Bromantasy

Chapter Twenty

Twenty

Juniper didn’t pretend not to be crying and blowing his nose as he shoved his own things into his pack and followed Mo out the door. And he didn’t try to explain, or beg, or do anything else. He just followed Mo in silence as they set off, keeping pace with Mo’s long strides as best he could.

Juniper’s stomach was growling loudly by the time Mo jerked his head toward a flat rock near the path and tossed his pack down.

“What’s your plan?” Juniper tried to ask him at lunch, but Mo just shook his head.

Mo was calmer now, at least—hiking many leagues had that effect on him, apparently. But his expression was closed off, that twinkle of mirthful affection utterly absent from his eyes.

Juniper missed it.

And thoroughly did not deserve it.

The prince was, as Juniper had thought, easy enough to track, his mercenaries loud and unwieldy, and uncaring about which plants they stomped and which trees they broke and what manner of trash they left in their wake.

Mo cursed under his breath every time he stopped to pick up a piece of garbage they had left, shoving it into the side pouch of his pack.

Juniper heard something about May the ground swallow you and For every piece of trash you litter, may the fairies take one of your toes, but that last one was a little horrifying and sounded like a direct repetition of something Mo’s grandmam probably said, so Juniper decided it was best not to listen too closely after that.

After he had diligently cleaned up the seventh disposable tobacco pipe, he opened his mouth to complain to Mo about the brutes ahead of them, only to snap his teeth shut just as soon as he did.

A little after lunch, when the sun managed to slip through the cloud cover high above them, they reached a place where the trail widened.

Juniper stooped low and examined the trail.

“Keep moving,” Mo said gruffly. “They’re keeping a rapid pace. We need to catch them by nightfall.”

This meant his plan was to attack at nightfall. For all his gifts, subtlety was not one of them. In fact, just days ago, he had confidently told Juniper his plan was “attack.”

He had also thought a net would be sufficient in capturing a dragon.

Juniper had never been more deeply in love with this fool, or more deeply unworthy of him.

“She didn’t go this way,” Juniper said, forcing his voice to sound more confident.

“If you tell me you know that because of a feeling in your heart—”

“That was one time,” Juniper protested. “And we saw some very cool stars that night, even if we did get lost. And I was eight winters old. Leave me alone.”

There was not even a hint of Mo’s usual smile. He stared back at Juniper, waiting.

“Then how do you know she didn’t go this way?” Mo asked, shifting his back a little and staring down at Juniper.

Juniper was suddenly acutely aware of their position—Mo standing above him, tall and imposing. Juniper kneeling in the mud.

His mouth watered, just a little. In a tasteful way. He was looking respectfully at that bulge in Mo’s trekking trousers.

Juniper shook himself and looked away. Mo didn’t want anything to do with him, and Juniper needed to focus.

“I can smell ash on the wind,” he told Mo. “And do you see those branches? I think they’ve taken a few people off the main trail with Bear, just in case they are followed.”

“You think they’re that scared of us?” Mo asked. It was the first time he’d looked pleased all day.

“It took four of them to hold you down,” Juniper said. “Besides, there’s a princess here somewhere—that’s part of why the prince is so worried—so they might be concerned she’ll try to take Bear. Or another mercenary group, even.”

“Five,” Mo said. “It took five men to hold me down, because four couldn’t. Though they mostly used the fifth to kick me.”

Juniper reached for Mo before he thought better, his fingers grazing Mo’s forearm.

Touching Mo’s skin felt a little like getting hit by lightning—or at least what Juniper imagined that would feel like.

He stayed inside during thunderstorms and watched them through his window from his rocker, sipping a mug of chaga. “I can wrap your injury,” he said.

The words came out a little breathless. On account of how touching his best friend felt like touching lightning.

Mo jerked back from his touch so quickly that he lost his balance—usually more a Juniper move than a Mo one—and Juniper dove to help him.

Mo was too big, his momentum taking them both down, and they hit the steep, muddy path hard, rolling over each other until they slid to a stop.

