Chapter Text
There’d been a brief scuffle as we left Pete’s. January, having imbibed deeply of her purse wine, claimed she was going to catch an Uber back to our neighborhood, but Pete and I both knew there was no way she’d find a ride at this time of night. The singular Uber driver in North Bear Shores was a student at the local university, and Keegan was probably studying for finals or celebrating their end right now. So even though it looked like the last thing that January wanted to do, she’d had to climb into my passenger seat.
January needed to sober up, and I needed to have her next to me for as long as I could manage without arousing any suspicion about my feelings for her before I could figure out exactly what those feelings were. So, we headed for the best place to soak up the liquor - and, as it happened, the only place still open where we could do so. I had no idea what the name of the 24 hour diner was, nor how they had enough traffic to stay open, but D O N U T S had gotten me through many bouts of writer’s block induced insomnia.
It was a liminal space of sorts: a neon sign on the roof that was so large you could hear it buzzing inside, booths ringing the window covered in cracked and faded orange vinyl, the same donuts in the same space every single day. Time hadn’t touched this spot in decades, and so it became a place where I could go and just exist and work my way through a couple day-olds. I’d watch the teens running in for a last snack before curfew, college students in a booth pregaming a party, truckers coming in for a cup of the world’s worst coffee, or on a slow night, just the road. It wasn’t foolproof, but most times I’d leave as the first fingertips of dawn streaked the sky, having worked myself down just enough that whatever part of my work in progress had seemed untenable before had the beginnings of a solution.
January had given the place a skeptical glance as we’d pulled up, which I could hardly fault her for, but she cracked a joke about my Ubering skills and some of the tension that existed between us evaporated. And then - the look on January’s face as she realized that our host for the evening was in his underwear. It was all I could do to keep from laughing as I saw it dawn on her. I held back out of sheer politeness and also the desire to play it cool around her for as long as humanly possible, but it was a memory I knew I’d replay again and again. We ordered what were inarguably some of the most unappetizing donuts I’d ever seen, slid into a booth, and before I knew it, we were bantering as though we’d never spent any time apart.
And I was just… God, I was just so delighted to have her there with me that it was like being 21 and pestering her for a pen in class all over again. I crammed an entire donut into my mouth just to see if it would make her smile the way she did in college, the kind that went all the way to her eyes, the kind that she seemed to have lost since I’d seen her last. When she burst into laughter, I felt like I could float. She was so funny , and I hadn’t forgotten that, I hadn’t forgotten anything about January Andrews, but to have it turned full force exclusively onto me thrilled me in a way few things ever had.
I had no idea what had happened to January in the last eight years, no idea why she was in North Bear Lake or why Pete’s book club had forced her deeper into whatever mental mire she was in, although I had to think it had something to do with Pete’s friend Sonya rushing out of the house as I pulled up. But January made me desperate for everything about her in a way that startled and overwhelmed me, both in strength and in its deep roots within me. There was no denying I had been obsessed with January in college, and I’d spent many years trying to convince myself and others it was a mere mix of professional rivalry and lust. The more time I spent with her now, though, as a more-fully formed adult somewhat more able to name his feelings, I was realizing I had to admit I really had been in love with her. And I wasn’t sure I had actually stopped.
“You were,” she said, “extremely rude to me, by the way,” pulling me out of the maelstrom of emotions acknowledging that I might truly be in love with January before it could fully form, shame tugging me back into the present. Reflexively, I clenched my fist, not to defend myself but to dig my nails into the meat of my palm - more than a decade removed from digging graves, I still kept them short, but they were enough to send a bolt of pain though my hand, keeping me in this moment and in the knowledge that I had hurt her.
I pulled her hands away from her face, needing her to see that I was serious. “I know,” I said, “I’m sorry. It was a bad day.”
January’s face did something funny then, like she didn’t think I was going to admit to being in the wrong. As much as I’d like to deny it, I think the Gus that January knew in college – the one she thought was still sitting across from her – probably wouldn’t have apologized. Just as this January was one I didn’t quite recognize, though, I was someone different too, and I wanted her to see this. I wanted her forgiveness, and I wasn’t ashamed to ask for it. So I did – and she gave it to me.
I didn’t realize how light it would make me feel, to know that I had January’s absolution and then to have her smile back too as we bickered back and forth about the book club. As I suspected, January had also assumed that Pete’s bookclub would be discussing her book tonight, which would account for some of that dazed look I’d seen earlier. Still, I knew there was something more fundamentally different about her, and I was desperate to know this new January.
***
I nearly ruined it – put my foot fully back into my mouth – once more that night. We were in my car, driving home from D O N U T S, a path so familiar it was easy to keep up a conversation and watch for the odd deer thinking about darting into the road at the same time. And, like an idiot – or, like a man who was a little high on sugar and proximity to January, I told her the truth.
“It’s the happy endings,” I said.
It’s the happy endings that I loved the most about her books and that I found the least believable – that after 85,000 words of getting to know someone, of fighting with them, fucking them, hurting them and healing them, that 15,000 more would see them happy together forever. I was a writer, I shaped words for a living, and I didn’t think that there was a combination of 15,000 words in this world that would see me happy with someone forever.
A voice in my head asked see you happy with someone forever? Or see someone happy with you forever? I didn’t think I was brave enough to answer it.
Being honest with her felt like picking a scab off a cut, a quick, sharp bite of fresh pain on top of old, and then a relief from the itch of healing, the satisfaction of rubbing your finger over fresh, smooth, tender skin. I wanted so badly to know and be known to January, and I was terrified that if I let either of those things happen that I would wreck whatever resulted, and I didn’t think I was strong enough to not give into those desires anyway.
“Entering a relationship is borderline sadomasochistic,” I heard myself saying, desperate to convey just how not prepared I was for a relationship even as every cell in my body hummed you might love her, you probably have always loved her . I suggested a casualness towards sex that College Gus definitely espoused, and that Adult Gus in Therapy knew was personally self-destructive, but it was scab picking again, a little pulling at a hurt to see if January would want to see the shiny new me underneath.
“See?” she asked me, and the only things I could see were the county highway stretched out before me and how much I wanted to kiss her, to wrap myself up in her until the world around us disappeared and God how disconcerting it was to have these feelings for January when I hadn’t seen her in a decade and I had been married and - “You are coldly horny, Gus.”
January was half-right: I was certainly horny in that moment, though anything but cold. I was almost feverish with excitement at being here with January, the fairy princess of my college daydreams become something a bit darker with age, something I wasn’t so afraid I would destroy because she had weathered some pain, too. And there, also, was confirmation I didn’t need but wanted all the same: that she remembered me - she’d called me Gus.
That night, I dreamt I was a pirate onboard a ship and January was a well-bred lady who’d stowed away onboard. In the middle of the ocean, I kept her safe during a tempest, my body a bulwark against buffeting waves and howling winds. In my arms, she found security and solace, and she told me her deepest and darkest fears. I kissed them away, and told her there was nothing she could say to scare me off.