Chapter 12 #4
Casey laughs, but something about the quality of it draws Will’s attention; his gaze flicks sharply away from the woodpile, up to Casey’s face.
He looks—nervous, Will realizes, after a second.
It takes him a moment to place it because he’s so unused to seeing that emotion from Casey; isn’t sure, now that he thinks about it, that he ever has before.
“Sort of,” Casey admits, and pulls something long and thin out of the little bag of supplies he tucked next to the woodpile early in the afternoon.
“We have to light it with something, and it would be a little symbolic, and I was going to show, uh…Bill, to be honest with you, a while ago, but he wasn’t, uh… he wasn’t always?—”
“I get the sense he wasn’t always…super with it?
” Will says, very carefully. They haven’t talked about this—Will hasn’t asked because, if he’s honest, he hasn’t been entirely sure he wants to hear it—but the agonized shift in Casey’s tone seems to pull the words from his mouth as though caught on a wire.
“Yeah,” Casey says, on a long, low breath.
“Yes.” He pauses, and then, unceremoniously, sticks out his hand and offers Will the bottle for inspection.
“Anyway, it’s ice cider. Like ice wine, except apples, and not grapes.
It’s not easy to make; you have to freeze the apples, and it takes way more apples than regular cider does, and then it has to ferment and age, and it took me a while to work out the flavor balance the way I wanted it, get the mix right.
But the alcohol content is way higher than regular cider, and not a lot of people make it, and I thought it might…
bring in more money, you know, then the standard hard cider does.
It’s a more specialized product, right? And it’s good , or, I think it’s good.
If you don’t think it’s good, that’s fine, but it took me a few years to make, so maybe don’t tell me?—”
“Oh my God, stop talking about it and give me a taste , if that’s how you’re going to be,” Will says, his eyes wide as he stares from Casey to the bottle.
Casey laughs, and shakes his head, and pulls two little shot glasses from a side pouch in the bag—just two.
Will eyes them, his analytical brain whirring.
It’s not like Will just happened to stumble upon him out here, or like Will was the first person Casey could find to try this with him; Casey planned this.
He put the bottle and the glasses here hours ago, he came and found Will , pulled him all the way across the party, sought specifically him to share this moment with.
A little dizzily, Will tries to remember the last time someone did that, and is embarrassed to realize that the closest thing he can think of is Selma inviting him to cheer her on in the Chicago marathon.
It’s not that it hadn’t been an honor, in a way, to stand in one spot for three hours with Selma’s girlfriend at the time, a woman who was very passionate about essential oils, in order to eventually hand Selma a bottle of Gatorade and watch her run away, but it hadn’t felt quite so… personal.
This does feel personal, in a way Will’s not sure how to parse—or, at least, in a way Will can’t help but parse in a singular and very particular fashion, one that will make him look very, very foolish if he’s wrong.
To Will’s eye, it seems…well, it seems like something of a romantic thing to do, doesn’t it, dragging him out here, making such a point of sharing this with him?
It doesn’t seem, for example, like something you might do with someone you really thought of as your loathed enemy, or upon whom you wished, to list only one of the things Will imagined Casey wished for him only a few weeks ago, slow death by aggressive foot infection.
It seems like the sort of thing you might do if you wanted someone to… If you wanted them to think…
Thank God, Casey is handing Will one of the shot glasses before he can finish that thought.
“Thanks,” Will says, and then holds his breath as Casey leans close to pour Will’s shot—is he leaning closer than necessary, Will wonders, or does he just feel a little drunk every time he’s inside the bubble of Casey’s personal space?
Either way, it’s over before Will can work out an answer, Casey stepping back to fill his own glass and set the bottle carefully down on the nearest flat patch of earth.
Will wrestles back the urge to close the space between them again, saying instead, “So, um. Are we toasting?”
“It’s your farm,” Casey says, with a shrug. His voice is pained, Will notices, but differently than it was around this topic a week ago. Less angry; more wistful. “So maybe you should make the toast.”
Will meets him shrug for shrug, then gaze for gaze. “Ah, but it’s your cider, right? And I’ve never been much of one for toasts, anyway. I’ve always been happier letting someone else handle it.”
Casey holds his gaze for a long moment, an assessing quality slipping into his expression that Will notices there, just sometimes, and usually from the very corner of his own eye.
Then, slowly, his mouth quirks, and he lifts the glass and says, “Okay, then. Here’s to absent friends, and twice to absent enemies. ”
“Ha,” Will says, his own mouth twisting, before he can stop himself.
He shouldn’t, really—he’s not even quite sure what Casey means by saying it—but it’s one of his own favorite toasts, and it feels, in this moment, apropos.
He thinks of Catherine Rose; of the Casey he met two weeks ago who seems like a distant memory; of his family, and his father.
He wonders, wanting to laugh, which of them he’s drinking twice for.
But he would drink twice, would drink four times, quite happily.
The ice cider is good , the flavor suggesting an unholy union between apple juice, woodsmoke, and deep, nearly burnt caramel, and Will savors it in little sips rather than throwing it back.
“ God ,” he breathes, when he’s done. “I’ve never had anything like it, it’s— wonderful . ”
“Right?” Casey says, grinning brightly at him.
“It’s a Canadian thing. I spent a few summers up there, long time ago, that’s where I first tried it—so people down here mostly don’t know about it.
But I was going to, before it all… Before everything.
I thought I’d present it to Bill or…whatever, you know, and see if we couldn’t set up a real operation here.
I ran the numbers and I thought it might make us more, maybe a lot more, than the traditional cider alone.
” He pauses for a moment, his face tight, and then the expression smooths out as he sighs.
“But things played out differently, and that’s life, right?
You can’t know how it’s going to go. It seemed a waste, though, after all that work, not to at least try the prototype, and it’s yours now, technically. I did it all in the farm’s name, so.”
“Casey,” Will starts, gobsmacked, not sure where to begin.
But before he can say anything, Noel and Todd are bustling up, demanding to know if it’s time to start the fire yet, and saying people are asking when the fire will be starting, and pointing out that the sun is down and they’re right here and have they considered starting the fire?
“Fine, fine,” Casey relents, laughing, and it’s quick work after that.
He and Will each take a box of long camping matches out of Casey’s bag and get to work catching pieces of fatwood on fire, which they slot into the larger woodpile once a proper flame gets going.
After a few minutes, the faint crackling of a few pieces of wood burning starts to grow into the louder roar of a proper fire, and Casey yells, “Stand back!” and then tosses a slow arc of the ice cider towards the flames.
It’s not a lot, just enough that the short-lived cascade of liquid catches the firelight before the alcohol brightens it considerably, a blinding flare that seems to solidify the blaze.
There isn’t time, after that, to circle back to who owns the ice cider, or all Casey’s hard work, or the fact that with every passing day Will becomes more sure that selling this farm to Catherine Rose’s buyers would be a godawful thing to do to someone who seems, reckless driving habits aside, like a pretty excellent person.
There’s dancing, instead, and more drinking, and so many people and conversations that Will can’t quite keep track of them all.
There’s singing and laughing and a late-night slice of cherry pie from the trunk of someone’s car that is maybe the most delicious thing Will has ever eaten in his life, and Will can’t make the space to go back to it.
He’s having too much fun with Casey, who makes him feel so present , so alive , that it’s hard to remember the Will he was just a few weeks ago, lurking at the edges of Selma’s parties, getting into emotional showdowns with his ex-boyfriends’ untamed lizards.
It’s not as though they don’t have time, after all.
It’s not as though, just because the bridge is being repaired tomorrow, they have to get into all of this right now.