9. Everett
9
Everett
I woke to vague light in my eyes, which was weird, because I had blackout curtains in my room.
Grandma’s house , a voice in the back of my head reminded me.
But when I blinked my eyes open to the reds and purples of early dawn, it wasn’t even Grandma’s house. It was Grandma’s back porch swing. I’d slept the whole night on the porch swing? I suspected I was going to pay for that in back pain later.
When I lifted my head, it reminded me why I’d fallen asleep on the porch swing. I had an entire bottle of wine in me when I did it. Maudlin and weirdly pathetic, mooning over a picture of what Peter might have looked like in his twenties, if he’d been a doctor in the fucking nineteenth century.
That was when another sensation accosted me. Warmth. Almost like I had a blanket on my legs, except I didn’t. And also, the blanket was breathing.
Slowly, I panned to look, half worried I was going to have a coyote or something sleeping on my lower half.
But no, it was...it was a living version of the picture I’d gone to sleep staring at. A picture that was now held in the hands of...of Peter Hawking? A living, breathing, twenty-first century version of Peter Hawking. Who was asleep on my legs.
He was beautiful. Even more beautiful than he’d been as a boy, those childish, elfin features translated into more grownup, masculine ones. Full pink lips, sharp cheekbones, eyelashes so long he could comb them. There were slight tear tracks down his face, dry and mostly gone, but still apparent through a healthy layer of dirt on his cheeks. Oh, not filth. He hadn’t been rolling in the mud or anything. I might not have even noticed the dirt, but for the completely clean spots the tear tracks had left behind.
As I watched, he blinked groggily, looking up at me with Peter’s hazel eyes. All those years, and there was still no mistaking them. It was too bad the picture of Peter Hawking had been black and white, because if I’d seen the color of his eyes, there’d have been no mistaking it. They were the color of warm amber and summer leaves, and right then, with the first rays of dawn were striking them, they were even brighter. Honeyed gold.
He gave me a tiny, sleepy smile, and pushed up off my legs.
He frowned when he realized that the picture of Peter and Eloise Hawking was almost crushed in his grip, wincing and letting it go. “I’m so sorry, I?—”
He cut off with a strangled noise, eyes going round and hand reaching for his throat. Strangely, though. Clumsily. He almost hit air, overreaching his throat by a few inches and having to pull back to get to it, like his arm was too long. When he managed it, his fingers flexed, like maybe he’d found something wrong there.
“Are you okay? Should I call for an ambulance?” I pulled back, started to stand, to look for my phone, but he flailed, reaching out for me and almost falling off the swing entirely when his whole body was thrown off balance by the motion.
He caught himself, bracing his hands on the swing in front of himself and then staring at them.
“P—Peter?”
He swung his head up to look at me, his voice coming out breathy and hoarse this time. “You...you know me now? You remember me now?”
I let myself fall back onto the porch swing, curling my knee under me and leaning in to wrap my hands around his face. His cheeks were smooth under my hand, not like he’d shaved, but like he’d never once in his life had to shave. But if he was Peter, he was thirty, so how did that work?
Still, it was undeniable. It was Peter. My Peter.
Gods, I’d missed him so much.
“I never forgot you, Peter. Not for a second, not ever. I came back looking for you, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. I spent the whole summer before college asking everyone in town about you, but they treated me like I was nuts.” I shook my head, trying to ignore that prickling in my eyes that had come back, and...Dammit, I didn’t care. This was my best friend ever, the guy I hadn’t seen in more than fifteen years, sitting right in front of me.
He was the last great thing in my life.
Yeah, it was pathetic that I hadn’t ever had anything better in my life after fourteen, but I fucking hadn’t. High school had been hell, alone with a bunch of strangers who hadn’t been interested in welcoming a new kid to their pre-arranged cliques. College had been a slog, trying to do my very best and get the best grades, working a full-time job all the while to prove to my parents that my master’s degree in art wasn’t just about wanting to laze around and paint naked ladies all day. Then a year-long unpaid internship with one agency, that had led to a job at another: Warren.
I hadn’t dated anyone for longer than a month or two, because none of them had been right. None of them had had golden-green eyes and sharp cheekbones and the softest lips and...
“But there was a boy. Last night, there was a boy who looked like you, but younger.”
Peter looked down at his hands, and his eyes went glossy. “But I...I’m old now,” he said, as though it was a reasonable response. As though it was about...
Fairies.
I smiled at him, as hard as it was through the lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. “You’re really not. You’re...fuck, you’re still younger than me.” I snatched the paper out of his hands and tapped it. He looked precisely like the man in it now. “Twenty-three. He was twenty-three in this picture. With his mother. Your...mother?”
Peter stared at her, swallowing hard, then leaning back. “I don’t have a mother. I never—I knew her, that lady. She was nice to me. Sad. But I don’t have a mother. Or a father.”
Through all of this, he continued staring at the woman on the page.
“I didn’t before. Remember her. I’m starting to—I’m starting to remember a lot of things. So much.”
I blinked and stared at him, and his legs tensed. His whole body was tense, in fact, ready to bolt. Again? Had it really been him the night before, still a child?
That was ridiculous . . . probably.
Still, every part of me screamed with protest at the thought of him running away from me. I couldn’t lose him again. Never again. But how could I convince him to stay?
“Pizza,” I blurted out, ineloquent and random, but not wrong. Peter had always loved pizza. That would make him stay. I had the ingredients, even the yeast for pizza dough, since I’d been planning to make some bread. “We can make pizza. In the kitchen.” I waved toward the back door, and he turned to look at it.
When he looked back at me, his eyes were sparkling with that old Peter impishness. “With pineapples?”
I laughed. “I’ll freaking put bananas on it if you want.”
His grin was perfect. It was Peter. “Nope. Just the pineapples. And ham.”