Chapter 18 Rhymes with “Endless Consternation” #2
I move around the van, searching for the angles where the light hits Ethan through the open door exactly right.
I frame up a few shots with his hoodie draped on the driver’s seat so perfectly haphazardly it would’ve looked staged if I had placed it there myself.
The space is vibrating with that pre-adventure anticipation.
I get why people follow this hashtag. It’s a fantasy of a new and improved sense of self.
Van-life Charley would be patient, easygoing, and open to adventure.
No partner would ever call me distant or guarded.
I’d never be left for an idea, because I’d become the idea. If I only had a van…
“Can I play something?” he asks, growing impatient. “Or will moving ruin the fantasy?”
“Please play something. You look constipated all still like that.”
He rolls his shoulders, his pre-performance tic that must connect him with his inner Bob Dylan. “Should I tie ropes to my wrists so you can more easily Jim Henson me?”
“Stop whining and pretend I’m not here.”
He grumbles for a minute before falling into a riff, playing it over and over, slightly different each time.
He always used to play like this in his parents’ donut shop, building a song brick by brick until it sounded like an effortless explosion of melody.
His lyrics were like that too. He’d start with something small—an interesting image or strange celestial metaphor that sounded right to his ear—then he’d build it out into something with meaning.
It was beautiful to watch him work. It still is.
With a camera in hand and Ethan playing guitar, it finds me again: that feeling of being in a memory and bottling it with the perfect image, as though it’s crystallized in amber light, so I might look back on it for years to come.
His lips curl up in what isn’t quite a smile but something better.
It’s awareness. Maybe he feels this too.
I know without looking that I’ve captured “the shot”—the version of this morning I’ll want to hold on to.
The dreamy foreground of him in the rising sun with the rocky lake shore in the distance.
The depth of field renders the rippling current just out of focus so that the water looms behind, haunting him.
The click under my forefinger is too satisfying for this not to be it.
I jump up beside Ethan on the mattress and close the mosquito screen. “That thing you were playing earlier was nice.” I look up at him through my lashes. “It’s good to hear you writing again.”
“Chuck…,” he says accusatorily, his eyes on his guitar. “Did you snoop?”
My cheeks burn red hot. “I may have stumbled upon your secret songwriting notebook in our cop kerfuffle.”
I flick through the camera roll in search of a distraction from how Ethan’s face plunges my heart into a pool of warm water. I could drown in the bliss of being this close to him.
“You’ll stoop to any level in your quest for nudes, won’t you?” He sits there for a beat before putting the guitar down. “It’s not much of a secret at this point, but yes, I’m writing songs again.”
“Since when?” I ask. As far as I’ve known, Ethan’s been blocked since Lemonface’s epic rise and fall into the Velvet Nebula of stardom.
His bandmate Benson, along with the slew of songwriters the label brought in, wrote their sophomore album, much to the dismay of listeners in possession of both ears and taste.
“The last couple of years.” He says it as though he’s not completely certain of the exact date he rediscovered his passion, and I don’t buy it for a second.
“Not having you in my life the way you used to be, it was…a shock to my system,” he tells me, pulling a hand through his hair.
“You’ve always had this way of shaking me by the shoulders and pointing me in the direction I needed to go, and without you, I forgot how to get up each day and breathe in and out.
Just…exist. I was always a disaster when we were teenagers, imagining my future in that town—that slow life of waking up each day, clocking in and out at the shop, everything the same, day after day.
I didn’t even recognize myself in it. Our friendship was the one good thing I had there, and you were the only person who ever kicked me in the ass and told me to go for what I wanted.
I’d begun to rely on you for that, and then suddenly, you were gone. ”
I suppress the impulse to jump in and soften his self-criticism. I stay silent, listening as he tugs me down onto the bed, our heads touching and our feet stretched on opposite ends like a bow.
“I flaked on a bunch of college shows and had to move back in with my parents to reset,” he continues.
