“What are you still doing out here?” Casey demands, crossing his arms over his chest. “I thought you were going to go in, or back to the house?—”
“I didn’t want to be…” Will says, trying and failing to suppress a visible shudder. “…rude, or whatever. Just go barging in.” He pauses, and adds, “I mean, uh. Again.”
“Common sense just doesn’t run in your family, huh?” Casey mutters. Giving Will’s soaked, shivering form a brief once-over and shaking his head, he adds, “Come on, then!” He wheels around and starts stalking towards the house.
Will follows him a few steps behind. His thoughts, he notices, have slowed down considerably; though normally guilty of thinking about seventeen things at once, he is currently down to one at a time. They float past him lazily, in no hurry at all to make room for his next worry or idea or thing to say. One of them is the thought that heshouldsay something, but after some intense consideration, he dismisses it on merit of not knowing what.
So he follows Casey, feeling meek and foolish and extremely ridiculous, back across the field and through the copse of trees and up the stairs and across the porch of the house he, less than an hour ago, so emphatically ran away from. As he steps through the threshold behind Casey, pulling the door closed behind him, he mutters, “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Casey says, looking away, and sounding too uncomfortable to be saying it out of Midwestern politeness. “I wasn’t going to, like,leaveyou out there. You were…” He pauses, and swallows, before continuing. “You were blocking the road.”
“Right,” Will says, for some reason feeling a little scrape of disappointment he can’t quite place. “Traffic hazard. I get it.” He rubs his hands over his arms, willing the soaked fabric of his sweater to dry faster.
Casey gives him a doubtful look. “Sorry, but what are you doing, exactly?”
Will scowls at him. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m trying to speed up the drying process.”
“By method of rubbing?” Casey shakes his head; for a second, it almost looks like he’s trying not to smile. “That’s not a recommended approach in any of the survival books, you know.”
“Well, what other choice do I have?” Will snaps, nettled and cold and so uncertain of his footing here that he barely knows where to step at all, and so might as well be honest. “My clothes—these clothes, on my body—are the only clothes I’m wearing today! The rest of the stuff I brought is in my suitcase, which is in my hotel, which is forty-five minutes away, and if there’s anything left from when I was a teenager, it’s trapped behind Junk Mountain.” He pauses, and, considering, adds, “And, I mean, in fairness, it has been a long time; it probably wouldn’t fit me, anyway. So I have to make do with what I’vegot.”
“If only someone had invented a machine,” Casey says, in tones of mock thoughtfulness. “One that you could use to make wet clothes dry. Almost like a…hmm, what’s it called…dryer?”
Rolling his eyes and, crucially, not thinking before speaking, Will says, “I wouldloveto put these in the dryer, Casey, really, I would, but the thing is,again,they are the only clothes I’ve currently got, so unless you want me walking around the house naked?—”
Will pauses. And freezes. And tries, in a second that drips slow and thick through his mind like so much molasses, to tell himself that Casey didn’t hear it, or that he can somehow turn back time a crucial few seconds and wind the words right back into his mouth.
But Casey’s cheeks flush, anyway, the flare of crimson surprising Will almost as much as the way his expression flickers, from annoyance to surprise to something Will’s not sure how to interpret, but can’t look away from. Their eyes meet, and for a brief and beautiful instant, Will’s back in those first moments in the market, onlyyesterdaysomehow. He’s looking up at this unexpected, unlikely man, and seeing in his cool green gaze a whole host of possibilities Will normally wouldn’t even allow himself to consider.
Will hates Casey, of course. Maybe he didn’t the moment they met, but from the next moment, and in every moment since, he’s been insufferable and impossible; Will can’t stand the man, no doubt. But it’s occurring to him—he can’t, in fact, make itstopoccurring to him—thatlikingandwantingare not necessarily the same. That Will doesn’t have to like Casey atallto wish Casey would push him up against the doorframe, redirect all the grating, frustrating parts of his unfortunate personality into making him Will scream at him in a new, more productive way. That what Will wants to do with his clothes is neither wear nor dry them, but let Casey pull them off him one by one, ripping them if that’s what it takes, as they stumbletogether towards the nearest couch or bed or rug. That, in fact, the hungry look that has appeared in Casey’s eyes is all the more thrillingbecausethey don’t like each other; because whatever happened between them wouldn’t have to be nice, or polite, or considered, or appropriate. It’s not like anything has been between them so far, and in every other respect that’s been dreadful, but now it makes Will’s whole body thrum with a sort of nervous, anticipatory tension that reminds him, distantly, of riding a roller coaster.
