Full Exposure

by Jerry Cole

  He measures out the coffee blindly: four spoonfuls for himself, four for Evan, one more for good measure. The pot hums to life with a gurgle when he flips the switch, and he turns to lean back, elbows on the countertop, arching to stretch out his back. Coffee drips into the pot with a slow plink plink plink, each drop accenting the thoughts that spiral through his brain like a film reel.

  He doesn’t know how it happened. Or, rather, he does—one too many drinks while out with the rest of their friends, the conspicuous lack of a taxi willing to take Evan all the way back to the waterfront that late at night, the offer of a bed at Scott’s apartment for the night—but he still can’t wrap his head around the fact that they had fallen into bed together so easily. If he turns it over in his head, he can somewhat rationalize it away with the strange tension that had started building up between them from the moment they met. If he thinks about it harder, he can pinpoint more terrifying thoughts, like I don’t want to be alone and I think he might be in love with me and, even more terrifying, I think I might be falling in love with him. Maybe they had been moving toward this ever since Scott found that photo album outside his front door.

  Isn’t that a thought.

  He pushes the tender voice in his chest down and pulls down two mugs instead, turning each one over in his hands carefully before setting it down on the countertop. Sensations flood back through his head in place of memories. The heat and the desperation and the hiss of breath from Evan’s lips just centimeters away from his ear. There had been a terrible, sudden intimacy to it all, a single crashing moment where they had gone from friends at arm's length to lovers breathing the same air. Scott can’t remember who had caved first, who had taken the first tentative step over that line. It had probably been him.

  All the usual rules of intimacy had flown out the window. There was no hug but don’t kiss, no look at me but never when I’m looking back at you, just the world filed down to a single point of contact and every brick wall Scott had built up in the five years since the love of his life died, all torn down by tender hands and a soft smile and green eyes like the first day of spring.

  He wonders, distant and aching, if he can call April the love of his life anymore. It doesn’t feel quite right, not with Evan taking up space in his chest like a burning star. His brain helpfully supplies him with phantom feelings of hands in his hair, lips on his pulse point, fingers trailing feather-light down his limbs, the taste of skin on his tongue. The click of a camera flash, the smell of sand and the ocean spray. Evan, Evan, Evan.

  The rattle of the coffee machine jolts Scott out of his thoughts. He fills the mugs absently, wiping a stray droplet from the lip of the pot and sucking it off his finger. The pot clinks as he sets it carefully back into the machine, the refrigerator door sticks and squeaks as he pulls it open. Evan sleeps soundly as he pours milk into his cup, sugar into Evan’s. The cream blooms like flower petals under the surface of the dark coffee.

  Scott takes a sip, and warmth erupts in fireworks on his tongue. This is his coffee now, not the mocha he had gotten daily in an attempt to remember the taste of April on his tongue. The sweetness is there, the richness and flavor, but it doesn’t make his heart hurt anymore. It melts in his mouth, trails down his throat and into his chest, spreads sparks to his fingertips and chases off the February chill.

  Nothing has changed, except for everything. A shuffle and a rustle of blankets floats down the hallway. Evan is awake. Scott laughs breathlessly, incredulous.

  All at once he pushes himself upright, grabs the second mug from the counter and slips out of the kitchen. It’s terrifying, so terrifying. He pads down the hallway silent as a ghost, feels the pounding of his heart filling his throat, nudges the bedroom door open with his foot.

  The light filters in gold through the windows, touching soft and gentle on the corners and edges of the sheets, illuminates them in striking clarity, bathing the entire room in an iridescent glow that Scott never seemed to notice in all the mornings he had spent here alone. Maybe, he thinks, maybe it had never been this breathtaking until Evan was at the center of it all.

  For a single, heart stopping moment, Evan shifts, lifts his head from the pillow, green eyes fixed on Scott’s own.

  The figure sprawled in his bed is so achingly familiar it’s foreign, gold-dipped and precious, half-buried in the mussed sheets and hair messy like a bird’s nest atop his head. Scott is hit momentarily with a sharp shock of vertigo. Tenderness courses through him, aching like a knife wound. This is what he’s been waiting for, what every late night conversation and every photograph and every brush of skin on skin lingering just a breath too long had led to. They had been celestial bodies, caught in the pull of each other’s gravity from the moment they set eyes on each other, spiraling closer and closer with every passing second, and now that they’ve collided, Scott has the sudden and stunning realization that he’ll never be the same.

  It’s frantic, petrifying and he doesn’t know how to face it.

  A flood of memories washes over Scott in an instant. Evan shifts, crosses and uncrosses his legs, and suddenly Scott’s brain is alight with every time Evan had ever turned to look at him, every brush of hands and every hold on, stay there, just like that when he had fumbled for his camera to capture an incredibly mundane moment in stunning technicolor. Scott would know Evan blind, would know the way his footsteps hit the sand, the way the afternoon sun illuminates his face in profile, would know the curve of his shoulders in a crowd of a thousand people. Evan has become as much a part of Scott as he is himself, and that thought is all at once uplifting and terribly, achingly frightening.

