Page 77 of Double Dared
He exhaled, and I felt it, the length of the breath, the relief inside it. Something unknotted in his face. Something that had been held taut for longer than I’d realized loosened all at once, and he was so beautiful standing there in the strange blue light of the eclipse that my chest couldn’t hold it.
I stepped into him. Or he stepped into me. Both. Neither. The world shrank between us, and we simply were where we were.
His mouth found mine, and I kissed him the way you kiss someone when you’re not performing it foranyone, when there’s no audience and no dare and no plan, when it’s only the two of you and the cold air and the grass and the thin ring of fire at the edge of the moon.
He kissed me back just the same.
And then, at the left edge of my closed eyes, through the skin of my eyelids, light returned. Slowly at first, a warmth more than a brightness, the sun finding the first millimeter of its return from behind the moon’s shoulder. The air changed. The temperature shifted upward by degrees. The deep bruised blue of the eclipse shadow retreated across the grass in a slow tide, and warmth spread over us, incremental, patient, the way things come back when you think they’ve gone forever.
We pulled apart.
His forehead came down to rest against mine, and we stayed there for a while, breathing the same cold air, the light slowly completing itself around us.
I looked into his eyes. They were dark and warm and so alive, and he was looking at me with everything he had, with no part of it held back or measured or made careful, and I understood, standing in the returning sunlight on a grass slope at the edge of the world, that this was what it felt like to be seen by someone who had decided on you completely.
I held his gaze.
I loved him.
He loved me.
The rest of it, all the rest of it, could wait.
epilogue
hours and years later…
We walked backinto my apartment with the eclipse still in our eyes, that particular blue-shadow quality the world takes on after something extraordinary has moved through it and left everything technically the same but permanently altered. Taylor’s hand was in mine, and I closed the door behind us, and the familiar smell of the apartment wrapped around me, coffee and old books and something faintly floral from the pothos that had grown three new leaves in the past two weeks without asking anyone’s permission.
I went to the corkboard.
I didn’t plan to, exactly. My feet found it the way feet find a place they’ve needed to go for a long time, and I reached into the drawer of the side table where I’d kept it, the Polaroid I’d taken of Taylor at thecottage. He was lying on his stomach across the bed, ankles crossed, the fire behind him throwing all his angles into warm relief. I’d looked at it many times when he wasn’t in the room. I’d held it and put it back and told myself things that were not quite true.
I found a pin and pressed it into the center of the corkboard.
Taylor came up behind me. I felt him before I heard him, the warmth of him, the particular gravity of a person you love arriving into your orbit. His arms came around my torso and crossed over my chest, and he pressed his face against the back of my neck, and I felt his breath, slow and deliberate and warm.
“To be loved by you, Harrison,” he whispered into my ear, “is like being loved by the eclipse itself.”
I covered his hands with mine and held them there.
For a while, neither of us spoke, and it was the best kind of silence, the kind that doesn’t need to be filled because it is already full.
Then, somehow, we were in bed, and the lights were off, and his skin was warm against mine, and his head rested in the curve of my shoulder in the way it always did, like the shape of me had been designed with exactly that in mind. I lay in the dark with Taylor breathing against my chest and thought, with the staggering simplicity of a thing finally understood, that this was what the last several years had been moving toward. Not deliberately, not in any planned sense, but with the particular logic of lives that find their own true north despite all the storms andmisdirections.
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, it was morning, and light came in at the angle that meant we had slept well past when we’d intended, and Taylor was already awake and watching me with his chin propped on his hand, patient and quiet and entirely himself. I looked at him and felt the beginning of every day stretch out ahead of us, new and generous and ours.
Everything was in its place at last.
He moved in at the end of the semester. The Bel House made a day of it, Greg carrying boxes with his usual wordless mood, Finn making a running commentary on everything Taylor owned and whether it deserved to come with him, Jason holding Peanut back from attempting to follow the boxes into the moving van under the impression that the boxes were going somewhere fun. Taylor stood in the center of the pavement with his hands on his hips and directed operations with the focus and authority of someone who had finally decided where his life was pointed. When the last box was in the van, Jason pulled him into one of those bear hugs of his that compressed the air from your lungs and left you feeling briefly like a smaller person, and Taylor laughed into his shoulder.
In Taylor’s hand, not to be trusted in the boxes, was a small, handmade stork that had decorated his windowsill for the better part of the semester.
That winter, I took him to the cottage.
Snow had come early that year, and the forest path up was mostly hidden under a foot of white, so wenavigated by instinct and familiarity and argued affectionately about which way the bend was for seven minutes before discovering we had both been right. The cottage emerged from between the trees in the early afternoon, when the light on the snow had that particular quality of silver and gold occurring at the same time, and Taylor stopped walking for a moment, just stopped completely, and looked at it, and I watched his face instead of the cottage because I already knew what it looked like.
