Ryder's Boys

by Cody Ryder

  Even when the waves of our mutual climax had cleared we held together, joined as one as our bodies heaved rhythmically against each other as we tried to catch our breath. I kissed the arch of Dakota’s neck just below his ear, drawing in his warm scent, and then kissed him again below his shoulder blade. Then I slowly withdrew myself from him, and went to go get him a towel to clean up with.

  Afterwards, we both took a shower together. I washed his back for him, taking the moment to admire his body and how much he’d developed over the years. He was gorgeous. He was perfect.

  We laid out together on the plush rug that was in the middle of his living room floor, naked and in each other’s arms, basking in the afterglow of what had just happened between us. Dakota nuzzled his face into my neck, and I felt the tickle of his breath on my skin, the familiar smell of his hair filling my senses. We didn’t say a word to each other, not wanting what was on both of our minds to ruin this perfect moment.

  What would happen to us now?

  Seven

  I dreamed I was in a garden. It wasn’t a garden that I’d ever been to before, though there were things about it that reminded me of Dakota’s. It was lush and welcoming, filled with fragrant fruit and flowers and plump vegetables. Like Dakota’s, this garden felt like a forest, in that it didn’t feel like it had a boundary—like it was growing wild into forever. I found a gravel pathway winding through the garden, and I followed it past sparkling waterfalls visited by white butterflies that looked like flower petals fluttering in the wind.

  I didn’t know where I was walking, only that I needed to keep going, and so I kept following the pathway until finally it came to a set of lawn chairs just like the ones in Dakota’s garden. I sat down in one of the chairs, and closed my eyes as a blanket of sunlight crossed over and filled my body with a powerful warmth. It wasn’t just ordinary heat—I felt it welling up from inside me and permeating out through my body.

  What was this feeling?

  Oh, right. It was love.

  Love for me and from me. It felt like it’d been forever since I’d felt this feeling.

  “Is that for me?”

  The warmth suddenly evaporated. I opened my eyes, and saw a haze of clouds coming over the sky, casting my garden paradise into shadow.

  “Alicia…?”

  She was standing in front of me, over a kitchen stove making breakfast, her long brown hair down over her back. I stood up slowly.

  “Is that for me?” she asked again, turning around to face me.

  “What? Why are you here?”

  “Well, because you love me, right? Because you’d do anything for me?”

  I shook my head. “I would’ve, before. Before you abandoned everything that we had.”

  She smiled sweetly. “But you do still love me.”

  My chest was tight. “No, Alicia. I gave up on you a long time ago.”

  “Oh, really?”

  She walked over to me and wrapped her arms around my neck, and rested her head on my chest. I stiffened up, my hands held tight at my sides. “You can’t be in love, Roy, because you don’t believe in love anymore, remember? It always dies in the end, isn’t that right? That’s what you believe now.”

  I didn’t say anything. I tried to move, to get away from her, but my body felt locked in place.

  “The truth is you still love me. Deep down, you do. You’re too afraid to love anyone else now, because you’re afraid it’ll all fail again. Isn’t that right, Roy?”

  “No…” I whispered. “You’re wrong, Alicia…”

  “I think I’m right.”

  “No…no, because Dakota is different. Dakota would never do that.”

  Her arms slid off from my neck as she stepped away from me. “Okay. But who’s to say you won’t go and leave him again?”

  I opened my mouth to dismiss her, but the words wouldn’t come.

  “See, honey?”

  No. I wouldn’t.

  “But what about your career? Your dreams, your goals?”

  What do they even mean anymore? Why am I chasing them?

  “Come on, honey. Come back to me.” She smiled brightly. “I made your favorite breakfast.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “No, Alicia. You need to leave.”

  She stood there silently, her arms cross over her chest.

  “You need to leave,” I said again.

  Dark smoke started to billow up from the pan on the stove behind her. Her face was flat and unhappy. Then her eyes widened, her shocked gaze locked on something behind me. She took a step back, and the fragment of the kitchen behind her vanished. I heard a growl at my feet.

  Looking down I saw Rosie, her back arched and her fangs bared into a snarl. She leapt in front of me and let out series of angry barks. Alicia pedaled backwards, her face gnarled in a look of fear, and then she vanished. The clouds cleared, and the sky brightened again. The sound of water and birds filled the air, and I dropped down into the chair behind me.

  Rosie sat at my feet, her tail wagging and face its usual friendly self. “Thanks, Rosie,” I said, petting her head.

  “You got it, Roy,” she said, her tail wagging harder. “I’m lookin’ out for you!” She started to lick my face.

  “Rosie,” I laughed, “Stop it! It tickles…”

  I opened my eyes, awake. Rosie—the real Rosie—stood with her paws on the side of the bed, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth. She licked the side of my face, which was already wet with her slobber.

