Carver shook his head, which was buzzing, and put his shirt on. “No, but I want a cigarette.”
“Alright, hand me my flannel.”
Carver obeyed, and Scott made sure his cigarettes were in the breast pocket before putting it on.
“I really don’t think I ever said that,” Carver said.
“Well,” Scott said, getting to his feet and pulling his boxers on, “I said it first, so relax. I wasn’t trying to freak you out, here.”
“I’m not freaked out.” Carver stood so he could pull on his jeans, doing his best not to wobble despite his quivering calf muscles. “But if you said it first, maybe you misheard me. Maybe I saidI love thisor something.”
Scott laughed. “If that were the case, I’d know, and I’d have been so embarrassed I probably would have just walked out. Are you fucking with me right now?”
“Why would I be fucking with you?”
“I don’t know, it’s just hard to believe you could forget something like that.”
“You know I forget shit,” Carver exclaimed breathlessly, gesturing at chest level. “You know I —” He tended to block things out. It was embarrassing to say this aloud. It made him sound unwell. “You know?”
Scott nodded. He knew.
Carver strode toward the doors of the poolhouse and pushed them open, bursting out into the warm night air. He didn’t bother to check behind himself for Scott as he went around the side of the building and cut a direct path through the grass to the wooded area at the back of the property. The crickets were even louder now; a dog barked in the distance. Other than that the neighborhood was silent.
The further they got from the house, the fewer lights there were. Carver dug his phone out of his pocket and used the flashlight to light his way. He could hear Scott’s soft steps in the grass behind him. He stopped when an abandoned and rusted old trampoline came into view, resting in a small clearing and surrounded by trees. This had been the site of several childhoodmaimings. Chip once smacked his face off the frame, chipping an adult tooth and busting out two baby teeth; Conway once misjudged a landing, went off the side and fractured her wrist. Carver got off light with just bruises and one hematoma.
Carver sat in the grass with his back at the base of a large oak. Scott came over and sat down beside him. In the clear night air it was much more obvious that they both stank of sweat, cum and two kinds of smoke.
Scott lit a cigarette, then handed it to Carver and lit his own. Carver took a grateful drag and rested the back of his head against the tree.
“Maybe I said it,” he admitted, in the hopes that if he acquiesced then his heart might stop racing.
“Look, it doesn’t matter either way,” Scott said without looking at him.
Carver’s heart, unfortunately, had not stopped racing. “You don’t think you meant it?”
“I don’t know.” Scott blew out smoke. It curled and dispersed in the darkness. “Maybe puppy love.”
Carver smoked and didn’t respond, just stared through the trees.
“I mean, what’s love,” Scott continued. “Two people wanting to share their lives? It would be pretty wild to have something that real at eighteen. We hadn’t built anything together, we didn’t know what life even was yet.”
“I don’t know,” Carver muttered. “I think I knew then. I think I was right about what life is.”
“Yeah? Congrats.”
“I mean that in a bad way. I thought it was rote and limited. I was hoping to be wrong.”
“Oh, gotcha. Well, you were, I think.”
“Was I?”
“Life’s definitely not limited, man,” Scott said. “That’s like the one thing it isn’t.”
Carver exhaled smoke and looked at him. Though it was a warm night, the sweat cooling on his skin was draining his body heat.
“I’ve been a lot of places and done a lot of shit,” he said, “and I keep running into the same types of people and the same situations. And most of it’s… flat.”
“Flat how?”
