He handed the bag to Galen, tipped his finger to his forehead, then turned around, and as he walked out of the tavern, the crowd split before him like the waves before Moses.
Bede turned his attention to Galen and the sleek white carrier bag in his hands. One by one, he handed out sturdy phone-shaped boxes to each of them, and one by one they fell silent as they opened the boxes.
Bede’s phone was black, which was fine by him, and though the phone was supposed to be refurb, it looked brand new. There was even a plastic sheet on the glass surface that needed to be peeled back, inch by erotic inch.
“Who’re you going to call?” asked Galen. “Who’s your first phone call to?”
For a second, Bede thought Galen was making a joke from the old Ray Parker Jr. song.Who you gonna call? Ghost Busters!But no. He was asking for who specifically.
Bede knew Winston’s number by heart, though by this time, five years on, that number had surely been assigned to someone else. A grandma in Utah, probably. He gripped the phone in his fingers and swallowed hard.
“What’s the matter?” asked Galen. “Is your phone broken?”
Now Bede had three pairs of eyes, a fourth and fifth pair, if he wanted to count the waitress and her helper, who’d come up to the table just then with two circular trays full of food. He shook his head and leaned back and smiled, pretending everything was okay even though it wasn’t.
He’d done that a lot in prison, especially in those first years, not wanting to give off any indication of the sweeping helplessness that would engulf him whenever he thought of Winston. As the years had gone by, the attitude of not giving a fuck had gotten easier, only now it was as if he’d forgotten how.
“No, it’s fine,” he said, forcing brightness into the words. “They’re just a whole lot thinner than I remember.”
“Yeah,” said Toby and Owen just about in unison, and Toby added, “Lighter, too.”
Bede put his phone aside and concentrated on his meal, the icy cool beer, bitter with hops, just the perfect distraction as he swallowed a mouthful and felt it slide down his throat. It tasted just like the beer he’d told Galen about when they’d gone swimming, and that moved him more than he’d expected it to.
He ticked the moments by in his heart until he felt a bit more normal, chomped through his cheese fries with appreciative sounds, and pretended that Galen’s gaze on him wasn’t protective and concerned.
Pretended extra hard that the idea of this didn’t dance around strangely in his gut. This was what happened when you opened your heart, a realization he’d not even needed years behind bars to teach him.
Only Winston had been able to crack him open. Only Winston had loved him, and laughed with him, cared about him. And if it seemed Galen felt the same way about him, well, it was a fluke that would only last till the end of summer.
Smiling as he drank his second beer, wishing he could get a second shot of very good whiskey, he made it through the rest of the dinner, and, thankfully, his heart settled down by the time dessert came.
He wasn’t much of a dessert guy but he ordered the carrot cake just to be sociable, and ended up passing most of it to Owen, who’d gotten the same, gobbled it down, and had been eying Bede’s leftovers.
Galen drove them back to the valley in the heavy darkness with the faintest glow coming from along the top of the bulky foothills. That was soon doused as the truck trundled down the switchbacks into the valley.
Once in the parking lot, Owen and Toby took off like they’d been shot out of a cannon, their phones’ faces aglow as they eagerly argued about who would call whom.
“Five bucks says they are both calling their fellow not-yet-arrested housebreakers,” said Bede, because those two were just dumb enough to call and brag and get sucked into their old lives now that they had a way to connect to them.
“You okay, Bede?” asked Galen, coming close. He reached out to tug Bede close to him, looping his fingers in Bede’s belt loops. “There’s something about the phone. You’ve been quiet ever since you opened that box.”
The last thing Bede wanted to do was burden Galen with his troubles.
“Not now,” he said. “Maybe later.”
He’d been thinking that once he figured how he felt about it all, it being what was happening between him and Galen, he’d be able to talk about it out loud. But then Galen asked, “Later, for what? Do you mean this?”
Galen rose and clasped Bede’s face in his hands, his fingers warm, the dark air swirling around Galen’s face, pulling the angles and planes into focus. Then Galen kissed him, softly, as if it were their first kiss all over again.
Bede let himself be swept up, to be petted and loved on because it felt so good, he was unable to resist.
Chapter 31
Bede
“Do you want to come to my tent?” asked Galen, and when Bede didn’t respond, he felt another tug on his belt loop.
“Yes,” said Bede, because of course, while Kell might be in Marston’s tent, he very well might be in tent number eleven, reading a book, waiting to hear all about how Bede’s night out had gone.
