Wanderlust (Filling Spaces #1) (2 page)

“Jesus,” Jamie muttered
as he rolled his eyes, “are you always this
nice?
 You have as much
right to be here as I do.  Stay if you want to stay.  Go if you don’t.”

Caught off balance by
the offer, Shea paused before he shook his head.  “No,” he reassured.  He had a
paper to finish by the end of the weekend, and his apartment badly needed
cleaning.  He’d left the desk covered in books bristling with sticky notes and
errant slips of paper.    “That isn’t necessary.” 
I just want to get this
done and go. 
But his body seemed unwilling to listen to his wishes even as
he stepped out the door; his ankle twisted badly as he took his first step onto
the porch.  The car seemed impossibly far away, and the journey down to it more
treacherous with every hour deeper into darkness.  He blew out a frustrated
breath and reached for his cell phone, peering at the glow of the screen in the
dimness. 
Maybe I can call someone.
Though, if he was honest, out of all
his many friends and acquaintances he couldn’t think of many who would drive to
the middle of nowhere, sight unseen, to retrieve him.
Maybe—

“Do you honestly think
you can get service up here?” Jamie asked incredulously.  Shea listened to the
wood creak as the other man stepped outside; a pair of battered sneakers came
into his vision as he gazed intently at his phone.  Jamie reached out and
tilted his head up with warm fingers.  Shea’s heart jumped at the surety in his
touch, the confidence in the way he moved. He really
was
handsome, Shea
realized, with features both serious and delicate, those gray eyes somehow
softer but still playful in the darkness.  “You’re not going to get far on your
own,” Jamie pointed out archly.

Shea hesitated.  “But my
car—”

Jamie tilted his head. 
“Want me to carry you down there, princess?”

Shea’s cheeks flamed. 
“
No
,” he snapped, and ignored Jamie’s hum of amusement.  He wasn’t used
to this harsh kind of teasing, the immediate intimacy of it, and recklessness made
words spill from him, relentless and stubborn.  “I’m just
hungry
.  And
tired.  I did what I came here to do, and now I want to go home.”

A shrug.  “Suit
yourself,” Jamie replied casually as he turned back inside.  “But if you’re
hungry, I have food.  I packed it for myself, but there should be enough for
two.”  His grin as he looked back over his shoulder was knife-sharp and
sudden.  “I’m
scintillating
company, promise.  Hell, I’ll even fix up
your ankle.”

Shea paused.  And it
occurred to him that he really should go home.  However long it took him to get
to the car, his apartment was waiting: small and cramped, yes, but cozy with
carefully-shelved books and framed pictures of family and friends.  Assignment
due dates and deadlines waited, foreboding, on his calendar, and Monday would
be full of demanding classes.  Beyond
that
, he found that he didn’t know
what to make of Jamie, how to handle his antagonistic way of teasing, the
challenge in his gray eyes, his blunt manner.  
Yes,
Shea thought firmly
to himself. 
Home would be best. 
Home where there would be time to
study and research.  Home where every few days he’d receive updates from family
and friends, and send a few brief and impersonal lines about his life in
return.  Home where there would be stillness and silence.  A lot of silence.

Sadness pierced him.

“Yeah,” Shea replied
absently and limped into the kitchen past Jamie.  “I guess I could stay.  It’s
the last time I’ll probably be here anyway.  I might as well enjoy it.”  He
felt Jamie’s surprised glance more than saw it, but didn’t acknowledge it as he
dropped wearily into one of the sturdy chairs at the kitchen table.  He fixed
his gaze intently on the faux-wood grain, rubbed a fingertip against a smudge
on the slick finish, and tried to ignore how much he’d just surprised himself
with his decision, too. 

He started when Jamie’s
hands cupped his foot.

“It’s sprained,
right?”  Jamie stripped away his shoe and his damp sock with capable, confident
efficiency, and Shea blushed at the touch of warm fingers against his skin. 
From this angle, Shea could look down at Jamie’s dark hair, could study the
comfortable fall of his soft-worn jersey shirt against his strong shoulders,
the well-frayed cuffs of his jeans. “Shoes like this aren’t much help around
here,” Jamie pointed out.

