Chapter Twelve
Twelve
I pulled the collar of my sweater up beneath my jacket, watching Micah set another piece of wood on the fire. The stone outcropping at the trailhead was curved enough to provide shelter from the rain and wind, and with Smoke curled up beside me, the trembling in my body had begun to slow.
He was doing his best not to be obvious about it, but every few minutes, Micah’s gaze found me in the darkness. I’d returned from the other side of the ravine with my eyes swollen, so cold that I couldn’t feel my fingers. Micah had pulled off his gloves and handed them to me without a word, taking a blanket from the truck and wrapping it around me.
He’d already started a fire, resigned to the fact that we wouldn’t make it out of the gorge in the rain. Looking at the cascade of water coming down the slope and spilling into the ravine far below, I was glad we weren’t going to attempt it. I didn’t have the energy to climb out of this hole in the earth. I didn’t know if I ever would.
Micah stoked the flames until the heat was hovering in the air again, and he sat down beside me, propping his feet up on his pack. He looked so at home in the consuming darkness, relaxed in a way that reminded me of all those nights we’d spent out here. But the memories inevitably led to the one that I couldn’t stomach revisiting—the night Griffin died.
That single moment hung like a black cloud over everything that came before and after. We’d all lied about what happened that night, a choice that had haunted me since. We’d never discussed it again, never rehashed the events or tried to talk it through. We’d made a decision, we’d stuck to it, and we’d done it for Johnny. Looking back, everything we did was for him.
I looked up at the dark treetops, where I could still feel his presence hovering over us. Coming to the gorge had been another twisted kind of experiment—a way to test the live-wire connection between me and Johnny. I didn’t know what I had expected to happen when I lay down on the earth where he’d died, but he seemed to be even more tightly coiled around me now.
That voice I’d heard saying my brother’s name was still echoing inside my head. Too deformed to be recognizable, but it had definitely belonged to a woman. My mind had been jumping back to the November 10 photographs for the last hour. The pink backpack. The blank images that followed. Now I was convinced the voice belonged to whomever had been out here with Johnny that day.
“Do you want to talk about what happened out there?” Micah asked.
I swallowed. “No.”
What would I tell him? That I was beginning to think I was being haunted by my brother? That I’d come to the gorge with the disturbing hope of somehow communicating with him? I knew how it sounded. The last thing I needed was for Micah to think I was losing my mind.
He didn’t argue or press, instead taking something from the chest pocket of his jacket. It took a moment for me to realize what it was. He held a joint up in the air with a question in his eyes. An involuntary smile broke on my lips before I nodded, and he grinned, fumbling with a lighter until its end was aglow. He took a steady drag before he leaned back over the fire, offering it to me, and I sat up, taking it between my fingers.
The sweet, potent smell of the weed was another one of those things that reminded me of before. Skipping class with Micah or coming home to him and Johnny smoking out at the fire pit was synonymous with those nights in the parking lot of The Penny with Olivia or the weekends at the swimming hole.
I set the joint on my lips and inhaled the smoke, letting the taste swirl in my mouth and down my throat, into my chest. It burned before it began to numb the ache that lived there. After I exhaled, I took another to chase down that dull stupor.
I passed it back to him, watching the flick of the flames between us. It only took a few minutes for the erratic jolt of the fire to slow in my vision, mimicking the movement of water. I sank into that feeling, burrowing down into the blanket until it covered my chin.
The joint glowed bright between Micah’s fingers as he took another drag. Once the smoke had left his lips, he let his head fall back to rest against the stone wall.
“You still have it,” he said.
I blinked slowly, his words taking their time to land.
“That thing with Johnny. It’s still there, isn’t it?”
I let my eyes run over his face, the shock I felt not fully taking shape through the high. “What thing with Johnny?”
“Are you really going to act like you don’t know what I’m talking about?”
“I didn’t know you knew about that,” I said, throat tight.
“I watched you almost drown that day, James.”
The memory came flooding back again, rushing ahead of my sluggish thoughts. Johnny up on those cliffs. The way my heart had nearly stopped. That falling feeling that pulled me under the water.
