by Jerry Cole
“You know,” he starts, and Evan immediately hisses at him for ruining the moment or something like that.
Scott doesn’t pay much attention, he knows Evan covets his candids like they’re priceless even if he’ll never sell them, but he does slow his movements just enough to keep from blurring the photograph as Evan snaps a quick test shot or two.
“You know,” he repeats when Evan lowers the camera, “most models get paid for this kind of thing.”
“Are you most models?” Evan huffs, fussing with the camera for a couple seconds before lifting it to his face again. “Don’t move. You’ll screw it up.”
“Am I allowed to see this one?”
Evan colors, the few patches of skin visible behind the camera flaring bright red. Scott tries his best to blame it on the weather.
“Nope,” Evan replies, predictably, a teasing edge to his voice. “Going straight in my spank bank.”
It’s Scott’s turn to flush at that, feeling warmth blossom in his cheeks. Evan, the traitor, snaps another picture. “You’re joking.”
“Of course I am. You’re so full of yourself,” Evan laughs, and the vice grip on Scott’s chest loosens just a little. He’s never quite sure how to respond whenever Evan flirts with him, even if he waves it all off as joking. Something in him always flares up, rears his head in surprise whenever Evan drops a throwaway line about Scott being attractive. He figures he’s just not used to attention. After five years of hiding behind a computer screen, he’s bound to take everything a little too seriously. It doesn’t mean anything, he reminds himself, not that he wants it to. That’s just how Evan is, he’s realized, hiding himself behind a wall of amicability and teasing comments whenever he doesn’t want to say what’s really on his mind.
He’s pulled out of his thoughts when he realizes Evan’s stopped taking pictures. He’s just kind of standing there, the camera dangling from his fingers at collarbone level, a grin on his face that spells trouble. At the sight of it, a wave of apprehension washes over Scott. That smile means Evan wants something, and Scott knows he won’t like it.
“Carter,” Evan calls, sickly sweet, and Scott knows Evan only uses his last name when he’s trying to deflect. He sees the flick of Evan’s eyes half a second before Evan opens his mouth to speak, and he’s already shaking his head.
“No. No.” Evan pouts behind his camera, but Scott is not getting into the freezing cold ocean in the middle of winter, no matter how many times Evan tries to make puppy dog eyes at him.
“Just for a minute!”
“I’m not getting hypothermia for a photoshoot, you maniac.”
Evan goes wide-eyed and petulant. It’s adorable, even if Scott won’t admit it to himself. “Not even if I get in with you?”
Scott laughs. “You wouldn’t risk your camera,” he teases, and his chest unclenches when the pout on Evan’s face shifts into a look of indignation.
“That’s… fair, actually,” he says, stepping a little further away from the waves threatening to wash over his feet. “I’ll get you in there one day, though.”
“Doubt it.”
Evan laughs at that, the sound filling Scott with warmth despite the chill in the air. “All right, all right,” he says, conceding. “Now come on, let me show you something cool.”
***
They bypass the house altogether, Evan making a beeline instead for the little white picket side gate to the right. Scott’s only ever been in his living room until now, but he doesn’t have much of a chance to look around. The second he clears the fence, Evan grabs at the fabric of his jacket and tugs him forward with a whiny come on that Scott can’t help but snicker at.
He lets Evan drag him through the yard, craning his neck to see around Evan’s frame until they stop in front of a little garden shed draped in a large, heavy, industrial-grade tarp.
“Is this where you tell me you’re secretly a serial killer?” he asks drily as Evan fumbles with the flap in the tarp in an attempt to get to the door. “This is third date level, at least.”
“Very funny,” Evan deadpans back. He lets out a little ah! when he manages to get a grasp on the door handle, then reaches back with his free hand to tug Scott forward. Scott stumbles, trips over his feet a little in his hurry to get past the doorway into the little room. “I don’t want too much light getting in, come on.”
