Lost Along the Way (14 page)

“Yes.”

“Do you promise?”

“Absolutely.”

He slumped in relief. “I’m glad to hear it.”

I stepped a bit closer and reached out to place my hand on his wrist. “Glad it’s not your fault?” I asked quietly. “Or glad we broke up?”

“Both.”

“So am I.”

He didn’t appear reassured at all. “But don’t you see? That worries me too. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I want you running back to him, but….” He swallowed hard, his gaze locked on mine. “You seem to be taking it all pretty well.”

“Granny’s soup helped a lot.”

It was the wrong thing to say. He winced at my words. “So, it’s only because of the soup?”

“No. Or maybe it is, but so what? That doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

“Are you sure?”

I was. But how could I explain it to him when I barely understood it myself? I stepped closer and reached out to take the towel from him before he ripped it in two. I set it aside and took his hands in mine. Still, it took me a minute to find the words I needed to say. He waited patiently for me to begin.

“On some level I know I should be devastated right now. I’m sure I should be falling apart, or drinking too much, or tearing out my hair. Or just fetal on the couch, crying my eyes out. But I don’t feel any of that. I just feel….” I closed my eyes, trying to focus on the spot of light that seemed to be showing me the way. The bright, steady surety in my chest telling me everything was going to be fine. “I feel reborn.”

It sounded absurd as soon as I’d said it, and I found myself laughing. Landon didn’t laugh with me. He watched me, his eyes steady, his expression guarded. “I’m glad.”

But he let go of my hands. He turned away from me to walk into the living room where he sank down onto the couch with his back to me.

I went back to the dishes, feeling as if I’d let him down, yet not knowing why. I thought back over our conversation, all the way back to the initial question.
Why now?
And the truth was, I hadn’t ever answered him.

“It
was
sudden, I admit,” I said. “But it wasn’t the bread. Or the soup.”

He didn’t move, but I could tell he was listening by the tenseness in his neck.

“It was you.”

He twisted around on the couch to regard me from across the room. “Me?”

“You.” I scrubbed the last fork clean and rinsed it under the clear stream of water from the faucet. “And your sculptures.”

Now it was his turn to say, “What do you mean?”

I pulled the plug on the sink and turned to face him, drying my hands as I spoke. “It’s going to sound crazy.”

“Crazier than the bread thing?”

“Good point.” I set the towel aside and leaned my hip against the counter. “I wanted to see you today.” And as much as he might have tried to hide it, I could see how my simple confession pleased him. “But I didn’t feel like going downtown, dealing with the parking and the crowds and… the noise, I guess. So I went for a drive, and I stumbled across the flea market.”

“I think you mean the ‘antique mall.’”

I laughed. “Right.”

“And?”

“Well, at first it was depressing, seeing all those castoffs. All the stuff that was once valuable to somebody, but now seems like junk. But then I came to your section, and….” I held up my hands, at a loss for words. How could I describe what had happened to me there? “It was so beautiful. It just felt like so much…
joy
. I mean, I went in there because I wanted to see you. But it felt like I really
saw
you
.” I shook my head, feeling as if I’d failed completely. “It’s hard to explain.”

He’d turned halfway around on the couch as I talked, and now he sat sideways on it, one arm resting along its back, his expression pleased but thoughtful, his eyes staring blankly toward the ceiling. “It’s funny. Ironic, even, that you’d say this to me now.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve been thinking about quitting.”

Nothing could have shocked me more. I strode into the living room so I could face him, wanting to see his eyes so I could judge how serious he was. “Quitting your art? Why would you do that?”

He shrugged, picking halfheartedly at the seam on the couch cushion. “I get in these funks. It’s hard, sometimes. I go through slumps where it seems like nothing’s selling. I feel like a complete failure. Money runs out, and I have to pick up landscaping work here and there just to pay the bills. And I find myself thinking, why bother? Why go through this, pouring my soul into something nobody appreciates anyway? Why not ditch it all and take a full-time job with the university. At least it’d be steady pay.”

“No! Landon, please don’t quit. You can’t.”

