“Is it Ben time?”
“An hour left,” Alexei replied. Technically fifty-eight minutes now. Not that Alexei was counting.
“How much longer ’til it’s Ben time all the time?”
“A little over three months.”
Rex knew this. Ben would be moving to Portland just after the New Year. The actual best Christmas present ever. Even better than Little Debbies.
Rex just liked to ask Alexei about it, because according to Rex, it was entertaining to watch Alexei blush. Sometimes, annoyingly, he would even pinch Alexei’s cheeks, if they were in the break room and Alexei was distracted enough to let it happen.
Alexei wouldn’t have expected it, that Rex would be his best friend at the office—Alexei’s friend, full stop—but he had worn Alexei down with his affection over the last year. And Alexei had learned by now that the unexpected things often were the best things.
Alexei had gotten this job at the Forest Service’s Portland offices a month after returning from the trail, late last fall. The job itself dealt mostly with budgets and memorizing more federal codes than Alexei had ever previously known existed. He did get to make lots of spreadsheets, though. Many satisfying charts.
Mostly, he loved coming to work every day and seeing the Forest Service logo on the wall. Even if he was still in a steel and glass office building, it always made him feel a little closer to the woods, to memories of the trail. He got a bit of a thrill, too, each time he was able to talk with scientists who worked in the field, who did the real work to help protect and manage those woods Alexei loved.
It made him daydream lately about going back to school for something more science based one day, something that would qualify him for more field work here, something that could combine his love of data with his love of the land. It was a quiet, consistent pull, this new small desire to do something more.
But for now, he was going to pick up Ben Caravalho from the airport in fifty-five minutes. He was out at his stable job, where sometimes, he got to learn a little bit more about trees. He got dinner once a week with his sister, who he swore got funnier by the week. There was a church he attended sometimes that displayed a rainbow flag in front of their doors, that might eventually become a place he could feel a part of.
He had not talked to his parents again. He had never passed them on the street.
But there was also a therapist he saw every other Tuesday. Who listened to him on the days when their ghosts haunted him more than he’d like. Who gave him coping strategies. Who had smiled last week and told him he was doing “so, so well.”
His therapist, early on, had also recommended Alexei for a referral for an autism assessment. When he’d first received the diagnosis, it had sent him into a tailspin of questions, mostly about his parents. Had they known? Had his teachers ever recommended an assessment for him when he was young that they rejected? What would it have been like if he had known earlier?
For the most part, though, when he was able to quiet his questions about his past, understanding his autism had only been another way for Alexei to learn how to love himself.
He had more dreams these days than he’d ever allowed himself to have before. But for now, having a job and a therapist and a sister and a boyfriend and a brain he understood better was all enough. It was more than enough.
Alexei spent the next fifty-three minutes reading his email and not comprehending any of it, mindlessly clicking in and out of a report he was not going to finish. At 11:59, he closed down his computer and left the office early for the day.
Ben had taken an early morning flight. Alexei would arrive at the airport entirely too early, as he always did.
Alexei could not wait for Ben to be here full time, tolivehere. It was too much even to contemplate sometimes. There were nights Alexei couldn’t sleep from the excitement. He would text Ben lists of questions—What kitchenware was Ben bringing? What kind of dog food did Delilah prefer? Should Alexei buy a new bookshelf?—or sometimes, lists of things he knew about himself that Ben might find irritating. His need to place shoes in perfectly straight lines by the front door. The fact that, inexplicably, healwaysbought spinach at the store, even though he had never, not even once, used an entire bag before it went bad.
Ben typically texted him back one of two things:
i love you so much
or
please go to sleep, you handsome nerd
What Alexei didn’t text, what he kept secret, were his dreams of buying a house with Ben one day. With room for a garden. Room for Delilah to run and rub her back in the grass. Room to plot their next adventures.
He knew Portland might not be permanent for him and Ben, that Ben might want to keep roaming after getting his taste of the Northwest. They had talked about it, and Alexei felt comfortable with whatever happened. He’d be okay leaving, he thought, if it was with Ben. Moving forward was different from running away.
Either way, even if they moved one day, Alexei still wanted to buy Ben a house. He would buy Ben a hundred houses, if he could, wherever Ben wanted them.
Despite his fantasies about the future, Alexei had to admit, as he drove to PDX, that there was something slightly bittersweet about this, Ben’s last trip to Portland as a temporary visitor. Alexei would be traveling to Nashville for Thanksgiving, as he had last year. But other than that visit and this one, Ben would be busy wrapping up his residency and his Nashville life this fall. He wouldn’t be back until January, when he arrived on a one-way ticket.
And as hard as the distance was sometimes, the anticipation of these visits was always heady, an all-consuming rush. By the time Alexei was actually en route to the airport, the excitement would fill his veins, fizzy like champagne, until he felt like he could float away. He would miss that.
Andthisvisit. Alexei had been looking forward to this visit for months.
Ben had never visited in September before. The few days they had spent in Cascade Locks last year didn’t count.
