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The fence in Maria’s back yard has a hole in it. It has had a hole in it for months now, but Maria doesn’t have a dog or a child and she doesn’t mind. Michael tells her “he minds” and promises to fix it even though she waves him off with a laugh. It’s probably a little silly, a little unnecessary, but lately things have been feeling tense and Michael wants to do something for her. He wants to do something nice. So he picks up some tools from the Airstream and comes right back to the fence while Maria is out shopping.
Walking into the Wild Pony and picking Maria was easy. Everything seemed to fall into place. The empty saloon, the guitar, the stage. The melody came out of him like he never stopped playing. He thought of Alex exactly for a moment, as he plucked the strings, remembering a time when Alex showed him how, made his mind go quiet. Then, he was watching Maria, his hands were sliding on the strings, his mind going quiet again. His consciousness reduced down to that moment: the sounds, the dim lights, Maria’s awestruck smile. It was easy.
Easy to kiss her. Easy to promise her they’ll talk. Easy to forget that he had to be somewhere else, with someone else.
Things have never been easy for Michael so this… this was refreshing, nice. It must’ve been the right choice, then, right? For the first time, Michael thought, he did everything right.
And then he came back to the trailer and here Alex was, on the gravel, getting ready to leave, much later than they were supposed to meet. So much later than Michael thought he’d be there. And things were hard again. Things were complicated and messy and the pain… all the pain was back. And Michael let him go. Because keeping him was hard. And being with Maria was easy. And Michael was so tired of things being hard, so tired that he let go.
And that was the right thing to do, right? Michael told himself it was. Because something this hard couldn’t be right. Something that had to be fought for so fiercely, something that never seemed to be possible, it couldn’t, shouldn’t be right.
Michael told himself that and stuck to his guns. Except, it wasn’t any easier letting him go.
At night, Michael dreamt of stars and footsteps. Dreamt of Alex walking away. Scenes playing out behind his eyelids in slow-motion. Michael counting his every step, holding his breath. The pain of watching it, watching him go, it lodged itself under his ribs like a tightness, a breathlessness. And the joy, the joy bursting out of that tightness into his fingertips as he saw, imprinted on those same eyelids, Alex laugh and smile, felt the memory of his skin on his own like an imprint, a birthmark. His dreams reminded him of the sharpness of Alex's mind, of how he fit all along Michael when they fucked. All these images, these sensations, these memories, playing out in his mind so sweetly that Michael started hating waking up.
Sometimes, he would dream of reaching out for Alex through time and space, limbs moving like he was drowning in molasses. The dreams, the memories, would stick to his bones, buried in them, weighing him down when he was awake, dancing on his eyelids every time he closed his eyes.
He would hear Alex’s last words to him, the way he spoke about all that pain. Blooming in his chest was the realization of how he missed it all until it was laid out bare before him on the afternoon sand, on the thick dust in the air. Every breath hurts, he said, and Michael saw it. After Alex came back to Roswell, there was a weight to him, to his movement, to his breathing. It was always there, Michael thought, always there for him to see but Michael was too focused on his own pain to see it. He always thought that he would recognize it in others, feeling it so sharply and for so long in his own life, but he hadn’t. Alex’s pain was bone deep and Michael missed it so easily.
It haunted him, stuck in his mind when he kissed Maria, when he wrapped his arms around her waist as she cleaned the bar, or stood outside on her porch, watching the starts. She would talk about planets and constellations and Michael would nod along and think of Alex and the pain behind his eyes, the shuddering breath he exhaled into their last embrace.
As time went on, it became clear to Michael that, maybe, there was sense in what Alex has said. He was afraid, always afraid, but he was the most afraid when Alex was closest, when a future with him was a reality within his grasp. It was easy to say that he chose Maria so that the world would stop spinning for once. Except, time passed, and it didn’t. The world kept spinning. Being with Maria was easy but living was still hard. Letting go of Alex didn’t bring his life to a standstill, didn’t quiet his mind or erase his fears. Letting him go wasn't a revolution, it was a revelation.
