Chapter 44 Kit #2
Bowie? I snort. The snort turns into a chuckle, and then I’m laughing. My head tilted back to the sky. It’s either laugh or cry, and I’ve had enough tears for a while, thank you.
Brett would have been in tears.
“Dude, you gotta share the joke.” The yell is so unexpected I snap my head over at the sound, laugh dying on my lips. Ian is a ways down the lake, closer to his side of the property. He’s in swim trunks and nothing else, feet in the water. He waves excitedly when I look over, and I wave back.
“Morning,” I manage to call back.
His smile gets impossibly bigger, flashing pearly whites.
He moves quickly to stand, then jumps into the water.
I watch from the end of the dock as he makes his way over to me.
His blond hair is darker when it's wet, and he pushes it back off his forehead when he breaks the surface.
He grips the edge of the dock, fingertips nearly touching my toes, and looks up at me with that same megawatt smile.
Ian is hot. Simple as that. I think he knows he’s hot, but he’s not the kind of hot guy that puffs his chest out and is a dick about it. I feel like Ian doesn’t have a dick bone in his body. Well…
“Hey, neighbor.” He flicks the water from his other hand at me teasingly, then pushes off the dock and swims backwards. “Come on in, man. The water’s perfect.” Ian floats on his back, arms out and smile for the sky. He’s the kind of guy the sun seems to shine differently for.
Like Brett.
I watch him for a moment before sucking in a breath and diving in.
The water is not perfect.
I sputter in disbelief, and Ian’s laugh is coming straight from his belly.
“Liar,” I accuse, gritting my teeth and rubbing my arms.
“Yeah, it's cold as fuck from all the rain.” He laughs again, and this time I find myself laughing with him.
When our laughs fade, he quirks his head at me, a more subtle smirk instead of a radiant smile on his face.
“You look different,” he says, wading a few feet away.
I puff out another laugh, but I feel like I’m under a microscope. “Different how?”
He shrugs and looks off behind me somewhere towards the cabins. Bowen’s cabins. “Got that same kinda look in your eye Bowen had when he went through his breakup. You dumped or do the dumping?”
Internally, I am immediately on my feet screaming. “When? Why? Who?”
Externally, I raise my brows and hope like hell my face is nice and easy-going. “You’re awfully direct. Maybe my fish died.”
Or my best friend died, took half my soul with him, and then I drank myself stupid and lost everything else that meant anything to me. If that’s the same look Bowen had, I need to know who broke his heart while I was away.
Ian chuckles and splashes me half-heartedly. “Nah, I know that look. You’re gay, right?”
I splash him back. “Do you have any filter at all?”
He shrugs his big shoulders again. “Not really. What's the point? We’re all here livin’ our one life whether we want to or not. Why waste time holdin’ onto shit when we could just say what we want to say, ya know?”
“Who told you I was gay?”
He squints at me with a little smile. “Dude.”
“What?”
He barks out a laugh and swims around me.
“Dude! Be so serious right now.” He stops swimming and gets a good look at my face.
Whatever he sees has him laughing more. “Well, one, Bowen told me. Duh. Two, you’re like, really obvious.
I’m pretty sure my muscles each blushed individually when you saw me get out of the truck the other day from how you checked out each one. ”
My laugh is pure horror. “Oh my God, I did not check you out.”
He pouts dramatically. “Blonds aren’t your type? I bet you like ‘em big, dark, and broody.” He waggles his eyes, and just like that, I know my face is bright red.
“Shut up.”
“I mean, I always kinda figured. You were never very stealthy about it.”
I splash him again and swim backwards. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I like my men…small. Definitely not muscled and with no hair.”
“You like little bald dudes?”
“Yep. Small and bald.”
He rolls his blue eyes to the sky. The sun glistens in each water droplet on his skin. He’s tanned and classically handsome. Sharp jaw, a mouth that's quick to smile and apparently ready to tell you whatever comes to his head. He’s easy and charismatic. He does absolutely nothing for me.
No one has.
Not a single person.
“For what it's worth,” Ian says, a slightly more serious look on his face, “if you ever want to talk to someone, man, I’m a good listener.”
Do I want to talk to someone?
It was always easier not to. To push it all away, pretend. Deny. Drown in it all because where do you even begin when there is so much? It’s been so long since I’ve shared anything with anyone other than the ghost of the boy who left me behind.
“Is he okay?” is what finally comes out.
Ian scans my face, and for a blink, I let him see everything I don’t know how to say out loud.
The memories of who I have always been are soaked in the water holding us.
Years of childhood, years of love so soft and pure.
It surrounded me when I ached with want then and embraces me still as a broken man who is full of a desperate hope for a different future.
Ian finally settles on, “He will be.”
It’s a short and sure response. The kind that Brett would have given, so sure of something he couldn’t actually know for certain. It makes me smile. It tightens my chest around that constant ache.
By the time I pull myself out of the water, my fingers and toes are pruned, and my face hurts from smiling. I haven’t laughed like that in years. Not since life was easy and I had no idea what kind of pain the body could withstand without a single visible wound.
The part of me that still holds tightly to my grief feels a hollow guilt as I make my way back to the cabin. The part of me that I have fought for every day since I left feels relief.
When you go so long without laughing, you start to wonder if you even remember how.
There is still a ghost of a smile on my face when I get to the van.
I put my empty water bottle in a small garbage bag and gather whatever bits I left around.
I leave my towel and grab a shirt, tossing it on before taking the garbage bag over to the cans on the side of the cabin.
I lift the lid, toss the bag in, and pause with the lid just about to close.
I lift it back up.
Inside, at the bottom of the bin, are four bottles.
The same four bottles from last night.
All empty and closed inside the trash.