Juniper caught his breath, acutely aware of his position once more.

This was somehow worse than kneeling in front of his best friend: Now, Juniper had his back pressed against the cool, packed dirt, his head resting on some moss.

Mo was above him, one muscular arm posted on the moss and leaves on one side of Juniper’s head, and one knee braced on the ground between Juniper’s legs.

Mo’s usually affable expression was stormy, those brown eyes of his sharp and glittering with an emotion Juniper didn’t often see. “How many times have we been here, Junebug?” he asked. “Wrestling instead of talking.”

“I think I liked touching you,” Juniper blurted, heat rising through his face as he did. Mo’s thigh was touching Juniper’s, and it was hard to think.

Mo’s expression shifted, and then he pushed himself up off Juniper and stood, reaching for his fallen pack.

Juniper rolled himself to his feet, only stumbling a little, and grabbed his pack.

“We can talk now,” he said as he followed Mo back up the hill.

“When do we ever talk, Juniper?” Mo asked without turning. “Come on, keep moving. It’s a little late for that, and we’re burning daylight.”

Juniper fell into step behind him, grumbling under his breath. He missed skin care and his bed and his warm hearth fire and Mo’s gentle snoring. He missed having a wall safely between them. He missed not having to know that everything was wrong between them, and had been for a long time.

“Are quests always this depressing?” Juniper muttered under his breath as they crested the hill again, Juniper taking the lead so he could track Bear. He hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but the unfortunate part about being in close proximity in the wilderness was that of course Mo had heard him.

“This is my first quest, too, Juniper,” Mo said a little tightly. “Sometimes you act like I just know everything. Like I know how to do it all, and I know what’s going to happen, and I just—I’m not your dad, Juniper.”

“Hey,” Juniper said. “I didn’t mean to call you Daddy. Which is very different than dad, thank you very much. Everybody knows that.”

Mo snorted. “This isn’t about that,” he said. “It’s about how you expect me to take care of you. And I wanted to take care of you. But the path is made by walking, Junebug. I don’t know how any of this works any more than you do.”

“You—you want to take care of me?” Juniper stopped walking, but Mo didn’t, crashing into Juniper from behind so hard that Juniper fell forward again.

Wanted to.

Wanted. Loved. All words that sounded like they were firmly in the past, while all of Juniper’s love and want was so brutally in the present that it made him feel as if he were slowly being snapped in half.

Juniper had always thought taking care of him must be a bit of a burden, really.

But that was just one more of the topics they’d never talked about.

As the bruggane would say, men would literally rather go on a quest to find a dragon than talk about their feelings.

Late that afternoon, they came so close to the prince’s small band of people that they could hear the clank of armor and the sound of voices, so Mo decided (without consulting Juniper, as per usual) that they would draw back a little and make camp for the night.

This time, the prince made more of an effort to disguise his location, reinforcing Juniper’s suspicion that he had been trying to throw them off the trail by sending the bulk of his men a different direction.

There was a much smaller campfire that night, and Mo reported that the camp was consistently guarded by people carrying swords.

This, of course, spurred Juniper’s worry that Mo “My Plan Is Attack” Elmthorn would simply walk into camp and try to take Bear. For being such a smart man overall, he was remarkably confident in his own brawn when it came to solving a conflict.

They set up their own camp upriver, in relative silence, in a small mossy gap in the trees Mo had chosen. Mo took the side nearest the tree line toward the prince’s camp, and Juniper wordlessly set his own pack on the opposite side.

Far enough from Mo that they could build a massive wall in between them, just like they had done ten winters ago.

Being in love was truly the stupidest thing Juniper had ever done.

Well, second stupidest. Betraying his true love (by trying to save him?) had to be the first stupidest. Telling Mo that they maybe weren’t equipped to go after Bear was probably the third stupidest, if he was really invested in ranking things.