A revelation he refused to accept but that, one day, hit like a ball you never saw coming. On that day Michael awoke in the middle of the night feeling Alex’s lips on his. Streetlights filtered through the blinds in straight lines across Maria’s bed. He turned left and saw her hair, peeking out of the blankets but when he passed a hand over his lips, he could swear that he could still taste him: Alex Manes. A crazy thought, really, followed by a compulsion. Michael got out of bed and into his jeans and into his truck and drove. He drove to the cabin or… almost to the cabin and then he jumped out of the truck and went up the gravel road, up to the wooden house and just stood there, on the porch, like a creep. It was the closest he’s been to Alex in so long and Michael knows he has no such powers, but he swore in that moment that he could feel him. Feel Alex laying on his bed, curled up under a blanket, right hand under his cheek, left arm reaching forward, and Michael closed his fist as if he could hold his hand from all that distance.
The pain lodged under his ribs turned into an ache and Michael turned back around and drove home.
“Babe,” Maria said through sleep, turning towards him, “you okay?”
“Yeah,” he whispered to her, kissing her forehead. She held his hand that night, held it in the sheets of their bed, right there, in front of his eyes. But Michael couldn’t feel her. All he could feel was Alex.
It’s crazy, really. It’s all in his mind, he knew that. But he drove to the cabin again and again, in the middle of the night, never going in. You let him go, Michael would remind himself as if he could ever forget but every time, he would feel like he needed the reminder. Needed to remind himself and forbid himself from opening the wound that barely started healing.
Things with Maria were good, really. She would chide him and laugh with him and smile and make dinner and make him not drink as much and Michael loved her, he really, really did. But he couldn’t tell her the truth, couldn’t share everything with her, and he couldn't explain the ache on his skin, the tingle in his limbs.
Sometimes she looked at him long and piercing and Michael would think she knows. But she couldn’t have, how could she know…
Michael is just coming back into the house from the back door when he sees, through the window, Maria rushing up the driveway. She comes in, frantic, like she’s been looking for him even though he’s been standing there, in the kitchen, all along. She doesn’t say “hi”, she doesn’t kiss him, she doesn’t even take off her shoes.
“He’s leaving,” she says, breathless and her and Michael never talked about Alex, Michael would never let her but, somehow, he just knows.
“He’s leaving, Michael, today,” she repeats, and her eyes are frantic, her tone urgent, she pulls at his arms until he stands. “I thought we had more time. I thought I had more time.”
“What are you talking about?” he says but fear is flooding him, anyway, because it’s so obvious, it’s so obvious now what they’ve been doing.
“There’s no time,” she urges, “no time for this, Michael. This wasn’t real. I know you know it. We were just pretending. You were afraid and hiding and I just wanted to do something reckless, something that I wanted, but I thought we had more time, more time to put things back. More time to figure everything out. But we don’t, because he’s leaving today and if you don’t stop him, if you don’t,” she breaks off like she doesn’t know how to finish the sentence.
“I love you,” Michael says but his tone is uncertain, like he’s trying to talk himself into it.
“Of course, you do,” she says like it’s so obvious, like she knew all along because she adds: “but not like you love him.”
“No,” Michael says because maybe the ache has grown, maybe he’s not sure anymore that it’s any easier without Alex but it still hurts and he’s still afraid.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she says, and she sounds angry but also fond and it’s such a weird combination. She hugs him, smoothing his hair and whispers into it, hotly, urgently: “don’t be a coward.”
All Michael and Alex know is this life that’s spinning around them like a hurricane when they’re together, falling together through the rain. One day they might hit the ground, Michael reasons. Extricating himself from the hurricane is the only way he can guarantee survival, he reasoned, but life proved him wrong. Proved that the hurricane is still spinning around him only now he’s alone. Michael doesn’t know if it can change, doesn’t know how to change it but he steps outside Maria’s door, regardless, and gets into his dusty truck.
Seven times he came to Alex’s cabin under the cover of night, seven times of parking down the road and trekking up to the cabin to stand under a locked door and listen to the night and the darkness, pretend he could hear Alex’s even breathing as he slept.
This might be the last time. The sun is low in the afternoon sky. The sand lifts like a cloud behind him as he speeds down the familiar roads. He drives all the way up to Alex’s cabin, relief flooding him when he sees Alex’s car still in the drive-way. He parks, blocking him in, the car still swaying into park as he leaps out onto the gravel with a satisfying crunch under his boots.
At that moment, Alex comes out, a duffle bag in one hand, his other closing the door behind him. The sky burns red against Alex’s skin, softening his features. His eyes open wide with surprise. He’s so beautiful that Michael can’t breathe.
The ache grows out from his ribs, into his extremities and Michael finally has a name for it: longing. He missed Alex so much, missed just the sight of him, so close and open. All the words he rehearsed on the way get stuck in Michael’s throat.