Bede took a moment to silently pull out his list, folded and double folded, a little jagged around the edges where it’d been torn from the tablet. He gave the piece of paper to Galen without looking up.
It didn’t really matter what books were ordered for the library, but it was important to make sure nobody knew how shook he was inside. How he’d kept up a barrier for five years and now it was crumbling. All because of a stupid pair of boots that Winston would have loved to see him wearing.
Maybe he’d throw those boots in the lake and say he lost them.
Chapter 12
Bede
After dinner was another campfire and, wondering if anybody ever got tired of them, Bede made himself sit through it, creating and eating a s’more, engaging in small talk he couldn’t remember a second later. Barely aware of the perfect summer night all around.
When darkness had truly fallen and he was back in his tent, Kell, high on chocolate and sugar, talking a mile a minute, got ready for bed. When he was tucked in his cot, Bede said that he needed to take a trip to the facilities.
He made it sound boring because he didn’t want Kell coming with him. He just wanted a moment alone, a moment in a lifetime of being alone.
He shoved his bare feet into unlaced work boots, jammed the laces down around his ankles, grabbed his flashlight, and headed along the path to the fire pit. It was empty now, quiet, still smelling faintly like ash and chocolate and the cool sand that had been poured over the coals.
Beyond the fire pit loomed the lake, flat and still in the darkness. Beyond that, the layer upon layer of pine trees surged upward along the hills to the barren rocks of Guipago Ridge.
Going a little way along the path by the edge of the lake, he didn’t quite know where he was, only that the faint breeze across the still lake was cool on his skin, and that his boots were rocketing around his ankles. So he stopped and took them off and stood barefoot in the uneven grasses, feeling them along the sides of his feet, his toes, a nighttime caress, absentminded. Soft.
It was that softness that broke him. Dropping his flashlight, he crouched down on his heels, face in his hands, and sobbed.
Winston was never coming back to him.
During Bede’s five years in prison, he had played a continual game of make-believe. That he never heard from Winston because Winston was in hiding. That Winston never called Bede in prison because those calls could be traced back to him. That Winston never wrote an old-fashioned letter, because the postmark might lead the cops right to Winston’s door.
And last, the most painful hope of all was, upon his release from Wyoming Correctional, that Bede would find Winston outside the prison, keys to a 440 Dodge Monaco in his hand. Saying,Lookit what I got. Cop car. Cop tires, cop suspension, cop shocks. Laughing, mouth open, head tossed back at the joke.
But instead of being met by Winston, Bede had walked out of prison empty-handed, and only a white van, the driver, and two fellow ex-cons were waiting for him. All of which was geared to blast Bede toward a Winston-less future, with uncertain horizons and along the bumpiest, most flint-flecked road he’d ever had to go down.
In prison, Bede had never cried, so he’d never needed to hide, either from his cellmates or the guards. He’d held back the tears and the pain in his gut every time they spiraled upward, tearing at him, razor-toothed. Relentless. He’d locked it all down, bolted it tight and never looked back.
Now, it all came pouring out, floodgates unleashed. A torrent of black-ripped grief that left him shaking, crouched down in thegrass. Hiding, his palms pressed to his eyes as if to hold back the tears.
But they would not be held. Having waited five years, their turn had come, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Maybe this was good. He’d get it all out and then bolt everything back down again. Continue on with the only the memories of Winston and their time together, the rough drug life contrasting with the silk-soft cotton sheets, the open window carrying the soft breeze and the sounds of the city.
He could carry with him the memory of traces of love on his skin, Winston’s low laugh in his ear as he reached across Bede’s body to the nightstand and the half-smoked joint that he obviously intended to finish off before the sun came up. Make Bede share it with him so their bodies could curl around each other, relaxed supple warmth pulling them into deep sleep.
“Bede?” asked a voice that cut through his grief so sharply it was like a blow. “What are you doing out here?”
Bede leaped to his feet, face damp, his eyesight blurred with tears, the rustle of the woods all around him fanning coolness across his hot skin.
“Bede?” asked the voice again. The beam of a flashlight swept across him. “Are you okay?”
Wiping his vision clear, Bede blinked at the figure in front of him.
It was Galen, the flashlight beam drawn to his side as he held it away from glaring into Bede’s eyes.
Bede could see that Galen wore cowboy boots. Clamped to his chest was a bundle that might be folded clothes and certainly was, for Galen was naked except for a snap-button shirt, currently unsnapped, and a pair of tight skimpy briefs.
The visual caught Bede so off guard that, his hands in fists, all he could do was roar in response. “What areyoudoing out here?”
Who the fuck walked around half-naked in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere? Weren’t there bears or some shit like that, roaming around, looking for snacks?
It didn’t matter. The worst person in the world had caught him doing one of the most intimate things. Bede could jack off in front of the chief of police if they’d wanted him to, but he would never have cried. Would never have felt as vulnerable as he did now, tears drying on his cheeks. More exposed than even Galen in his state of half-undress.
