The Road to Amazing

by Brent Hartinger

  "Think about it," I said. "This was a fantastic night. First that great bachelor party, then after the power went out? All the things they said?"

  Kevin nodded. "It was. We have an amazing group of friends."

  "And even the whale — orca. When that happened, everyone immediately went into action to try to find us another place for the wedding."

  Kevin thought about it. "You make a good point."

  We unwrapped ourselves from each other, then undressed and crawled into bed. I couldn't help noticing (again) how big and soft the mattress was.

  "I know I said this before," I said, "but this bed is incredible. What is it made of? Like, memory foam on top of kittens, on top of marshmallows, on top of actual angel hair?"

  "Back home, we sleep on a two hundred dollar futon. What exactly do you expect?"

  I leaned over and kissed Kevin. I felt him relaxing under me, spilling into the bed like melted candle wax.

  "That's nice," he said, and I nodded.

  I kissed him again. The first one had been an "I love you" kiss. This was a "Do you want to fuck?" kiss. Kevin kissed me back a third time. His kiss said, "Yes."

  Full disclosure: as great as the night had been, I'd been horny ever since Nate's lap dance. I'd tried to ignore it, but ignoring horniness has never really worked for me. It was like trying to ignore an itch inside a cast — basically impossible.

  Now, of course, I could finally scratch the itch.

  I pulled back and, smirking, looked at Kevin. "One other important part of this weekend?" I said. "We never would've known how incredible Nate looks in a Speedo."

  Kevin blushed a little. "Well, I actually did already know that. Roommates, remember? And, uh, I know what he looks like out of a Speedo."

  I covered my face with my hands. "Oh, don't tell me, I don't want to know!" I peeked out through my fingers. "You know I'm not serious, right? Tell me everything. Spare no detail!"

  Kevin laughed. I'd long since learned that one of the best parts about being in a same-sex relationship was sometimes discovering you both find the exact same things and people erotic. It was real a turn-on, sharing secret desires with the person you were with, and knowing he felt them too.

  "What's so strange is that Nate is probably the straightest guy I know," Kevin said. "Which is a good thing, because if he hadn't been, I would've fallen madly in love with him."

  "I can totally see that," I said.

  "I think that's what made me so embarrassed about the striptease. It was like my fantasies of him were finally coming true, like he knew what I'd been imagining all these years."

  "Except in your fantasies, it doesn't exactly stop with a striptease, huh?"

  "How did you know?"

  "Should I be jealous?"

  "Incredibly."

  I laughed and leaned in to kiss him again. He was totally relaxed now, completely knocked out of his wedding-related funk.

  We kissed for a second longer, but then I pulled back.

  "Something occurs to me," I said slyly.

  "Huh? What?"

  "This is the last time we're going to have unmarried sex. Premarital sex."

  Kevin scrunched up his face. "We've been having sex for something like ten years now."

  "Still," I said, smirking, "don't you think it's kind of hot?"

  "What?"

  "That we're having premarital sex! You know, what people say is so sinful and illicit."

  "You're crazy. You know that, right?"

  I felt the crotch of his boxer briefs, which, not surprisingly, was rock-hard and leaking precum. He'd been just as turned on by Nate's striptease as me. "Yes, I'm crazy," I said. I thought for a second. "We should do something different."

  "Different how?"

  "I don't know. Something we've never done before. Sex-wise, I mean."

  "I knew what you meant. But there's nothing we've never done before. At least not anything that I'm interested in doing."

  On one hand, Kevin had a point: there were plenty of things that I had no interest in ever doing sexually either. On the other hand, after tonight, I was going to be having "married" sex for the rest of my life, the kind of sex that everyone says is so boring — the kind of thing I'd been talking about with Min. I guess I couldn't say for sure I'd never have sex with anyone else ever again (Kevin and I were monogamous, and planned on being monogamous, but I'd listened to enough Dan Savage podcasts to know that you can't ever say never). Even so, I wasn't crazy about Kevin's attitude, especially after I'd so deftly talked away his wedding anxiety. What was that old saying about how you don't know if you like something until you try it?

