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“I’m not,” Alex says.
“I’m hungover,” June says as she reaches for the pitcher of mimosas. “Alex, you did all this?”
Alex shrugs, and June squints at him, bleary but knowing.
That afternoon, over the sounds of the boat’s engine, Henry talks to Alex’s dad about the sailboats that jut up from the horizon, getting into a complex discussion on outboard motors that Alex can’t hope to follow. He leans back against the bow and watches, and it’s so easy to imagine it: a future Henry who comes to the lake house with him every summer, who learns how to make elotes and ties neat cleat hitches and fits right into place in his weird family.
They go swimming, yell over one another about politics, pass the guitar around again. Henry takes a photo of himself with June and Nora, one under each arm and both in their bikinis. Nora is holding his chin in one hand and licking the side of his face, and June has her fingers tangled up in his hair and her head in the crook of his neck, smiling angelically at the camera. He sends it to Pez and receives anguished keysmashes and crying emojis in response, and they all almost piss themselves laughing.
It’s good. It’s really, really good.
Alex lies awake that night, drunk on Shiner and way too many campfire marshmallows, and he stares at whorls in the wood panels of the top bunk and thinks about coming of age out here. He remembers when he was a kid, freckly and unafraid, when the world seemed like it was blissfully endless but everything still made perfect sense. He used to leave his clothes in a pile on the pier and dive headfirst into the lake. Everything was in its right place.
He wears a key to his childhood home around his neck, but he doesn’t know the last time he actually thought about the boy who used to push it into the lock.
Maybe losing the job isn’t the worst thing that could have happened.
He thinks about roots, about first and second languages.What he wanted when he was a kid and what he wants now and where those things overlap. Maybe that place, the meeting of the two, is here somewhere, in the gentle insistence of the water around his legs, crude letters carved with an old pocket knife. The steady thrum of another person’s pulse against his.
“H?” he whispers. “You awake?”
Henry sighs. “Always.”
They sneak through the grass in hushed voices past one of Henry’s PPOs dozing on the porch, racing down the pier, shoving at each other’s shoulders. Henry’s laugh is high and clear, his sunburned shoulders bright pink in the dark, and Alex looks at him and something so buoyant fills up his chest that he feels like he could swim the length of the lake without stopping for air. He throws his T-shirt down at the end of the pier and starts to shuck his boxers, and when Henry arches an eyebrow at him, Alex laughs and jumps.
“You’re a menace,” Henry says when Alex breaks back to the surface. But he only hesitates briefly before he’s stripping out of his clothes.
He stands naked at the edge of the pier, looking at Alex’s head and shoulders bobbing in the water. The lines of him are long and languid in the moonlight, just skin and skin and skin lit soft and blue, and he’s so beautiful that Alex thinks this moment, the soft shadows and pale thighs and crooked smile, should be the portrait of Henry that goes down in history. There are fireflies winking around his head, landing in his hair. A crown.
His dive is infuriatingly graceful.
“Can’t you ever just do one thing without having to be so goddamn extra about it?” Alex says, splashing him as soon as he surfaces.
“That is bloody rich coming from you,” Henry says, and he’s grinning like he does when he’s drinking in a challenge, like nothing in the world pleases him more than Alex’s antagonizing elbow in his side.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alex says, kicking over to him.
They chase each other around the pier, race down to the lake’s shallow bottom and shoot back up in the moonlight, all elbows and knees. Alex finally manages to catch Henry around the waist, and he pins him, slides his wet mouth over the thudding pulse of Henry’s throat. He wants to stay tangled up in Henry’s legs forever. He wants to match the new freckles across Henry’s nose to the stars above them and make him name the constellations.
“Hey,” he says, his mouth right up in a breath’s space from Henry’s. He watches a drop of water roll down Henry’s perfect nose and disappear into his mouth.
“Hi,” Henry says back, and Alex thinks,Goddamn, I love him.It keeps coming back to him, and it’s getting harder to look into Henry’s soft smiles and not say it.
He kicks out a little to turn them in a slow circle. “You look good out here.”
Henry’s grin goes crooked and a little shy, dipping down to brush against Alex’s jaw. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Alex says. He twists Henry’s wet hair around his fingers. “I’m glad you came this weekend,” Alex hears himself say. “It’s been so intense lately. I… I really needed this.”
Henry’s fingers give a little jab to his ribs, gently scolding. “You carry too much.”
His instinct has always been to shoot back,No, I don’t, or,Iwant to, but he bites it back and says, “I know,” and he realizes it’s the truth. “You know what I’m thinking right now?”
“What?”
“I’m thinking about, after inauguration, like next year, taking you back out here, just the two of us. And we can sit under the moon and not stress about anything.”
“Oh,” Henry says. “That sounds nice, if unlikely.”