“And that wasn’t the only time. I was around you guys long enough to see it. Even if you didn’t want to tell me.” His eyes were on the fire now.
I hadn’t ever considered whether Micah had really thought about what he’d seen that day. I hadn’t even figured it out myself for a while after. Once I did, the strange link between me and Johnny wasn’t something I’d talked to anyone about. Not even Johnny.
“You could have, you know,” Micah said.
“Could have what?”
“Told me.”
I exhaled, shivering beneath the blanket. There was a part of me that knew that. There was almost nothing I felt like I couldn’t tell Micah back then, but in the end, it was that very secret that had made me leave.
“I can still feel it,” I said. “I can still feel that connection between us. Like it’s not gone.”
“He’s a part of you, James. Maybe it won’t ever feel that way.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I shook my head. “This is different. It’s worse since I got back. Like I’m somehow tapping into his mind. His memories. I can hear him sometimes. The other day, I thought I…” I didn’t finish. “What do you think that means?” I breathed, the fragrance of the weed still potent around me.
The calm that had settled in me moments ago dissipated just a little. I was suddenly desperate for him to put words to this. To validate this inexplicable, unquantifiable feeling I’d had since we were kids.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you believe in anything?” I asked. “Like about what happens when we die?”
His head lifted back up so he could look at me. “What?”
“Seriously, what do you think happens?” It was almost all I’d thought about since Johnny died, but I couldn’t remember the three of us ever talking about it. I had no idea what Johnny had really believed.
Micah took his time in answering, putting together the words with care before he spoke. “I mean, I guess I’ve always felt like it makes the most sense that we would just…become a part of everything else, you know?” He waved a hand at the surrounding darkness, where the sound of the rain and wind still swelled. “This can’t just all be for nothing, right?”
Those words unearthed ones that Johnny had once spoken to me.
What the fuck are we even here for?
It was one of the only times I remember really feeling like Johnny and I weren’t on the same side. It was the fight that would change the trajectory of our entire lives, we just didn’t know it yet. And I did understand what Micah meant. Standing in the belly of the gorge felt almost spiritual. There was a transcendence to the moment that couldn’t be explained, and it was impossible to be in a place like this and not feel it. More than that, I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that we didn’t just stop with our pulse or our brain waves, and that there was more to all of this than the carbon and water that made up our skin and bones.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
I pressed my lips together, staring into the flames again until my eyes burned. “I just don’t feel like he’s gone.” I heard the words leave my mouth, but I hadn’t planned to say them. When my eyes focused past the fire, to Micah’s face again, he didn’t react. “There’s this unbearable pain in knowing that he is gone, but it also seems like it should feel different somehow, like there should be this absence. But there isn’t. He’s still here, Micah.”
Micah watched me, unblinking.
“Sometimes I think he’s trying to tell me something,” I whispered.
His gaze grew subtly more focused, as if the words concerned him. It only made me more afraid of what he was thinking.
“Like what?”
I inhaled past the splintering sting reigniting in my chest, waiting for the words to find my lips. But they didn’t. I wasn’t ready to say out loud what I could feel in every bone of my body—that it wasn’t an accident. That I’d begun to believe that he wanted me to know that something happened out here that day.
“It went both ways. You know that, right?” Micah said. “He always knew when something was going on with you or when you were lying about something. He knew about us. Long before you told him.”
I sat up, looking at him. The day I finally admitted to Johnny that Micah and I were together was the same day we’d had that fight. I’d kept it from him for months because I knew my brother. I knew that Johnny would ruin it. Burn it all down. And the day he found the acceptance letter from Byron, that’s exactly what he did.
Finding out that I’d lied about the letter was one thing. Leaving Six Rivers was everything Johnny had ever wanted for me, and that was mostly because he knew it’s what I wanted for myself. But it wasn’t just Johnny I was afraid to leave behind. It was Micah, too. He was the one who’d been the most hurt about Byron, because he knew I wouldn’t have hidden it if I hadn’t already decided I was going.
“I get it now. I understand why you lied,” Micah said.
His words fractured in my mind as the weed bled deeper into my veins. “You do?”
