by Jerry Cole
“Home is wherever Frances is, in my book,” he says. His words are measured, careful. “Or,” he amends, “wherever the people I care about are.”
There’s a click and an inhale, and the scent of cloves wafts through the icy night air. Scott looks up, first at Evan’s hand tucking the lighter back into his pocket and then at the cigarette between his full lips. “I didn’t know you smoked,” says Scott, eyebrow raised.
Evan laughs, the sound like bells. “I don’t, really. Only when I want to look cool.”
Scott huffs a laugh and turns back to the railing. “You never look cool.”
There’s silence for a beat, the breaking of the waves cutting through the space in the dropped conversation. Evan pulls another drag from his cigarette, blows the clove-scented smoke out in a cloud, drops the half-finished stub to the sand below. “You’re not forgetting about her, you know,” he says, so quietly that Scott nearly misses it between the crash of one wave and the next.
“What?”
“April,” Evan clarifies. Scott’s heart does a painful little squeeze in his chest. “You’re not forgetting about her.”
“I’m moving on, though,” counters Scott, his tone bitter, acidic.
“Moving on and forgetting aren’t the same thing.”
“Aren’t they?”
Evan exhales through his nose, long and slow, and pushes himself upright. He tilts back on his heels, overbalancing but keeping his hands on the railing to avoid falling backwards. “Not exactly,” he says. “You can move forward and not forget about something. You can forget about it and still be stuck in the exact same place.”
“Which one are you?” asks Scott, keeping his eyes trained on the ebb and flow of the water.
“Which one do you think?” There’s a weight against Scott’s arm, warm and heavy, and when he gathers himself enough to look over, Evan’s calf is pressed up against him. “I left everyone I cared about five years ago. Exactly five years, actually. I was stuck here until you found me.”
“Did you forget?”
Evan pulls a face. “I tried to.” He’s silent for a second, then makes a noise like a startled little gasp, patting the pockets of his jacket. “I almost forgot this, though,” he says, “I have another gift for you.”
“What?” Scott blinks, his brain wading sluggishly through the glasses of spiked eggnog to catch up to the conversation. “No, come on, you didn’t have to—”
Evan cuts him off by bending down and pressing a present into his free hand. It’s small, about the size of a credit card, wrapped up in layers of gold foil and topped off with a miniature red bow. “It isn’t much, but I had the time and the tools and I figured you might like it.”
Scott peels off the wrapper slowly, tucking his finger underneath the tape to slit it open instead of tearing the paper like he had done with his other gifts. Somehow, it doesn’t seem right to mess it up, not with the lengths Evan had gone to in order to wrap it this nicely. The gift wrapping folds up easily under his fingers, pushed aside to show a hint of glossy paper underneath.
He forgets how to breathe.
April stares back at him from the photograph in his hand, nestled snugly in a bed of wrapping paper and red ribbon. He knows this picture, knows it like the back of his hand, never thought he would have the courage to develop the film and actually look at it ever again.
It’s not a very good photograph, of course. He’s no artist like Evan, but it shows what he needed it to show. April stands dead center, half turned to face the camera with a smile as wide as the Atlantic stretched across her face and a cardboard storage box in her hands, overflowing with kitchen tools and utensils. It was the day they had moved into together, when they had brought in everything they owned and dumped it all into the living room and slept on an air mattress for a week straight because neither of them wanted to set up the cheap bed frame April had brought from her parents’ home.
Something cracks in Scott’s chest, and he thinks it might be his heart.
“You made this?” he croaks, once he manages to find some semblance of his voice again. Evan looks sheepish when Scott tilts his head up to get a better look at him. He rubs the back of his neck and keeps his eyes fixed squarely on the horizon.
“Yeah, well,” he says, a chuckle in his voice. “You left your camera with me that one time, and I had the darkroom anyway. I figured I might as well get some use out of it.”
Scott doesn’t realize he’s crying until the tears drip from his chin, and he wipes them away with the back of his hand before they can fall onto the photograph.