“I don’t see you
wearing hiking boots,” Shea retorted with a pointed gaze at Jamie’s scuffed
sneakers, and tried not to wince as the other man turned his ankle this way and
that to inspect it. 

To his surprise, Jamie
laughed sharply.  “But I know this place really well.  You obviously don’t.” 
He rifled through his dark bag and, after a few moments, produced a bandage
that he would around Shea’s ankle with confident expertise.  “I found this
place a while ago just by hiking around up here.  The ticks are pretty bad
around, so maybe that’s why hardly anyone comes by.  Either way, when I found
it empty, I thought it’d be a good place to do some writing.” 

“You write for a
living, then?” Shea gazed down at Jamie’s dark hair, surprised by how soft it
looked, and became suddenly overwhelmed by the sudden temptation to weave his
fingers into it.  Embarrassed by the urge and the suddenness of his own desire,
he kept his hands clamped firmly at his sides as his cheeks flamed. 

Jamie snorted,
oblivious to Shea’s mortification.  “If I wrote for a living I’d be dead,” he
replied, and tugged Shea’s sock back onto his foot.  “I was one of those
pretentious assholes who went to college and got a humanities degree.”

Shea’s brow drew down
as he came to his feet and carefully tested his ankle.  He still couldn’t walk
without pain, but limping around with the stability of the bandage to support
his ankle felt far preferable to the alternative.  “Getting a humanities degree
isn’t for pretentious assholes,” he objected as he gingerly made his way across
the floor.  “
I
have a humanities degree.”

Startled, Jamie glanced
up from his bag as he stuffed his supplies back inside.  “Really?”

“Yeah,” Shea answered. 
“Is it so surprising?  I’m in graduate school now.”  Satisfied by his circuit
across the floor, he reclaimed his chair.  “After I graduate, I’ll teach, and—”

Jamie rolled his eyes. 
“So you
are
a pretentious asshole.”  Before Shea could object, he
scoffed in derision.  “Getting a degree in humanities to
teach
the
humanities to other poor assholes getting degrees in the humanities so that
they
can teach the humanities…”  He dug around in his bag some more and produced two
more granola bars, an orange, and an apple.  “It’s a self-perpetuating system. 
It’s useless.”

He stuffed the apple
into Shea’s mouth before Shea could protest.  Shea bit down reflexively,
surprised by the tart sweetness of the fruit on his tongue despite its bruised
appearance, and remembered immediately how
hungry
he was. He decided a
debate on the value of the humanities could wait. “This ish dinner?” he asked
around a mouthful of apple.

“Yeah,” Jamie answered,
and shoved a granola bar across the table.  “I only spring for the best,
obviously.  Enjoy the feast, m’lord.”

For a time, they didn’t
speak, and only the crinkle of wrappers and the tapping of Jamie’s fingers on
the keyboard of his laptop disrupted the companionable silence.  Shea found the
granola bars entirely satisfying, despite their being smashed during their
tenure at the bottom of Jamie’s bag; the relative silence of the cabin crept
into his bones and he relaxed, breathing deeply of the warm damp air. 

Nice
,
he thought tiredly.  Outside, the crickets still trilled as they had in his
childhood, and as the shadows in the kitchen lengthened he could almost ignore
the decay of the house, the yellowed walls and the buckled floor illuminated
only by the screen of the laptop.  He suddenly felt very glad that he’d
visited, after all.

“Jamie,” he began
quietly.

The other man’s fingers
paused on the keyboard. He didn’t glance up. “You’re still awake?  I thought
you were dozing off over there.”

Shea’s gaze settled on
the sky outside the window, on the silhouetted tangle of trees against a
deepening night sky.  “You said you didn’t write for a living.  What do you
do?”

The silence lingered so
long that for a moment he thought he wouldn’t receive an answer.  Jamie didn’t
resume his typing, but finally he offered a shrug and tilted his head as he
glanced up. “A little bit of everything,” he answered.  “Whatever jobs I can
find wherever I go.  A bachelor’s degree in the humanities won’t really get you
shit these days.  I’ve worked at amusement parks, fairs; I’ve done temp work, a
few stints as a server and one as a secretary, truck driver…” He nodded to his
computer.  “And in my spare time, I write and travel. When I get tired of a place,
I just leave and go somewhere else.”

