Chapter Five
The heat hadn't broken by nightfall. If anything it had thickened, settled into the loft like something with weight, and Avery lay on top of the quilt in his borrowed shirt with sweat gathering at his hairline for the second night running, listening to Hayes move around the kitchenette below the sound of his own pulse.
"This isn't working," Hayes said, finally, from somewhere near the window. He'd propped it open an inch with a paint stick, for all the good it did. "Lake's right there."
Avery lifted his head off the pillow. "What?"
"Water's still. No wind tonight." He was already pulling a shirt back over his head, the one he'd stripped off twenty minutes ago when the heat got unbearable. "Cools off faster than sitting up here waiting for it to."
"You want to go swimming. At night."
"You want to keep sweating through my sheets."
Avery didn't have a counter for that.
***
The path down to the water ran behind the workshop, packed dirt gone soft from the storm, and Hayes didn't bother with a flashlight.
Avery followed the pale shape of his shirt through the dark, one hand out in front of him more from instinct than need, until the trees broke and the lake opened up in front of them — black glass, no moon yet, just enough starlight scattered across the surface to prove it was there at all.
"Can you even see where you're going?" Avery asked.
"Done this walk a thousand times. Could do it blind."
"That's not actually reassuring."
Hayes didn't answer that one. He was already at the end of the dock, shirt off and dropped somewhere Avery couldn't see, and then there was a sound — a clean cut through water, no splash to speak of — and when Avery got to the edge of the dock himself, Hayes had already surfaced ten feet out, hair slicked back, just a dark shape against darker water.
"Come on," he said. "Water's not as cold as it looks."
Avery stood at the edge with his shirt half off, suddenly aware of how much of him it was covering. "How deep is it?"
"Over your head at ten feet out. Shallow enough to stand at the dock ladder."
"That's a very specific answer for someone who just told me to jump in blind."
"I know this lake." A pause, and Avery could hear the smile in it even if he couldn't see it. "Get in, Mercer."
He got in.
The cold hit him first — not shocking, not the gasping kind of cold, but a clean drop against skin that had spent all day soaking up heat with nowhere to put it, and Avery went under to his shoulders and felt something in his chest unclench that he hadn't known was clenched.
He came up gasping anyway, just from the surprise of it, and heard Hayes laugh — a real one, short and low, the first one Avery had heard out of him since the gravel lot.
"Told you."
"You didn't tell me it would feel like this."
"Didn't have the words for it. Figured you'd get there yourself."
Avery pushed his wet hair back off his forehead and treaded water, turning in a slow circle.
The workshop's single porch light was the only thing marking where land started.
Past that, nothing — no other lights on the water, no cabin lit up across the way, just the black shoreline and the trees standing over it like a wall.
"It's so quiet out here," he said.
"That's the point."
"I don't think I've ever heard nothing before. Actual nothing." He let himself drift, arms moving slow, keeping him afloat without effort. "There's always something back home. Traffic. Someone's TV through the wall. My phone."
"Doesn't bother you?"
"It used to be background noise. Now I think it was just something to drown out the rest of it."
Hayes didn't say anything to that. He'd swum in closer, close enough that Avery could make out the shape of his face now that his eyes had adjusted — the line of his jaw, water beaded along it, dark eyes steady on him in a way that had nothing performative in it at all.
They ended up near the dock ladder eventually, both of them finding the shallower footing without discussing it, standing chest-deep with the water gone still around them.
"You said your family runs on a schedule," Hayes said. "What happens if you break it?"
Avery looked at the water instead of at him.
"Nothing dramatic. Nobody yells. It's worse than that.
" He ran his thumb along the surface, watching the small ripple spread and die.
"My mother gets quiet. Disappointed-quiet.
And then for the rest of the visit she finds small ways to bring it up — did you get caught in traffic, was work that demanding, maybe next year you'll plan better — until I've apologized enough times that she lets it go. "
"And you just take it."
"It's easier than the alternative."
"What's the alternative?"
"Actually telling her no. Telling her I'm tired, or that the schedule's the reason I'm never not tired, or that I don't actually want to spend four days performing how well I'm doing for people who only care if the performance holds up.
" He shook his head, water dripping off his jaw.
"I don't know how to do that without it turning into something bigger than it needs to be. "
"Sounds like you're protecting her from something she caused."
