“I'm not saying it to make you feel guilty.” His voice was steady, matter-of-fact, like he was commenting on the weather. “Just answering your question.”
I pulled a crushed sleeve of crackers from my jacket pocket, remnants of a gas station breakfast that had tasted like cardboard and regret. The ducks noticed immediately, paddling toward us with the focused determination of creatures who'd learned that humans sometimes came bearing gifts.
“Jonah came to see me,” I said, scattering cracker crumbs across the water. “Few days after I got back. Told me I was an idiot if I thought I could just slip back into town without dealing with... things.”
“That sounds like Jonah.”
“He also said I had a habit of running when things got complicated. That I'd done it before, and I'd probably do it again unless someone called me on my shit.”
Evan was quiet, watching the ducks squabble over crumbs.
“Were you planning to run?” he asked finally.
“Honestly? Yeah. Maybe. I don't know.” I threw another handful of crackers, harder than necessary. “Everything here is so... familiar. Like stepping back into a life that doesn't fit anymore, you know? But also like the only life that ever did fit, and I'm just too fucked up now to see it.”
“You're not fucked up.”
“I'm twenty-four, living in my childhood bedroom, with a photography degree that's apparently worth less than the paper it's printed on and enough debt to buy a small car. If that's not fucked up, I don't know what is.”
“It's temporary.”
The certainty in his voice made me want to believe him, but believing things hadn't worked out so well for me lately.
“It feels pretty permanent. Like maybe this is just who I am now—the guy who had big dreams and spectacular failures in equal measure.”
Evan turned to look at me then, really look, with those hazel eyes that had always seen too much.
“You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you're so busy being disappointed in yourself that you can't see what everyone else sees.”
“Which is?”
“Someone who was brave enough to chase something impossible. Someone who spent six years in a city that chews people up and spits them out, and came home whole. Different, maybe. Older, definitely. But whole.”
The words settled into my chest like warm honey, sweet and soothing in places that had been raw for months.
“I should have called,” I said, voice rough with honesty I probably should have kept to myself. “All those years. I should have picked up the phone and... I don't know. Told you I was thinking about you. Asked how you were. Something.”
“Why didn't you?”
“Pride, mostly. And fear. What if you'd moved on? What if you didn't want to hear from me? What if I called and realized that whatever we'd had was just... high school bullshit that felt important at the time but didn't mean anything in the real world?”
“And what if it did mean something?”
The question hung between us like a bridge I wasn't sure I was brave enough to cross.
“Then I was an even bigger idiot than Jonah said I was.”
“Jonah's right about a lot of things,” Evan said. “But he's wrong about you being an idiot. Scared, maybe. Human, definitely. But not an idiot.”
A duck paddled close to the edge, eyeing my depleted cracker supply with the kind of optimism that suggested he believed in miracles. I scattered the last of the crumbs, watching them disappear in a flurry of feathers and competitive quacking.
“I'm sorry,” I said.
“Nate.” Evan's hand covered mine, warm and solid and real in ways that made my throat tight. “Stop apologizing for following your dreams. Even if they didn't turn out the way you planned.”