***
Frances and Mitchell giggle as they bundle into the backseat of the car, falling over each other to make space for Gabriel climbing in behind them. Scott pats Gabriel on the back fondly, grinning when he turns to give Scott a cheery thumbs up.
“Get them home safe, will you?” Evan calls from the porch, wrapped up in a bright purple throw blanket that somehow manages to offset the violent pink of the house. Gabriel slurs something incoherent and waves him off, and Scott catches faint traces of Evan’s chuckle from behind him as he closes the door on the three in the car. They’re still laughing as the driver pulls away, heads back toward the city, the tail lights of his car fading into empty black shadows as it turns a street corner.
The night air is icy, but Scott doesn’t feel it. He’s still buzzing from the warmth of the alcohol, slightly tipsy and nowhere near ready to turn in for the night. His veins feel like they’ve been hooked up to an electrical socket, sending electricity humming through him like a live wire, and when he hears the sound of footsteps on gravel, he turns to face Evan with a smile and an aren’t you cold out here on his lips. It dies away, though. Evan is closer than he had anticipated, leaning forward into his space as if seeking out his body heat, eyes a little glazed over in the same way Scott knows his own are.
“You didn’t go with them,” says Evan after a second, and his voice hits Scott like little pinpricks of heat in the cold, chasing away the winter chill with the lilt in his accent and the alcohol-laden slur lacing his words. Scott shrugs.
“Not enough space in the car,” he says. “I’ll catch another one.”
Evan laughs, and it sounds like bells and honey in milk and every sip of coffee he ever stole from April’s cup in the mornings. “This isn’t the city, you know.”
Scott raises an eyebrow and looks pointedly out at the ocean.
“No, I mean,” Evan starts again, breaking off to giggle. “You can’t just get another cab like that. As far out as I am, I have no idea when another driver will be available.”
Scott blinks at that, the gears in his head clicking into place one by one. He must have some kind of lost expression on his face, because Evan squints at him a little before bursting into a fresh wave of laughter. His shoulders shake under the cover of the blanket wrapped around them, his cheeks scrunching up as the corners of his lips curve up into a smile. The tip of his nose is red, Scott realizes, flushed with the cold, and it makes the dusting of freckles across the bridge stand out just a bit more.
Evan is more open like this, he thinks. Here, way out on the outskirts of the continent, with the sea spray whipping up into the air and sending shivers up his spine and down his forearms. He couldn’t imagine Evan anywhere else. He had lived in the city, sure, had lived and loved and spent his life there, but Scott can’t imagine any way his eyes would light up quite as brightly without the open expanse of water in front of them. Here, under the cover of night, Evan is radiant enough to outshine the stars, and Scott has to resist the sudden urge to trace his freckles just so he can compare them to the constellations peeking out over the tops of the mountains.
“Come on, let’s go for a walk,” Evan says, tilting his head toward the waterfront. He pulls the blanket tighter around his shoulders like a makeshift shawl, and Scott resists the urge to peel his jacket off and drape it over Evan’s thin frame.
“You’re not wearing any shoes,” he mumbles in
stead, but shoves his hands into his pockets and follows when Evan walks away without a reply.
He catches up when Evan makes it onto the sand, feeling his shoes sink in unpleasantly with every step. Evan slows down imperceptibly, matching Scott step for step until Scott gives in and kicks off his own shoes as well. On his left, the waves lap against the sand, high tide leaving them with little room to walk along the sand without their feet being drenched in icy water. Evan sticks close to Scott’s side, shoulders brushing through the blanket and the thick fabric of Scott’s jacket.
The buzz is beginning to wear off, he can feel it. His head hasn’t started to hurt yet, he doubts it will until the morning, and all that he can feel is the chill of the air and the burning warmth blossoming against his side every time he comes close to Evan.
