Inside the cabin, we ate and we worked. Wolfe built a fire each night and banked it when we went to sleep. Moonlight shone through the window, and the late-night train whistle echoed across the snow.
Wolfe’s eyes glittered in the near-dark. When we snuggled beneath the covers, the snuggle soon turned into something more. A tussle. A manly wrestle that would leave us both breathless by the time we were done. Which would cause Wolfe to jump up and open the window to get a blast of cool air on his skin.
Not all nights, but most nights. I watched him do it, his skin pale in the moonlight as he shivered and inhaled like an animal when the barn door was finally opened.
“Too cold?” he would ask, turning to me, his hands on his chest. Worried that I might catch a chill.
“No,” I said, as I always did. “It’s fine.” And it was because he would warm me up soon enough.
“I should get you Netflix,” he said one night as he shut the window and came back to bed.
“No,” I said. And I meant it. What we had was an island floating in a sea of white and blue. It didn’t need flickers on a screen or any distraction. It needed what it had, which was me, Wolfe, and the work. And tea, of course. Pots and pots of hot tea made in a cherry-red teapot.
CHAPTER 20
blue
Wolfe let me sleep in on most mornings, which I appreciated, waking up in that rumpled bed that still smelled like him, my head on pillows that still harbored his scent. He would make tea in the cherry-red teapot and sit at the table all by himself, facing the back door, and look out on the land that he owed money to the bank for. Think his thoughts. Stay very still.
At all other times, he was motion and action, his hands creating something, his eyes tracking the horizon from time to time as though scanning for danger. It was just the way he was.
Getting up, making myself get up, I showered quickly, got dressed, and brushed my teeth. All perfectly ordinary actions that settled me. Told my body this was home. As I moved from the bathroom, Wolfe opened the back door; we watched the ribbon of gray steam wend its way outside. A bit of a cold breeze swept into the kitchen.
“Might get a low-pressure system from the west today,” Wolfe said as he shut the door. “That means it might warm up a little.”
I sat down, nodding my thanks as he pushed a white china mug across the table. He’d gotten it ready for me. Timed it right. Added milk and sugar, just the way I liked it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You okay?” he asked. He pointed between his own eyebrows. “You’ve got a furrow.”
I felt my forehead, touched the space between my eyebrows, and winced. “A headache, I think.”
Since my first few nights in the cabin, I’d not had a headache, just aches and bruises that had faded over time. My ankle was sturdy. So was my wrist. I was fine.
Except now, the room did an odd thing. It started changing shape, the living room wider than the kitchen, and the far wall to the front door wider than that. I blinked hard, and that headache rushed in to land right in the middle of my head. I gripped the table, nearly dropping my mug of hot tea, to steady myself.
Then the flood started. A rush of images that swamped my brain with the power of a firehose. Not flickers. Nothing behind a fog. Memories. Where I lived. Where I came from. The view from my bedroom at the back of the house my parents owned in Virginia, the grass lawn designed to host parties where people played bocce and croquet.
Shouts from down the long hall, my parents in my brother’s room. Laying blame. Flinging accusations. Cameron laughing at them. Telling them to go fuck themselves. That he was gay, and so who cared. They had. The family line must continue, or something like that.
The day Cameron died. I found him in his bedroom, where he’d taken pills meant to last him several months. A sour gray foam had bubbled from his mouth and dried. My parents were more worried about what the neighbors would think than how Cameron had felt when he’d taken those pills. About the fact that Cameron didn’t cry out, though he knew he was dying.
I stood up, but I shouldn’t have. The room wobbled and my knees started to go sideways. Wolfe was there to catch me. To sit me back in the kitchen chair. He hunkered down at my side.
“Blue?” he asked, his hands on my thigh.
“My name is Crispin,” I said, the words high-pitched and hard. “I’m from Virginia. My brother died. He overdosed. I think he did it on purpose just to get away. We weren’t that close, but he was a good guy.”
“Are you remembering?” Wolfe asked softly. Looking up at me with wide, dark eyes. Not moving away. Not leaving. “What are you remembering?”
“Everything,” I said.
I remembered the Reserve, a bad boys’ reformatory, a place I later discovered was not more than fifty miles from my home.Fifty miles. That’s all the distance my parents traveled to dump me off. To put me in the hands of people—and surely my parents knew this—who thought cruelty was how you changed someone.
The Reserve was a camp for troubled boys that promised results, only nobody counted the cost. A place for kids with problems. Being gay. On Drugs. Violent. Or just troublesome at home.
The Reserve was made up of three or four buildings, on land that was two inches above swampland, on a field that mostly lay fallow, as far as I could tell during the time that I was there. A twenty-acre wasteland tucked behind an industrial area, next to a pair of railroad tracks and a slow-moving creek.
