Nineteen
A week passes, and Garrett doesn’t pull away, each day filled with evidence of the new reality that exists between us: small touches and kisses and actions and glances, all solidifying that we have moved on to a different version of our relationship.
I walk into his bedroom one evening to find him splayed on his bed, watching Gladiator II on his laptop.
I can’t see the screen, but I hear Harry Gregson-Williams’s reworked version of the original movie’s theme drifting from the speakers.
“I think I liked the first one better,” I say.
He pauses the movie and looks up at me. “How did you know what I was—” His jaw drops as he realizes the extent of my soundtrack knowledge. “Impressive.”
“Not really,” I say. “That theme is pretty iconic. But,” I add, before I can stop myself, “you should rewatch the battle scene from the first movie sometime and then compare it to the first fight scene in Pirates of the Caribbean. The similarity between the two scores is wild.”
He laughs, eyes bright. “I’m sure it is.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m being a nerd.”
“You’re being cool.”
I grin at the compliment, and a beat of awkward silence falls as I hover in his doorway.
“I was wondering,” I say, deciding to get it over with, “if you—if you don’t have anything else going on—do you want to go on a date tomorrow?” I swallow, worried that I have misread the last week and that he’s about to turn me down before sending me slinking to my room across the hall.
“Yes,” he says with incredulous certainty, as if there is no other possible answer.
So the following evening, I lead him along the Lake Superior shore, hiking a narrow path between bare birches and young pines.
The cold, clear day is drawing to a close, and the sun begins to dip low in the horizon, painting the sky in periwinkle, pink, and gold.
To our left, down a rocky slope, the lake cuts into the land in a wide bay, large parts of which have frozen over.
“Can we walk on it?” he asks.
“Not unless you want to fall through, get hypothermia, and die.”
He looks at me sideways. “I feel like falling through the ground and dying is becoming a theme for a lot of the places you take me.”
“I try to be consistent.”
The path rounds a corner, veering us away from the sheltered bay and toward the open, wild waters of the lake.
It spreads in front and around the peninsula where we stand, a frigid blue black.
The waves crash ashore, sending a constant, heavy mist into the trees that were brave enough to plant themselves along the shoreline.
When we find the spot, Garrett stops.
“Amazing,” he breathes.
Before us stands a grove of pine saplings, only a few feet taller than us, where the freezing water spraying up from the lake below has solidified on every needle. The weight has caused the trees to bow together, forming a dome of solid ice.
On the side facing us—the one away from the ravaging force of the lake—a small space opens like a low doorway into the dome.
Garrett drops onto his hands and knees, looks at me over his shoulder, then crawls inside.
I follow, and then the two of us are together in a sculpture of branch and ice and snow.
I settle next to him, the ceiling inches above our heads.
A thick icicle hangs from the dome all the way to the ground. The setting sun turns the icy walls an iridescent blue. Through an opening, where two stronger branches have braced themselves against each other, we can see the roiling lake and pastel sunset.
I remove a pack from my back and set it down between us and begin unloading it. I pull out a blanket, a lantern, a thermos filled with hot cider, and a lunchbox containing two pasties.
Garrett watches me, a strange expression on his face.
I pause, midway through stretching the blanket across the ground underneath us. “Too much?” I ask. “Shit. It’s too much. Katrina said I shouldn’t go too big on the first date, that it comes across as desperate and—”
“Enzo,” he interrupts, placing his gloved hand over my own. “It’s perfect. So. Incredibly. Perfect. No one has ever done something like this for me before.”
A shaft of evening light falls across his face and he becomes golden.
Our eyes lock, and I read something behind his, a sort of sadness that tells me he’s not just referring to a cheesy date.
I wonder if it’s possible that he’s never been surprised by a gift someone put time and thought into, something planned just for him.
I remember all the early mornings Dad drove me to music competitions, how he sat in the front row of every band concert.
I think of the dinners Aunt Liz cooks, the surprise birthday parties she’s thrown for me.
I think of the books Emma leaves on my bed, ones she’s enjoyed and is positive I will, too.
These things are all a part of my life—things I’ve taken for granted.
But I can see in Garrett’s eyes that this is new for him.