He laughed mirthlessly. “Don’t worry. Even if I do quit—which I say I’m doing at least once a year—it never lasts.”

“Because you love it.”

He glanced up from the seam on the couch, finally meeting my eyes again. “No matter how frustrating it gets, I can’t stop building them in my head. I can’t stop seeing new ways of putting the pieces together, and eventually, I end up back in my studio.”

I sat sideways on the couch so I could face him. “That’s why you’re not a failure. You’re the most successful man I know.”

His laugh was loud and humorless, and I hurried on to make my point.

“I mean it. It’s all a matter of deciding what success means to you. Is it all about money?”

He chewed his lip thoughtfully but didn’t answer, so I answered for him.

“Of course it isn’t. I make a decent living at what I do, and I spend most days hating it. I went into it because I like the weather. I like studying the clouds and the hail swaths. But that’s not my job. My job is mostly about playing office politics and learning which cake makeup best covers my wrinkles. And I find no joy in it at all.” A sad statement, but one whose truth I felt in my heart. “But you? Oh my God, Landon! The things you do!”

“I weld scrap metal into oversized pinwheels.”

He was joking, but only barely, and I leaned closer to take his whiskery cheeks in my hands. To force him to meet my eyes. “No. You build beauty. You capture joy. You find a way to take all that happiness inside of you and form it into things that turn the wind into laughter and the sun and rain into art. You make this world better, just by being in it. Just by sharing yourself. And I don’t care how many lawns you have to mow to pay your mortgage. As long as you build those things your heart demands, you will never be a failure.”

For a moment he sat there, stunned and still. But then he leaned toward me. He hooked his hand behind my neck and pulled me close enough to touch his lips to mine. “Danny, I….”
I love you.
I knew it was what he wanted to say, and the knowledge made my heart swell, but he stopped himself. He swallowed hard and said instead, his voice thick with emotion, “There is nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you right now. I’d walk to the ends of the earth and bring back a fallen star, if you asked me to.”

“How about you just walk across the street and bring back a couple of condoms?”

He laughed and kissed me. “I’ll be back before you’re undressed.”

He was wrong on that count, but I didn’t hold it against him.

T
HE
NEXT
thirty-six hours were bliss. Although he’d brought back the
condoms, we didn’t use them that night. We didn’t need them. We found enough pleasure just holding each other and making out like teenagers. Groping and fondling. Teasing with our hands and our mouths. Grinding our naked bodies together with a passion that left me drained. He woke me sometime before dawn, and we did it again, half asleep as we stroked each other.

He was gone much of Saturday, working his vendor booth at Jubilee Days. Meanwhile, I worked on clearing the last of the clutter from the spare bedroom. My old room was full of my past, and the twin-sized bed was way too small. My parents’ room was out of the question for obvious reasons. If Landon and I were to have a space for us as a couple, it had to be here. I cleared out all of the boxes, changed the sheets, located a lamp to put next to the bed, and made sure the drawers in both bedside tables were stocked with the essentials. The walls were still bare, and I debated driving to Tiny’s to buy some of Landon’s photos. I also felt the room could use some metal birds and a lace doily or two. But there’d be time for that later.

That night, after a dinner of Chinese takeout and a shower where we soaped each other until we ran out of hot water—for real this time—I led him into bed, and we made love as I’d longed to do since the day he’d fed me his magic bread. He lay beneath me, moaning with pleasure, whispering my name as I took him slowly from behind, kissing his shoulders and his neck as I moved in him. It was divine. Better than the shower hallucination. Better than I could have imagined. Sweet and perfect. Passionate and emotional. It left us both weak and quiet, unable to put words to what we were feeling. We could only hold each other close, trembling in awe at what we’d discovered.

The next morning I woke to the amazing warmth of his mouth. My bladder screamed to be emptied, but not as much as my brain screamed to let him continue his ministrations. It was lazy and slow, the most glorious torture I’d ever felt. It took me ages to come, but when I finally did, it was worth it. Afterward, he moved back up to kiss me deeply, sharing the taste of my seed, his erection wedged against my thigh.

