And you wouldn’t be in cahoots with someone’s sister if you hated him, right?
Still. Maybe Ben was here only because he wanted to yell at Alexei in person about everything, which again, would be reasonable. It was awful, how Alexei had left that night. He deserved to be yelled at.
Maybe—
Ben finally turned his head. Pushed off from the car, turned toward him.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, as Iris Caravalho would say.
Alexei breathed deep.
He took a step forward. Walked into Washington. Toward the man he loved.
Ben wiped his palms on his shorts as Alexei approached, stuck them in his back pockets. Looked at Alexei from under those dark eyelashes.
Alexei came to a stop when he was five feet away, trekking poles dangling from his hands.
“Hi,” he said.
“Lex,” Ben said, and Alexei almost fell over from the impact. “Hey.”
Ben looked down then, shuffled his feet.
“I thought…you came to my hometown, where I’m from. So I thought it only fair that I met you here, in the state where you were born.”
God, Alexei thought. He looked good. Alexei had forgotten for a bit there, how good Ben looked.
“I wanted to make some kind of big gesture to welcome you home, but I can’t play the guitar, and I can’t write like you, so…”Ben glanced at Alexei. Took his hands out of his pockets. He looked almost shy.
“I was just wondering, Lex, if you’d take a walk with me.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ben white-knuckled the steering wheel. It was only a few miles to the tiny village of North Bonneville, just past the Bonneville Dam. He’d been there all morning, while Alina texted him updates from Alexei’s GPS. Had gotten everything ready, practiced what he was going to say, before Alexei finally walked across that bridge.
Alexei had gotten in the car. Things were going as smoothly as they possibly could, in terms of surprising-the-man-you-loved-who’d-abruptly-left-your-home-without-saying-good-bye-several-months-ago kind of metrics.
Still, as they drove down the road in silence, as Ben wound through North Bonneville and parked behind the dugout of a Little League baseball field, he wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t be sick at Alexei’s feet once they got out of the car.
He looked so good. So strong and calm. His beard was even scruffier than before. He smelled awful. Ben wanted to kiss him so badly.
Alexei left his pack in the car. It was clear he knew where they were, smiling when they approached the entrance to the trail. Strawberry Island, it was called. Alexei smiling was another good sign.
And to Ben’s great relief, once they began walking through the open, breezy grassland of the island’s interior, past the waving wildflowers and the rush, it took only a few moments to get used to it again. Walking next to Alexei. Wrapping himself in Alexei’s quiet. Letting it soothe his heart.
And as they walked, as Ben kept stealing glances Alexei’s way, he could see it. Feel it. That Alexei Lebedev was at peace now. His shoulders were relaxed, that little smile never quite leaving his face.
Ben swallowed past a lump in his throat. He had stuff to say. He couldn’t cry yet.
He led them to a side trail that wound through a patch of cottonwoods, toward the tip of the island. His heart pounded in his temples.
As they neared the bench at the end of the trail, Ben exhaled when it came into view, exactly as he had left it.
Alexei’s steps faltered. He stopped a few feet from the bench, staring up into the trees. At the strings of battery-powered white lights Ben had placed there this morning, using the stepladder Alina had let him borrow, currently hiding behind a fir tree. At the hundreds of paper cranes, strung among those lights, that Ben had carried in a large box, somewhat ridiculously, on his flight across the country.
He had worried the effect wouldn’t be as impressive if Alexei arrived in the middle of the day, as he had, but it was dim enough in this patch of trees, and it had turned cloudy over the river, where the blue-gray caps of the Columbia were visible from the viewpoint, the deep green hulk of Hamilton Mountain to their right, the monolith of Beacon Rock. And they were all alone here, and it felt—
Alexei’s forehead was furrowed. That little line there Ben loved so much.
