She pushed her laptop away and grabbed her phone, sliding her finger across the screen to open her messages.
Chelsea Cavanaugh 9/18 10:01 p.m.
Please be awake
Daisy Yuen 9/18 10:02 p.m.
Always awake
Chelsea Cavanaugh 9/18 10:02 p.m.
I loved Shannon once, a lot, too much. I loved him so much I wanted to rip it out of me and throw it away. Where did it go? How can love change that quickly?
Daisy Yuen 9/18 10:04 p.m.
I thought you told me you sorted this out with yourself
Chelsea Cavanaugh 9/18 10:05 p.m.
I did! I’m confused. I don’t know if I’m loving people the correct way.
Daisy Yuen 9/18 10:06 p.m.
There’s no wrong way to love a person. Unless you still like love him like LOVE him then we need to talk.
Chelsea Cavanaugh 9/18 10:08 p.m.
No, not IN love, but love. In general.
Daisy Yuen 9/18 10:09 p.m.
Are you okay? Do you want to meet for ice cream?
Chelsea Cavanaugh 9/18 10:10 p.m.
That would be easier
Daisy ordered a cone topped with one scoop dark chocolate chunk, one scoop white vanilla mint for her and Chelsea to share.
She didn’t really know what she was doing at the ice cream shop off Main in the middle of the night, but they’d gotten there just before the shop closed. She knew she was there because her heart had dropped unceremoniously into her stomach when Chelsea had texted her. Every fear had become tangible, every ounce of worry and shred of self-doubt had stampeded over her as she lay on the couch and looked at her phone.
What Daisy realized as she managed to hold the text conversation while crying angrily by herself with Mercy licking her toes, was that Chelsea wasn’t proving every single one of Daisy’s fears right: She was expressing the living, breathing essence of her own. Chelsea feared loving Shannon too much or too little because she didn’t understand it, she couldn’t pick it apart like an article, or break it down like a math problem. It just was, in its silence and obscurity, a part of her.
“I don’t love him, Daisy,” Chelsea snapped, a bright, embarrassed flush darkening her cheeks. “I just… I love him, he’s important to me, like Aiden is important to you and I don’t know how to deal with that. I don’t know what it means.”
“It means he’s your best friend,” Daisy said. She licked across the ice cream cone.
“I know that. I know he’s my best friend, but how is it possible for me to love him? Once you date someone and break up, either you’ll always love them or you never did, right? That’s why people aren’t friends after they date?”
Daisy rolled her eyes. “Do you actually believe that shit?”
“I don’t know. The only people who ever told me they loved me after I turned thirteen were my grandmother, Shannon, and Shannon’s parents.”
She held the ice cream cone to her mouth and paused, replaying the last sentence over again in her mind. Vanilla mint dripped down her chin. She swiped it away and handed the cone to Chelsea, who watched her with wide, honest eyes.
It dawned on her that Chelsea really didn’t understand it. She didn’t know. This was Chelsea’s battle: her old lies coming back to fight with her.
“Of course you can love him, Chelsea.” Daisy lowered her voice, suppressing the irritation that kept rising, urging her to say the things she wanted to say, the things that would hurt and couldn’t be taken back. Why the fuck did you let them do this to you? Why didn’t you leave a long time ago? But Chelsea couldn’t answer those questions, and even though they festered in Daisy, she would never ask them. “It’s okay to love someone at one point in your life and then recognize the changes you’ve both made, and love them still. It’s not impossible, and it doesn’t mean that you never loved him or that your feelings weren’t genuine. That’s what you’re worried about, right? That you lied to him.”
Chelsea licked the top of the cone and nodded; her brows pinched together.
“I love Aiden, but I don’t love Aiden like I…” Love you. “It’s a different type of love. It’s not like I want to…” Daisy fit her hands together and wiggled her fingers, trying to find any other term besides fuck or screw or sleep with or make love to—the lineup of words made her cringe.
