Chapter 13 #3
“All right, all right. You know what I mean. The most beautiful place in Fleming County, technically not inside the city limits of Siren’s Point but close enough that we can just pretend.” He smiles when I roll my eyes at him, gesturing for me to precede him onto the trail.
It’s actually a fairly wide one—in most places, we’ll be able to walk abreast—but the start is always the busiest, so instead of constantly falling in line to let others pass us, we start that way.
Neither of us talks for the first little bit beyond a murmured hello to everyone we pass.
I was a wildlife admirer growing up, but not to the point where I could name every single plant and animal.
As such, I have no idea which birds are currently singing us on our way, but I appreciate them all the same.
My mom used to tell me that nature was healing.
Whenever the pair of us had a particularly bad day, she would say that we needed to go outside and breathe—touch grass, smell a pine tree, and let the ocean kiss our toes.
“Feel better?” she’d ask, a smile on her face, wind teasing the ends of her hair.
We always felt better then, and I feel better now.
I sometimes don’t even recognize how shitty I feel until suddenly I’m better and understand that the before was worse than I realized.
I feel that way right now, with the birds chirping and the sticks cracking under our feet, Shiloh’s steady presence soothing all the rough edges of life.
I inhale as deeply as I can, heart squeezing in longing when I catch the scent of the harbor over the smell of the woods.
I love that about him. He feels like a direct extension of the ocean.
Like she shared one of her children with us but still calls him back every day for a visit.
When Shiloh starts glancing over his shoulder at me, I take that as a subtle hint to move up and walk next to him.
It’s a beautiful day, with the temperature hovering comfortably between warm and cool, the sun filtering through the tips of the trees and throwing dapples of light across the pine needles scattered across the path.
Shiloh’s arm brushes against mine, swinging gently at his side as he walks.
It’s not a super-difficult trail by most standards, but it’s hard enough to elevate our breathing.
I hadn’t counted on Shiloh’s panting breaths to be quite as erotic as they are, nor the catch of his arm hair against mine, nor even the way the jeans he’s wearing seem to have been painted on.
They are tight. A little harder to appreciate when I’m walking next to him, but just as tempting as the view from the back.
I wonder if he’ll be able to get them off later without assistance.
“How’d you meet Daniel?” he asks once we crest a hill and the trail flattens out.
“Oh.” Surprised by the question, I barely think before I answer. “The internet. I searched for personal assistants and went with the first one that felt right.”
Shiloh looks at me in shock, boot coming in contact with a rock and sending it skipping away into the brush.
“You just…hired a stranger off the internet? He could have been a criminal!”
“So could anyone,” I reply fairly, grinning at the indignation on his face. “You have to take a chance on people. There’s no way of knowing how things will turn out until you hire them and see.”
“I guess, but shit. You were eighteen. He could have taken advantage of you, and how would you have even known?”
Pleased with the concern, I turn my face away and grin.
My fingers brush the back of his hand, and I try to imagine a world where I could reach for him and hold on.
Apparently, it was a world that was available to me as a teenager had I only taken a chance.
I wonder if that might have been enough to tie me down and keep me in Siren’s Point and hate myself a little bit for even questioning.
The idea of Shiloh’s friendship being less of an anchor than him as a partner makes me sick.
The urge to apologize knocks its knuckles against the back of my teeth.
I keep it to myself, though, because Shiloh’s made his desires clear, and any more apologizing on my part will only make it seem like I’m trying to displace my guilt onto him.
It’s for me and me alone, now—a quagmire of self-disgust for me to stew in late at night when I should be falling asleep.
“Daniel’s great,” I tell him, swallowing down the rise of guilt and sadness long enough to respond. “You’d like him, if you ever met him. He’s addicted to Scrabble.”
“Is he coming to visit?” Shiloh asks cautiously.
It’s the one thing we didn’t really cover during our heart-to-heart over pizza on his deck—how long I’ll be staying.
I wish I knew. The plan, as such, is to relax and unwind and try to unravel the ball of nerves in my chest long enough to paint.
The plan is to break the creative block and go back to LA.
Daniel’s plan, anyway, and hell if I don’t know what my own is.
“Maybe. He made noise about wanting to see where I grew up.”
Shiloh hums to let me know he heard me but doesn’t reply.
We focus on hiking for a bit, gravel crunching under the heels of our boots and sticks cracking in the woods.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done something like this—gone for a walk for no other reason than to get outside and spend an hour or two with the silence of nature.
My life in California has been nothing but work, so even if there are places like this there, I don’t know of them, and have never visited.
It doesn’t feel like much of a loss, which I suppose is a good indicator of just how little I love my current home.
“I play Sudoku.” Shiloh breaks the silence. I look over at him as he lifts a hand to wipe his face. This trail was a lot easier to manage when we were fifteen and hadn’t once felt exhaustion in our life.
“Yeah? I could never figure that out. I’d get to the end, and one number would be off, and I’d consider killing myself.”