Avery looked up at that. Hayes wasn't smiling. Wasn't gloating about being right, either — just watching him, waiting to see if it landed.
"That's not — " Avery started, and then stopped, because he didn't actually have the rest of that sentence.
"You don't owe anybody a performance," Hayes said. "Not even family."
"Easy for you to say. You live alone on a lake."
"Wasn't always alone." He said it flat, but something under it had changed, some door cracked that hadn't been cracked before.
"Had somebody, a few years back. City person, like you.
Came up here for a summer, said she loved it.
Quiet, slow, nothing happening." He looked out past Avery's shoulder, at the dark water, not at Avery.
"Lasted two winters. Told me the same quiet that made it romantic in July made her feel like she was disappearing by February.
Said the town was too small to hold a whole life in. "
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. She wasn't wrong." A shrug, barely visible in the dark, more felt than seen. "This place isn't for everybody. I know that. Doesn't mean I want to keep finding out the hard way."
"Is that why you keep tourists at arm's length? The nice car, the whole — " Avery gestured vaguely, encompassing the last two days.
"Something like that." Hayes's eyes came back to him, and even in the dark Avery could feel the weight of the look land somewhere under his sternum. "You're easier to be around than most of them."
"I broke down in your parking lot and ruined a pair of shoes."
"Wasn't talking about the shoes."
The water had gone completely still around them, no wind to move it, just the small currents made by their own bodies staying afloat.
Hayes had drifted closer without either of them tracking it happening — close enough now that Avery could feel the warmth still coming off him even in the cold water, close enough that if either of them exhaled too hard it would touch the other.
Hayes lifted a hand. Avery didn't move away from it.
His fingers found the wet hair stuck to Avery's forehead and brushed it back, slow, deliberate, and then his thumb stayed where it landed — against Avery's temple, barely any pressure to it at all, just contact. Avery's breath caught somewhere behind his ribs and stopped there.
Neither of them said anything.
The starlight wasn't enough to see much by, but it was enough to see this — Hayes's face inches from his, water beaded on his jaw, his eyes not moving off Avery's for one single second.
Avery could feel his own pulse going hard enough that he was sure Hayes could feel it too, through the water, through the few inches of nothing left between their chests.
He didn't lean in. He didn't lean away either. He just stood there, treading water without really treading it, waiting to see what Hayes decided to do with the hand still resting against the side of his face.
Hayes's jaw moved, once, like he was working something loose in his throat before it came out.
He didn't say it. Whatever it was.
His thumb pressed once, barely, against Avery's temple — not quite a caress, more like a period at the end of a sentence neither of them had spoken out loud — and then he pulled his hand back.
Slow. Deliberate. The same way he'd raised it in the first place, like taking it away cost him something specific he wasn't going to name.
"Water's getting colder," he said. His voice had gone rougher than it needed to be for that sentence.
"Is it?"
"Gonna be, soon enough." He was already moving, backing toward the ladder, putting distance between them one measured stroke at a time. "Should head up before you catch something."
Avery stayed where he was a second longer, water lapping at his collarbone, his own hand coming up without meaning to and pressing briefly against the spot on his temple like he could hold the shape of it there.
Then he followed.
They climbed the ladder one after the other, dripping onto the dock boards, and neither of them said much on the walk back up the dark path — Hayes a step ahead, his shirt held loose in one hand instead of pulled back on, water still running down his spine in the faint spill of the porch light.
Avery trailed behind him with his arms crossed over his own wet shirt, not from cold.
The workshop door stuck the same way it had the first night, and Hayes shouldered it open the same way too, and neither of them said anything as they crossed the concrete floor past the boat hulls, up the narrow stairs, into a loft that hadn't gotten any cooler in their absence.
At the top of the stairs Hayes stopped, one hand on the doorframe, and looked back at him — just for a second, just long enough that Avery felt it land somewhere low and stayed there — and then he stepped inside and reached for a towel off the shelf without another word.
Avery stood in the doorway a moment longer, his shirt sticking cold and wet to his skin, his temple still holding the ghost of a thumb that had pulled away before it needed to.
Neither of them mentioned it. Neither of them slept easy either — Avery could hear it in the too-careful way Hayes shifted on his side of the bed once the lights were off, the same rigid stillness Avery had spent the night before performing himself, and he lay there in the dark with the line between them somehow thinner than it had been the night before, close enough now that either of them crossing it would take almost nothing at all.