Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
By late afternoon, the house was ready. The wood pile was fully stacked, food prepared for easy snacking, and lamps at the ready should the power fail again.
Jake had cleared a small area, partially protected from the worst of the weather by a stone porch, on the eastern side of the house, the sheltered spot allowing for a clear, uninterrupted view across snow covered moorland towards where the sun would eventually rise.
Now, as the early dusk of midwinter descended, Jake banked up the fire while Ru made tea. The domesticity of it was disconcerting, of how easily they’d fallen into an easy rhythm together.
“So what exactly do we do?” Ru asked, settling into the sofa and wriggling down into the cushions.
Jake sat beside him. “We wait, acknowledging the darkness as we reflect on the past year, and the one to come.” He felt self-conscious explaining it, aware that to anybody who’d not grown up with it that it probably sounded like a load of New Age bollocks at worst or at best a rag bag of quaint and colourful but essentially silly customs, rather than an integral part of life.
“Sometimes I read. Or just watch the fire.”
As darkness settled fully outside, their talk ebbed and flowed, nothing taxing, nothing that delved too deep. Jake sank deeper into the cushions, in the warm room lit only by flame and lamplight, his limbs grew heavy; it had been years since he’d been at such bone deep ease.
“Your nan,” Ru said during one quiet moment, the fire casting his face in warm gold. “She must have been remarkable.”
Jake nodded, memories surfacing of the single-minded, and sometimes fierce woman, who’d loved him with everything she had.
“She was the centre of the universe. The rest of us orbited around her. Tough as old boots but soft hearted when it mattered.” He stared into the flames, at the sparks, at a section of log that collapsed into embers.
“Nan was a farm worker’s daughter. The family had lived at one with the land since the time of the ancestors, she always said.
” Jake smiled. “She was a romantic at heart. The prosaic truth is that I come from a line of poor farm labourers, my parents being the first as far as I know who worked at jobs that had no connection with the land. One thing she always said, though, was that modern life had lost touch with the natural cycle.”
“I think she was right,” Ru said quietly. “We’re all so disconnected from the natural world now. Always rushing, never pausing to notice the turning of the year.”
Jake glanced at him, surprised by the understanding. “That’s what she said. Almost exactly.”
Ru smiled, the firelight catching in his eyes. “Great minds.”
The night deepened. The midnight hour came and went. The only sound the pop and crackle of the wood burner. Even the wind had fallen silent.
“Can I ask you something?” Ru said. “You don’t have to answer, but…”
Jake had fallen into the shadowy world between sleep and wakefulness, but there was something in Ru’s voice that snapped him into wide awake alertness. Ru was staring at him, looking like he’d wished he’d not asked.
“Go on. You can ask but it doesn’t mean I’ll answer.”
Ru looked over his shoulder, at the photographs on the wall. Jake already knew what Ru was going to ask.
“The photo of you, when you were younger, with the other soldier. He…he looks like he matters to you. A lot.”
“He did. Still does. That’ll never change.” Jake hesitated for a beat. “His name was Ben.” How could his throat still thicken, his voice still catch, after so many years?
“Was?”
Jake nodded. “He was killed. Blown up by an IED, a crude homemade bomb essentially, in Afghanistan. He was my best friend and my confidant. I could tell him everything except for what mattered most of all.”
“You loved him?”
Jake nodded. Turning to the fire, he blinked away the tears he believed he’d long ago run out of. “I fell head over heels from the moment we met in basic training.”
“Did he guess?”
“I think so.” Jake stared into the fire, not seeing the flames but a face that would never grow older.
“We didn’t talk about how we felt inside because we were tough army lads.
Or at least I was tough. Ben, though, he was way too soft to be in the forces.
I often wondered why he’d signed up. I’m not sure he knew why, either.
I like to think that in time I’d have been honest with him, but the time didn’t come. ”
“I’m sorry. He looks lovely, and you look happy with him.”
“Right on both counts.” Jake pushed himself up. “I’m going to make coffee. Want some?” It was the not so subtle signal to say the topic was closed.
