Page 68 of Doomsdate

“Everett, why don’t you want to go home to your parents?” The question’s been sitting in my gut all day, ever since I saw the desolation in his face at his sister’s house when he discovered where she’d gone, and where he’d have to go if he wanted to find her. I want to understand this impulse to leave everything behind, as if his reasons could explain Mom’s decision to leave her home, too. What happened? What does it take to give all that up?

His whole frame seems to brace itself beneath the covers. “Home?” he finally says. “Honestly, the word has lost all meaning to me now. What vague recollection I have of it are the years I spent with Louise. That home disappeared, though, when she died. Whatever came before—the shitty New York City apartments split among four roommates, and before that, my parents’ house in West Point—never really qualified. After we left D.C. and moved to New York, my parents enrolled me in a military boarding school nearby. They did it without even asking me.” Everett shakes his head. “I started high school there, in a new state, in an entirely new life that I didn’t want. My parents had decided that it was time for me to follow in their footsteps. To stop watching so much TV, to start the long and illustrious military career they were sure I was destined to have. It was never a question with them, not even a statement. They issued commands, and as their son, it was my job to obey. Never hesitate. Never have a single thought of my own that they didn’t personally authorize.”

Everett drags a finger down the sheets. “But I wasn’t cut out for the military, and my parents were furious about it. The brief interludes I spent with them and Gemma between the long, lonesome, exhausting semesters at school were often worse than what my drill sergeants exposed me to—constant criticism and disapproval. Nothing I did ever pleased them, even when I broke all the best, most interesting parts of myself and tried to hide them away.

“So, eventually, I stopped pretending. My academic grades were still excellent, but my performance in military education was abysmal. Their wrath was exactly as bad as anticipated when I ran away after high school graduation and didn’t show up for the USMAPS program at West Point after they pulled all their strings to get their bumbling son admitted. And when they discovered I’d secretly applied to NYU and enrolled? They did everything they could to ruin it—cut me off financially and refused to pay for anything, thinking that I’d be too poor to do anything else but fall in line. But it didn’t work—I knew how they’d react, and I’d planned for it. Tucking away funds, applying for financial aid, then throwing myself into film school with its stories of heroes and villains wholly different from my own.” He huffs, a sad sound. “I even got Gemma a secret phone she could use to call me without them finding out.”

“Wow,” I breathe out, shocked but not quite sure why. After all, didn’t my mother do the same thing? Control my life down to the quick? She was just better at it than Everett’s parents were. Started earlier. Took me out of society so young I had no clue how to set a different course for myself. Unlike Everett, I didn’t know the language of escape. Or that there was anything out there worth escaping for. I only knew fear.

“That was that. We lost all communication until about five years ago, when Gemma and Louise ganged up on me. Gemma begged me to give my parents another chance because they wanted to reestablish ties, and Louise wouldn’t let it go until I finally gave in. So we started communicating again, but it soon became clear they don’t know how to love me anymore. They did when I was young, but once I set off on a path different from the one they picked for me, it’s like their disapproval was all they could feel. They acted like I’d betrayed them somehow.” Everett’s brow pinches. “But it was either betray them or betray myself. In the end, I chose myself.”

“No wonder you don’t want to go home,” I say softly. “It isn’t home. Not really.”

“I haven’t had a home in a long time,” Everett admits.

I marvel at the words. On paper, Everett and I couldn’t be more different. But our feelings, the way our lives shaped us, hurt us, made us, couldn’t be more alike.

“Why do you want to live with Gramps?” Everett asks, and I can tell he’s wanted to ask this for some time, too. There’s something about the dark of this bedroom, the way the crescents of our bodies have waxed together into a full, glowing moon in our own night sky, that makes words easier. Questions like stars shining around us.

“I don’t,” I whisper, confessing it to myself as much as him. “I love Gramps. He’s all that I have. But what makes this feel like the end of the world is the idea that my time in it is over again. I had ten years of life on the outside, and it took almost all of them for me to start living. It feels like going backward. It feels like my mom, all over again.” A tear rolls down, crossing the bridge of my nose to land on the pillow.

“Then why are you doing it?”

“What choice do I have? I have nowhere else. And Gramps is very important to me. I have to make sure he’s okay. If I didn’t have him…”

I can’t finish the statement. Can’t even finish the thought.

Everett pulls me to his chest, wrapping his arms around me and stroking my hair.

It is the loveliest thing I’ve ever felt.

I tilt my head up and find him looking down at me already, his hazel eyes full of starlight. “Is it…always like this?” I ask the question I’ve been wondering all night as he strokes my jaw gently. “Does it always feel like…like this?”

As vague as my words are, he knows what I mean.

He shakes his head slowly before murmuring, “No.”

And I just—I kiss him.

Maisie

In the light of the early morning, standing here in the White House kitchens and rooting through their fruits and vegetables, I feel more confused than ever.

I kissed him. I thought the lesson was over, but after that, it seemed to…I don’t know. Relapse? I kissed him, and he kissed me back. Ten minutes later, his hand was inside me, and I was moaning his name. It didn’t feel like a lesson, but I did learn that the more he touches me, the more I want to be touched. The weirdest part was, we never had penetrative sex. We could have, but we didn’t. He was waiting for me to initiate it, I think, to state that I was ready, but I couldn’t. Not because I didn’t want to. I’ve never wanted something or someone so desperately in all my life.

I was afraid to.

I already feel so much. Stray tears followed each of my orgasms last night, all on their own. My heart felt so big and swollen from so many unnameable emotions, one more step forward with him and it might have burst. That’s when my survival instincts took over. Even though it meant missing my goal to have that kind of sex, even though I’ll always wonder what it would’ve felt like to welcome his body into mine, my innate sense of self-preservation commanded me to halt, to stop right there. So, I did. It just felt too risky.

Where I messed up was letting him spend the night in my bed. I woke up this morning wrapped around his back, leg thrown over his, clutching him like a stuffed animal I was half convinced would run away in the night. For a whole minute before I remembered our reality, I felt happy. Content. Warm and safe with Chicken nestled in a puddle of blankets at our feet.

I screw up my eyes, wincing at the memory. This arrangement is temporary and always has been. His parents are picking him up in two hours, and then I’ll be alone, again, and, if I’m not careful, stuck holding a bag of unrequited feelings I promised both of us I wouldn’t get. No matter what it feels like in his arms, Everett Greer is not my boyfriend. I need to remember that.

I release a heavy sigh, jumping when footsteps sound behind me.

Everett arches an eyebrow at the cucumber I’ve raised over my head instead of the machete I’d meant to grab. “Good morning. Please don’t bludgeon me to death with that impressive gourd.” His lips twitch at the corner.

I exhale a small, relieved laugh. “You’re lucky. This thing weighs at least three pounds.” I turn my back to him as I start pulling sacks of dry beans and rice from the pantry shelves, then glance at his significantly lumpier duffel by the door. “Did you pack your Apollo suit?”