“But I started writing again. It was cathartic. Ivan used a few of the songs on his album with his new band, and I cowrote some stuff with Seraphina.” He gestures to the two women depicted in an artful line drawing on my boobs.
“It’s been nice to create songs and let them take on lives of their own outside of me.
Writing was the part I always loved. Those relationships also helped me rebuild a stable of steady gigs, but I love not having to live and die based on the whims of Division Three college basketball banquets. ”
“I love that,” I say, though it feels so insufficient. He curves his body toward me, letting his arm slide around my waist to land at the small of my back. We’re so natural like this. It’s hard to believe that we’ll both be able to let this go in a matter of days.
“I was actually working on a song for Laurel and Pete. For a gift, kind of,” he starts, but something in my face stops him in his tracks. “Say it, Beekman.”
A small laugh spills out of me. “You cannot gift them a song. It’s so ‘oblivious guy at the bonfire with the acoustic guitar’ and you’ve somehow managed to never be that guy.”
“We have two hours to kill before Ted can take us out there. What am I supposed to do?”
“If that’s the only way you can think of to kill time…”
Ethan considers for a moment, then moves closer so his forehead bumps against the tip of my nose. “Message received. You only want to use me for my body.”
He pulls me into his chest, grounding me again and halting the buzzing anxiety in my brain. I’m so aware of the passage of time. The way each moment we’re not touching is a moment wasted. He presses his lips to my wrist. It’s so gentle. Warmth spreads up my arm like hot honey.
“To think I’d given up on this ever happening,” he says, his voice low and aching. “Now that I have you, this whole other part of me has finally come alive, like the best things only exist when you’re a part of my life.”
I press my ear to his thumping heart and stare down at our clasped hands. “I don’t want to run out the clock on this, you know?” My voice breaks on the last word. It catches us both by surprise.
“Hey.” He pushes my chin up to meet his gaze.
“There’s no clock,” he assures me. “We can find a spot like this to park the van tomorrow night. And the night after.” His lips travel along my neck.
I groan when he finds the space behind my ear.
“Can’t sell this thing now. It’s sacred ground.
We’ll keep driving forever if you want.”
“That’s nice,” I say, referring both to the sparks skittering down the column of my throat and to the fantasy that we could live on an eternal road trip when I have an office of angry colleagues and a house I can’t afford waiting for me.
But I’m still in that moment of the vacation where I’m playing pretend—imagining other lives for myself—and I’m not ready to stop. “I haven’t ever thought of you and me as a possibility. I couldn’t let myself picture it, knowing it could never happen.”
“And now?” he asks, his expression so full of boyish longing. It’s that dreamy, wistful look he used to wear when he talked about music or an imagined future outside of our tiny town.
“I feel alive too, Ethan,” I tell him. Even though it doesn’t do the feeling justice.
The way my heart feels so tangible, I could tear it out of my chest and hand it to him.
This indescribable pull toward him was nailed shut in a box in the deepest corners of my mind and I’ve busted it open with a crowbar.
Nothing I feel for Ethan is new—it was always there—but now I’m consumed by it.
His gravitational pull will yank me off a cliff if I’m not careful.
“You called me Ethan.” His expression rearranges itself into something more cocksure.
“So?”
“I’ve never heard you call me that before.”
My nose scrunches. “Sure you have.”
His expression shifts—a storm changing direction.
His eyes trail all over my face, staring back at me like I’m something to look at, a work of art to stand in awe of.
It’s how I sometimes catch myself looking at him .
I drag my hand up to his collarbone, noticing the way the rhythm of his breathing slows.
I don’t ask what this is or how this trip will change things between us.
Instead, I kiss him, tangling our limbs as we grab hold of each other like our lives depend on it.
Maybe because touching like this feels overdue after years of suppressing the occasional burst of fantasy.
I know the weight of him, the feel of his skin, the press of his lips, from each and every time I thought about kissing him and didn’t.
I’m so used to loving him, but loving him like this is all new, and I won’t waste a second of it parsing out where the fantasies end and reality begins.