The overwhelming smell of chemicals is what hits him first. For a moment, he’s confused, blinking to adjust his vision from the bright, harsh light outside to the dull red glow inside. After a second, though, he manages to take in the clutter of the room for what it really is.
It’s sparsely furnished, but the shed is small enough that he feels packed in like a sardine. A row of cheap plastic card tables line the walls, covered in trays and equipment that Scott couldn’t put a name to if he tried. The entire right half of the shed is strung through with clothesline at varying heights, dozens of developing photographs hanging from them, and in the center of it all stands Evan, shifting from foot to foot and waiting on Scott with an expression halfway between nervous and hopeful.
A darkroom. Evan’s brought Scott to his darkroom.
Scott takes a moment to take it all in, staring around in the red-tinted darkness at the sheer amount of photographs around him. Besides the ones hanging up to dry, there are stacks of finished photographs in a corner, sheets developing in the trays along the tables, rolls of film stacked into neat piles here and there. This isn’t a hobby, it’s a lifestyle, and suddenly Scott understands the nervous anticipation in Evan’s expression.
“You did all this?” he asks, once his throat has opened up enough to speak again. Evan shifts his weight again, sucks his bottom lip into his mouth and worries it beneath his top teeth. “Jesus, Evan, this is… this is incredible.”
There’s admiration, stunned awe in his voice. He just hopes Evan can hear it, too.
Evan just shrugs, though, sheepish. “I just like doing it myself, that’s all,” he says quietly. “There’s something nice about being in here and seeing everything develop.”
Even with his minimal knowledge of anything photography related, Scott has to agree. He can almost picture Evan at work, hunched over the table or pinning photographs one by one up to the clothesline, sleeves rolled up to his elbows and expression pinched in concentration. It’s a comforting image, familiar. Scott doesn’t know how anyone could see Evan in the middle of all of this, looking like a kid in a candy store surrounded by chemicals and film, and think he belongs anywhere else.
“Come on,” Evan says eventually, tilting his head toward one of the tables, with bottles of strong smelling clear liquid lined up on it. “Want to see how I do it?”
With an expression like that, Scott can hardly refuse.
***
He hovers awkwardly at Evan’s side as Evan goes through the routine of developing the film. There’s a constant stream of narration that Scott only half understands. He tries to keep up with it, but the science of it all goes completely over his head after the first handful of sentences. Still, though, it’s nice to listen to Evan ramble on, even if Scott has no clue what he’s saying. The tenor of his voice alone is soothing, pitched low and quiet in the dim, red-lit room, and the faint hint of his accent makes it melodic and lively. Scott could listen to him read the dictionary and never get bored.
It’s nice, he realizes, just being allowed to exist with Evan like this. It’s not a demanding kind of friendship, no matter how many times Evan tries to pull him away from his work to try some new restaurant or cafe he’s heard of. It’s just simple, easy and effortless to be in Evan’s company. There are no awkward silences, no uncomfortable tension, nothing but Evan’s excitable personality. It’s a feeling Scott hasn’t felt in a long time, one he thought he’d forgotten.
Something catches Scott’s eye as Evan is explaining the delicate process of hanging the photographs up to dry, and he finds himself squinting closer at one of the pictures hanging from the clothesline.
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“Is that me?” he asks, peering up at the image. It’s hard to make out in the dim red light, but the scene is clear enough. Thanksgiving, taken from Mitchell’s kitchen looking out into the dining room. The table itself is blurred and out of focus, Mitchell and Frances nothing more than colorful splashes against the hazy backdrop. The only thing actually in focus in the photograph is a single figure, captured in profile. Scott stares at himself on the glossy paper, studying the way the light from the overhead ceiling lamp plays shadows over his face, the open and happy expression he wears.
He hadn’t even remembered Evan taking the picture, but he supposes that’s the whole point of a candid photograph anyway.
“Do I really look like that?” mumbles Scott, the words more directed at himself than toward Evan.
