All We Can Do Is Wait(42)

Scott closed his eyes and wondered if he would ever see Aimee again. He wondered if Skyler would actually come back. He wondered if he prayed then, harder than he ever had—even as a little kid when his parents were fighting and the whole world seemed to be crashing down around him, if he somehow prayed harder than that—if he could open his eyes and be somewhere else entirely.





Chapter Ten


    Jason



IT KEPT REPEATING. The cycle of thinking that maybe some news was coming, and then nothing—then the worry and the daze rushing back in. They were spinning in place, all of them. Except, of course, for Skyler, whose life could, after a few hard weeks or months of her sister’s therapy, return to normal, almost like all of this had never happened. Jason was bitter and angry, so tired of this feeling that nothing in his life could get better.

Then came the numbness. A strange sensation of calm muffling the sound of Alexa crying, dulling the sting of Skyler’s happy news. Still, he wanted a pill, or a drink, or something that would hasten his retreat from the world.

The taste Jason had had—of a life that felt real and present and good—had been so short. Just a few months. The joy of that first kiss, followed by many other wonderful things. Kyle didn’t mind the occasional joint, the occasional drunk and bleary night spent wild and laughing together. But the other stuff, and the constancy of Jason’s stonedness, had bothered Kyle. And before too long, to make Kyle happy—and, he slowly realized, to make himself happy too—Jason eased up. It wasn’t like he was some crackhead dying for a fix. There was no withdrawal or anything. He mostly just felt clearer and sharper and brighter, not waking up every morning flattened and headachey and grouchy. He actually felt, well, happy some mornings.

He and Kyle could only have a very few mornings in bed together, theirs being a secret kind of a thing, but at least the memory of Kyle, the knowledge of him, was in Jason’s head every morning when he woke up, for nearly that whole summer. Some nice or funny or comforting thing Kyle had said echoing in his ear, some smell of him, some tingle somewhere on Jason’s body where Kyle had touched him. He woke up eager to explore the day. To see Kyle, yes, but also to see where else this new feeling could take him.

He went sailing. Theo had a boat, a little Beetle Cat that was easy enough for one person to handle, and Jason spent most mornings out on the bay, everything blue around him, the wind whipping. He’d taken lessons as a kid and was surprised at how quickly the muscle memory returned to him. Pretty soon he was confidently sailing out far enough that he could barely see the beach anymore, alone on the water, the day laid out before him, shimmering with possibility. He hadn’t felt so calm in his own skin in a long time, and he quickly grew to cherish those mornings, loving the expanse of the ocean rolling out in front of him as he raced across it, and loving watching the land get closer and closer as he turned and headed for home, knowing that things back there were pretty good too, for the time being anyway.

Jason couldn’t really remember how he’d spent most of his days after sailing. There was just a handful of persistent memories. The day he got caught in a little storm, trying to manage his mounting fear as he desperately made his way back to shore, texting Kyle when he got home, I almost died!

Kyle wrote back omg and then, sending a shirtless pic of himself, will this revive u?

Jason replied, no now im really dead.

There was the day Jason rode his bike—another skill reclaimed from childhood—all the way to Orleans and back, forty miles or so, probably the most exercise he’d gotten in years. He’d just done it to do it, getting back home right before dinner, his mother asking him where he’d been all day. Jason told her he’d just been around, not doing much, and Linda smiled and said, “That’s nice. It was such a nice day, wasn’t it,” chopping tomatoes for dinner, Garrison Keillor droning away softly on the radio.

And of course there had been days with Kyle, when he wasn’t working. After they’d “broken the seal,” as Kyle (a little grossly) called it, and had sex for the first time, a lot of their hours together were devoted to finding discreet, available places to do it. Usually that meant Laurie’s when she was at work, or Jason’s house when his parents were in Boston or at the club. But they found other places: Kyle’s car a lot, a motel once, one time even doing it in the walk-in fridge at Grey’s, a cold, sorta scary, entirely thrilling experience.

Of course they had to be careful not to be seen together, in any capacity really, so a lot of their precious, too-rare alone time was spent in Kyle’s car, driving further west, toward the rest of Massachusetts. Everyone figured that Kyle was visiting his mom in Bourne, and they assumed Jason was . . . well, off being Jason somewhere.

But they were together instead. Eating lunch or early dinners at places by the water in Dennis and Yarmouth, hanging around on the beach, swimming. One afternoon they drove to Corporation Beach in Dennis, wide and crowded with swimmers and sunbathers, even on a late Tuesday morning. They’d fooled around in Jason’s bed earlier—Alexa off at an early shift, his parents playing golf at the club with another couple—and Jason still felt hot and flushed as they drove, giddy and sexy and, he was beginning to realize, in love.

They found a place, a little ways away from the bulk of the crowd, and laid out their towels, Jason lying on his back while Kyle got out a book to read, a dog-eared paperback with a drawing of San Francisco on the cover.