Chapter Six
TAD’S GLAD he isn’t driving. He hates driving. It sucks in New York, but that’s like saying water is wet. It seems to suck here too. Traffic, tourists, and interminable stretches of asphalt. Yuck.
The fact that he’s getting outside and camping is salvaging the whole trip. There were three gardens he wanted to see in Vegas, but he only made it to two. One was in the Bellagio, and the other was a cactus garden at a chocolate factory. The only reason he convinced Walt to make the drive was by promising to buy everyone chocolate.
His manager, Callie, texted him back while they were at the Hertz office with enthusiastic support for the unplanned extension of his vacation, informing him that she’d be thrilled to spend an extra week taking care of Hetty (his cat) and all his plants.
They’re outside Vegas on 95, all wide-open vistas and asphalt snaking to the horizon. Scrubby bushes and cacti dot the flat, dusty ground. Tad sneaks a look at Lewis. A hot flutter in his stomach makes him look longer than he means to. It’s hard not to, because Lewis is really a magnificent specimen. Those shoulders, those arms . The soft fall of brown hair over his forehead. That strong jaw, currently covered in stubble.
Lewis laughs out of nowhere, and Tad’s first thought is to wonder what dumb thing he did to provoke the amusement. But Lewis says, “I can’t believe we’re doing this. This is crazy.”
He has a really nice laugh. Of course he does. Nice, solid baritone. Tad stretches, not realizing until he does it that he was trying to take up as little space as possible. His shirt rides up and he tugs it down. Lewis’s eyes seem magnetically drawn to the exposed skin. Tad’s neck heats in self-conscious pleasure.
“Add it to the list of crazy things we’ve done over the last twenty-four hours, I guess?” Tad says, hoping Lewis isn’t going to get weird again. It’s strange, because Tad would never ever in a million years think he would be the one who was cool with this situation—he’s too shy to use Grindr, for god’s sake, and he needs to be four drinks in before he’ll flirt with a guy. But he kept waiting for his crushing shyness to reassert itself this morning, and it just… didn’t.
“I guess,” Lewis snorts. “I’m so not a crazy person. I’ve never thought about riding a mechanical bull once in my whole life. And suddenly last night I was like, I have to.”
A smile sneaks onto Tad’s face. “You were a natural.” Like Tad’s ever ridden a mechanical bull.
Tad stares at Lewis’s fingers wrapped around the steering wheel. He has nice hands. Kind of knobbly knuckles. They have personality. The bones sketch from wrist to knuckle, veins snaking over the top, and Tad’s stomach hurts with a sudden and intense need to kiss them.
“So you’re like, a mechanical bull aficionado?” Lewis asks.
“Oh yeah, totally. That’s what I do, you know. I go around to all the mechanical bulls in the country and rate them. I have a TikTok—just-the-mechanics-no-bull.”
Lewis guffaws. Tad bites the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. When he stays silent, Lewis looks at him, worry creeping over his face. “Oh, do you… that’s your job? Or like… you make money doing that?”
Tad’s composure cracks and he laughs. “No. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”
“Did you make up that TikTok handle on the spot?”
“Yeah.”
The look Lewis darts at him is sort of… enraptured? But he shifts his eyes back to the road quickly. “So you’re not a mechanical bull reviewer. What do you do?”
Oh good, they’re talking about work now. Tad should’ve stuck with the mechanical bull TikToker story. “I’m an editor for a botany magazine.”
“Really?”
Now he’s the gay who cried wolf. “Really. You know in magazines how there are the regular columns before the feature articles?”
“Sure.”
“I manage those.”
“That’s cool,” Lewis says. Weirdly, he sounds like he means it. Tad’s used to people glazing over when they hear botany. “What’s it called?”
“You’ve probably never heard of it.”
“Maybe I want to pick up a copy.”
Tad has to look out the window at the passing scenery because no one, ever, has said that before. The most common responses he gets are: Botany, that’s plants, right? Are any of the letters to the editor real? And Do you want to write an article about my garden?
Incidentally, he’s never wanted to write an article about anyone’s garden.
“Sorry, is that creepy?” Lewis says.
Tad lets out a breath of laughter and turns to look at Lewis again. “No. It’s nice.”
“Oh.” Is Lewis blushing? “I’m just curious.”
Okay, now it’s moved beyond nice, straight to sweet. “ Hudson Valley Botanists ,” Tad says. “Like I said, it’s small. We do quarterly publications, three digital, and then one print. We just finished our fourth quarter issue—the holiday one—that’s why I could take more time off with no notice.”
Lewis’s eyes keep darting from the road to Tad. “That’s really cool.”
