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I saw the corner of his lip quirk up before he faced forward again, and I snuggled against his back as he hit the throttle. The air whooshed around me, and my adrenaline spiked. I’d expected fear to seep in, but instead, it was elation. Riding on the back of this motorcycle was hands down the most electrifying thing I’d ever done.
We wove down the tree-lined, winding road, my hair whipping in the wind behind me. I felt so free. So alive. Like I was untouchable and nothing bad in this world could ever reach me. And the crazy thing was, I couldn’t even be sure if it was because of the motorcycle or if it was thanks to the man steering it.
I didn’t have a watch, but I was pretty sure we’d been driving about twenty minutes when Will slowed and turned down a familiar road. My heart jumped into my throat. I suddenly knew where we were going. After a moment, the trees on either side of us opened up to reveal a beautiful field of dandelions and wildflowers. And just beyond that was a lake with a wooden dock. A dock that held so many memories for both of us.
He pulled up to the lake and killed the engine, leaving nothing but the silence of seclusion hanging in the air around us. The sun was low in the sky and cast an ethereal glow over the lake. I let go of his waist, my fingers shaking as I reached up to unbuckle the helmet. Quickly realizing that I was too nervous and too green to get it undone by myself, I decided to get off the bike and let him do it for me.
I took his offered hand and swung off the bike, trying for agile but probably just looking silly. Will took off his own helmet and then reached up to unclip mine without a moment’s pause.Victory.
When the helmet left my head, I shook out my hair, worried that it was matted and mussed. His jaw twitched as he watched me, then shook his head and hung each helmet from the handlebars before dismounting with a graceful sweep of his leg.
“You remember this place?” he asked, nodding at the dock.
“I do.”Boy, did I ever.
I smiled as I looked around, memories coming back to me, playing in my mind’s eye like old movie reels. We may have taken the main road to get here, but when we were kids, we’d cut through the trees from our neighborhood. Paul, Will, and I used to come here and skip stones, swim, play hopscotch on the dock, and just be kids. Then, when we got older, this place became both a party spot for large groups of teens and a quiet place for long talks into the night.
One night in particular, when we were barely old enough to wrap our heads around what a scary place the world could be, Paul and I finally found out the hard truth about what was going on in the house next door. That night, after Will had gone a few rounds with his dad, he’d thrown pebbles at Paul’s window until he woke up. Seeing Will’s bloody face had caused my brother to rouse me for help, and we’d patched him up on the porch before coming here to finally learn exactly how much our friend had been keeping from us.
But I knew that sad memory wasn’t the reason he’d brought me here tonight. Instead, it was because this place was as familiar and comforting to us as the tree house that once loomed in my own backyard. This lake had swallowed up the darkness of his confessions that night and replaced them with the peace that came from letting us in. In the end, it remained a safe space in our hearts.
“Come on.” He took my hand without waiting for a reply and tugged me toward the dock.
When we reached the end of the wooden structure, he kicked off his boots and removed his socks, cuffing his jeans. I slipped out of my shoes and rolled up the hem of my slacks, joining him where he sat on the edge. Our feet barely skimmed the warm water of the lake, and we swung them back and forth, sitting in silence for a long moment.
“I ran into my mom tonight,” he said in a low voice.
I flinched, gazing over at him. “You did?”
“Yep.”
“What did she say?”
“Not much. She actually seemed offended that I hadn’t reached out when I moved back here. Can you believe that?”
I licked my lips, turning back to the water. Will’s mom was something else. He’d spent so many years living in a house where he knew his dad could fly off the handle at any moment and hit either one, or both, of them and she’d done literally nothing to stop it. In fact, she’d actively participated in covering it up and coaching him to stay silent. It was worse than neglect. It was torture.
“Icanbelieve it, actually.” My voice was as low as his, but he stiffened like I’d yelled the words.
“What?”
“Think about it, Will. She’s clearly not in touch with your wants and needs. She never has been.”
He ruminated on that for a minute, his shoulders sagging forward as he stared down at his hands. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
Suddenly, so many things clicked into place for me. “I get it now.”
“Get what?”
“I get why you didn’t want to tell Paul how you felt about me. I get why you didn’t want to risk losing your family.”
A half-smile graced his lips, but he didn’t meet my eyes, just kept looking down. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. It makes sense on the surface, I guess. But now that we’re talking about this, I see it even clearer. We really are your only family, and you were afraid that if something bad happened between us, you’d lose us all.” My voice had begun to shake under the sadness of my words, so I stopped speaking and looked at the lake again. It was darker now, the sun so low in the sky it wasn’t visible above the trees.
“That’s the gist of it, yeah. But I realized something today that makes all of that irrelevant.”
“What?”