“Really?” Shea asked
incredulously.

Jamie’s gray eyes
narrowed slightly, challenging, though a faint amused smile still lingered on
his lips.  “Think I’m a drug addict?” he asked.  “An alcoholic?  Homeless?”

“No,” Shea replied
defensively.  He
didn’t.
  Something about the clarity in Jamie’s steady
gaze, his biting humor and his confidence, disabused Shea of such notions
before he could entirely form them.  But he’d never imagined a life like that,
so blithe and untethered and lacking in linear progression.  High school, a
bachelor’s degree followed by a graduate degree, a teaching job: he’d planned
and mapped out those things for years, and so had everyone else around him. 
Life meant going forward, and forward meant moving
up
—and Jamie seemed
not as interested in moving up as he did in moving sideways, or in circles, or
wherever the hell he wanted.  Shea tried to put the thought into words.  “It’s
just,” he explained earnestly, “that I’ve never
met
anyone like you before.”

Jamie hummed in
amusement.  “You’re one of
those
kinds of guys,” he observed lightly as
he stood up from his seat and glided by, brushing the back of his hand against
Shea’s cheek as he went.  “One of those nice, polite,
sweet
guys—”

“You talk about me,”
Shea pointed out sourly as he tried to ignore his aching response to the touch,
“like I’m an idiot.  I’m not an idiot.”

“—who’s never thought
beyond his own picket-fence plans even once,” Jamie finished triumphantly, and
rummaged through his bag.  He emerged with a towel, which he flourished at Shea
as he struck a dramatic pose, hands outstretched.  “There are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Shea blinked,
surprised.  And then he smiled.  “I like that play.”

In response, Jamie
flicked him lightly on the nose.  “If you like it so much then you can recite
it to yourself while I shower,” he announced, and turned towards the bathroom. 
Before Shea could express surprise that the old plumbing still worked, the
taller man threw a wicked smile over his shoulder.  “Unless you’d like to join
me.”

Shea flushed deeply; Jamie
disappeared into the bathroom laughing.  After a moment, the squeal and rattle
of the pipes preceded the rushing patter of the water, and silence fell again. 
The laptop remained open on the counter, beguiling—and after a guilty glance or
two at the shower, Shea peeked at the screen. 

He didn’t know what he
expected.  Porn, maybe.  Porn
definitely. 
Instead, though, he saw
simply documents: fragments of prose, half-written poems, and thoughtful
paragraphs. All eloquent.  Jamie
was
a good writer; the musings Shea
read wouldn’t have been out of place on some of the witty and progressive blogs
he enjoyed, and certainly surpassed the skills of some of his graduate school
peers.  The short stories, still rough drafts, nevertheless had the compelling
pull of a really good read.  “What an interesting guy,” Shea murmured aloud, surprised,
and retreated to the nearby window in hopes that gazing outside would soothe
his guilt over snooping.

Darkness completely
surrounded the cabin now, and Shea grew gradually aware that he’d lost his
chance to return to the car.  He couldn’t make the trek with no light, and he’d
stupidly brought no flashlight of his own. His cell phone wouldn’t illuminate
enough to matter, and stumbling through the darkness would only risk further
injury to his ankle.  And suddenly, as he told himself all of these things and justified
his decision to linger, he realized as he did so that he’d never had any
intention of leaving to start. 

He interests you too
much.
 

Or maybe, he
rationalized, he simply wanted to make the most of his time here, to end it on
a happier note.  Yes.  Today had been such a sad day, after all, and—

“Enjoying your alone
time with the window?”

Shea realized that his
face was pressed to the glass and his warm breath clouded the view of the
darkness outside.  He turned.  Jamie’s shirt stuck damply to his body and some
of his wet dark hair clung to his cheek.  He smelled like soap and water, and
Shea immediately shoved down the urge to reach out and
touch
the beads
of water that still glistened against his collarbone
. 
“That was quick,”
he mumbled, and prayed the other man wouldn’t notice his blush in the
flickering light of the kitchen.