“Goodmorning.” His voice was thick, still heavy with sleep. He rubbed a hand through his hair, less artfully tousled and more just messy now. “So we start here?”
“Yeah.” I nodded toward the trailhead sign at the far end of the lot. Casual, casual. “I picked a nice loop that shouldn’t be too busy—about seven miles, takes us past two lakes. We’ll hit the second one around lunchtime, so that should be good for apicnic.”No big deal. Cross-referencing trail maps with pictures for the past three days? Not me, nope.
Finn’s gaze caught mine. “Thank you for organizing this.”
“We haven’t even started yet.”
“Doesn’t matter. I know it’ll be great.” He slipped out of the car and tipped his face up to take in the canopy as I did the same. The morning air carried the sharp freshness of autumn, and he inhaled as if he meant to fill himself to the brim—like a balloon, ready to float away. “Even just being here…” He glanced at me, eyes bright. “Feels like I can breathe again.”
God, I like you.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “It’s like…everything seems wider here, more open. Lighter.”
He nodded. “Trading concrete for wood.”
“Traffic for wind.”
“Yeah.”
For a beat, we smiled at each other across the hood of the car, something slow and brilliant twisting through my veins. Finn looked away first, moved to collect his daypack. I grabbed mine, and we set off, gravel and dried leaves crunching under our steps.
“More than six years in,” Finn began after a minute, “does New York feel like home to you?”
I gave myself a moment to turn the answer over in my mind. “You know, when people ask me that—especially people back home—I usually say that parts of it do. But truth is: no, not really. It feels like a place I’m passing through.” I paused for a sideways glance at him, the fairly narrow trail forcing us to walk close. “I’ve got Shane, but other than that, I haven’t put much into…building a life. And no relationship, obviously.”
Until now. Except this wasn’t one—but it was dangerously easy to picture it even though I’d always been fine on my own. It was simpler, safer.
“See,” Finn said, “I’ve always been the opposite.” He nudged a twig with the side of his shoe. “From one relationship straight into the next. Like maybe I needed that external validation—proof I’m worthwhile. Trying not to do that anymore.”
Trying not to dowhatanymore—line up a string of relationships? Or relationships in general? But then he wouldn’t be here. This was too much trouble for a casual thing. Right?
I kept it light. “Look, someone like you? You could have a revolving door of guys, sure, but you shouldn’t need any of them to feel good about yourself. Just look at where you are, what you’ve already done.”
He tried for a smirk that didn’t quite make it, quirked into something almost self-deprecating. “Like winning the Suture Bowl, you mean?”
“That’s one thing, yeah.” I hesitated, words balanced on the tip of my tongue. I set them free. “I wanted you to win, you know?”
His expression tipped fully into a smile, shy but pleased. “You did?”
“Yeah.” I bumped our knuckles together. “Which is to say that even then, I couldn’t be fully neutral. Not about you.”
He didn’t answer—just shifted a little closer.
Sunlight sifted through branches and speckled his face in gold. He looked at home here, the same way I felt—tuned into the frequency of whispering leaves and gently humming insects.
“You told me to hold my question,” he said eventually. “About your parents. Whether Shane knows you better than they do.”
“Yeah.” I stepped over a root. “It’s nothing big, really. We get along fine—great, even. But they don’t understand my life. They’re proud, massively so, but they don’t understand the hours, what it took to get here. When I tell them about cases, it’s like a foreign language.” Did that sound whiny? I lifted ashoulder. “Like I said, nothing big. I know I’m lucky. They love me, they’ve always been fine with me being gay, and I’d like to think they raised me well. Many kids would be happy to be in my shoes.”
“Sure.” Finn paused. “But it’s such a basic human need, isn’t it? Wanting to be understood. Especially by the people we love.”
How do I keep you?
I inhaled crisp forest air, the taste of autumn on my tongue. “Your dad’s a doctor, so…probably different for you?”
“I guess?” His expression shifted, quiet for a few seconds as if he was truly giving it some thought rather than handing me a prefabricated answer. “I told you he’s a small-town GP—well-loved, knows not just his patients by name, but also their parents and kids and pets. Surgery isn’t that. And I think there’s a part of him that’s disappointed I’m not following his path, that I won’t take over his practice one day.”
Same expectations, different shades. “Were you ever tempted?” I asked.