“She’d be happy for you, you know,” Evan says after a bit. They’ve walked a quarter mile or so, enough that the waterfront begins to pull away from the street. It feels more isolated like this. The only signs of life around them are the faint, amber glow of streetlamps in the distance and the empty lifeguard stands dotting the coast. When Scott looks over, Evan’s gaze is trained forward, a gentle curve to his mouth and his eyes slightly closed. “April.”
It’s been a long day, a fun but tiring one, and Scott blames exhaustion for his inability to push away the dull ache in his chest at the reminder. “You think so?” he asks, looking away from Evan and back out along the coastline. Evan hums, a soft sound that barely reaches Scott’s ears over the cadence of the waves against the sand.
“You loved her, right?”
It’s Scott’s turn to go silent, then, and he rubs his thumb against his fingers inside the pockets of his coat. Evan doesn’t press him, doesn’t talk, just keeps walking and lets him think over his answer in silence. Scott kicks at the sand, feeling it give way and scatter out in front of him, scuffing his heels a bit as he walks.
“I loved her,” he says eventually, and stops walking. Evan takes a couple more paces forward before he seems to realize that Scott’s stopped, backtracking when he does. He sits down on the sand, patting the ground next to him.
It’s cold when Scott sits. He’s not used to the ocean in winter, when the air is icy and the water threatens frostbite or pneumonia to anyone brave or foolish enough to swim in it, and he can feel the chill against his legs even through his layers of clothing. Evan doesn’t seem to mind it, though, just lifts up one side of his blanket and reaches over to drape it around Scott’s shoulders.
Somehow, the press of Evan’s arm against his own is warmer than the blanket around him.
“I was going to ask her to marry me,” Scott says after a moment, and Evan goes stiff for a heartbeat before relaxing again. “The night she—”
He trails off, unable to force the words past the lump in his throat, but he knows Evan understands.
“Did she know?” asks Evan.
“I think so,” Scott replies, stretching his legs out in front of him. The water laps at the soles of his feet, pinpricks of tingling cold not quite far enough up his skin to do any real damage. “We would talk about it, sometimes. You know about getting married, moving out of the city into a little house in a quiet town. I wanted a dog. She wanted two.”
Evan huffs a quiet laugh through his nose.
“I thought I was going to marry Frances, once,” he says, leaning back on his hands. Scott looks over at him, quirks an eyebrow.
“I thought you didn’t love her.”
“Oh, I love her,” Evan chuckles. “Loved her more than anything on Earth, really. Not the same as being in love with her, though.”
Scott blinks. “I don’t get it.”
Evan smiles, and it looks small, sad. “Things are different, you know, for our kind of people—” He breaks off, and Scott barks out a laugh, prompting Evan to swat playfully at his shoulder. “I’m serious, you ass. Even if I had been into women, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.”
“I know, I know,” Scott says, raising his hands defensively and trying not to show his surprise at Evan’s confession. “You’re the prince of bloody Wales, right?” He forces an accent on the last few words, and Evan shoves him good naturedly.
“I do not sound like that,” he whines, pouting ever so slightly. It’s cute, Scott thinks, the way his nose scrunches up like a petulant child whenever he goes into a mood. “Really, though, I thought I was going to marry her since before I could walk. Her parents and mine had an agreement. I was supposed to inherit my father’s fortune and they wanted the money going to a family they trusted. Not that any of that really matters now, anyway.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
Scott breathes out, watching the way his breath curls into smoke as it hits the air. “Why doesn’t it not matter now? Why did it matter in the first place?”
“I didn’t have to love her to marry her, did I? And anyway, I’m disinherited now, so it’s not like she still has to, either way.”
“So, what,” Scott says, pulling his legs back up to wrap his arms around his knees. “You left because you didn’t want to marry her? Even though you love her?”
“Not like that,” replies Evan. “And not exactly. I wouldn’t have minded marrying her, really. She got it, anyway. She didn’t care much whether or not we were an item. She was always more of a best friend to me. I couldn’t make her marry me if she loved someone else, though.”
