Trust the Focus

by Megan Erickson

  “Sounds delicious,” I said, my head on the back of the couch, my eyes drooping. It’d been a long day of shooting and I was so freaking tired. . . .

  ***

  Something cold pressed into my hand, jolting me awake, and I stared at Landry standing above me with a smile on his face, wrapping my fingers around a bottle of beer. “Burgers are on the grill. Now sit on the floor.”

  “What?” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes. “Did I fall asleep?”

  “For a minute,” he said. “Now come on, sit.”

  I took a sip of the cold beer and slipped to the floor. Landry sat behind me and began to work on the knots in my shoulders. I moaned and dropped my head between my bent knees.

  “You’re so easy,” Landry teased. And all I could do was moan. “Your mom called.”

  When I was working and Landry was with me, he kept my phone. I didn’t like getting distracted. “Did you answer?”

  “Yep, and she wants you on the float thing with her.”

  I rolled my eyes but inside I felt a little proud. “Really?”

  His fingers stuttered and I craned my neck around. He worried his lip. “And me too?”

  I jerked away from his hands in a swift motion, tugged him off the couch, and moved him in front of me. He sat cross-legged between my bent legs and I gripped his knee. “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  He still bit that lip. “Telling you?”

  “Will you quit phrasing everything as a question?”

  He threw up his hands. “She wants her son and his boyfriend on her float, okay? It surprised me.”

  Yeah, me too. “God, it sounds like a trap. Maybe they’re going to throw something at us.”

  He squinted and his lips twitched in amusement. “Like glitter?”

  “You’d love that. Or you’d complain it wasn’t your color.”

  He glared. “I look better in silver. Don’t mock me.”

  I cocked my head to the side. “You gonna try to turn this into a Pride float?”

  He pressed his lips together, but I saw the smile creeping at the corners of his mouth. “Can I hire a go-go boy?”

  “No.”

  “Can I wave a rainbow flag?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He paused. “Can I wear rainbow socks?”

  “Lan—”

  His eyes twinkled. “Okay, rainbow underwear.”

  I laughed. “I’ll call her back. I feel a little like a political weapon, but whatever.”

  The public response in my mom’s world to the knowledge that I was gay was conflicted. Some voters withdrew their support. Some didn’t approve but said they would still support my mother. And there was a new, large group who now supported my mother because of her acceptance of me and her reconfigured platform in favor of equal rights.

  It was a gamble and sometimes I wondered if our relationship was built on the fact that it was good for her career. So I kept my distance but tried to support her as best as I could.

  I looked down at my tattoo, the black lines bold on my tan arms. Lan told me that if I ever needed to, I could cover it up with a cuff. But I told him I placed the tattoo there for a reason. I didn’t want to cover it up.

  “So,” I said, squinting at Landry. “You burning our burgers?”

  “Oh!” he shouted, jumping up and running to our back porch, his bare feet slapping on the floor of the trailer.

  I stood up with a groan and walked into the kitchen. I grabbed forks and a couple of napkins and then opened the overhead cabinet beside the sink to grab some plates.

  Inside the cabinet door hung our calendar. He’d uploaded all the pictures he’d drawn to some site and had a calendar made. The original drawings were scattered around the trailer, the Mount St. Helens one hanging above our bed.

  We were getting some made with Landry’s drawings next to my dad’s pictures. I thought about selling them and Landry approved as long as we donated a portion of the proceeds to The Trevor Project for LGBTQ youth.

  Landry built a website with an online shopping cart and made it look all pretty as only he could do. We already had preorders for next year’s calendar, because of my dad’s popularity and the viral explosion of our blog. My mom muttered about how we could finally move out of the trailer but she didn’t understand that Landry and I weren’t in a hurry. Plus, we were talking to the farmer about someday purchasing this acre of land and building a house on it.

  For now, we’d worked hard to make this little trailer our home. Landry made a collage of the photos we took on our trip of the two of us. They covered a whole wall in our bedroom with a variety of frames in different sizes. The center of the collage was the picture my mom had seen on the blog, the one where she knew we were together.

  The one that showed how in love we were.

  Once Landry rescued the burgers from the grill, we sat on the back porch, plates in our laps, beer bottles on the ground beside us.

  The burger was pretty burnt but I was hungry and ate it anyway, then forked up a heaping side of beans.

  “You want ketchup?” I asked.

  “That joke is seriously not funny anymore, Jus,” Lan muttered.

  I chuckled. It was still funny to me. Always would be.

  When I was finished my food, I dropped my empty plate beside me and leaned back with my beer propped on my stomach.

  I rolled my head to the side to see Landry in the same position, his head turned to me, a soft smile on his face. “You wanna sleep out here tonight?”

  Sometimes we dragged sleeping bags into our two-man tent and slept outside in mild weather. It was a little hot and the mosquitoes were relentless, but fuck it. I slept well out here. “Sure.”

