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They set out early, the sky still edged in pink from sunrise, the neighborhood quiet and empty and still. Miller is not a morning person but his grogginess has turned to clarity, now, on the front step breathing in the scent of new-cut grass and morning dew. Thin, high notes of birdsong fly from the branches of the trees, no other sounds through the silence. He barely slept last night and yet, every time, this moment of leaving animates him: the unreal texture of his own familiar life as he packs it up and sets it aside, and separates himself from his routine. The feeling is not like excitement, but like decision, and confidence, a sureness like the path the front walk takes through the overgrown grass and to the sidewalk, to their car waiting for them by the curb.
He throws his bag in the backseat, then stands for a moment, leaning on the open door with his arm on the car roof, palm flat against the sun-warm metal. He looks out at the houses with their dark windows, how the glass catches the sun.
He’s so lost in thoughts that are not thoughts, wordless and more unfocused than he would ever admit, that he does not hear the footsteps behind him, and startles at a sudden touch. He jumps, then settles back, closes his eyes: Bryan’s arms are wrapped around him, Bryan’s laughter low and close against his ear. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Guess I’m not really awake yet,” Miller answers, half-turning around to face him, starting to smile. He’s trapped between Bryan’s body and the car, the outline of the door against his back, and he feels every bit of the warm summer morning building—rests his hand against Bryan’s cheek and kisses him—a slow and lazy heat.
He used to take road trips all the time, road trips and train trips and backpacking trips, used to be away more often than he was home, used to wonder what counted as home for a person like him. Now it’s the house with the pride flag draped over the railing of the front porch and the chickens in the back yard, and Bryan, and this, moments when he does not want to pull away and does not have to. Bryan has never driven across the country. He’s never taken any trip that wasn’t for necessity. But he’s listened to Miller’s stories, some of them so often that they feel like old, worn tales by now, listened in the quiet lull of evenings as the weather starts to warm, and they leave their windows open, listened as he stared out at the twilight and played absently with Miller’s fingers, hands trapped gently between hands.
Until he asked him finally where he still wants to go, where he has never been.
Anywhere with you seemed like a cliché, stupid answer. He said it anyway, and did not let himself laugh at himself, or soften the sincere, secret tone of his voice.
Now Bryan disentangles them but doesn’t let go, hands at Miller’s waist, dragging down, hooking his fingers in Miller’s belt loops. His hair is in his eyes, embarrassed smile on his face. “We’ll never get an early start like this,” he says, which almost makes Miller laugh. The sky is still bright yellow at the horizon and the light is still golden and soft and low. A few stars are still visible in the clear, pale blue above. The day has barely begun, and they are ready.
*
Eventually they’ll make it to the West Coast.
In time.
Sometimes they take the highways, in the evening and at night, for the rush of anonymous headlights speeding by and the intensity of the wind through the cracks in the windows, the tall billboards lit in fluorescent hues watching over them. Neon signs on tall posts backed by a flood of blue-black sky, advertising motels, fast food chains. Beneath them, their own wheels spinning so fast they’re gliding, a steady beat of movement and Miller’s hands sliding down to curl along the bottom of the wheel. Bryan lets his hand rest lightly on Miller’s leg, as he sits back in his seat, his eyes half-closed.
During the day they choose back roads and detours, which take them through small towns they’ve never heard of, and which start to look alike and to almost feel like home. Most of them are worn down around the edges: pale coats of paint on clapboard houses and chain link fences around small, neat front yards. The grass grows in a cacophony of greens over the front walks, in the cracks of the sidewalks. Everything is growing and bright beneath the high, unfiltered summer sun. Miller stares out at the faded asphalt and reads the names of the side streets they pass, as they roll the windows all the way down, to hear the barking of dogs in the yards and the hiss of sprinklers, to feel the full warmth of the day, breathless, still.
In the commercial districts, all of the buildings are rectangular, two-story storefronts with closed blinds over the upstairs windows, painted in fading tans and blues and cracked off-whites. They pass a laundromat, a cafe, a dollar store set off at the top of a hill, behind a looming parking lot. The sidewalks tilt, uneven, toward the road. They climb a hill, and the houses along the hillside rise above them, half-secure atop cracking concrete walls.
Sometimes they take daytrips into cities, and act as tourists. Selfies with a skyline of skyscrapers, silver and sparks of sun on glass at their back. At the last moment, Bryan kisses his neck. The angle is off; they are distorted at the bottom of the frame and Miller is laughing, and the kiss doesn’t feel like a kiss but like laughter on his skin.
They people-watch in a park, to the background noise of traffic, stretching their legs along winding dirt paths, flip pennies into a fountain to make a wish. Then they keep going. Past this small oasis, the city turns gray with only splashes of color: advertisements, traffic lights, yellow cabs. Bryan’s never lived in a city and when he tilts his head all the way back, to catalogue the very tops of the buildings, Miller holds his hand tight, so he doesn’t become dizzy with the vertigo of steel prodding at endless white-blue sky and sun.
Later, they swing down south, where the air turns thick and humid, and the days pass by on a long, slow buzz, insects in the underbrush and creeping vines. They find themselves sometimes so far out of the way that they’re swaying along rutted dirt roads, so lost it’s like the sludge of the heat and the unwinding hours of the afternoon are in their blood, and they’re glad not to pass another living soul.
For a few days, they’re in farmland, passing exposed on a long, straight blacktop, toward an infinite and distant horizon, field upon field to either side of the road. Bryan tells him stories, fantasies he used to have about this kind of life—as if he could ever manage it, he admits now, with a lazy grin. Miller asks him if this is why he decided to raise chickens. “Caught me,” he answers, and it’s funny, because the utopia he’s imagined for himself is just longing for everything too vague to be known, for greener grass, but then he really bought a brood of chickens, introduced Miller to them on the first day they met—so there’s some part of him that will reach out to fantasies he knows are insubstantial as air and make them real. Funny too because he has—
“Caught you,” Miller echoes, and picks up Bryan’s hand and kisses the back of his knuckles, soft.
*
They’re at the edge of the mountains when a summer rainstorm finds them. The sun has set and a warm night settled in, and they stand out under the awning of their motel room and watch the rain hiss down against the pavement, and count out the seconds between the bright forks of lighting, cracking across the sky, and the deep, breath-catching rolls of thunder booming overhead. The mountain peaks are only shadow until the lightning hits. Illuminated, they rise like fortress walls. Along this twisting, aimless road, only the motel, a few restaurants, a gas station, lie scattered, each distant from the last, and Miller feels himself small beneath the vastness of the sky.
Bryan slips behind him and wraps his arms around Miller’s waist, tucks his nose in against the side of Miller’s neck. He’s just out of the shower, his hair and skin not yet dry, and so warm; he smells like hotel soap and strange shampoo.
Miller inhales deep, and on the exhale, he turns around in Bryan’s arms and walks him back, until he’s up against the motel room door. Here it’s easy to kiss him, to feel every familiar line and muscle of him, to feel Bryan clinging to him and hear the shaky-slow exhale of his breath, even over the downpour, the scattershot thud of thin rain on the roof and in the parking lot. He never wants to let go. He wants to cling to him, too.
He doesn’t let go.