Chapter 23 #2
He cornered me against the pool wall and pinned me there with his body, his hands braced on either side of my head, water streaming down his face. "Caught you."
"Took you long enough."
He kissed me. Soft and slow, nothing like the frantic energy of a moment ago. I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him back, and the morning stretched out around us, endless and golden.
"Race you," I said against his mouth.
"What?"
"Ten laps. Loser makes lunch."
His eyes narrowed. "You can't beat me in the water."
"Guess we'll find out."
We lined up at the shallow end, hands on the wall. Joel counted down from three and we pushed off together, and for the next five minutes the only sound was splashing and breathing and the occasional curse when one of us pulled ahead.
He won. Barely.
"Lunch is on you," he said, smug and breathless.
"Best two out of three?"
"You're a sore loser."
"I'm a competitor." I splashed water at his face.
I made sandwiches, nothing fancy, but Joel ate his like I'd handed him a five-course meal. He kept looking at me across the kitchen island with his head tilted, studying me the way he studied footage of his own jumps.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing." He took another bite. "This is good."
"It's a sandwich."
"It's a good sandwich."
We spent the afternoon doing nothing. Joel lay on the couch with his head in my lap and let me run my fingers through his hair while some movie played that neither of us was paying attention to.
"This is weird," he said.
"What is?"
"Not doing anything." His eyes were closed. "I don't know how to not do anything."
"You're doing something. You're lying here."
"That's not something. That's the absence of something."
I tugged gently at his hair. "You're overthinking it."
"I'm always overthinking it."
Around four, we walked down to the beach. The house had a private path through the dunes, wooden steps half-buried in sand, sea grass brushing our legs as we passed. The ocean stretched out flat and gray-blue, the afternoon light starting to soften.
Joel collected driftwood without being asked. I found a spot where the sand dipped into a natural hollow, sheltered from the wind. We built the fire together, working around each other like we'd done this before, like we'd done this a hundred times.
The wood caught. Smoke curled up into the sky. Joel sat down next to me, close enough that our shoulders touched.
"I used to do this with my dad," I said. "Before. When I was a kid."
Joel leaned into me and hummed in answer.
"We'd drive out to Lake Erie, just the two of us.
Build a fire, watch the sun go down. He'd tell me about playing in college, before his knee blew out.
" I picked up a handful of sand and let it sift through my fingers.
"He doesn't remember any of that now. I asked him about it last time I visited and he just looked at me like I was telling him someone else's story. "
The fire crackled. The waves rolled in, steady and indifferent.
"I'm sorry," Joel said.
"It's okay. I'm not telling you so you'll feel bad. I'm telling you because this reminds me of that. Being here. With you." I looked at him. "It's a good memory. That's all."
The sun was lower now, turning the water orange and gold. Joel's face was lit from the side, half in shadow. He was watching the horizon, his jaw tight, his shoulders creeping up toward his ears the way they did when he was working through something he didn't want to say.
"What happens Sunday?" he asked.
There it was. The question we'd been circling for days.
I waited. Joel pulled his knees up, wrapped his arms around them. He looked younger like that, smaller, like someone trying to hold himself together.
"I don't know," he said. "I keep trying to figure it out."
"Okay."
"It's not okay." His voice was rough. "You go back to Vegas. I go back to Colorado. We text when we can. We see each other when schedules line up." He picked at a thread on his shorts, not looking at me. "The schedules never line up."
He was quiet for a long moment. His throat worked.
"I spent years hiding," he said. "I swore I'd never go back to that."
He didn't say the rest. He didn't have to. The closet sat between us, the thing we'd been stepping around since New Mexico, the reason we were on a private beach instead of a restaurant, the reason he'd rented a house with a fence and no neighbors.
I wanted to tell him it wasn't that simple. Hockey would eat me alive if I came out. But he knew all that. He'd known it from the beginning.
"I'm not asking you to come out," he said. "I know what it would cost."
His hand found a piece of driftwood and he turned it over, studying it like it held answers.
"I just don't know if this survives," he said. "That's all."
He wasn't wrong. Two cities. Two impossible schedules. A closet I couldn't leave. On paper, this was already over.
But my dad had made plans too. Things he was going to do when he retired, places he wanted to take us. None of it happened. The future he'd counted on dissolved while I was still young enough to learn the lesson.
"I don't know what happens Sunday either," I said. "Maybe this doesn't survive. Maybe we go back to our lives and this turns into past tense." I reached over and took his hand. His fingers were cold. "But we're not there yet. We're here."
His hand tightened around mine.
"That's it?" he asked. "That's your answer?"
"That's my answer." I lifted his hand and pressed my lips to his knuckles. "Be here with me. That's all I'm asking."
Joel didn't say anything for a long time.
"I've never done this before," he said finally.
"Done what?"
"Wanted something I couldn't train for."
I held his hand and watched the water creep closer.
"I want more than one day," he said. His voice was quiet and almost angry. “I want more than a week. I want… I want more than this, Red.”
"So do I. I wish things were different."
“Me too.”
We sat with that. No solution. No plan. Just the fire burning down and the water getting closer and Joel's hand in mine, grip tight enough to hurt a little.
The fire burned down to embers. The stars came out, one by one, then all at once. Joel's head dropped onto my shoulder, and I turned my face into his hair and breathed him in.