For all his confidence, his popularity, the privileges his wealthy family has afforded him—and for all the things he does for others—he doesn’t know what it’s like to have someone do something big like this for him.
“Thank you,” he says.
And looking at him now, I realize I don’t have the words to articulate what I’m feeling, the emotion blossoming in my stomach too large for my vocabulary. In the Caving Grounds, I kissed him because I wanted to. Now I kiss him because it’s impossible not to.
I lean toward him and place my hand on the back of his head and guide him to me. His lips are warmer than I remember.
The kiss is soft at first. But then he slides closer to me, placing one arm around my back, pulling me in. A fierce determination overcomes both of us, and we can’t stop, can’t get enough.
Time stretches. The light begins to dim. The pasties and cider grow cold.
Garrett and I, however, do not.
When we get home, Emma and Dad have already gone to bed.
I lead Garrett by the hand through the darkened house I know by memory.
He bumps into the giant urn in the entry hall, catching it as it wobbles on its perch.
He swears and I shush him, and then we both laugh, realizing it’s not even ten and that we don’t need to be quiet.
We get to the landing between our rooms and pause, my hand still clasped in his.
His thumb rubs the soft spot on my palm.
I toy with a loose thread on the cuff of his sweater.
He angles himself toward me, places a finger under my chin, tilts my head back, and our lips meet.
I realize that, without the barrier of winter jackets between us, I can slide my hands under his shirt.
I know what he looks like shirtless, but this is new.
Under my fingertips the curves of his chest are more real, more perfect than before.
His hands press into my back, and I’m amazed at how much surface area they cover, how much of me fits under them.
We move into my bedroom by touch because we can’t break our lips apart, and land on my bed, his solid body pressed against me.
I pull at his hair, my lips moving along his throat, tasting salt and skin.
He grinds against me and we’re both hard and frantic, and just when I begin to wonder how far this will go, he rolls off me.
“We should probably slow down,” he says.
I turn myself onto my side and face him and nod because I have no breath left. My body wants more of him, but I also register a relieved part of my brain that wasn’t ready to go all the way, because it hadn’t processed what that would mean.
Instead we talk.
Garrett props himself up on his elbow, and his eyes glance around the room, landing on my oboe. “How did you pick the oboe?” he asks. “Out of all the instruments?”
“It had to do with a movie soundtrack,” I say.
His lips twist. “Shocking.”
“When I was ten, right before it was time to start band in school, I got up in the night for a glass of water or something. Dad was still up and Aunt Liz was over. The two of them were watching a movie, and the most beautiful music I’d ever heard was floating up from the living room.
Just this haunting melody played by a solo oboe over a gut-wrenching chord progression.
I don’t even think I knew what instrument it was at the time, but I knew I wanted to play that song.
‘Gabriel’s Oboe,’ it’s called. I fell asleep on the stairs, listening to the music while Dad and Aunt Liz finished the movie. ”
“What was the movie?”
“The Mission. It’s funny: I’ve listened to its soundtrack a million times, but I’ve never sat down and watched the movie. I’m almost afraid it won’t live up to the music.”
“I love that story,” Garrett says. “My brother Charlie plays the trumpet, and he only picked it because it seemed like the loudest instrument. I think your reason is better.”
It feels different, talking to him like this, inches apart on my bed in the glow of my bedside lamp.
Everything we say takes on added weight.
We keep talking for hours, about all the things we always talk about: about life and our dreams, about books and movies, about stupid things and important things.
We develop inside jokes and we kiss and we hold each other in a dozen different ways, and every time I feel like I’m drifting off to sleep, he says something that makes me feel too alive with energy, and we talk more.
It is early morning when we fall asleep, still clothed and still holding each other, and the last thing I notice before my eyes slide shut is the unexpected way his sleeping face looks: like he’s anxious, tense, as if the part of himself that portrays coolness and confidence has shut down, leaving only a clenched jaw and a worried crease between his eyebrows.
The next afternoon, I sit at my keyboard wearing Garrett’s Irontown Football sweatshirt, overlarge and filled with his scent, and compose a simple piano sonata.
It starts with an F-sharp minor chord, low and long, then builds into a contemplative, yearning melody over a rolling chord progression.
It is ice and waves, pine branches and sunset, stormy eyes in the fading golden light.