“Ewan,” he admonishes, my name breathless with a hint of laughter. I shrug.
“I’m not even kidding. I bought the Sudoku book at the airport I boarded in, and threw it away at the airport I arrived in.”
He chuckles, hand brushing mine again, neither of us moving to give the other more space.
I wonder if he can feel the way the air crackles to life every time that happens or if that’s just a product of my fanciful, artist’s mind.
You’re a dreamer, Mom used to say. Well, right now, my dreams are nothing but Shiloh, Shiloh, Shiloh.
We come up on the split in the Two Tails Trail.
Without discussing it, we take the left.
We’d hiked both of the tails multiple times growing up, but the left had always been the favorite.
I’m gratified to see that it looks no different now than it did back then, the same trees and rocks and shadows dappled across the path.
There’s a rock formation up ahead that looks like a mermaid’s tail if you tilt your head and squint hard enough.
Nostalgia hits me like a truck, and I approach to put a hand on the warm surface.
We used to climb all over this damn rock, perch on the top and eat the snacks our moms packed us, jump off the highest point and somehow manage not to break our ankles when we hit the ground.
“Pretty sure they added the sign because of us,” Shiloh comments.
I look back at him, standing with his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans. He nods to the right, toward a little wooden sign asking hikers to PLEASE DON’T CLIMB. I snort.
“The historical society considers this a protected monument,” he continues, humor evident in his voice.
“Shut up. Because it looks like a mermaid tail?”
“Yeah. Namesake of the trail and all. Apparently, it’s a big worry that children will climb all over it and ruin the integrity of the—”
“—rock,” I finish gleefully, patting it with my hand. “Ruin the integrity of the rock.”
“Don’t mess with the historical society,” Shiloh cautions, adding so much gravitas to the warning that I can’t help but laugh.
This right here is what I’ve been missing.
I want to spend every moment with him and suck up the good Shiloh vibes like a sponge.
No wonder I’ve been so miserable the past few years.
How could anyone be happy when this is absent from their life?
We hike a little further until we come to a rock that isn’t protected by the town.
Shiloh sits down and leans back on his hands, shoulders stretching the seams of his navy-blue shirt.
When I sit down next to him, he looks over and smiles, eyes seeming to mimic the exact color of the fabric.
I’ve always loved that about them, the way the blue seemed to flow between shades depending on what he was wearing.
After a few moments of silence, I realize I’m not the only one staring.
Eyes steady on mine, Shiloh’s face stays turned my direction, not moving but for the wind teasing the longer strands of his hair.
I wait for him to turn away, blush a little bit, the way he sometimes does when there is too much attention on him. He doesn’t.
His gaze presses on every inch of my face, a slow, sensual perusal, like the barest touch of fingertips.
By the time he’s looking at my mouth, I’m the one who’s flushed and burning with want.
It would be easy—so, so easy—to put a hand against his chest and press him back, to lay him down and stretch out on top; to feel and explore and love all the areas of him I’ve touched only in dreams.
“Afternoon!” a cheerful voice says, interrupting the private space Shiloh and I were caught in. Startled, I turn and look dumbly at a pair of hikers passing us by.
“Afternoon,” I repeat back, my voice oddly hoarse.
My body, which had felt floaty and light and beautiful for that moment, locked in sync with Shiloh, comes back down to earth abruptly.
I already know before I even turn back that it’s passed; that Shiloh will be looking off into the distance at the view and no longer looking at me.
I already know I won’t be able to tug it back, that it was a lovely little sliver of time meant to be enjoyed but not to keep.
“Want to keep going?” Shiloh asks. He is indeed staring out at the trees, forearms balanced on his raised knees.
“Sure,” I reply quietly, wishing instead we could go back in time five minutes.
The rest of the afternoon passes in a pleasant haze of seven years of missed small talk.
Somehow, even though I read all of Shiloh’s emails, there’s still plenty to catch up on.
He needles me for information about my own life in LA, his words a steady, gentle nudge to get me to talk.
I don’t particularly want to, and he can tell.
I’ve been lucky in my success as an artist. I’m successful enough to be able to comfortably handle this period of convalescence and not worry overmuch about money should my inability to paint continue.
I’m grateful for that. But if Shiloh’s life is ocean spray and lobster cages and weathered wood, mine is bright lights and oil paints and a single candle burning in a midnight-dark room.
I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished, while also being ashamed of how little I have to show for it.
I’m scared to know what he thinks my life in LA looks like and how he feels about it.
I want to be the Ewan he loved as a boy, not the Ewan who came back as a man.
By the time we circle back to his truck, he’s teased out quite a bit more than I’d been planning on sharing.
I told him stories I thought were humorous and relaxed a bit when he laughed.
I told him about playing Scrabble with Daniel and the giant rat I went to war against in my first apartment.
I told him about seeing a therapist and taking antidepressants and struggling with insomnia.
I didn’t tell him I love him, even though I wanted to.