Ru nodded. “Thanks, that’d be nice.”
As the night progressed, they took turns adding logs to the fire, making fresh drinks, occasionally stretching stiff muscles. Around two in the morning, they shared the food Ru had prepared, bread and cheese and fruit that tasted better for the hour and the company.
“Are you getting tired?” Jake asked, noticing Ru stifle a yawn.
“A little,” Ru admitted. “But I want to see it through. The whole night.” He shifted, leaning back into the sofa. “Did you used to wait up with your nan, when you were a kid?”
Jake nodded. “My mum, too, but not my dad because he had to be up early for work, but he always said he was with us in spirit.” Jake smiled as the happy, comforting memories of his family came back to him. “Nan always said the longest night teaches us patience. That some things can’t be rushed.”
“Like waiting out a storm.”
“Yes, just like that.” The words prickled against Jake’s skin, feeling the sharpness of their double meaning, of the storm that had built up between the two of them and remained unresolved.
As the night wore on, Jake found himself drifting, not quite asleep but not fully awake, awareness narrowed to the warmth of the fire and Ru’s presence beside him.
At some point they’d moved closer, their shoulders touching as they leant into the sofa.
Jake knew he should move, keeping the distance he’d told himself he should maintain, but the contact was comforting in the deep quiet of the longest night.
He woke fully to find Ru’s head resting against his shoulder, his breathing deep, steady and warm against Jake’s neck. Jake sat still, hardly daring to move but knowing he must.
The fire had burned low, little more than pockets of red amidst the grey and crumbling embers. Jake checked his watch. Seven-thirty. The sun would rise in a little over half an hour.
“Ru,” he said quietly. “Wake up. It’s almost time.”
Ru stirred, blinking slowly, sleep fogged and disoriented. “Did I fall asleep? Sorry. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I was never one for staying up all night. Just think of all those raves I missed out on.”
Jake smiled. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine anybody less likely to dance the night away in a disused warehouse.
They made their way to the utility room and bundled themselves up in layers. Just before they left the house, Jake wrapped a silky soft scarf around Ru’s neck. He did it without thinking, only wanting to make sure Ru was warm and comfortable.
Outside, the world was still dark, but with that particular quality that precedes dawn, of darkness preparing to yield, holding its breath before the change.
The freezing cold was shocking after the warmth of the house. The world was silent, snow muffled, waiting. Jake cleared away fresh snow from a small bench, and they sat side by side, close enough that their bodies seemed to share warmth even through layers of clothing.
“It’s beautiful,” Ru whispered, as if afraid to break the hush.
The snow-covered landscape stretched out before them, the bleak moor rising as a darker silhouette against a dark sky.
“Watch. It happens quickly once it starts.”
They sat in silence as the miracle unfolded.
First, a barely perceptible lightening of the eastern sky, a shift from black to deepest blue.
Then a line of pale gold appearing at the horizon, spreading upward, warming to amber.
Clouds caught the light, their undersides painted in warm pinks and golds against the brightening blue.
And then, suddenly, the first direct ray of sunlight, a spear of pure gold striking across the snow covered uplands. The white landscape came alive, glittering with a million diamond points of light, the pristine snow reflecting and magnifying the sun’s return.
Beside him, Ru caught his breath. Jake turned to find him transfixed, eyes wide, face illuminated by the new light. Something stirred and twisted in Jake’s heart at the sight. A recognition, a certainty, that the universe had shifted, its axis forever changed.
“My nan said the first sunrise after solstice is sacred,” he said, voice rough with emotion. “That wishes made in the first light have power.”
Ru turned to him, face glowing with more than just the dawn. “What do you wish for?”
The question hung between them. Jake looked at Ru, really looked at him, at the man who’d sought refuge in his barn during a blizzard and who had, somehow, in just days, begun to thaw something long frozen deep within him.
He studied the bruise that’d spread across Ru’s nose and under his eyes; beaten and battered Ru might have been, but it could do nothing to diminish how beautiful the man was, both outside and in.