I reached down to brush my fingers up his length, making him moan. “Tell me what you want.”

He kissed me again. “No hurry. We have all day.”

“What about your booth?”

He smiled. “To hell with it. I’d rather stay here with you.”

He said it lightly, but I heard a hint of tension in his voice. It confused me until I realized what day it was.

Sunday.

The day I had to go back to Westminster.

I chose not to think about it. My real life would come crashing down on me soon enough. For now I wanted to think only of the hours I had left with him. I wanted to lose myself in him for as long as I could, and so we spent most of the day in bed. We took breaks to eat. To shower. We laughed together and shared stories of our pasts. But mostly we made love with a fervor that drove everything else from my mind. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d felt such urgent, unquenchable desire. It was exhausting, and yet I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. By the time we stumbled into the kitchen in search of dinner, my limbs were rubber. My cock felt raw; my lips bruised. I’d climaxed so many times since Friday my balls ached. It’d been years since I’d felt that way, and I relished every minute of it.

“I hate to tell you this,” Landon said as he stood staring into my fridge, “but unless you want to eat condiments for dinner, we’re going to have to leave the house.”

His statement was punctuated by the
pop-pop-pop
of a string of firecrackers outside. The Fourth might have passed, but the weekend was still in full swing. And suddenly, I didn’t want to let it sneak by.

“Let’s go downtown.”

“To Jubilee Days?”

“I haven’t seen it in years.”

“I think it’s supposed to rain.”

“Rain?” How was that possible? We hadn’t had rain in ages, although I had to admit, I hadn’t done more than glance out the window since Friday. “Says who?”

“The Channel 9 weekend weatherman.”

I waved my hand dismissively, feeling giddy and reckless. “I know him. He’s an idiot.”

“But they say there’s a front moving in.”

“Are you kidding?” I pulled him into my arms and kissed him. “You can’t trust weather forecasters. Haven’t you heard they’re always wrong?”

He laughed. “Oh really? Since when?”

“Since now. So, how about it? You up for bad nachos and carnival rides, all in one night?”

His smile was slow and sweet. “Absolutely.”

We drove downtown in Landon’s beat-up pickup truck. As always during Jubilee Days, parking was a nightmare, but it didn’t bother me tonight. The downtown section of Laramie had been blocked off to vehicles. Vendor booths lined the streets. A stage had been set up on the corners of Second and Grand, and country rock blasted from the speakers, seeming a bit too loud for such a gentle evening.

We ate overpriced junk food, then browsed the booths together. We didn’t hold hands, but occasionally he’d step closer to me. He’d run his fingers up the inside of my arm, raising goose bumps along my spine. Flashing lights and screams reached us from the carnival, which was jammed into the narrow space between downtown and the railroad tracks.

“No Zipper this year,” Landon lamented.

“But there is a Spider.”

We climbed together into the little bucket seat and waited as we rotated up, toward the western sky. The ride operator stopped us there and we sat hand in hand, staring up into the heavens. From this angle, nobody but God could see us. In the distance, frequent cloud-to-cloud lightning revealed a line of storms stretching from the Rockies to about fifty miles out. Wind shear tore off the anvils of the mature storms, but the bases still lit up with a light show that put the fireworks to shame. Thunder boomed, rolling slowly across the plains toward us. I couldn’t help it—the meteorologist in me longed to peek at the local radar.

Landon nudged me with his elbow. “Told you.”

“I’ve never been so happy to be wrong.”

And then we were moving, spinning wildly, sliding across the narrow seat into each other. Round and round, up and down, and when it was over, we got right back in line to do it again, trying to fit as much fun in as we could before the storm reached us. So much laughter and adrenaline, and when the storm clouds finally opened up and burst upon us, all I could do was laugh. Our fellow carnivalgoers ran for their cars, shrieking in both delight and alarm, but I didn’t want shelter. I wanted to revel in the downpour. I pulled Landon aside, out of the rush of traffic. I wrapped him in my arms, taking in his smiling face and the brightness of his eyes.

I think I love you.