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Austin chuckled. “A lot.” He looked up at the cloudy night sky. “Fuck, I don’t even know where to start.”
“How about at the beginning?” I said just as we broke through the silk alley and into the clearing that held a few perfectly placed benches, looking out across the creek and toward the thick forest line. Fireflies twinkled over the water, floating past us, one landing on my shirt as we sat.
“We met when we were both eighteen—”
“Ah, right when my memory loss starts. Perfect.”
“We never did have good timing.”
“Clearly,” I said, earning another chuckle from him. “How’d we meet? Was it through an app? A friend? The circus?”
“Close with all three, actually.”
My head snapped to the side. “What? Really?”
“No, of course not,” Austin said, laughing louder this time.
Damn. I really liked that sound.
“We met at the Bear Lodge on their eighteen-and-up nights. One of your friends was over twenty-one and kept sneaking us drinks in the bathrooms. We got trashed and ended up leaving the bar early, but we didn’t get far. We could still hear the music and started dancing next to my car for like half an hour. It was nice.”
“It sounds nice.” And it made me angry I couldn’t remember it. The first time Austin and I met was this morning in the pet store, no bars or parking lot dances involved.
Except it wasn’t. I couldn’t let my reality become warped because of my accident. I closed my eyes and let the anger I was holding on to float away. With my mind blank, I asked Austin to describe the night. “Everything about it. Down to what we were wearing.”
And so he did. He painted a picture as vivid as any hanging up in my house right now, showing smiling moments with family and friends, Austin missing in all of them.
Not this one. Austin described everything about the first night we met. How he was wearing a blue-and-white plaid shirt with khaki pants and had thought he put on too much Abercrombie & Fitch cologne only to be complimented by me later on in the night for how good he smelled. He talked about my friends, two of them who were my roommates to this day.
“They didn’t know about us,” Austin explained. “No one did. We kept things secret.”
I opened my eyes then. In Austin’s, I could see a clear river of pain, and it wasn’t the reflection from the creek. His lids were narrowed, brow furrowed and back stiff.
“It was my decision to keep it secret, wasn’t it?” I already knew the answer to my question, but I still asked it.
“Yeah,” Austin said. He rolled his head, and I could hear his neck pop. I doubt it did anything to ease the tension.
“Fuck,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was… well, I’ve been told that I was really deep in the closet. Apparently I was scared of making my dad upset.”
“Terrified.” He let out a deep breath. “Charlie, you don’t have to apologize. What happened sucks major donkey dick, there’s no denying that, but it happened, and whatever happens in the past is as unchangeable as the water flowing down that mountain and through that creek.”
It was my turn to laugh. It came out uncontrolled and spread to Austin, even though I could tell he wasn’t exactly sure what we were laughing at.
“You’re a regular Pluto.”
“You mean Plato?” Austin gently corrected.
“Plato.” And then we both laughed some more, and I found myself liking that sound even more than just his laugh alone. “Whatever, man, you know what I meant.”
“Clearly,” Austin said, smile still wide. “I always do.”
“Yeah, I’m starting to see that.”
The laughter died down, but the giddy feeling in my chest only got stronger. Our knees did that awkward thing where they kind of bumped and we both left them together for two seconds before we snapped our legs shut. How weird was that? A man who I had been intimate with—at least I thought (hoped? prayed?)—and yet I was nervous about leaving my leg against his for too long.
Life, man. It was fucking weird.
A question rose to my lips. “Was that night at the Bear Lodge the night we had our first kiss?”
Austin huffed another laugh, this one sounding a little self-deprecating. “Funny you ask. No, no it wasn’t. Our first kiss was here, actually.”
That made my eyebrows jerk up across my forehead. “Here? Like in this park?”
“Like on this bench.”
I turned to him, my knee against his and me not giving a fuck anymore. “You’re joking,” I said, jaw cracked.
He shook his head, smile a half slant on his face, matching the half sliver of moon that popped through the clouds. He looked so damn good. A dream of a man. The way the moonlight briefly highlighted his cheekbones and grin and gem-like hazel eyes almost put me under a spell. I didn’t particularly have a type when it came to guys; I liked them all. I could always find something I liked about a dick, and usually about the man attached to it.