  “Ah,” I grunted, sitting up in the bed. “Rosie.” Then I remembered what had happened in my dream, and I laughed. “Did you know I was having a bad dream?”

  She cocked her head at me.

  “Thanks for saving me, girl,” I said quietly. “I wish you really could talk.”

  Dakota was asleep next to me, quietly snoring, his face pushed deep into his pillow. I smiled, and then kissed him on the head. I slipped out of bed and walked downstairs naked where my clothes were still strewn across the living room floor, and picked them up and got dressed. I went to the kitchen to drink a glass of water, when Rosie let out one loud bark. I jumped in surprise.

  “What is it?” I thought maybe she was hungry, but she wasn’t by her food and water bowl, which were both full. I found her sitting outside the room which I knew used to be Dakota’s dad’s study. She watched me as I came up to her, and then turned and walked into the room where she curled up on the floor, her head on her paw.

  The room wasn’t one that I knew very well—I’d probably only glanced into it back during high school, but I recognized that Dakota had left the place mostly unchanged. Old photos and books lined the shelves. The desk had a closed laptop on it and various papers, fliers and other things for the Lifespring Gardens, and so it seemed like Dakota had taken over the room as his study. There were also a few picture frames on the desk, and I bent over to look at them.

  There were a few photos of his dad and him together, one of his family when he was just a baby, another of Rosie, and…the last photo made my heart do a flip. I snorted a laugh, and picked up the frame. It was a photo of him and I in high school, sitting on a curb wearing poorly fitting dress clothes surrounded by a bunch of fast food bags. I remembered exactly when it was taken—the night of senior prom. We and our friends had decided we weren’t going to go, and instead spent the money on hiring a limo to take us around San Diego. Because we were in high school and couldn’t really go anywhere fun, we’d had the driver take us through a bunch of different drive-throughs.

  “We were a bunch of dumbasses back then, weren’t we?”

  I looked behind me in surprise. Dakota stood leaning against the doorway of the study, clad only in a pair of boxer briefs. He smiled.

  “We really were,” I said, putting the photo back on the desk. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snoop around.”

  “You were snooping, huh?” He came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist, and turned my head to kiss him. I let out a contented sigh, fee
ling the warmth of his body against my back.

  “Just a little. Rosie led me in here.”

  “Don’t blame the dog,” he teased, giving my ear a little nip.

  I smiled. “I can’t believe you have that photo on your desk.”

  “Me neither. Trust me, sometimes I’d stare at it wondering why I still had it, but every time I tried to get rid of it, I just couldn’t. Hungry? I’ll make us breakfast.”

  “Starved.”

  Back in the kitchen, Dakota pulled ingredients out from his fridge while I sat at the counter and watched him. Rosie lay at the base of my stool, and I used my foot to rub her back. Soon the kitchen was filled with the savory smell of grilled onions, garlic and potatoes. He sliced up a tomato and tossed it into the cast iron skillet, and then cracked several eggs into a separate pan. There was a thick loaf of fluffy bread wrapped in plastic on the counter, and he took it out and cut off several slices.

  “This is from the farmer’s market,” he said. “Guy loves my onions and potatoes, so I trade him for his bread.” He popped the slices into the toaster oven and then returned to the stove, giving the pan a final stir before clicking off the heat. He grabbed the skillet with a glove and pulled it off the stove, serving out portions onto two plates. Then he uncovered the other skillet and spatula’d out the eggs. The toaster dinged.

  “This looks amazing,” I said as we sat down to eat.

  “It’s simple,” he said, “No frills. But when you have really good ingredients, you find you need less seasoning and stuff like that.”

  The food was delicious, and we wolfed it down hungrily. When we were finished, we both sat back in our chairs and gazed across the table at each other.

  “So,” Dakota said, “how long do you think you’re going to be around for?”

  “Well, I ought to go home. But I can come back, I just need to change, and then I can help you out with whatever you need to do here.”

  “I’d like that. But it wasn’t exactly what I meant.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess…until…”

  Until?

  I get a new job and can move back up north? It sounded so distant now. Plans which I’d made, but forgotten the reason why I’d made them. Like they were from another version of me.

  “I don’t know,” I finished. “I guess I have a lot to think about.”

  Dakota smiled. “I guess so, huh? Well, I’ll be here. You just let me know when you’ve figured it out.”

  We cleaned up the dishes together, and then Dakota drove me back home. I leaned in and gave him a kiss before reaching for the door handle, then stopped and laughed. “I was going to say I’d text you, but I realized I still don’t have your new phone number.”

  He laughed and squeezed my leg. “555-2553.”