Still, Evan hums in reply. “It’s a good look on you.”
“What is?”
“Being happy,” Evan says, shrugging it off with a nonchalant shake of his shoulders. “You can look so sad sometimes. I wish I knew why.”
You really don’t, Scott thinks, and he doesn’t realize he’s said it out loud until Evan fixes him with an unamused frown. Suddenly, all at once, the idea of telling Evan about April seems like something he should really do while sitting down.
There’s a stool in one of the corners, a tall, uncomfortable looking once, but it works well enough. Scott pads over to it, drops down and rests his heels on the support beam between the legs, and Evan leans back against one of the tables. It should be easy, recounting the story, Scott thinks. It’s been five years, after all.
To exactly no one’s surprise, it’s the furthest thing from easy he can think of, but he presses on anyway.
It starts like a dam bursting, a leak giving way to a flood. He tells Evan about April, about the excitable girl with scuffed up knees that moved in across the street and two houses down, about how he had accidentally flown a model rocket over the fence in her backyard and broken his arm trying to climb over the fence to get it back. He tells Evan about growing up with her, about watching her blossom from a hurricane of a kid into a gangly, awkward teenager into a beauty at the end of high school, about how he had taken her to their senior prom and spilled fruit punch all down the front of her expensive dress, about how she had just laughed it off and said you can be my boyfriend to make up for it.
Evan just sits there in relative silence, interjecting with a laugh at a funny story or a quiet, throwaway comment every now and then. Somehow, it’s easier to tell Evan than it had been to tell Frances. She had looked so sad, her face so full of pity. Evan’s expression is just curious, only the slightest bit melancholy, and it’s far easier to deal with.
So Scott presses on, tells him about the Romance, capital R, because it seems deserving of the title. April had been Scott’s great love, the childhood crush-turned-high school sweetheart. Evan’s smile goes soft and fond when Scott gets to their days in college, recounting the way he and April had sandwiched themselves into a postage stamp studio apartment for four years while he studied computer science and she studied archaeology, and the way they would never fight over him leaving computer wires in the walkway and he would never argue when she wanted to bring home rocks and fossils that left dust over every horizontal surface in the kitchen.
His voice doesn’t start to shake until after graduation, and he’s almost proud of himself for it. We went out for dinner after the ceremony, he says, and his voice pitches up on dinner like it’s going to break. Evan picks up on it immediately.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he says, his voice soft and soothing. There’s a warmth on Scott’s knee, a single point of contact, and it takes Scott a second to realize Evan had placed his hand there for reassurance. It’s like a lifeline, and Scott tries not to feel too bad for the way he leans into the touch.
“I should,” he says, trying to convince himself as much as Evan. “It’s okay. I should.”
Evan is silent again after that, so Scott finishes his story. There’s not much left to tell. He skims past the summer and early fall. Most of it had been him settling into his new job and April into hers. It doesn’t get hard again until after that, until he forces himself to stammer out a recount of the way he had decided to propose, of the jewelry shops he had visited and the time he had spent planning the proposal.
“You wanted to marry her, then,” Evan says.
“More than anything.” Scott’s voice wavers, cracks into two. “I was going to propose before Thanksgiving, so if she said yes, we could have celebrated with her family, and if she said no, I could abscond and spend the holiday with mine instead.”
“Do you think she would have said no?”
Scott pauses, twists his fingers together in his lap. “No,” he says. “No, she wouldn’t have.”
“So did you propose?” Evan asks, and Scott feels icy black fingers wrap themselves around his heart.
He takes a breath, steadies himself, focuses his consciousness down the single point of contact where Evan’s hand still rests against his leg. “I was going to,” he says. “We were supposed to go out for dinner, something nice and fancy to celebrate a big project she had been working on, but she had to work late so she called and told me just to wait for her at the restaurant.”
Evan blinks, stays silent, attentive.