  He smiled brighter. “Good.”

  I took a sip of my beer and picked at the label. “You ever surprised we made it here?”

  He didn’t speak and I looked up. Half of his face was in shadow from the setting sun. “What do you mean by ‘here’?”

  I waved a hand. “Together.”

  He blinked. “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, I don’t mean together, together. I always knew we’d be friends. At least, I thought so. I never thought we’d be kissing friends, though.”

  I chuckled. “I think kissing friends is better.”

  The smile was back. “Yeah, me too.”

  “And Lan?”

  “Yeah?”

  I ran my thumb over the underside of my ring finger. The Twizzlers wrapper-ring long gone. “You were right, you know? About how we needed to feel what was wrong to know what was right?”

  Because at that moment, staring in Landry’s blue eyes, the beer just beginning to fuzz my brain, the thought of sleeping under the stars with him next to me, even the old trailer reminiscent of Sally behind me—that was right. Everything about it was right.

  And instead of a future I dreaded, I had a life where I enjoyed living in the moment, and not because I was trying to avoid what happened next. Because every day, my life kept getting better. I blinked my eyes. Like the shutter of my camera. Because I wanted this moment framed in my mind.

  A breeze blew softly, ruffling Lan’s curls and raising goose bumps on my arms.

  “You smell that?” he asked.

  “The cinnamon?”

  He nodded and reached over, twining his fingers with mine. I kissed his finger, the third one, where he’d worn that Twizzlers ring during the summer. The finger that was naked now, but wouldn’t be for much longer.

  “It’s like he’s here,” Landry said, eyes soft.

  I squeezed his hand. “He is here. And he’s smiling.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I wrote this book at the end of 2013, during National Novel Writing Month. I’d been querying for a long time. I didn’t have a book deal or an agent.
Frankly, I was a little down about my publishing journey. This business isn’t for the faint of heart, that’s for sure.

  But at the time, I had this idea about a young man on a cross-country road trip with his best friend to spread his father’s ashes. But what was the conflict? What was going on? Then it hit me like a ton of bricks—Justin was in love with his best friend. And after that revelation, this book basically wrote itself. I think I wrote about thirty thousand words in two weeks, which is almost half of the book. Justin and Landry poured out of me like a flood. I fell in love with them and I laughed with them and cried with them. They meant everything to me (and still do). They lifted me up when I wasn’t feeling so hot.

  And then I got an agent and a publishing deal for a different book I’d queried and Justin and Landry (or JusLan as I call them), were put aside for a while.

  But I never stopped thinking about them. I polished them up in 2014 and fell in love all over again. The response when this book went out on submission overwhelmed me, and thank you so much to the InterMix team for loving this book like I do. To see them come to life and to have the opportunity for other people to meet them is a dream come true.

  I have so many people to thank for the making of this book. Natalie Blitt, my critique partner and friend, you are a huge reason this book was written. You loved JusLan from the first sentence, and you believed in this book and that meant so much to me. It still does. You mean so much to me.

  Lucas Hargis, I can’t really express how big of a part you played in this book. I still have the e-mail from you after you read the first chapter: “YES YES KEEP WRITING.” Well, I did. And you encouraged me and you fixed my . . . ahem . . . technical mistakes. And you told me that you believed Justin and Landry belonged together. I hope you think of them every time you smell cinnamon. And I hope you realize how much you mean to me as a friend and fellow writer.

  Jen Norwood, your critique of this book was on point and I used a lot of your ideas in the final version. Thank you so much for loving this book.

  Amy Pine and Lia Riley—thank you for your encouragement and friendship and handling my many neuroses. You should probably get a medal for that.

  Thank you to Vanessa North, Amy Jo Cousins, Sarina Bowen, Ashley Amsbaugh and Nyrae Dawn for all the kinds words, excitement, and encouragement.

  To my agent Marisa Corvisiero, thank you so much for working as hard as you did in getting this book a contract. I am so grateful for all you do. You are my rock star.

  To my editor Kristine Swartz, thank you for loving this book as much as I do. Thank you for believing in Justin and Landry. You also handle my neuroses well and I’m so grateful for that. Hashtag Juslan.

  Thank you to everyone at InterMix, my publicist Courtney Landi, and the art department for this wonderful cover that really is JusLan to me.

  Thank you to my husband, for believing that love is love and for being proud of me. Thank you to my children for dealing with Mommy’s craziness. Thank you to all my friends, family, and last but not least, Andi—you’ll never be one of the “little people.”

  Megan Erickson worked as a journalist covering real-life dramas before she decided she liked writing her own endings better and switched to fiction. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, two kids and two cats. When she’s not tapping away on her laptop, she’s probably listening to the characters in her head who won’t stop talking.

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