His gaze drifted over the borrowed clothes, his clothes, that for all they were far too big, sat on Ru as though they belonged on him.
And, when their eyes met, Ru gazed back at him with a softness that made his heart vault.
“To find my way home. To regain my place in the world.”
They watched in silence as the sun continued its ascent, the world transforming around them. The longest night was over. Light was returning, minute by minute. The wheel of the year had turned.
“Thank you,” Ru said, when they returned to the farmhouse and settled on the sofa. They sat closer than they had been before the vigil, as if some invisible barrier had dissolved with the night. “Sharing that with me, it was… magical, somehow. Yet that doesn’t seem enough.”
Silence wound itself around them as they sipped coffee, each lost in the gentle glow of the fire.
A shift had taken place, something fundamental had changed during the long night and the dawn that followed.
The boundaries Jake had established seemed less certain now, less necessary.
The reasons for holding back less convincing.
Ru set down his mug. Turning to face Jake, his expression was both nervous and determined. “Jake,” he said quietly, “about the other night—”
Jake opened his mouth to speak, to say something. Anything. But Ru shook his head and raised his hand, palm outwards. Any words Jake had withered on his tongue.
“I—I haven’t changed my mind. What I wanted then is what I still want.
And I’m not vulnerable, whatever you might think.
I appreciate you trying to protect me.” His voice dropped, became quieter, huskier, every letter, syllable, word firing up Jake’s nerve endings.
“But it’s not me you’re trying to protect, is it? ”
A weight pressed down hard on Jake, heavier than any weight he’d carried on night manoeuvres, stumbling around in enemy territory in the black of night.
“I have to be cautious. Careful.” Because if my life is ripped apart one more time, I don’t think I could survive.
“I understand caution.” Ru moved closer, close enough that Jake could smell the coffee on his breath and see flecks of silver in his grey eyes. “But there’s caution, and then there’s hiding.”
Hiding.
The word hit with unexpected force, resonating with a truth Jake had been avoiding.
But he hadn’t only been hiding, he’d been running away.
Not from Ru, but from the possibility of connection, of vulnerability.
From the risk of caring again, and the pain that would rip through him when it all came tumbling down.
“The solstice is about balance,” Ru continued softly. “You said it yourself. Dark and light. One as necessary as the other.” His hand came to rest on Jake’s arm, warm through the cotton of his shirt. “Maybe this is about balance, too.”
Jake looked down at Ru’s hand before letting his gaze drift up to meet Ru’s eyes, so open and honest in the morning light. Something shifted within him, like ice breaking on a frozen river.
He wasn’t sure who moved first. Only that suddenly all the air between them was gone and Ru’s mouth was on his, warm and certain.
Jake’s hands came up to cup Ru’s face, careful of his bruised nose, as the kiss deepened, warm and wet, tongues exploring and tasting, all of it sweeter than honey, and more intoxicating than any alcohol could ever be.
This was different from their first kiss, because Jake knew exactly what he was doing, what lines he was crossing, what walls he was dismantling.
And for the first time in longer than he could remember, he didn’t care about the consequences.
Ru pulled back slightly, just enough to meet Jake’s eyes, his breathing shallow and uneven. “Still want to do the right thing?” he asked, a hint of challenge in his voice.
Jake gazed at him, at Ru’s flushed cheeks, his pupil blown eyes, the grey a narrow band encircling blackness.
But it wasn’t just the want and need Jake saw.
He saw a man who’d stayed awake through the longest night to witness and share the dawn with him, a man who’d opened his heart and mind to traditions and rituals so many others would have found strange, warping them into an amusing story to tell friends. But Ru wasn’t so many others.
A man who, god alone knew how, saw more in Jake than he saw in himself.
The sun was fully risen now, the world white and pristine, made new by the returning light. Inside, something else was being reborn, a possibility Jake had thought long buried, a capacity for feeling he’d believed lost. He made the decision without knowing it.
Pushing himself to standing, he pulled Ru to his feet. Without a word, not letting himself think but only letting himself be, Jake led Ru through the living room, to the stairs, and up to his bedroom.