Scott goes quiet, mulling over his memories of Frances and everything he’s learned about her over the two months he’s known her. Something clicks, a lightbulb going off in the back of his head. “Ah. Mitchell?”
“Mitchell,” Evan agrees. “I figured if I made my parents angry enough to disinherit me, Mitchell would get the money, and they might just come around to the idea of Frances still marrying the heir eventually. They couldn’t very well disown both of us. Everything was fairly new then, you know? I had only just realized something like that could even work, legally. Mum would never let me go, of course, so I got into a fight with my father about the most jarring thing I could think up over Christmas dinner and booked a flight back out here for the next morning. Made off with a decent amount of money too, to set myself up. And to piss off my father more, of course.”
“And you couldn’t let anyone know where you were, because—”
“Because they’d come after me,” Evan says. “And Frances hates it when I try to be all noble. I knew she’d talk sense into me, and I didn’t want that.”
“Five years out here, then,” Scott hums, tilting his head to look up at the stars scattered across the velvet sky. “You hid out pretty well, even this close to the city.”
“Yes, well,” replies Evan, with a self-deprecating smile twitching on his lips. “I couldn’t just leave them, could I? Besides, this was the only place I really loved in the States, and I didn’t exactly want to stay in England, where every businessman in a three-city radius knows my family name.”
They fall silent after that, letting the conversation drift off until the only sound in the night is the crashing of the waves against the shore. The tide recedes little by little, each new wash of water coming up just shy of the last, until the ocean is far enough out that Scott can stretch his legs out again without fear of getting wet. Evan is warm against his side. If Scott closes his eyes and focuses, he can feel the movements against his arm as Evan breathes, chest rising and falling in time with the crashing waves.
It seems so easy to kiss him, under the barely there haze of alcohol and the cover of the twinkling stars. All he would have to do is lean over, close his eyes. It’s simple, so simple he hardly questions the fact that he wants to kiss Evan, that he’s wanted to kiss Evan for a very, very long time.
Evan turns when he leans in, nose to nose and breathing the same air, close enough that Scott can feel the puff of warm air against his cheek when Evan exhales. God, he wants this, wants it more than he has since April died, and somehow the thought of her doesn’t hurt q
uite as much when he focuses on the little hints of hazel in Evan’s green eyes. He smells like cloves and vanilla, like Thanksgiving and Christmas all wrapped up with a bow under the air of sea spray.
Evan blinks, long and slow, and a melancholy sort of hopefulness reflects back at Scott when his eyes open again.
“Don’t,” Evan says, voice hoarse. “Not if you don’t mean it.”
Scott doesn’t.
***
He catches a cab back to the city half an hour later, the driver pulling up silent and tired when Scott waves him down. Something strange sits in the pit of his stomach the entire way home, chewing him up from the inside. He has the vague, lingering feeling that he might have to do some soul-searching, but his head is still far too hazy to even consider it.
He’s dropped off at the door to his apartment building and he slides the driver a comfortable tip, stumbling out of the car and through the front door before the biting cold of late December can reach him. The hallways are lit with the dim glow of Christmas lights filtering through the cracks under the doors, the street visible through the window shining bright despite the fact that it’s nearing three in the morning. The city doesn’t sleep so much as it dulls down, the usual bustle reduced to sparse traffic and a handful of drunken carolers singing off-key as they stumble down the street. It’s the kind of Christmas Eve that feels trapped in glass, encased in a thick layer of frost. Not quite real, not quite happening, like watching the world go by in slow motion.
Scott reaches up, touches his lips with two fingertips.
When he makes it into his apartment, he shucks off his coat, sending up a silent thank you for central heating as the chill finally seems to seep out of his bones. He sends off a quick message to Frances and Gabriel, a simple got home safe, good night. He’ll see them in the morning anyway, he’s sure. He has a feeling they won’t let him hole himself up alone on Christmas Day, and he’s a little surprised to realize he doesn’t want to be alone.