  "That's a fair point," I said. "Still, I'm serious. This is an important moment. The sex should be special."

  "Okay, okay." He hesitated. "What does that mean exactly?"

  I thought about it. "Well, for starters, it means I should take a shower too."

  He gestured to the en-suite bathroom with both arms. Maybe it was my imagination, but he seemed a little impatient with me.

  As I was showering, I thought to myself: How can we make this sex special? What could we do? And as I soaped myself up under the water, I started to get some interesting ideas. Yeah, technically, we'd done it all before. But not necessarily in the exact order I was planning. It was a little like a good screenplay: sure, every possible story has already been told in one form or another, but that doesn't mean Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl wasn't a really good movie.

  I dried myself off, then flossed and brushed, and slipped into a pair of clean briefs — the closest thing I had to Nate's Speedo.

  I stepped into the doorway of the bathroom, standing in my sexiest, most Nate-like pose.

  I started walking toward the bed in my best possible straight-boy strut, not graceful, not polished, but confident and cocky and real.

  Halfway to the bed, I heard snoring.

  I stopped and stared. So much for one last night of hot, premarital sex: while I'd been taking my shower, Kevin had fallen asleep.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  When I woke up the next morning, something immediately felt wrong.

  For one thing, everything was quiet. It was strange after the rain (and occasional thunder) of the night before, to not hear anything at all outside. There weren't any other noises either. Was everyone gone? Or maybe it was only what I'd noticed the morning before, about how Vashon Island is so much quieter than Los Angeles.

  But the world wasn't just quiet. It was still — still, but not calm. There was something about the air, the pressure. Was it high or low? I didn't know, but it felt like something was going to happen, something big. It was almost like the changing pressure was the reason I had woken up.

  That and the fact it was ten-thirty in the morning, according to the clock. Wow, I'd slept in late, even in a room with no curtains. I really must have been wiped out. And it was light out, but not nearly as bright as it had been the day before.

  Kevin was gone — I was alone in bed. That was another thing that was weird. I'd been living with Kevin for over a year now, and we often woke up at different times, and it never felt strange. But this was our wedding weekend, so somehow it seemed odd not having him next to me.

  The wedding, I thought. It was now only a few hours away.

  I pulled on some clothes and made my way out into the rest of the house, but it all looked deserted. It was cold, and in the front room I could smell the lingering scent of burned candles from the night before. But I noticed that someone had cleaned up all the glasses and beer bottles, and washed the dishes in the kitchen too.

  "Hello?" I said. "Is there anyone here?"

  No one answered.

  Somehow I knew that it wasn't like the morning before, when I was up early and I'd sensed that everyone else was still in bed. This time I could tell the house was empty. So where the hell had everyone gone? Was it the same thing that had happened to the people of Amazing? Had everyone committed ritual suicide by lining up on the porch and jumping out int
o the bay? Or maybe they'd been abducted by aliens. What would that be like anyway? Would they have ships with long, articulated arms like the aliens in The War of the Worlds? Or would they just beam them up like on Star Trek?

  I stepped into the kitchen, and saw Min and Ruby sitting at the dining room table with their earbuds in, reading and listening to media devices.

  "Oh!" I said. So much for the house being empty. It was yet another reminder that I made a really shitty Veronica Mars.

  They saw me and pulled out their earbuds.

  "Morning," Ruby said. "Hey, four more hours! You ready?"

  I smiled. "Yeah," I said. "Uh, where is everyone?"

  "They all went into town for breakfast," Min said.

  I smelled coffee. It tells you how big the Amazing Inn was that I hadn't smelled it earlier.

  I poured myself a cup. "Well, thanks for waiting."

  "You were imagining we'd all been abducted by aliens, like at Amazing, weren't you?" Min said.

  I smiled. Sometimes it can be a little embarrassing how well Min knows me.