“No,” Chelsea hollered. She kicked Daisy under the table, catching onto what she was trying to say. “Of course not!” Her face burned, and she took a bite of the chocolate ice cream, since they’d worked through the mint. “I would never—no, god. That’s my point. I don’t have those feelings anymore, but I still…”
“Don’t kick me,” Daisy snarled, swinging the toe of her boot at Chelsea’s shin. “You’re allowed to love him, Chelsea. You don’t need anyone’s permission. You don’t need mine. It isn’t an issue unless you want to crawl in bed with him—good luck getting past Aiden,” she added and snorted a laugh, “and you don’t need your parent’s permission or the guy who served us our ice cream’s permission or Karman’s or anyone’s—no one! You don’t have to explain yourself to the world. You can love him as a friend; you can love him until it hurts and it still counts. Trust me, I would know. I’ve loved someone so much it broke my heart, and he’s my absolute best friend. I don’t bother trying to explain that to anyone. You don’t need to explain your friendship with Shannon to anyone.”
“But you know that it’s not—”
“I know,” Daisy hissed. She scooted her chair over until their shoulders were pressed together. “If that’s what you’re worried about, I get it. And thank you for…” She made another wild gesture with one hand. “… the transparency.”
Chelsea sucked on the melting bottom of the ice cream and bit off a chunk of cone. “This chocolate is really good,” she said, doing what she always did and changing the subject.
They ate their ice cream with intermissions of chuckles or snorts. Chelsea wiped a fingerprint of ice cream on Daisy’s face, and Daisy pressed a sticky kiss against Chelsea’s cheek.
It wasn’t until the ice cream was gone and Chelsea was wiping a chocolate stain from Daisy’s cheek that the gravity of the conversation sank in.
Chelsea inhaled a deep breath and held it.
Daisy waited, her hand clasped over Chelsea’s knee, lips moving across her jaw to her bare shoulder.
“I’m a bit of a mess, Daisy,” Chelsea confessed. “And I’m sorry for that.”
Daisy kissed her shoulder. Her neck. Her jaw. She placed her hands on either side of Chelsea’s face and kissed her gently on the mouth. “Aren’t we all?”
23
Three hundred sixty-five days.
It’d been one year: one autumn, one winter, one spring, and one summer. It’d crept in on him in his sleep, stirring Shannon into bolting from his dreams. He sprang up, gripped his knees, and inhaled a shaky breath. It’d been one entire year.
How they both allowed it to slip by without paying any attention was marginally embarrassing, but Shannon wasn’t thinking about that. He dismissed the thoughts spinning in the back of his mind and focused on everything that was right in front of him.
“What’s wrong?” Aiden said, suddenly alert. He reached for Shannon’s wrist and curled his fingers around it. “Bad dream?”
Shannon coughed over a laugh and pawed at his eyes, shaking his head leisurely from side to side. “What’s the date?”
“What?” Aiden spat. He groaned and curled into Shannon’s side, nudging his forehead against the edge of Shannon’s shoulder. “It’s two in the morning; go to sleep.”
“It’s October second. We missed our own anniversary.”
Shannon looked at Aiden and found Aiden looking back.
“Put your eyebrows down, I’m serious,” Shannon added.
Aiden’s brows dropped, and he lifted onto his elbows
, measuring Shannon with calculating, sharp eyes. On most occasions his inability to sleep made Aiden into one of two things. One, he was a corpse. There was no waking him when he had finally fallen asleep, and if he was awakened, he was only half-alive. Two, he was this, awake as if he’d never been asleep, awake as a shark or a hungry nightmare, awake as an addict. Shannon saw his cheek cave in, sucked between Aiden’s back teeth.
“Yeah,” Shannon said. His accent made everything sound sweeter. “What’re you thinking about?”
“I never considered tonight our anniversary,” Aiden said.
Shannon tilted his head and waited.
Aiden obviously wasn’t finished talking, but he paused, giving Shannon a moment to absorb his statement. It wasn’t until it’d been said twice that Shannon realized how odd it was. Anniversary. It had always been a stupid, juvenile thing to him. Anniversaries were for movies and flowers and dinner at a restaurant with candles on the tables. The only anniversaries he’d ever celebrated were with Chelsea. They went to the fanciest Italian place in Milford, which wasn’t very fancy at all, and after dessert pretended they knew what they were doing in the bed of Shannon’s truck for a whole twenty minutes.
