Chapter Text
Part of living in a small town surrounded by fields, surrounded, in turn, by mountains, is that gossip travels faster than wildfire. And Booker knows. He’s seen wildfires.
Nile Freeman returned her 10th High School Reunion RSVP from an address in New Haven, Connecticut.
Nile Freeman’s RSVP did not include a plus one.
Booker hears it first from Angie, his ex, when he’s picking up the boys for one of his weekends. Angie was a year behind him in high school, but works at the local feed store with Janice from his year who is organizing the reunion. Not just rumor then, but definitely gossip. Angie mentions it with a twinkle in her eye and damn her for all those late nights in each other’s arms where they shared the deepest parts of themselves and mistaked such coping for romance.
Booker hears it from Jeremy at the hardware store and Aaliyah whom he runs into at the post office.
And then, as they’re working on extracting one or two more years of useful life from the engine of the Petersen’s tractor, Andy leans over to grab a wrench and says, oh-so-casually, “Have you heard Nile Freeman’s coming to the reunion?”
Andy hates the township gossip; goes out of her way to avoid hearing it.
So everyone, every single person, cow, and sheep in their godforsaken mountain basin must know that Nile Freeman is coming to the reunion.
“Yeah,” he says, “I’ve heard.”
“And?”
“It’ll be nice to see her-- and all the other folks coming back.”
Andy shakes her head at him. “You are so full of shit.”
Nile steps out of the rental car and turns to look, really look, at the sprawling concrete and brick building where she graduated from high school.
When people in college, in grad school, in interviews, ask her where she’s from, she says, “Chicago,” which is true.
She doesn’t tell them that her mother’s always expected a string of letters -- MD, JD, PhD, take your pick -- to follow her name.
She doesn’t tell them that the pressure of being one of three black students in a prestigious magnet high school, of having to represent her whole community every single fucking day, sucked more than they could possibly imagine.
She doesn’t tell them that, in retaliation, she started making out with and then going out with the hot older chick who dealt weed on the corner the summer after 10th grade.
She doesn’t tell them that her mother’s solution to this “problem” was to ship Nile off to her Nana’s house out west.
She doesn’t tell them that Nana’s homestead was the best place she ever lived, that after her year of banishment she begged to stay, to finish high school there, and her mother reluctantly agreed.
The last time Nile stood here, outside New Salem Township High School, was the May evening she wore a cap and a gown and a Valedictorian’s medal around her neck.
She wonders what’s changed.
She wonders what hasn’t.
If everybody doesn’t notice Nile Freeman entering the gymnasium, Booker certainly thinks that they do.
Janice darts up and shakes her hand and Nile takes it gracefully and allows herself to be shepherded to the table with the nametags.
And then, open season. Everyone and their mother wants to talk to Nile Freeman.
He doesn’t blame them one bit.
Her star always burned brighter than the rest of them. If she noticed, if she knew, she never ever seemed to let on.
He sees Brad fucking Lawrence sidle up to her. Brad, the sheriff’s son. Brad, the captain of the football team. Brad, the hotshot lawyer who now lives in the small city on the other side of the mountain range and so thinks he’s better than the rest of them. Well, Booker supposes, he’s always thought he was better than the rest of them. That was the problem.
Booker watches Nile talk to people, listen, ask questions. He watches Brad move along at her side.
Booker has rarely wanted to punch Brad more than he does right now. No, he revises, he’s never wanted to punch Brad and felt he could get away with it more than he does right now.
Then Brad dares put a hand to the small of her back and she whips around and says, loud enough for the whole gym to hear: “I am not, nor have ever been, interested in you, at all. Do not touch me without my consent again.”
Booker can’t help but grin. He hadn’t planned on talking to her. She was so far out of his league, even more so now than she’d been in high school. But maybe, just maybe it’d be worth it to summon the courage.
Nile’s got a drink in her hand -- finally, after that shit show with Bradley fucking Lawrence -- and she’s surveying the room. People have been coming up to her all night, names she’s barely remembered. Nile knows her closest friend from high school just had a baby and hasn’t made the trip back. She doesn’t blame her, flying with an infant sounds hellish. But there are still people she’d been hoping to see…
The man approaching her seems familiar, more familiar than most of the folks she’s talked to so far. They’ve all changed since high school, and certainly, nobody had a chest that broad when they were just eighteen, and even for those that could have grown a beard, they weren’t really in style. Finally, it’s the hair that tips her off, sandy blond, always pushed back and a bit messy. Booker, it has to be.
“Hey,” he says, “I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I’m--”
“Booker, I remember.”
His eyes widen in surprise and, even in the low lighting of the gym, they are startling, beautifully blue.
“You came out to Nana’s to fix the stuck window in her spare bedroom the day I moved in,” Nile continues. He nods. “And you invited me to a party out at the old one-room schoolhouse that night, introduced me to Joe and Nicky and Andy, made me feel at home here.”