  Min and Ruby exchanged a glance, then Ruby started to stand. "Oh, hey," she said, "I've got some stuff to do."

  This was sweet. They both thought Min and I might want to be alone, to talk about my feelings about the wedding. Maybe that would have been true yesterday, but I felt different about Ruby now, after what she and everyone else had said the night before.

  "It's okay," I said. "You don't need to go."

  She looked back at me, trying to figure out if I was only being polite.

  "Really," I said.

  She smiled, then half-shrugged and sank back down again.

  "How are you doing?" Min said.

  How was I doing? I had to think about that. It's (still) not that I had second thoughts or last-minute jitters about the wedding. When it came to my feelings, nothing had changed: I wanted to marry Kevin, full stop.

  But I felt weird about something — something more than the atmospheric pressure — and I couldn't quite figure out what it was. It wasn't the fact that Kevin had fallen asleep before we could have hot, premarital sex — that was such a small deal it wasn't even worth mentioning to Min and Ruby.

  "Well, I'm still not being neurotic in any way," I said, and Min smiled, and Ruby grinned too when she realized this had to be some kind of in-joke between us. "Honestly, this weekend has been fantastic. Seriously, last night? That was incredible. I felt so connected to everyone."

  Min nodded and Ruby beamed. Outside a gust of wind blew, and pine needles skittered across the deck.

  "But?" Min said.

  "Well, ironically, the one person I've felt sort of disconnected from is Kevin," I said. "He's been preoccupied all weekend. Which makes total sense. I mean, he explained it to me Friday night, how important it is to him that the wedding go well. And then every single thing that could possibly go wrong starts to go wrong. I don't blame him, not at all. It's just ironic, like I said."

  Min and Ruby nodded in sync, like those cats you see in YouTube videos.

  Meanwhile, I thought about what I'd said about Kevin, and I realized it really was the truth of the weekend. It was one of those times when you don't know what you're feeling until you put it into words. The two of us played a mean Newlywed Game, but that didn't mean we were connecting, not really.

  Outside, the wind blew again.

  "That's weird," I said.

  Min and Ruby exchanged a glance.

  "What?" I said.

  "Nothing," Ruby said.

  "There's a windstorm coming," Min said.

  A windstorm? Okay, now I was starting to think Kevin had been right and I'd been wrong: our wedding really was cursed.

  "When?" I said.

  "Um...now. They've sort've been predicting it all weekend."

  So Kevin was also right and I'd been wrong about weather forecasts. The others probably hadn't brought it up with me because they didn't want to jinx things.

  "But the good news is that the storm will be over this afternoon," Min said, "probably even by the time of the wedding. It's not even supposed to be that bad. So it doesn't change anything. What's the worst that could happen?"

  This made me relax a little tiny bit. If the weather forecast had been right about everything else, why wouldn't they be right about this too? So what was the worst that could happen? We had power no matter what. And it would take a really bad storm to knock down actual trees, blocking the roads.

  "I should call him," I said.

  "Kevin?" Min asked, and I nodded.

  I realized I hadn't turned my phone off of airplane mode (which I put it on at night). But when I did, I saw I had a voicemail from early that morning.

  "Russel?" said the voice in my voicemail. "This is Angel Wells. Your caterer? I'm so, so sorry to have to say this, especially with such late notice. But our power went off last night, and it still hasn't gone back on. I've been trying to find a replacement kitchen, someone on the island with power, but I haven't been able to. I feel so terrible about this, but I'm not going to be able to provide the things we talked about."

  * * *

  I didn't call Kevin to tell him what Angel had said. I decided to wait until he got back from breakfast, so I could talk to him in person.

  I was thinking about what I'd say to him. I was definitely going to stress what Min had said about the windstorm not being that bad. And as for the caterer, I could argue that it wasn't really a new disaster — that it was only the logical extension of the power outage from the night before. But even if Kevin agreed with my reasoning, I didn't see what difference that would make.