This, he realized, was a first of firsts.
“Get your keys,” Aiden said.
Shannon wasn’t sure what the silence between I never considered tonight our anniversary and get your keys meant, but he imagined it meant something. He didn’t bother trying to figure out what Aiden was getting at or arguing with him, so he asked, “Where are we going?”
“Wherever you want,” Aiden said.
They dressed quickly and clumsily, bouncing off each other as they tugged on their shoes. Aiden pulled on a black beanie and Shannon ran his hands through his hair, attempting to tame it. Shannon was awake, but the world turned slowly enough to be dreamlike. He handed Aiden the keys, slumped into the passenger seat, and ignored his seatbelt. The twilight sensation of being awake and asleep at the same time was something Shannon rarely experienced, but as he watched Aiden from his side of the Jeep Cherokee, he found himself wondering if this was the kind of universe Aiden wandered in: being awake but not fully and asleep but not fully, stepping halfway out of a dream.
Aiden glanced over. “Where to?”
“You choose.”
“Turn on music,” Aiden said, and Shannon did.
Laguna Beach passed by in intervals of palm trees, dark buildings, darker streets, and the darkest ocean. Shannon noticed how alive everything was at night with the wind snapping at the windshield and fog clinging to the shoreline. He’d almost forgot what the dark was like when he was a part of it rather than an outsider trying to look in.
Aiden stopped the car in a beachside parking lot on the south side of town. It was a local’s beach, Table Rock, and the parking lot wasn’t really a lot at all, but a two-lane street that curved around a neighborhood. The headlights died. Music played, too low to be distinguishable; the fuzzy sound was the background noise to their conversation.
“Why are we here?” Shannon asked.
Down a steep concrete staircase was a deserted beach, and from their spot against the curb, Shannon saw the white foam of waves crawling up the sand.
A sigh was Aiden’s answer, along with the click of his seatbelt coming loose, and his long legs as he hoisted over the center console and rested in Shannon’s lap.
“I didn’t forget,” Aiden whispered. “It just came and went, and I didn’t want to make a big deal out of something that wasn’t…”
Shannon touched his calf and catalogued his expression as it changed. Aiden’s pupils dilated, and his lips tightened into a line before they relaxed again, parting to let out a soft sigh.
“Our finest moment,” Aiden concluded. He blinked and Shannon followed the trail of his lashes as they connected and swept upward.
Aiden gripped the seat behind Shannon’s shoulder with one hand and touched Shannon’s face with the other. Three fingers brushed his mouth, pressed on Shannon’s lips, trailed over his jaw, and cradled the side of his neck. Shannon tried to remember this experience from a year ago. He pieced the image together—Aiden on top of him, hand clamped over his chin, gaze hard and unwavering. He felt the burn in his chest from that night—adrenaline exploding like fireworks beneath his skin—and he remembered Aiden kissing him.
A year didn’t seem that long ago.
“I thought about it, but I didn’t know how you’d feel about doing something. Celebrating,” Shannon said, leaning back as Aiden tugged off his tank and tossed it in the back seat. Everything was still outside the car, bathed in a blackness that only the witching hours could provide. Shannon gripped Aiden’s ribs. “Then I didn’t realize it’d come and gone. Why don’t you consider this our anniversary?”
“Because of Halloween,” Aiden said. His voice was crisp against Shannon’s ear, intimate in a way that could only be intimate in the middle of the night, in the front seat of a car, on a night they’d both mutually avoided. “That’s when you decided.”
“Decided?”
“On me,” Aiden clarified. His teeth scraped over the T-shirt covering Shannon’s shoulder. “A year ago tonight we started running from each other, but on Halloween last year, you decided to stop running.”
“I chased you down, actually,” Shannon said playfully. “But a year ago tonight you kissed me for the first time. That has to count for something.”
“Yeah, it was a shitty kiss,” Aiden said, laughing against Shannon’s neck.
“You must be remembering it differently than I am.”
“You thought the Clock was wrong.” He pressed the words right below Shannon’s ear, a scalding hot brand. “You told me—”
“I was wrong, not the Clock,” Shannon blurted. “I was scared of you, darlin’.”