  Evan breaks eye contact, rolls over and sits up slowly. Scott’s heart leaps into his mouth when Evan looks back up to squint blearily at him. He can feel his face shifting into a tender smile regardless of his attempts to school his expression, biting his lip. He’s never been like this. He could always be impassive, impossible to read. Evan draws every expression out with finesse, before Scott even realized he’s doing it, and then matches it in kind. Scott can feel the tenderness chased away, an uncertain sort of giddiness taking its place.

  God, he’s so beautiful. Scott never realized.

  Or, he thinks, maybe he had, and just never tried to admit it to himself.

  “Morning,” Scott says carefully, and then something in Evan seems to slot into place, waking up all at once like a switch has been flipped. His eyes blink open, going from bleary and half closed to alert, and something in his expression looks concerningly like a deer in headlights. He looks up at Scott, eyes wide.

  “Did we…?” he asks, trailing off in a way that makes it uncomfortably clear exactly what he’s asking. Scott feels his expression go tight and pinched when he registers the closed-off affectation in Evan’s voice.

  “Looks like it,” he says, careful to keep his voice flat. “I made you coffee, by the way.”

  Evan takes the cup Scott holds out to him, sipping at it with a pensive furrow to his eyebrows. He doesn’t look like he regrets it, Scott thinks, but he doesn’t seem overjoyed, not in the way that Scott had been earlier. It’s a far cry from the night before, when he had looked at Scott like he had hung the moon and the stars in the sky. Something in Scott’s chest aches. He wants that Evan back, the one that had been so vivid and open, not the one in front of him, so clearly trying to figure out how to close himself off again.

  It must be hard, Scott realizes with a shock, to strip yourself bare like that. Evan might have come back to Frances and Mitchell, sure, but only in the physical sense, really. He still acts like a scared cat, like an easily spooked bird, ready to run at the first sign that something might go wrong. Scott’s never seen him act around the girls like he had last night, voicing his feelings without a second thought, letting every one of them write itself across his face like a brand. He wants to be able to read Evan now, wants that strange ability Frances seems to have to know exactly what’s running through Evan’s head.

  All he can do, tho
ugh, is sit and watch Evan sip his coffee in silence.

  ***

  “Hey, April.”

  The drizzle has just begun to let up when he sits down in his usual spot, back to the gravestone, knees bent and separated with his arms resting between his thighs.

  “I thought I’d come and see you. It’s been a while.”

  The gravestone is silent. It always is.

  “You see,” he says, willing his voice not to crack. “You see, there’s something I think I need to apologize for. I think I let you down, and not in the way I usually do. It’s not like when I go out and forget to buy eggs but buy too many tomatoes, or when I leave the balcony door open and the wind knocks your papers off the desk.”

  He has to pause and take a shuddering breath. He didn’t think it would be this hard to talk to a dead girl.

  “I don’t think I’ve been very good to you, since you left. I let myself get caught up in everything, focused so much on all my problems that I forgot you always just wanted me to be happy.”

  April doesn’t reply, unsurprisingly.

  “And I think,” Scott continues, pushing on despite the growing lump in his chest. “I think I forgot how much I used to love you.” He swallows, fists his hands in the grass. “I think I forgot so much that I let myself fall in love with someone else.”

  Footsteps echo against the gravel and the headstones, and Scott whips his head around. All he can see for a moment is hair, long, dark hair, and his heart skips a beat before the image of April fizzles, shifts into Frances standing with an umbrella to keep the rain out of her hair.

  “I thought you might be here,” she says, her voice soft and gentle in the way people sound when they try to give children bad news. Scott doesn’t know how much she heard. “You’d better come with me.”

  “I was just—”

  “I know,” she says, and Scott notices the wrinkle in her brow, the tremor in her hands. “And I’m sorry to pull you away from her, it’s just that we can’t find Evan.”

  Scott’s heart sinks into the pit of his stomach like stone, dread branching out in ivy-like tendrils through his limbs. “What do you mean, you can’t find him?”

  “I mean, he was supposed to meet Mitchell and I for lunch and he isn’t answering his phone. He’s not at your apartment and Mitchell says he isn’t at his house either.” Frances’ tone is frantic, distraught, and suddenly Scott has a mental image of a Christmas five years before, of Frances waking up to find her best friend missing without a trace.

  “We’ll find him,” Scott says, reaching out in an attempt to soothe her as much as himself. “He’s not at my place?” Anymore, he almost adds, but stops himself at the last minute.

  “No, I went to check, but he’s—”

  Frances stops, cut off by the ring of a phone inside her purse, and Mitchell’s face smiles out in static when she checks the caller. For a moment, she glances at Scott, as if seeking some kind of permission. He nods, and she hits the green call button and lets Mitchell’s voice fill the space between them.

  “He’s gone back,” she says. “Caught a plane an hour ago.”

  Frances is silent. Scott feels something in his chest splinter into a hundred shards of glass.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The world keeps spinning. Scott’s life goes on, whether he wants it to or not, and it pulls him along with it.

  Everything around him seems like it’s painted in flat grays and blues now that Evan is gone.

