“It’s only like an hour drive.”
“I guess I think of Jersey as farther away than it is.”
“City boy.”
“Yeah.”
Scott kissed his way up Carver’s hand, then kissed the tips of his fingers, then opened his mouth. Carver, pleasantly surprised, pushed his middle and index fingers into Scott’s mouth until hehit warm tongue. Scott started to lightly suck them and lifted his gaze, pinning Carver in place with his dark eyes.
After only a few seconds of this Scott glanced around and gently withdrew Carver from his mouth, turning his hand so he could kiss his bruised knuckles, then turning it again so he could kiss his scraped palm. Then he returned Carver’s hand to him.
Carver didn’t know what to do now. He was overflowing emotionally and had a little bit of a hard-on. He didn’t want to part from Scott, but he was aware of how fragile this thing between them was. He didn’t want to squeeze it to death in its first hours of life. It wasn’t like all the other things he’d chosen for himself, all the lessers of two evils which necessitated furious and immediate commitment before he changed his mind. He knew this, and he wanted Scott to know he knew it.
“I might come by tomorrow morning and say goodbye,” he said.
Scott nodded. “Okay.”
“And then later this week I’ll text you, I guess.”
“Sure. Sounds good. Where are you gonna be staying?”
“I was thinking I’d stay on our yacht… I work in Hudson Yards, and our marina’s only like three miles south.”
“On a yacht?” Scott said, raising his eyebrows. “Alone?”
Carver shrugged. “It’s a nice yacht.”
“I’m just saying like, you’ve had a big emotional shock. Do you want to be alone?”
“Uh… maybe, maybe not. I just don’t know what the alternative is.”
“Staying with a friend?”
Carver tried to think of a friend who would actually be emotionally helpful to him in this situation and came up blank. “My friends aren’t great with stuff like this,” he said.
“Family?”
“Chip and Conway don’t have room. I could keep staying with my parents —”
“What about Josie and Hank?” Scott interrupted.
“I guess that’s a thought,” Carver said.
Somehow, though, this didn’t feel like the right answer either. Carver knew what he wanted — to leave with Scott and just go be with him wherever — but he was embarrassed to even raise the point. This was the same guy who told him he was Lillian’s pet dog, and the idea hurt his pride. He couldn’t rid himself of the image of a dog, leash unclipped, darting over to heel at Scott’s side and follow him home. He couldn’t fix his life by becoming the runaway he’d failed to be at eighteen. He would have to figure out some other thing to do.
“I’ll discuss it with them tomorrow,” he said, just to have something to say.
“Okay,” Scott said. “Look, if you really want to be alone, have some time to think, then you should be alone. I’ll stop — I keep trying to tell you what to do, sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Carver said, laughing and getting to his feet. “I’d love to be told what to do.”
Scott got up, too. “But I can’t tell you what the right thing is. You know that, not me.”
“Sure, allegedly. Do neither of us have a car here, by the way?”
“Uh…” Scott chuckled. “If you don’t, I don’t. We could walk.”
“Two miles in the dark? I’ll call an Uber.” Carver opened the app on his phone, then glanced up. “Can I say something about the van situation?”
