Canned & Coated (Friction Fiction #4)

Chapter 1

“You don’t have to limit yourself, Nate.”

Milo’s eyes flick from the road to the box of donuts in my lap, then back up to me. I can tell he’s clocked my hand hovering over a blueberry glazed.

Close enough to count as temptation, but not close enough to give in.

“Have as many as you want,” he says.

I barely even consider it before I'm snapping the lid shut and tossing the box into the back seat.

“I shouldn't,” I say, shaking my head.

Milo barks out a laugh. It’s the kind of laugh that doesn’t stay in his chest but spills everywhere, filling up any space you're in like it’s looking for somewhere to land. In the small car it rattles through the seats and into the steering wheel until even that starts to shake with him.

“Oh my god,” he says, “are you afraid of the donuts?”

“I’m not afraid,” I tell him, “I don’t want to ruin dinner.”

“We’re camping. Dinner is gonna be hot dogs and half a protein bar,” he says, one hand on the wheel as the other reaches towards the backseat, fingers searching until they catch on the edge of the box. “Give it to me!”

“Eyes on the road!” I shout, clutching the oh-shit handle as we veer into the opposite lane.

I’m being dramatic. I know I’m being dramatic. There haven’t been any cars for miles, but this is how Milo is. He’s a disaster of pure energy stuffed into a 5’7 body that frankly does not seem equipped to contain him.

Pale skin, thinning dark hair stuffed under a faded ball cap, stubble everywhere, and a 1970s porno mustache that hovers a little too confidently over his lip.

The kicker is the glasses. Circular horn-rims that make him look like he teaches high school drama when he’s not doing mushrooms in the woods.

Today he’s sporting a flannel shirt, cutoff jean shorts, and knee socks pulled to hell. He looks like a gay summer camp counselor from a vintage PSA about stranger danger.

It’s hot though. In it’s own way. Which is annoying. Because he drives like a man who’s never feared death and flirts like he doesn’t realize he’s doing it.

I’m the opposite in every regard. I would rather fake my own death than flirt openly. If I’m interested in someone, my instinct is to become less visible somehow. Quieter. More polite. Maybe develop a sudden fascination with whatever object happens to be nearest me.

Nothing says desire quite like studying the closest object with intense concentration.

The problem is that, physically, I’m not built for subtlety. I’m tall and lanky. All long limbs and awkward angles. Pale skin that burns if the sun even hears about me. Brown hair that never does what I ask of it. Brown eyes so standard they feel selected from a dropdown menu.

There’s nothing offensive about how I look. Nothing remarkable either. I’m the human version of room-temperature water.

Perfectly acceptable. Rarely requested.

Where Milo looks intentional and effortless, I look like I wandered into my closet in low light and accepted whatever happened.

Flannel shirts. Jeans. Neutral colors. All regular clothes you’d see on any unremarkable man pushing a cart through a hardware store or standing too long in front of lawn fertilizer. It’s the wardrobe of someone who says things like “let me grab my good flashlight.”

Or a dad. Definitely a dad.

Not even a hot dad. Just… a dad with dependable opinions about extension cords.

“You’re weak, Nate,” he declares with a mouthful of donut since he somehow managed to grab one anyway.

The blueberry glazed. The exact one I wanted and the last one in the box.

I sit there and sigh as he grins at me, teeth dotted with crumbs.

“You’re one sad whiff away from selling your soul for that last maple glaze,” he says.

“I’m setting boundaries,” I mutter.

He points a sticky finger at me. “You’re setting yourself up for failure. That box had twelve donuts, and you brought it on a three-person trip. That’s four donuts each. Don’t try to force me into eating the other eleven, because I’ll do it!”

I snatch the box back. “FINE! I’ll eat another!”

Milo lunges for it, swerving straight into the opposite lane. I screech and grab the handlebar for dear life, body flailing, donuts in my lap doing a full rollercoaster.

In the scramble, he gains the upper hand and yanks the box clean out of my grip with a victorious howl.

“I don’t want you to stuff your mouth because I told you to. I want you to want to.”

“I don’t want to!” I yell, which is a lie, because I do want to.

I actually want it so bad it’s embarrassing.

I’m one second away from caving and grabbing another and then another and not stopping until there’s nothing left but that stupid cardboard box and the faint smell of sugar.

I want to eat at least three and lick the glaze off his fingers and mine, but that’s beside the point.

He rolls his eyes, but there’s a softness in the action. “You’re allowed to want things, and if you want them, you can take them. It’s not that complicated.”

“Okay then,” I hiss, bracing as we hit a pothole and my seatbelt cinches tighter across my already tense body. “I want you to not kill us.”

Milo laughs as he speeds us up, aiming our joyride straight at whatever bad idea waits ahead.

“If we die, at least you won’t be bloated,” he says, then pauses as something clicks behind his eyes. They widen. “Wait… is that it? You don’t wanna be bloated? Because…”

“Don’t,” I squeak.

Too quick. Too loud. Too guilty.

It’s already too late. I watch his whole face light up in real time.

“Oh my god,” he gasps, smacking the steering wheel. “You’re trying to look hot because we’re gonna see…”

“Nope. Stop right there.”

“…Tanner.”

I groan loud enough to scare a crow out of a passing tree.

“For the first time in literal years and you wanna look good for him! OH MY GOD.”

If I’m being honest, the whole thing about not wanting to ruin the camping experience by stuffing myself with donuts… that part’s not a lie.

I do want the full version of it. I love the slightly miserable, kind of perfect version where dinner is whatever questionable sludge we manage to throw together over a fire.

That’s the deal. You don’t half-step a camping trip.

Camping requires total commitment. All the way down to eating burnt beans, sleeping on lumpy ground, and waking up feeling like you got hit by a truck while still insisting you had a great time.