“It was raining, but I got there all right. I had enough time to talk to one of the waiters and ask for his help, I was going to do the classic ring in the champagne glass trick, but I sat there and waited for hours. She was so late. She didn’t pick up when I called, either, and by the time it hit about two hours after the end of her shift, I started to panic a little.”
He can feel the lump in his throat, tears threatening to spill from the corners of his eyes. Evan squeezes, tightens his grip on Scott’s knee, and it somehow manages to help just a little.
“I got the call right as the restaurant was closing,” he continues, voice shaky. “They said she had hit a puddle that was deeper than it looked, had hydroplaned and spun off the road into oncoming traffic.”
Evan sucks in a breath through his teeth, sharp and shocked.
“I buried her a week later.”
“Jesus, Scott,” says Evan, voice slightly hoarse from lack of use during Scott’s monologue. He shakes his head, opening and closing his mouth as if searching for the right words. “That’s—God, Scott. I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you,” Scott replies, because he’s learned not to say it’s okay when it isn’t okay at all. He’s grateful, though, for the support. Evan’s hand leaves his knee, comes up to tug at his arm instead, and the only warning Scott gets is a whispered tell me if this is all right before Evan is leaning forward, wrapping himself around Scott’s shoulders in an embrace.
Scott returns the hug as soon as he remembers how to use his arms. His chest feels like an odd combination of heavy like a stone and lighter than air.
Chapter Eleven
The Christmas party is in full swing inside Evan’s little beach house, carols ringing joyfully even through the walls, the lights strung up along the roof and the porch railing giving the night a faint, warm glow. Through the half open doorway, Scott can hear the sounds of glasses clinking, of drunken singing and laughter filtering out into the night air.
Evan had all but jumped at the chance to hold the party, now that he’s back together with the girls. It’s far, of course. Evan’s little house is hours out of the way, but Scott had just bundled into a cab with the girls and split the fare, stopping to pick up Gabriel on the way with an apologetic explanation of I can’t ditch him on Christmas, really. Frances had just laughed and said that any friend of Scott’s was a friend of theirs and had folded Gabriel into their little patchwork group as quickly as she had done with Scott himself.
It’s like watching the television from outside a window. The conversations inside are muffled, floating incoherently out into the night, to where Scott is sitting on the edge of the porch steps, slu
mped over against the railing. He’s got a drink in his hand, pushed onto him by a much drunker than usual Frances who had muttered something about needing to stay hydrated.
When the door creaks, he doesn’t look up, but he knows by the footfalls that it’s Evan.
“All by yourself?” Evan asks, words slurred just the faintest bit.
“Had to get out here for a little bit, clear my head.” Scott pats the ground next to him, fingers tapping against the wood of the deck. “Needed a bit of solitude, I think.”
“Mind if I come out to be lonely with you?” asks Evan, and Scott pushes down the smile that plays at the corners of his lips.
“Go ahead. I’m just being a downer.”
Evan doesn’t have to say anything. He tilts his head, inclining it toward the ocean, and Scott nods. April?
“It’s always her,” he replies, answering Evan’s unasked question. “Me being here, finding that book and moving on, forgetting about her… it’s not fair. Not to her. Hell, the last time I celebrated a real Christmas was when I spent it with her.”
Evan scoffs, and Scott turns to look at him, something hesitant and vague in his expression. “Nothing’s fair,” he says, accent thick and words clipped. “But if you hadn’t found that book, I probably never would have come home.”
A soft snort of laughter makes its way out of Scott’s mouth, unbidden. Turning his gaze back to the wide expanse of sea and sky in front of him, he raises his glass to his lips. The alcohol goes down slow and sweet, like honey. “This is home, now? Two months ago you were aching to run away.” He feels more than hears the way that Evan pads up to the railing, leaning up against it with his elbows propped up on the cold metal, his gaze on the side of Scott’s face burning despite the chill in the air.
