Alexei pressed his lips together.
“I don’t think I necessarily understood that as queer when I was twelve, at least not consciously. But when my D&D friends talked about it…I felt it. How Alanna and Thom both reject society’s expectations of them. Alanna’s refusal to live as someone she didn’t want to be. She was so…fearless.” Alexei swallowed. “I was always a shy kid, and…yeah, I think I loved Alanna so much because I always wished I could be a little more like her.”
The space between them filled with the sound of the wind whispering through the pines.
“Tell me more,” Ben said again after a long moment, his voice quiet.
“Do you seriously want to know the whole story?”
“I do.” Ben adjusted himself on the ground, fluffed his sweatshirt before resettling. “Read it to me?”
“What?” Alexei stared at him.
“I told you, I’m bored. And Alanna sounds pretty badass. You don’t have to, though.”
“No, I…”Alexei trailed off.
He shot Ben another glance.
“You won’t make fun of it? It really is, like, fifth-grade reading level.”
“I promise. I won’t make fun of it.”
And the thing was, Alexei knew he wouldn’t.
But he still couldn’t quite believe he was going to do this anyway.
He openedAlanna: The First Adventureand paged past the title page, the map of Tortall. He cleared his throat.
“Chapter One: Twins.”
He tried to make his voice sound normal as he read through the first page, but God, this was bizarre. Reading Tamora Pierce to Ben Caravalho in the middle of the desert, at the age of twenty-nine.
But as he kept reading, he got into a bit of a rhythm. With a small thrill, he felt himself slipping back into the magic of Tortall, even now, even here.
Ben closed his eyes halfway through the first chapter. Alexei didn’t mind if Ben fell asleep. He looked peaceful, and happy, so Alexei kept reading, because he rather felt the same.
And then, on page thirteen, when Alanna dropped her cloak, revealing herself to be Alanna and not Thom, and her companion Coram choked on his brandy—Ben laughed.
It wasn’t eventhatfunny when Coram choked on the brandy. But it was a little funny. Ben’s laughter was soft, but genuine, like it always was, and it lit up Alexei’s insides like a firecracker.
Ben was listening. He was on Alanna’s side.
Alexei smiled into his paperback and took another breath. And then he kept reading about Alanna’s travels to the capital, on the way to her destiny, while the desert sun traveled overhead, blazing into the bleached, sandy earth of Southern California, sinking into Ben and Alexei’s skin.
Chapter Seven
Ben couldn’t stop smiling from the moment he woke up.
His body was rested from the zero. He and Alexei had been hiking together for enough time now that their routines were starting to feel natural, melded together: how long it took each of them to pack up camp; when they each liked to eat their biggest meals; how to balance their pacing. Alexei was talking more, sharing more, seeming more at ease. The wind was calm this morning, making their early first hours of hiking easy as pie.
And it was dinosaur day.
Ben hummed as they walked. He often sang inside his head as they walked, sometimes a little outside, too; you needed something mindless in your brain to survive this damn trail. But he figured humming out loud, continuously, would annoy Alexei. And there was no better way to tell your friends you cared—or that you had something you really, really wanted them to ask you about—than to annoy the shit out of them.
An impressive mile and a half into the morning—Ben had made it through at least 40 percent of Tom Petty’s oeuvre—Alexei finally broke.
“Ben.” He stopped in his tracks, and Ben almost crashed right into him. “For the love of God. What is happening.”