“You were right not to trust the prince to begin with,” Juniper said in the growing darkness that had fallen over their campsite. “When we first met him, and he’d lost all his men. I bet he did let Bear’s mom eat them, or burn them to a crisp, or whatever she did.”

Mo grunted in response as he unrolled his bedroll.

Despite the years he had spent getting good at reading Mo Elmthorn’s grunts, Juniper didn’t know what this one meant. And at this point, he was too tired to continue decoding.

“I’ll take that to mean ‘Yes, Juniper, I am always right.’ And it’s true, but I’m listening now, Mo. So maybe we could do this part together? Please?”

Mo’s eyes looked everywhere but at Juniper. “This isn’t something that can be solved with a wrestling match or by quietly hoping it will go away or get better on its own, Junebug,” he said softly. “I did try.”

The words dug into Juniper’s skin and stayed there. What could he say to that? Mo was disappointed in him. Mo didn’t trust his judgment anymore, if he ever really had.

“I never meant for any of this to happen,” Juniper attempted one last time. “I didn’t know what the prince was planning.”

But Mo was so sick of his shit that he probably didn’t even want to hear Juniper’s explanation. He’d already made that clear.

“What do you need?” Juniper asked wearily when Mo only hmm’d at him in response. “From me?”

Because maybe he couldn’t ever be trusted again. Maybe he couldn’t ever be looked at as if the sun shone from him. He hadn’t realized Mo had looked at him like that until the look had faltered, all the warmth of the sun gone with it.

Mo settled back into his blankets, on his back, lacing his fingers beneath his head, which was a truly unfair angle of those accentuated biceps in the moonlight.

He stared up at the starry sky for a long moment before he answered.

“Maybe just a story tonight, Junebug,” he said. “If you’ve got one more in you.”

It sounded a little like goodbye.

Juniper’s heart squeezed in response, but he snuggled down beneath the blanket that still smelled like Mo and breathed deep.

“Once upon a time,” he began. “There were two fools who lived on a farm. And one day, a giant ogre arrived, with only two teeth and great big fists the size of boulders. His breath smelled like Bill Bronson in a dirty tavern, and his eyes were oozing with—”

“No oozing,” Mo murmured. “Please.”

No oozing was one of Mo’s most-often-violated rules.

It was also his only true fear: things that oozed.

Once, when their lambs had all gotten sick and been very sneezy for about three weeks one spring, Mo had spent half of that time throwing up every time he saw one of them sneeze.

Or even tipping their heads back like they might sneeze.

“No oozing,” Juniper acknowledged. “The ogre was not oozing anything, but he did smell very bad. He was on the run from the royal guards, because he had just killed some king or other, and was trying to free the land from the iron grip of the royals. And he came to the farm to—”

A gentle snore interrupted him from the other side of the clearing.

Mo was already asleep.

Ten winters ago, Juniper had woken on one winter day beneath a heavy quilt that was not his own, in a bed that belonged to his best friend. They had been drunk the night before. Mo had been talking about leaving, and Juniper had interrupted him by…kissing him.

It was warm and sweet and bright, and winter couldn’t even really exist outside when Mo kissed him back like that. Because Mo had kissed him back. Firm and insistent, his tongue pushing inside Juniper’s mouth, his breath warm against Juniper’s jaw.

And then Juniper had fallen asleep in his bed.

He had woken under a blanket that smelled like Mo Elmthorn. And that in itself was not strange.

What was strange, that morning, was the quiet in their little cottage: no fire crackling in the hearth, no clang of pots on the stove, no scrape of boots or creak of the front door as Mo came and went.

Ten winters ago, on that horrible winter morning that changed everything, Juniper hadn’t wanted to open his eyes, because as long as they stayed tightly shut, Mo wasn’t really gone.

Now, the sun was warm on Juniper’s face, though the cold of sleeping outdoors in the autumn days leading up to Samhain had set into his bones as it always seemed to out here.

And once again, Juniper did not want to open his eyes to a world in which Morn Elmthorn had done what he always did:

Leave Juniper behind.