3
It was raining when Theo stepped out of the airport in Seattle and looked around. It was raining because of course it was. The clouds, a low, heavy, hanging pewter colored mass, were mourning him coming back just as much as he was mourning having to.
The worst part, maybe, was how the damp air, scented with the salt of the Pacific Ocean, seemed like home to him. Oh, New York had rain, for sure, but there was something different about the rain of the Pacific Northwest. It scented the air and got all through his hair and into his skin.
At least it wasn’t a cold rain. At least his father, in pulling this ridiculous hissy fit, had chosen a nice time of year for it. It was spring here, and the rain was warm, more like a mist than a shower. It settled around him like a blanket.
Sighing, he pushed his damp hair out of his face. He was overdressed, he realized, glancing around at the other people in the airport. New York was more formal, in general, and had more of an old-school business culture, than Seattle did. It was far more casual here, more laid back, just one more thing that Theo was going to have to get used to.
Not that he was going to be here long enough, he told himself firmly, for it to matter. He would have the house cleared out in a few weeks, tops, and he was even optimistic that he would be able to plot out a new novel in the evenings. How much work could it be to clear out one old house, anyway? It wasn’t even a huge house.
It had been just big enough for himself, and his father, and his mother.
Pushing that thought away, he brought himself to the much more practical thought of how he was actually going to get to that house. Fall City, his tiny home town, was not particularly close to Seattle, maybe half an hour drive or so, at least, and he didn’t have a vehicle.
Another thing that he’d have to fix, he realized, with another long, heaving sigh which pulled that fragrant, damp air deep into his lungs. It seemed to revitalize him a little bit, to pull his thoughts together.
He’d been scattered ever since his father had called him and told him that he was going to sell the house, and that, unless Theo wanted to go sort through everything, all of the stuff in the house would go to charity. Theo had had to come face to face with some expectations that he’d had.
It wasn’t that he wanted anything in that house. It was just that he didn’t want to not have any choice in the matter. He didn’t want it taken away without him at least having the chance to do something about it. So here he was, on the other side of the continent, with no idea how to get where he was going.
He’d need a car to deal with the stuff in the house, too, wouldn’t he? His eyes fell on a line of taxicabs waiting, shimmering yellow and bright in the bleak, gray landscape of the airport parking lot. The car thing, he could deal with some other time. Right now, the trick was just to get there, before he lost his mind.
Or better yet, he could hop right back on a plane. Right back to New York, which was where he belonged. Where his home had been for nearly eight years. Where he was comfortable. Where he had friends.
Where he even, God help him, had Liam. Though maybe it was just as well that he wasn’t still back in New York, with his infuriating ex, if that’s what Liam could be called. Liam, who was pushy as hell, and who had always been trying to get Theo to go faster than he’d wanted to in bed.
As Theo walked to the front of the line of taxis and got in one, as he gave his address from the deepest recesses of his memory, he thought about Liam, his first real boyfriend. If they could even be called that.
Liam certainly seemed to think that it didn’t count unless they were actually screwing. He had said so, at least, time after time. Maybe he’d even been right. From what Theo could tell, there weren’t a lot of people who wanted to go as slow as he did, especially not among gay men.
Still, had he been expected just to drop his pants for Liam immediately? Sometimes, he thought that was exactly what Liam had wanted, and Theo hadn’t been comfortable with that. This had been, and was, all new, uncharted, scary territory for him, and he could still remember the rush of fear, of almost panic, that he’d had to face when he had realized that he was really more interested romantically and sexually in men than in women.
He could still remember it because it had only been a few months ago. Liam had known that, and yet, he hadn’t been interested in waiting. Even now, when they’d been broken up for a month, which was about as long as they’d been dating in the first place, once or twice a week Liam would call him and want to get together.
It was all highly confusing. It wasn’t even that he didn’t want to have sex with a man because he did. He thought about it all the time. It was just that, with Liam, at least, it didn’t feel right. But he’d been working on it, he had …
The scenery blurred around him, and the skyscrapers gave way to low buildings, detached houses, and finally, to a mass of vibrant green. The forest. The forest here was way different than in New York, all tall conifers.
He knew this forest. Back in New York, he’d always enjoyed hiking in the deciduous woods, but it was a completely different thing. Hadn’t he always felt like a visitor there?
Not that he should get too used to being here. Like he’d already planned out, he was going to be here a few weeks. At most. Enough time to salvage anything that he wanted. His own stuff, he didn’t care that much about, to be honest, he’d lived this long without it.
His mother’s belongings, though, that was a different story. They were all he had left of her. Even if he was pretty irritated with his father for making him do this, he wasn’t going to let them just be donated.
Not when he’d realized, just after his father had called him just a few days ago, that he could barely remember her face. Her smile, he had that etched in his mind, and the smell of her when she hugged him, the way she’d made him feel safe and secure, those things he could remember.
But what had she really looked like? What was the color of her eyes? It was terrifying to him that he could forget so much in eight years. It wasn’t like he’d been a little kid when she’d died, but he was forgetting. Like an old picture, the kind which had been taken with actual film and not digitally preserved fading in his mind, the colors and angles and curves of her were being forgotten.
He didn’t want that. Maybe once, right after she’d died, he had. He would have been relieved to know that he could forget at least a fraction of how it felt to have her gone. Not anymore. He didn’t know what he was ready for, how much he could take, but he did know that he wasn’t ready to have the decision taken away from him.
Outside his window, his eyes, only sort of focusing on the scenery, noted that the trees had given way to buildings again. Nothing like Seattle. Fall City, despite its grand name, was not a city. It wasn’t even incorporated. It was just a settlement of around about two thousand people, a small town, if that.
God, it hadn’t changed at all. All of a sudden, the years flashed away, eight of them, and he was looking back at this place for what he had assumed, back then, would be the last time. Then more years fell away, and he was a kid, riding his bike down these streets.
“Oh wow,” Theo whispered, and he closed his eyes as the cab navigated its way through the small town, through the nest of streets, the center of which was his home. Or had been his home. Or was?
He didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to think about being a kid here, because, of course, there was one person who was inextricably linked to his childhood. One person who, maybe more than even his parents, he associated with this place, which seemed frozen in time.