He passed the joint back to me. “That’s how you and Johnny worked. You made your own reality. Sometimes that meant distorting what was real so that the other one wouldn’t have to know the whole truth. You protected each other. That’s why you left, right?”
I met his eyes, catching his meaning. “I don’t want to talk about Griffin,” I said, in a tone that was more pleading than angry. If we pulled at those stitches, I would come undone.
Micah nodded. “I know you don’t.”
Mercifully, he let it drop, and I realized that while I’d come to Six Rivers armed with my yearslong anger, I was now mostly just bracing myself for his. But whatever tension that had materialized in the darkness slowly waned with the passing silence, and that white-knuckle feeling began to fade.
That was like him, I thought. Micah was never one to hide things, like the rest of us. He didn’t pretend.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?” I asked.
“Come on, James.”
“What?”
A long, exhausted breath escaped his lips. “We could fill the fucking ocean with the things we never said to each other.”
That pinch behind my ribs twisted tighter. There was more behind that statement than I wanted to absorb, because it was unbearably true. Now that ocean was so deep and wide that I couldn’t even begin to make sense of it.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said, finally.
The shadow of a warped smile changed the shape of his mouth. “Me too.”
I waited for him to look at me, and when he finally did, the Micah I knew best was there in his eyes. The high from the joint had given me a reprieve, but that one look was enough to push the simmering pain over the edge of that numbness.
I opened the blanket wrapped around me, letting one hand extend toward him, and after a moment his hand found mine. I pulled him into me, and the ache was there before he even got his arms around me. Like every ounce of pain and fear and sadness we’d known had been a mere harbinger of this. And on the other side of it, I didn’t know if there would be anything left. I was so tired of all the remembering.
Micah’s warmth enveloped me and I let myself press into it, inhaling the smell of him. His face turned into my hair, and that one, simple touch held so much tenderness that all the tears I’d cried across the ravine were there again, tucked just beneath the surface. But I didn’t feel like crying now. A different, more desperate feeling knotted in my stomach. It was a heavy weight that I could feel all the way into my legs.
I tipped my face up to look at him, and the firelight moved over his cheek, reflecting in his eyes. They didn’t leave mine, and I could feel him searching for an assurance that I knew what I was doing. That I had some kind of awareness of how close I was to tipping over this cliff between us.
Slowly, his hand came up and grazed my jaw until his fingers slid into my hair, and when my mouth was only inches from his, I could hear my own breath coming faster. Like I could feel the seconds ticking down to the moment he closed the distance. But Micah didn’t move. He was waiting. For me.
His fingers tightened in my hair, igniting a chain reaction that pulled me closer, and as soon as I pressed my lips to his, his hands were on me. Opening my jacket. Tugging at my jeans. I leaned into his weight, the blanket falling to the ground, but almost as quickly as he’d kissed me back, he was pulling away from me, his mouth breaking from mine.
My chest rose and fell between us and I stilled, watching him swallow.
“I don’t know about this, James.”
Emotion curled tight in my throat. Because neither did I. Things with Micah had always felt like a riptide, and once I was in its grasp, there’d be no escaping its pull. I didn’t know if I was trying to find a home inside of it, or if I needed to break out of its orbit, once and for all.
The first time Micah kissed me, I’d felt like I’d been waiting my whole life for it. And that’s what this felt like now. Like the entire world was rotating around us.
Before he could decide to pull farther away from me, I kissed him again. This time more slowly. It was several agonizing seconds before his arms tightened around my body. And then we were swallowed by the firelight. I lifted the sweater over my head, not thinking about what we were doing or why. I was just chasing anything that didn’t hurt.
He pulled me onto his lap, sliding my legs around him, and a rush of gravity swept through me. The moment froze, the seconds static as my stomach dropped. It felt suddenly like I was falling again. Like I was moving through the air, about to slam into the ground. I could hear the sound of my heartbeat, taste him on my tongue. Micah’s hands found the old, worn paths they’d once taken, and I let myself pretend we were still those kids. Before I left. Before Griffin Walker. Before everything changed.