  When they finally drove up, I met Kevin in the parking lot.

  "I've got bad news," I said.

  "The caterer canceled." He nodded. "I know, she called me too."

  The others unloaded bags of groceries from the back of the car. With a grunt, Nate hoisted up a particularly heavy bag.

  I looked back at Kevin. "What's going on?"

  "After Angel called me, we all went to the grocery store. The power's out all over town, but the store has an emergency generator. No ice, though, so we'll need to make some here. We stopped by Angel's too, and she gave us as much food as she had, no charge. No cake, unfortunately, but we picked some up at the store. She's really sorry, by the way."

  "But—"

  "We still have three hours before the wedding. So we're going to cater the wedding ourselves."

  "Really?"

  Kevin nodded. I'd been expecting him to fall apart when he found out our caterer had canceled, but he didn't seem upset at all. On the contrary, he looked more focused than he had in days.

  "There's one other thing," I said, wary. Even now, the air was blustery. If the windstorm hadn't officially arrived yet, it would soon enough.

  Kevin nodded again, a little impatiently. "The storm. I know. It's all good, Russel. The weather says it's not going to be that bad, and it should all be over by three anyway."

  With that, he turned and grabbed a couple of bags from the car.

  As he started for the house, I stopped him and gave him a big long kiss. We were right in the path, so the people with the groceries had to step to one side. But we didn't care (and neither did they, judging by their smirking).

  Afterward, Kevin didn't say, "What was that for?" because he knew exactly what it was for. He just smiled and headed for the house.

  I looked over at Min, who had followed me outside. We didn't need to exchange any words either. We nodded to each other like two overworked waiters at a party full of entitled rich people — sharing a connection that everyone else was completely unaware of.

  * * *

  We had a little less than three hours to get everything ready for the wedding, but we had a fair amount to do, so everyone immediately got to work, cleaning the bathrooms, cooking the food, and rearranging the furniture.

  At one point, I heard Min say, "This election is going to be the key. If the Republicans win it, they will have final
ly proved you really can fool most of the people most of the time. It's the ultimate triumph of ignorance over reason."

  Instantly tense, I glanced over at Vernie, making canapés.

  Then Vernie said, "Oh, I completely agree with you! If this group of sociopaths wins, we're all screwed. It's game over for the country and the planet."

  Min and Vernie bonding over liberal politics? I totally should have seen this coming.

  I noticed Otto over in the front room reading something on his phone. I wasn't annoyed that he'd stopped rearranging the furniture — everyone was stopping to check their phones now and then. No, it was something about the way he was standing that made me look twice, like he'd just learned either he had cancer or he'd been nominated for an Emmy.

  I stepped closer.

  "Is everything okay?" I asked.

  He looked at me, and I saw he was crying. But I wasn't any closer to knowing if he had cancer or an Emmy nomination, because I'd probably cry if either one happened to me.

  "What is it?" I said. "What's wrong?"

  He wiped his eyes. "I'm an idiot, that's what's wrong."

  I didn't understand so he showed me his phone. He'd received an email.

  I read it:

  Dear Otto Digmore:

  My name is Kyle Simon, and I'm twenty-one years old. When I was five years old, our apartment caught fire and I was trapped inside. I have third degree burns on sixty-two percent of my body, including a lot of my face. My sister was killed during the same fire. A year later, my parents divorced, and I've lived with my mom ever since. I was homeschooled for a while, then I went to high school. I dropped out, but I did get my GED. I didn't go to college, and now I work as a night watchman in an office building.

  I've never really had any friends, but I like to watch TV and movies, and play video games.

  I first heard you were going to be a part of Hammered last April. When I saw your picture, I started counting down the days until it was going to be on TV. I watched it the first night, and I know you didn't have a big part in the first episode, but I could hardly believe my eyes. After the show was over, I couldn't even talk for the rest of the night. My mom asked me what was wrong, and I said, "Nothing," and went to my room.