  “Thanks. Don’t worry, I’ll probably have Lifespring Gardens withdrawals in a couple hours. Dakota withdrawals too.” I opened the car and stepped out, leaning over to give him a wave. He waved back, a lopsided smile painted on his face, and then pulled away. A cough of grey smoke puffed out from the tailpipe of the old Volvo as it sputtered up the street and disappeared.

  As I walked in the front door, I was greeted by sound of my parents arguing.

  “I told you, Joe, I was going to cook spaghetti for dinner tonight, that’s why I bought the damn onion for!”

  “I forgot!”

  “Well, obviously you forgot, otherwise you wouldn’t have used it.”

  “Okay, Carol. I’m sorry about that. I really don’t think it’s a big deal.”

  “It is a big deal, because this always happens!”

  I walked into the dining room—my mom was in the kitchen, pacing back and forth, and my dad sat at his usual TV watching spot at the kitchen table with a plate of breakfast sausage and grilled onions in front of him.

  Before, I wouldn’t have thought to interfere—I’d been too mixed-up about everything going on in my life—but now I couldn’t just keep quiet. I had to get to the bottom of all this.

  “Mom, dad!” I said, raising my voice so that it echoed above theirs. They both turned and looked at me with wide, surprised eyes.

  “Oh, Roy,” mom said. “You’re home.”

  “Hi, son,” said dad. They both were acting as if everything was completely normal, and I guess it was. The pointless bickering had become commonplace for them now, apparently.

  “What is going on with you two?” I asked.

  My mom thrust her hand out towards my dad. “I’ve just…had it up to here with reminding him what to do.”

  “Oh, ok,” dad said, shaking his head. “And I’m tired of you nagging me all the time.”

  “Parents!” I boomed. “Settle down. Jesus.”

  Both kept silent. My dad looked down at his plate of food, and my mom glared at the fridge. I took a long, deep breath.

  “Mom, let it go. Dad, don’t give a half-assed apology. Since I’ve moved home it feels like you two always need to disagree on something.”

  “Well, sometimes,” mom said to the fridge.

  “No, a lot of the times,” I said. “It’s been bothering the hell out of me. So tell me, what is going on with you two? Do you not love each other anymore?” The words tasted bitter as they came out, but I had to ask them.

  They both looked at me in shock, and then at each other. They seemed confused, like the idea was something neither of them had even considered.

  “Of course we love each other,” dad said. “Well, I can’t speak for Carol—I mean—your mother, but I love her.”

  Mom’s face softened just a little as she looked at my dad. “Well, it’d be nice to hear it from you more then, Joe.”

  “Hey, well, it started getting a little difficult for me when you started not saying anything back to me.”

  “I was upset!”

  “About what?!”

  “About…I don’t know. About something.”

  I sighed. “Mom? Do you love dad?”

  “Well…yes, of course I do.”

  “Then let go of whatever silly thing you’re upset about, and forgive him. Both of you. Come on, you’re getting more and more upset with each other and you don’t even remember why? Have you two forgotten how to talk to each other?”

  Dad scratched his head and contemplated his breakfast again. “I guess we’d just gotten used to doing things a certain way, it became normal.”

  Mom nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Then I think you two had better talk about this. Don’t you think?”

  They looked at each other.

  “Mom, why don’t you sit down?”

  She went over to the table and took a chair across from my dad.

  “Good,” I said. “I’m going to go upstairs now. Please, talk.”

  I went upstairs and then stopped on the landing to listen. After a minute of silence, my dad’s voice carried up.

  “Roy is right, Carol.”

  “I know. I guess there’s a lot that we’ve left unsaid.”

  “Well, I suppose now’s the time to get it all out there…”

  Satisfied that they would do their best to discuss things, I went to my room, shut the door behind me and then dropped onto my bed with a sigh. I felt a major relief. It wasn’t only because my parents were finally addressing that damn tension between them, I felt like I’d been released of some of those pesky questions about love that had been eating me up these past months.

  I’d had an irrational crisis over the “truth” about love, and our ultimate destiny with it, mostly because I’d feared that I had lost my chance to ever find love again, that it had passed out from my life like the way women lose their ability to have children after a certain age. Of course, that wasn’t the case. Love could always be waiting around the corner in a completely different and surprising form from the last time, and always changing, without definition—just as people are always changing. The high school Dakota and I could never have worked out if I had stayed in Powlton back then—we weren’t ready for each othe
r. How could we have been? Our love never would’ve been complete, because we weren’t complete.

  My parents had changed too, but in the comfort of their marriage they’d forgotten to let each other know. They’d forgotten how to talk to each other and let each other in. Would they be able to do that now? I no longer felt afraid of the possibility that they wouldn’t, because it didn’t invalidate anything about love, or the love that they had felt in the past.