for anyone else.

You breathe him in: sweetness, warmth, the bite of alcohol, fire and shadows and light. He unbuttons your jeans, unzips them, kneels down to peel them off of you. He touches his lips to your thigh—first the outside, then the downy-soft inside—and hesitates for a moment before he stands to kiss your lips again. His hands skim across your bare back towards the clasp of your bra, raising goosebumps like twilight stars. And then again, he hesitates. His hands come back to your face, his fingertips calloused but lithe.

“You’re nervous,” you murmur, smiling. You tuck his escaped lock of hair behind his ear, pressing yourself against him: hips, chest, soul. The sapphire blue lace of your bra and panties rustles across his skin. You can’t get close enough to him; it’s not possible, it’s not fathomable. He’s holding himself back, you can tell. He’s panting with the effort. In the midnight silence, you can hear every sound he makes with crystalline clarity. The moonlight pours in, painting you both in ghostly silver light.

Aegon chuckles shakily. “I am,” he admits.

“I think you’ve done this once or twice before.”

“Yeah, but not with you.”

“I want this,” you say, your lips to the curl of his ear. His skin is hot with eager, rushing blood. “And I want you to be the one to set me free.”

Something snaps in him, something breaks like a wave. Your bra tumbles to the floor, your panties are whisked away, you and Aegon are on the bed together tangled up like arteries flush with life. There is a breathless sort of desperation in it: in the way your fingers intertwine, in his gasps and your moans, in the sustained pleasure—so intense it borders on pain—that causes euphoric tears to spring up in your eyes, in his deep, startlingly powerful thrusts that begin slowly and then build to a furious rhythm. And you know then that he agrees, it’s not possible to ever get close enough to each other; but still, you resolve to try.

“Look at me, baby,” Aegon whispers as you arch into him and you beg him not to stop, his palm turning your face towards his. “Look at me, look at me, look at me…”

You unravel like thread torn from a spool until its empty, like a mystery, like stitches clipped from a healed wound. There’s an insurmountable sort of peace that follows it. Nothing is okay, and yet everything is, and you can conjure up no words but only colors: the white of snow, the indigo of the night sky, the gold of the rare unclouded midday sun, the ethereal green-violet glow of the Northern Lights. Aegon empties himself inside you, crying out and kissing the side of your face over and over again, tasting heat and salt and your unnamed love for him. You can feel the serenity settling over him as if it’s your own pulse slowing, your own mind cleared like the horizon after a storm. You are irredeemably etched into each other. You are two sides of the same coin: too weightless, too rooted, unable to leave, unable to stay.

As you lay side by side in the moonlight, your fingers tangled in his hair, Aegon says: “You are the only thing that’s ever made me want to stop running.”

“You could stay. I want you to stay.”

“For a while.” He pulls you against him. You rest your head on his chest: ink, scars, slow thudding heartbeat. His fingertips draw invisible paths up the length of your spine. “Not forever. But for a while.”

She’s hoping in time that her memories will fade.

“I don’t want to have to forget you,” you whisper, your voice breaking.

“Not yet,” Aegon vows. It’s the only promise he can make. He kisses your forehead, sweeping the tears from your cheeks with his hands. “Not yet.”

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