The great contradiction of low self-esteem is hungering for compliments, for someone to notice something good about you, and not believing it when one comes your way. “It’s a job. It’s not really that cool.”
“Well, I think it is,” Lewis says.
The compliment makes Tad’s brain error 404. “What do you do?” he asks.
“I’m a paralegal. I work at an environmental law firm.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“It can be. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing some good in the world. And it pays the bills.”
“And for your burgeoning mechanical bull obsession?” Tad says innocently.
Lewis snorts. “And that.”
They pass a mileage sign and Lewis exclaims, “Tonopah! That’s where we get off for the park, right?”
Tad unlocks his phone to check the route again. “Yep.”
“A hundred and seventy-five miles? So what’s that, like….” Lewis’s forehead crinkles in thought. “Maybe another two and a half hours?”
With a glance at the clock, which reads 2:32, Tad says, “Sure, but you know the sun sets at like, four-thirty, right?”
Lewis’s silence screams I didn’t think about that.
“And it’s a four and a half hour drive total. We’re not going to get much hiking done,” Tad adds, in case Lewis doesn’t get it.
He feels like a dick. Like he’s telling a little kid their art project sucks. Or something.
Lewis’s shoulders dip. “So… you’re telling me it’s a bad idea to hike on a mountain in the dark?”
There’s a spark of humor in Lewis’s eyes, and it makes butterflies flutter in Tad’s chest.
Okay. So maybe he didn’t only invite himself along on this trip because of altruistic, but entirely legitimate, fear for Lewis’s safety. Maybe a teensy tiny part of his motivation also came from the desire to spend more time with Lewis before he walks out of Tad’s life. A normal person would be able to turn this situation into friendship. The way Lewis was talking this morning, it was like he was so mortified at getting drunk married that he couldn’t stand the idea of continuing any relationship with Tad.
So he’ll keep Lewis from walking off a cliff or getting lost and dying of thirst. And maybe at the end of it, they can be friends. Tad isn’t going to hope for more, no matter how much of a crush he currently has.
He’ll get over it.
“It’s only like, mostly a bad idea to hike on a mountain in the dark,” Tad says as seriously as possible.
Lewis shoots a grin at him and the butterflies whirl inside Tad’s rib cage.
He’ll probably get over the crush.
A long drive with someone he hasn’t known for even a day is Tad’s idea of torture. What does he have to talk about with a near-stranger for four and a half hours? Normally he’d be so stressed about how fast he was going to run out of things to say that he’d choke and not say anything, even the things crowding the back of his throat.
But talking to Lewis is effortless. Talking to him makes Tad feel like they’ve known each other for longer than twenty-four hours.
No—that’s not quite it. The feeling of just meeting is still there, but instead of it being this big, awkward thing, where Tad can’t make his words come out and sits there looking like a freak while Lewis regrets spending time with him, it’s a vast sense of possibility.
Talking to Lewis is easy. The road and miles fall away until they reach Tonopah, which has a charming Old West main street that looks like it would be fun to explore. Lewis tells him about Tonopah as they drive through—its history as a silver mining town, its current life as the closest town to the Tonopah Test Range, which Tad didn’t know existed, and which is apparently called Area 52? Who knew! They drive past a clown motel that claims to be world famous, and Tad says he doesn’t want to live in a world where a clown motel can be world famous. Lewis laughs and Tad feels pleased with himself that they’ve been trapped together in a car this long and Lewis isn’t tired of his sense of humor yet.
Soon they’re turning off the highway. A cattle stop rattles under the tires as they turn onto a narrow, beat-up road. It’s paved, barely. Then the asphalt disappears and the road turns to gravel.
It climbs and turns into more of a track than a road. Tad opens the window and takes a deep breath. The air smells different in places like this. Excitement thrills up his sternum. He may have come along on this trip to keep Lewis alive—and also to keep himself in Lewis’s vicinity—but he really does love camping. He loves hiking; he loves the feeling of each step taking you further from your responsibilities and obligations.
They bump along the road, climbing into the mountain range. Tad’s sputtering cell signal, down to one weak bar of EDGE, finally dies. There’s something he loves about that moment too. That clench of adrenaline when you get cut off from the world. Some people go skydiving; he goes to remote places with no cell signal for the same effect.
Maybe he likes that it’s not something in him cutting him off from the world, it’s the world cutting him off.
“There should be a parking lot,” Tad says, leaning forward in his seat.
Parking lot is giving it more credit than it deserves. There’s a gravel area where a person could park a car, which Lewis does. There aren’t any others in the lot.
The car shuts off and the quiet is jarring. “Well,” Lewis says, “here we are.”