Release(15)

And Adam had said, “Okay.” He’d said, “Okay.” He hadn’t even tried the it’s-not-a-label-it’s-a-map thing he’d sold to Angela. Why not? Why hadn’t he? Why the hell did he just take whatever Enzo offered? Without argument or demand. Without even apparent self-respect.

Because he loved Enzo. Maybe there didn’t have to be any other reasons. Maybe love made you stupid.

Maybe loneliness did.

Because: the day Adam got his driver’s licence. That day.

It was two months after Adam turned sixteen, six months in with Enzo. Adam assumed he’d failed his test after bumping a kerb while parallel parking, but the examiner – a rumpled man who seemed genuinely on the edge of tears, so perhaps was nursing some fresh private grief – hadn’t seemed to notice or much care about anything. He passed Adam without even looking up from his clipboard.

Adam had taken Enzo out in his mom’s car – after promising not to go near any freeway and to call every hour to reassure her that he hadn’t wrecked anything and was, incidentally, not dead. They had ignored the state law that said new licensees could only drive their siblings for the first six months. “We look like brothers anyway,” Enzo said. They didn’t.

They’d gone to Denny’s, celebrating the good news with deep-fried mozzarella sticks and Moons Over My Hammy.

“Let’s go to the lake,” Enzo had said, when they finished.

“We go to the lake all the time,” Adam said.

“Not on our own. Not to the far side.”

“There’s nothing on the far side.”

At which Enzo smiled.

The far side of the lake was officially state park. Unofficially, mostly due to budget cuts, it was a place where less-than-legal fields of pot were grown, and there were lurid and preposterous rumours of a forest cult and sightings of half-naked men in the furs of who knew what animals.

“It’s daylight,” Enzo said. “We’ll be fine.”

“Not daylight for much longer.” Adam hated that the thought of driving out there made him nervous, but it did. If not the actual danger, then for what would happen if his parents found out. Though that was true of a lot of things these days.

“I know,” Enzo said. “That’s what I want to show you.”

So they’d gone, Enzo directing him along lakeside roads that looked a lot less dangerous than legend made them out to be, though they did drive past the cabin where Katherine van Leuwen would eventually be murdered, so perhaps legend was on to something.

“Where are we going?” Adam asked.

“A secret place.”

“Which you know about how?”

“I don’t for sure. I found it online.” He glanced over at Adam. “When I was thinking about what to get you.”

“You were thinking about me?” Adam’s chest lightened at even the thought. He also got half a hard-on and had to fight to keep from giggling.

Ridiculous.

“Turn here,” Enzo said, “and it should be…”

“Whoa,” Adam said, pulling to a stop in a small parking lot that looked all but forgotten. Ahead of them, a quirk in the trees made a perfect frame for Mount Rainier, bold as a tomcat, turning an unseemly, intimate pink as it stared across at the sunset.

“Best secret view around here,” Enzo said. “Apparently.”

“Cool,” Adam said, a wholly inadequate word for the unexpected beauty of it, almost as if the mountain – a source of justifiable vanity for everyone who lived here – had been gathered for a private view, just for the eyes of Adam. Given to him by Enzo.

That was love, wasn’t it? Enzo had taken time to think of him, taken time to do something as a gift to celebrate the new licence, thought ahead to the time he’d spend with Adam.

“I love you,” Adam said, eyes firmly on the mountain.

“I know,” Enzo replied, not unkindly, not unlovingly, just stating a simple fact.

“My mom and dad,” Adam said, swallowing a knot away. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Enzo.”

“I know that, too.” And he’d put a hand on Adam’s arm, then up to his head, bringing him over for a kiss, then another, and if he said, “There’s something else this parking lot is famous for”, and if Enzo had also thought ahead to bring condoms and if they then did the famous thing right there in the front seat of Adam’s mother’s Kia, if all that was true, it remained true that Enzo had thought about the view of the mountain, had saved it for Adam, had said to Adam when they were undressed, “You are so beautiful”, with the face of someone looking past the physical.

How could that not be love?

“I love you,” Adam said again, pale and naked under Enzo’s darker, amusingly hairier body.

“And oh how I love you, too, Adam Thorn,” Enzo said, kissing Adam’s eyelids, deep in his rhythm.

Oh how I love you, too. Adam held on to that embarrassingly long in the months that followed, the months that somehow led to “We’re just messing around.”

Because evidently that’s all Enzo had talked himself into thinking they were doing.

Adam hadn’t even told Angela exactly how it had ended, and he told her everything. He’d hinted instead that it was sixty–forty mutual when it was really one hundred to zero. Even then, Angela had been ready to burn the earth Enzo walked on.