Aiden had changed in the last few months. He was not him, but him. The first time they’d been like this, with Aiden’s knees close to Shannon’s hips and Aiden’s torso pressed along Shannon’s stomach, Aiden had been coltish and strong. He’d had jagged bone that ground into Shannon and clavicles that stuck out beneath his shirt. Now he was more than bone and angularities. The MMA gym and his new obsession with running had carved his body into a replica of his personality: sinewy, rigid, and sharp.
Shannon ran his hands along Aiden’s stomach. “Do you know what you did to me that night? You completely wrecked me,” he said through a breath. “I couldn’t concentrate after that. I barely managed to focus on work; I couldn’t do anything. I thought about you constantly.”
“When’d you think about me most?” Aiden murmured.
Lips touched Shannon’s temple, the top of his cheek, and hovered over his mouth. Aiden watched him and swallowed hard when Shannon’s fingers caught the edge of his sweatpants.
“It’s hard to say.” Shannon felt Aiden press closer; his hips reached for Shannon’s hand. “Usually when I was alone, but it didn’t matter. I could be at work, sleeping, taking a shower. What about you? Did you think about me?”
Aiden smirked, his lips twisting and eyes glinting. “Yeah, I thought about you,” he said haughtily.
They were playful until they weren’t. It was Shannon and Aiden having a two-way-mirror conversation until it was Shannon sliding his hand roughly between Aiden’s legs. A weak sound was Aiden’s response, gasped and choked, taken off-guard. Aiden gripped his shoulder, tried to catch his breath with his mouth pressed against Shannon’s cheek, and snuffed out any virtue of shyness. Aiden’s hips canted and rolled into Shannon’s palm; his stomach clenched and his back arched. They knew what they’d come here to do, and still Shannon said, “We should go back home.”
Aiden leaned back just enough to rid Shannon of his shirt. “No, if this is a re-do and we’re acknowledging tonight as our anniversary, we’re doing it right.”
Shannon’s head spun as Aiden mouthed at his throat.
His body reacted—muscle memory—when Aiden fit their hips together. The movements of Aiden’s body, every roll of his stomach and tilt of his pelvis, still surprised him. He moved like a dancer or the ocean or a storm, all of it combined, everything at once.
Mouths met in a hurry and slowed after the impact. Aiden flicked Shannon’s jeans open and somehow, with a precision Shannon appreciated but could never replicate, slid out of his sweats without leaving Shannon’s lap.
“When’d you get that flexible?” Shannon said against Aiden’s mouth, accommodating another deep, hungry kiss.
Timid laughter vibrated his lips. “This is supposed to be sexy and spontaneous; stop talking,” Aiden rasped.
Again, the playfulness turned fierce. Shannon’s breath caught in his throat, the drag and pull of Aiden grinding their hips together followed their lips, pressing and parting for air. Aiden’s hands glided Shannon’s shoulders, and Shannon’s hands settled low on Aiden’s back.
After this they would go home, Shannon would get him into bed, and they would repeat, repeat, repeat. They would wake up, and Shannon would make coffee, and Aiden would say something crude to dismiss what had happened. Shannon would listen, and they would laugh, but they’d remember what it really was—rewriting their first meeting.
Because in reality it was this: Aiden Maar and Shannon Wurther giving themselves to each other in the most intimate way, on a night that was etched into their bones, in the car where it all started, enjoying the youth they still clung to as they clung to one another.
Aiden’s palm hit the window, and he kissed Shannon hard.
It was this: Shannon Wurther still wondering what he did to deserve Aiden Maar, and Aiden Maar proving again and again how right the Clock really was.
24
Wind whipped and howled. Leaves skittered across the toes of Daisy’s pointed black boots. Almost-naked tree branches chattered restlessly as day faded into night. She held a small, disposable cup of hot cider in her hands with the lid pressed under her septum ring. The scent of sweet apple and cinnamon snuck over the tip of her nose, reminding her of every year she’d been the trick-or-treat chaperone for her siblings and every house party or gathering at The Hollow that’d followed.
Curved Horizon Page 20
