“Great,” says Casey, beaming at him. Will smiles back, helpless not to in the face of Casey’s expression, though his own goes somewhat queasy when, out of the corner of his eye, he notices Meredith suddenly looking very amused.
If other people are able to tell how I feel about this,Will thinks with sudden, crystalline clarity,I will walk north until I am fully submersed in Lake Erie and see if there’s any truth to the rumors of lake monsters. They can have their merry way with me! Take me away, boys!
“Can I,” Will says, as he waves an awkward goodbye to a now-grinning Mere without making eye contact with her, then starts to follow Casey through the gathering crowd of the party, “grab a drink, maybe? I think I might really need a drink.”
“You can get one where we’re going,” Casey says. As they pass it, Will looks wistfully at the bartender’s table he himself, six hours before, stocked with his own favorite brands of alcohol; he considers ducking over while Casey isn’t paying attention and at least grabbing a beer. But Casey must sense it; he looks over his shoulder at Will, and snorts, and then reaches over and grabs Will’s wrist like it’s nothing, like he doesn’t even think about it. “Comeon. After the two weeks we’ve had, I think we can do a little better than one of Jared Eckles’ mixed drinks.”
Casey’s hand is warm around his wrist, the meat of his palm flush against the suddenly rushing estuaries of Will’s veins, his fingers flexing a little with every step; Will can’t think about that. If he does, he’ll stop talking, and stop moving, and juststand here like stone, transfixed. If nothing else, Casey would be bound to notice that. So…
“You said Jared was a good bartender!” Will protests, outraged. He does so in a hiss, so that Jared won’t overhear them and be offended. “This morning! I said we needed a good bartender, and you said Jaredwasa good bartender?—”
“You said you neededabartender, and I said Jared wasabartender,” Casey corrects, slanting a grin over his shoulder. “Which he is! He’s a fine and affordable bartender, who will get you serviceably drunk on cocktails that taste fine at the beginning of the night, and then progressively less good as he, himself, gets drunker.” At Will’s little squawk of outrage, Casey adds, in relenting tones, “He’s also the only game in town, unless you want to hire in one of those companies from Akron to send somebody down. And he’s fine, really; nobody here will mind or be surprised by any of Jared’s drinks. I just…think we might be able to do a little better, that’s all.”
God, he still hasn’t let go of Will’s wrist, is pulling him through the crowd now. Somewhere, somebody’s started playing some music over the speakers—Noel, probably, since the music is decidedly teenage for about twenty seconds before the track is abruptly switched to something more upbeat, and involving fewer swear words—and as they walk, people around them begin to dance. Some are just bobbing loosely to the music, but others are pairing off, laughing and swinging one another around, happy in that way music and a warm night and good company can bring out in people. It’s so simple, and yet to Will always feels so monumental, so important. Maybe it’s because he grew up without much of it, and struggles now both to find it and to be part of it when he does track it down, the way an animal raised in captivity can forget the basic instincts it was born with. Perhaps it’s because itdoesfeel like a basic instinct human beings are born with, some intrinsic part of the experience for as long as people have been people: the urge togather, and dance, and laugh, relish the simple joy of being with others.
God, I’ve been lonely for a long time, Will thinks, and then, out loud, says, “You know, I think I need that drink quite badly now.”
“Is Noah Anderson’s dancing really so disturbing to you?” Casey asks, his eyes sparkling with amusement.
“No, it’s not that—” Will starts to say, but then he follows Casey’s leading gaze to the owner of Anderson’s Bike Shop, who is doing something that is clearly an attempt at the Worm, but might, generously, be called the Unfortunate Piece of String. He corrects himself: “Uh, sorry, itisactually that. What?—?”
“He does it at every party,” Casey says, in as low a voice as he can while still being audible, with an amused little shrug. “Thinks he’s killing it. Nobody has the heart to tell him—ah, here we are.” He drops Will’s wrist at last, and Will looks up in surprise at the large pile of wood they had thrown together this afternoon, sitting ready to be set ablaze.
Will eyes it dubiously. “You put a bar in there while I wasn’t paying attention?”
Casey laughs, but something about the quality of it draws Will’s attention; his gaze flicks sharply away from the woodpile, up to Casey’s face. He looks—nervous, Will realizes, after a second. It takes him a moment to place it because he’s so unused to seeing that emotion from Casey; isn’t sure, now that he thinks about it, that he ever has before.
“Sort of,” Casey admits, and pulls something long and thin out of the little bag of supplies he tucked next to the woodpile early in the afternoon. “We have to light it with something, and it would be a little symbolic, and I was going to show, uh…Bill, to be honest with you, a while ago, but he wasn’t, uh…he wasn’t always?—”
“I get the sense he wasn’t always…super with it?” Will says,very carefully. They haven’t talked about this—Will hasn’t asked because, if he’s honest, he hasn’t been entirely sure he wants to hear it—but the agonized shift in Casey’s tone seems to pull the words from his mouth as though caught on a wire.