  Scott opens the door to an empty apartment when he gets home, and tries steadfastly to pretend he hadn’t expected anything different. His dishes are still stacked in the sink, his spare coat draped over the back of the couch. A sock pokes out from beneath the coffee table, and he forces himself to forget how it had ended up there.

  The worst part of it all, he thinks, is how clear it was that Evan had tried to erase his presence. Scott’s things are stacked up, put away neatly in ways that Scott never would have done himself. If Evan wanted Scott to forget that he had been over at all, it would probably have been better just to leave the mess as it was. He cleans anyway, gathering things up from where Evan had put them and tucking them away into different corners of his apartment, just to scrub the feeling of displacement from the air.

  He nearly misses it, he’s so caught up in the melancholy of it all, and when he picks up the scrap of paper, he almost mistakes it for the note from the photo album. Violet ink is scribbled over one side of it, and Scott hates it, hates it because he knows that Evan doesn’t carry that pen around with him, that Evan must have gone home to write it and come back while Scott was out just to slip it underneath the door. He wonders how long Evan had been planning to leave.

  Scott—

  Sorry for ducking out on you like this. I tried not to be rude, I really did, but I couldn’t think of any other way around it. Don’t blame yourself for this. I know you will, but please don’t. I’m just the kind of person who runs away from things that are too good for him.

  Keep the jacket, it’s yours. You always wore it more than I did, anyway, and you’ll have a chance to give it back at some point even if I don’t know when that will be. I’ll try not to hide for too long.

  It’s funny, you know. You were the first thing in my life that I never wanted to run away from, and here I am anyway. Predictable.

  Don’t call. I’m going home for a bit and you’ll have to pay the international fees if you do. I’ll see you when I see you, I guess.

  Moving on is okay, but don’t forget, please.

  E.A.

  ***

  He crumples the note in his fist, throws it across the room. It bounces off the wall unceremoniously and falls to the ground without so much as rolling away.

  It takes a few hours for the anger and the hurt to subside enough, but he does call. He puts his phone on speaker so he doesn’t have to cradle it up against his face, listens to the ring go on and on and on before it clicks into Evan’s voicemail recording. Evan doesn’t pick up the next time he calls, either. He hits Frances’ name instead, lifts the phone to his ear and exhales a breath he didn’t know he was holding when the line clicks and Frances picks up.

  “I’m going after him,” she says, before he can manage to get a word out.

  “Okay.”

  Her tone is soft, apologetic when she speaks again. “I’ll get him back,” she whispers. “Don’t worry.”

  “I know you will,” he replies, because he does. He stays silent on the line until she hangs up with a whispered goodbye. When she does, he lets his hand fall to his side, the phone clattering to the floor loudly.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Scott doesn’t see him again until the summer.

  July sneaks up hot and humid, a layer of heat haze sticking to his skin no matter how many cold showers he takes. The air conditioning leaks out of his apartment little by little, leaving his entire living room just a few degrees past comfortable, and the sticky air outside is just shy of unbearable, so he finds himself spending more and more time in Mitchell’s coffee shop.

  She gives him glass after glass of cold water, which he appreciates, and doesn’t complain too much when he sits at the bar and distracts her from the handful of customers that trickle in over the hours. Every now and then she’ll put down her marker and lean over the counter a little, and they’ll just exist quietly together for a bit.

  “Have you heard from them?” Scott asks eventually, and Mitchell exhales a breath he hadn’t realized she was holding.

  “I got a call about a week ago,” she says. “From Frances. She’s in Paris. She left him behind in the Alps but she says he’ll catch up eventually.”

  Europe, then. Evan had left Scott with a faint clue of his plans, had said he would be flying out and he wasn’t sure when he would be back, but it still stings him every time he’s faced with any concrete proof that Evan is gone. He tries to listen to Mitchell when she tells him not to worry, really, but he still can’t shake the empty sort of feeling th
at claws its way up the insides of his chest when he remembers that Evan isn’t around.

  “They’re not gone for good, you know,” Mitchell says, reaching over to give Scott a light punch to the shoulder. It jerks him out of his thoughts, but the sinking feeling still sits heavy in his stomach like a stone. He washes it down with another sip of water. “It’s not like before. He’s not running away. He’ll be back.”

  Scott nods, even if he finds it a little hard to believe.

  “You liked him, didn’t you?” Mitchell asks after a moment, elbows rested on the countertop. “My brother.”

  Scott snorts. “Past tense doesn’t really cut it,” he says. “Was it that obvious?”

  “Not obvious, really,” Mitchell hums. “It’s just—it seems very like him to do something like this. He’s never been very good at facing other people’s feelings.”

  A memory crosses Scott’s mind, of Evan hesitant to even see his sister for fear she’d resent him. “So I’ve seen.”

  With a steely expression and a quick nod, Mitchell opens her mouth to speak again. “Well,” she says. “With that settled, I just want you to know you have my blessing, whatever that counts for. You’re good for him, Scott. Better than anyone else has been, better than Frances and I could be.”

  That manages to draw a smile out of Scott, and Mitchell brightens when she sees it.