Part of my apprehension has to do with the donuts too. The empty calories. I already know I’ll regret them later when I’m trying to convince myself that whatever we make in a dented pot is worth eating. So stuffing myself with glazed sweets doesn’t exactly feel like the smartest move.

That’s also where Milo starts making an annoying amount of sense.

Hate to admit it, but there’s a small, deeply embarrassing part of me still alive in there, still making choices I’d rather not examine, and he absolutely wants to look good when I see Tanner again.

He’s my second-oldest friend, the missing piece of our trio, and my first love.

This is the first time all three of us have been together since the weeks after graduation, when everything still felt possible and none of us knew enough to choose a direction.

Before Milo and I started dating. Before things got defined.

And definitely before Tanner climbed into that beat-up Jeep and drove off chasing something bigger than the rest of us.

We all met back in elementary school when we all lived on the same cul-de-sac. Fast friends by the second week of school and inseparable by Halloween.

Those were the days of bike rides that became full-day adventures, sleepovers built on junk food and video games, and entire summers where we didn’t go a single day without seeing each other.

Now it’s been five years, which in the grand span of time isn’t that long, but it’s more than enough time for a person to become someone else entirely.

When I see this man sometime in the next few hours, he’ll probably feel like a stranger, and I don’t know what to do with that because the version of him I know is still stuck somewhere back there.

Nobody ever saw him the way I did.

Tanner McCormack always occupied that confusing middle ground between lanky and muscular, like a cross-country runner who looked shredded and hungry at the same time.

Someone with oversized glasses and curly hair, who spoke too fast when he got excited because the words could never keep up with his brain.

The scent of sunscreen still reminds me of him, because he always seemed one step removed from someplace warmer, easier.

He wasn’t the guy people tripped over themselves to notice. He was the kind of person people decided they understood in two seconds and never looked at again.

To me, he was the cutest, most endearing thing I’d ever seen. The kind of beauty you only notice when you actually pay attention, and once you do, you can’t unsee it.

He loved comic books and video games and Dungeons & Dragons and math… and God, did he love adventure. Even at twelve, he talked about seeing the world. His eyes would light up whenever he said he wanted to live in a van and travel cross-country one day.

I don’t know if I fell for him because he made the world feel bigger, or because I wanted to be the person he took with him when he left.

I was obsessed. Quietly. Pathetically.

For years.

All while Milo was relentlessly obsessed with me in a way I somehow failed to fully clock at the time or maybe I did and filed it somewhere I wouldn’t have to deal with until later.

Milo was always there.

Where Tanner and I were quiet, Milo was loud and funny in that relentless way that never let me stay in my own head too long.

He didn’t read comics with me or map out ridiculous adventures, but he could make me laugh until my stomach hurt, always had the right snack on hand, and could spot me spiraling from across a room before I knew it myself.

I thought of him like a brother, which feels almost insulting now. I guess it was my mind’s way of reducing him to something easier to hold onto.

I spent years fixated on this unreachable, golden version of Tanner while Milo spent that same stretch standing right next to me hoping I’d eventually look over and see him.

By the time Tanner was gone, already halfway to becoming someone else, Milo was still there. So I reached for what was in front of me. What felt safe, real, already proven.

What had been waiting the whole time.

Milo knows he was second.

I don’t think it hangs over us or turns bitter. It’s a fact. Something he made peace with long before I did.

Maybe there’s comfort in knowing the waiting meant something. That all those years of showing up weren’t wasted. Maybe that’s where his confidence comes from, because when he pokes at old feelings I try to bury, it never feels insecure.

It feels settled.

Sometimes I get the strange sense he wouldn’t even mind. That if something had happened then or happened now, he wouldn’t see it as a threat. Maybe he’d think it was something inevitable finally working itself out of my system.

The thought that he might be okay with that, might even want it in some quiet way, lands heavier in my gut than jealousy ever could.

“It’s fine if you do,” Milo says when I don’t answer. It’s almost like the man can read my mind.

I spear him with a look.

“Want to look good for him,” he adds quickly, one hand lifting in mock surrender, even as that stupid smile tugs at his mouth.

I turn toward the window, watching the trees smear into green streaks as we speed past.

“You haven’t seen him in forever, and back then you were like… feral for him,” he adds.

“Milo…”

“Feral.” He says it louder this time, enunciating it till he’s sure it’ll stick. “Poems on your Tumblr feral.”

I groan. “They weren’t poems.”

“They rhymed!”

“They were song lyrics.”

“Okay, Shakespeare.”

I shoot him a look, but his grin is blinding, eyes back on the road, smug and sunny.

“It’s okay to still have feelings, Nate,” he says. “Maybe you have unfinished business. Maybe we all do.”

Unfinished business.

That’s one way to say it, I guess.

It sounds clean when he says it like that, but it doesn’t feel clean. It feels messy and knotted up in all the almosts and maybes and bad timing, and now that I have to see this man again all of it is pushing up to the surface at once, as if it never really went anywhere at all.

I know what Milo’s asking of me, even if he’s not saying it outright.

To look at it.

To admit it.

To let it exist without pretending it doesn’t matter.

The thing is, I don’t think I can. At least not without admitting there’s still a piece of me that wants Tanner, and probably always will, in some small, inconvenient, impossible-to-explain way that doesn’t disappear just because time passed or because I chose someone else.

Admitting that, even to myself, doesn’t take anything away from what I feel for Milo. If anything, it makes everything more complicated, more real in a way I don’t know how to clean up or fix or simplify into something easier to hold.

I want Milo and I want Tanner and I don’t know what to do with that except sit in it as the road stretches out in front of us and the trees blur together and everything keeps moving whether I’m ready for it or not.