“Yeah,” Casey says, on a long, low breath. “Yes.” He pauses, and then, unceremoniously, sticks out his hand and offers Will the bottle for inspection. “Anyway, it’s ice cider. Like ice wine, except apples, and not grapes. It’s not easy to make; you have to freeze the apples, and it takeswaymore apples than regular cider does, and then it has to ferment and age, and it took me a while to work out the flavor balance the way I wanted it, get the mix right. But the alcohol content is way higher than regular cider, and not a lot of people make it, and I thought it might…bring in more money, you know, then the standard hard cider does. It’s a more specialized product, right? And it’sgood, or, I think it’s good. If you don’t think it’s good, that’s fine, but it took me a few years to make, so maybedon’ttell me?—”
“Oh my God, stop talking about it and give me ataste, if that’s how you’re going to be,” Will says, his eyes wide as he stares from Casey to the bottle.
Casey laughs, and shakes his head, and pulls two little shot glasses from a side pouch in the bag—just two. Will eyes them, his analytical brain whirring. It’s not like Will just happened to stumble upon him out here, or like Will was the first person Casey could find to try this with him; Casey planned this. He put the bottle and the glasses here hours ago, he came andfound Will,pulled him all the way across the party, sought specifically him to share this moment with.
A little dizzily, Will tries to remember the last time someone did that, and is embarrassed to realize that the closest thing he can think of is Selma inviting him to cheer her on in the Chicago marathon. It’s not that it hadn’t been an honor, in a way, to stand in one spot for three hours with Selma’s girlfriend at the time, a woman who was very passionate about essentialoils, in order to eventually hand Selma a bottle of Gatorade and watch her run away, but it hadn’t felt quite so…personal.
Thisdoesfeel personal, in a way Will’s not sure how to parse—or, at least, in a way Will can’t help but parse in a singular and very particular fashion, one that will make him look very, very foolish if he’s wrong. To Will’s eye, it seems…well, it seems likesomethingof a romantic thing to do, doesn’t it, dragging him out here, making such a point of sharing this with him? It doesn’t seem, for example, like something you might do with someone youreallythought of as your loathed enemy, or upon whom you wished, to list only one of the things Will imagined Casey wished for him only a few weeks ago, slow death by aggressive foot infection. It seems like the sort of thing you might do if you wanted someone to… If you wanted them to think…
Thank God, Casey is handing Will one of the shot glasses before he can finish that thought. “Thanks,” Will says, and then holds his breath as Casey leans close to pour Will’s shot—is he leaning closer than necessary, Will wonders, or does he just feel a little drunk every time he’s inside the bubble of Casey’s personal space? Either way, it’s over before Will can work out an answer, Casey stepping back to fill his own glass and set the bottle carefully down on the nearest flat patch of earth.
Will wrestles back the urge to close the space between them again, saying instead, “So, um. Are we toasting?”
“It’s your farm,” Casey says, with a shrug. His voice is pained, Will notices, but differently than it was around this topic a week ago. Less angry; more wistful. “So maybe you should make the toast.”
Will meets him shrug for shrug, then gaze for gaze. “Ah, but it’s your cider, right? And I’ve never been much of one for toasts, anyway. I’ve always been happier letting someone else handle it.”
Casey holds his gaze for a long moment, an assessing qualityslipping into his expression that Will notices there, just sometimes, and usually from the very corner of his own eye. Then, slowly, his mouth quirks, and he lifts the glass and says, “Okay, then. Here’s to absent friends, and twice to absent enemies.”
“Ha,” Will says, his own mouth twisting, before he can stop himself. He shouldn’t, really—he’s not even quite sure what Casey means by saying it—but it’s one of his own favorite toasts, and it feels, in this moment, apropos. He thinks of Catherine Rose; of the Casey he met two weeks ago who seems like a distant memory; of his family, and his father. He wonders, wanting to laugh, which of them he’s drinking twice for.
But he would drink twice, would drink four times, quite happily. The ice cider isgood,the flavor suggesting an unholy union between apple juice, woodsmoke, and deep, nearly burnt caramel, and Will savors it in little sips rather than throwing it back. “God,” he breathes, when he’s done. “I’ve never had anything like it, it’s—wonderful.”
“Right?” Casey says, grinning brightly at him. “It’s a Canadian thing. I spent a few summers up there, long time ago, that’s where I first tried it—so people down here mostly don’t know about it. But I was going to, before it all… Before everything. I thought I’d present it to Bill or…whatever, you know, and see if we couldn’t set up a real operation here. I ran the numbers and I thought it might make us more, maybe a lot more, than the traditional cider alone.” He pauses for a moment, his face tight, and then the expression smooths out as he sighs. “But things played out differently, and that’s life, right? You can’t know how it’s going to go. It seemed a waste, though, after all that work, not to at least try the prototype, and it’s yours now, technically. I did it all in the farm’s name, so.”
“Casey,” Will starts, gobsmacked, not sure where to begin. But before he can say anything, Noel and Todd are bustling up, demanding to know if it’s time to start the fire yet, and saying people are asking when the fire will be starting, and pointing outthat the sun is down and they’re right here and have they considered starting the fire?