Then Casey’s face shutters and, his voice suddenly remote, he says, “Yeah, probably for the best that you restrain yourself.”
Whatever strange feeling was swelling within Will like a balloon pops unceremoniously, leaving the confetti of his burgeoning hope strewn across his mind. Without another word, Casey crosses the hall, climbs the stairs, and disappears up to the second floor.
“Well, great,” Will mutters to himself. “That’s just great. I’ll stay here in the hallway then, freezing slowly to death, don’t worry about old Will, nothing to see here—” A thud on the stairs cuts him off, and Will whips his head up just in time to see the source of the second thud hit the hardwood. Curious, he approaches, and in spite of himself, knowing it’s idiotic and pointless and hardly worth it and setting himself up for embarrassment in any case, his stupid heart can’t help but beat a little faster in his stupid chest when he realizes what he’s looking at.
Casey has thrown down, from the second floor, a pair of sweatpants, a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and a towel.
EIGHT
Essentially the entire first floor of the farmhouse is visible to the outside world, at least if you choose the right window; Will, resigned to his fate, scoops up the clothes and heads for the Lime.
The Lime had once been known as the Lime Green Powder Room. This, to the best of Will’s handed-down knowledge, had been in the 1970s, when the house had been under Jillian’s control—it was an era where a certain sort of woman in late middle age went wild and painted low-stakes rooms green, and when people still said “powder room” instead of “bathroom” or “toilet.” Jillian had been shooting for a reasonable, respectable shade of sage, but what she had ended up with was a sickly, almost-neon green bathroom, which evoked nothing more than the sense of being in a chemical accident. Unable to afford a new round of paint, she’d quite emphatically insisted that the color was a very intentional selection of lime green, and things had proceeded accordingly. By the time Will was a child, the bathroom had been referred to as “the Lime” for so long that he’d thought, for years longer than was acceptable, that a lime was another name for a toilet.
He walks in now, already pulling his sodden sweater and shirt off over his head, grateful to be rid of them. He makes quick work of stripping down and drying off, shimmying into the clothes Casey tossed down to him with a groan of gratitude—he’d almost forgotten what it was like to be both warm and dry. He sits down on top of the closed toilet for a second, taking a deep breath, reveling in the sensation of basic comfort. Looking down at himself, he starts to smile; he is, he realizes, wearing head-to-toe farm merchandise. Kudos to Casey, he’s guessed Will’s sizing right; every piece of bright red, clearly holiday-themed clothing fits him perfectly, and something about that is oddly satisfying, for reasons he’s not prepared to consider. He settles, instead, for glancing around him with the smug self-satisfaction he’d never risk if anyone had any chance of seeing him.
It bears strange fruit, this little moment of smugness, because after a second, Will notices the Lime is…different.
It takes him a while to place it, but the color hits him first. The green is the wrong shade—the color that assaulted one’s eyes while using the facilities in the Lime was not a good color, but it was unforgettable. If lime green could vomit, was the experience…or maybe if an olive and a yellow highlighter had a child.
The color on the walls now is green. Not the strange, unsettling green of before—this is a bright, clear yellow-forward green you’d find on the rind of an actual lime. It even shifts, Will notices as he looks around the small bathroom, yellower in some places and more chartreuse in others, like the skin of an actual lime.
Will stands at this point, and leans in close to be sure—oh, wow, there’stexture.The particular stippled texture of citrus rind, worked into the wall. It must have taken someoneagesto do, and…
God. “Someone.” As if Will doesn’t know exactly who itwas. As if Will couldn’t just walk upstairs and ask him about it. “Hey, seems like you did something really awesome and interesting with an inside joke my family left alone out of amusement and then simmering resentment for fifty-odd years, good for you,” might not be the best conversation opener, but it wouldn’t be the worst, either. Would it be better or worse than, “Hey, it seems like you do all kinds of weird, interesting art projects around here—that’s neat, don’t you think? I think it’s neat, anyway, unless that makes you hate me even more, in which case I feel totally neutral about it and forget I said anything at all.” What about a good, old fashioned, “Hey, it seems like we got off on the wrong foot, is there any chance you’re kind of a cool person? Because I’m not, but hey, if you are, that might be nice.”
It doesn’t come to that, anyway. As Will leaves the Lime behind, a pile of wet clothes balanced precariously in one hand and soaked shoes in the other, a knock sounds at the front door.