“I did.” He scuffs his feet and ducks his head. Goodness, he’s still so shy.
“So what’ve you been up to?”
She learns about the business he started with Andy, fixing everybody’s farm and ranch equipment faster and better than the techs they could get in from the city. Letting folks put off the costs of their repairs to pay once the harvest was in.
Janice gets on the microphone and they’re directed to move to the buffet and tables on the other side of the gym.
She tries to downplay her years at college, her work towards her PhD in Art History.
They sit down at a table together and he asks her about it, the best parts, the worst parts, her students, her research.
She learns about Angie and the boys, how he doesn’t regret those six years, but they're both happier now. Angie’s husband is the best and Booker’s proud of the business. He shows her pictures on his phone, in most of them, Henry and JP are smudged with grease and delighted about it. They hang out together in his shop, ask him questions while he works, helps him when they can.
She tells him about her PhD cohort, how the five of them are basically family at this point, how it’s hard to date in academia because you’ll never get tenure track jobs at the same university, and it’s hard to date outside academia because they don’t get the work that goes into it.
“I think everyone kind of expected you to bring someone tonight,” he admits to her.
“It’s not a hard choice when you don’t have anyone to bring.”
She learns about what he’s been reading -- well, listening to, dyslexia’s still a bitch -- including a book on hip hop and street art. They swap recommendations for novels.
She learns he still does odd jobs around Nana’s place, and Andy still takes care of the animals every morning. She gets confirmation Nana really is doing okay, because Nile knows her grandmother would rather lie about something like that on the phone than admit weakness when Nile was thousands of miles away.
He leans in as talks, really looks at her as he listens. His attention should be unnerving, but it’s not. It feels good to be under his gaze. He has never smiled easily, but she sees his lips quirk up as they keep talking and it pleases her beyond what is probably reasonable.
Soon enough, dinner is over and the music starts. Hits from a decade ago, naturally. People are singing along and jumping excitedly on the dance floor. Then the DJ puts on a slow song, summons everyone to join in.
Memories of the ramshackle old schoolhouse, a roof and barely the semblance of walls and some fairy lights someone had hung up, of an old boombox and a nice boy she’d just met flash across her mind. Should she? Well, this whole thing is about nostalgia and she’s leaving in the morning anyway, so what would it hurt to ask?
“Do you want to dance?” she says.
“Now?”
“Yeah.” She stands and extends her hand to him. He takes it. “For old times’ sake.”
“For old times’ sake,” he mutters as he joins her, and for some reason, she’s not sure she believes him, believes either of them. Especially not when his hand settles on her back, and he draws her close and they begin to sway together.
When Booker imagined how this night would go, he did not imagine slow dancing with Nile Freeman. Well, perhaps he did imagine it but didn’t think it would ever actually happen.
And yet, here she is. Talking to him. Listening to him. Leaning into him with that wry little smile and happiness sparkling in her eyes. And now they’re dancing, just like the night they met.
It’s also nothing at all like the night they met.
After a moment, Nile leans in even closer to him and asks, “What happened, Book? You were my first friend here and then suddenly you-- you pulled away?”
He feels his heartbeat in his chest, feels a lump form in his throat.
Maybe it’s the slight buzz of the alcohol or the nostalgia floating thick in the room. Or maybe it’s the idea that she’s leaving in the morning, that he won’t have to live with the consequences of telling the truth.
“I didn’t think I was worthy of you, I guess,” he begins. She jerks a little and her brow furrows, but she doesn’t say anything. “With your honors classes and making the varsity soccer team and your group of new, smart, talented friends, what could I, a lousy student who did odd jobs for your grandmother, add to that?”
He feels the world narrow down to just the two of them. He couldn’t tell you what song was playing. He couldn’t tell you if anybody else was on the dance floor with them. She opens her mouth to say something, to object, maybe, and he can’t let her, not yet, not till he’s been absolutely honest with her in case he never gets the chance again. “I still don’t, to be honest. Still don’t know why you’re talking and dancing with me instead of any of the other people in this gymnasium.”
“God, you’re an idiot,” she says and there’s unmistakable affection in her voice. He doesn’t know what reaction he was expecting, but it wasn’t a fond smile, or the slide of her hand from his shoulder to the back of his neck.
She draws in close to his ear and says, “I kissed a lot of people underneath the bleachers outside, and none of them, none of them, were as strong or as capable or as kind as you.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that, because what if she had kissed him underneath the bleachers back then? Would her kiss have felt as effortlessly confident as he imagined it, laying awake at night, staring at his bedroom ceiling? Would it feel like that now? Her words are at once complementary and bewildering and he doesn’t know how to act or think and so he just holds her close and keeps them swaying and stepping slowly to the beat of the song and hopes it won’t end just yet.
She pulls back so she can look at him and she cocks her head and continues, “I still remember the ride you gave me on your dirtbike to that party out at the old schoolhouse. And thinking, in between the terror of how fast we were going, that if all country boys were like this it was going to be a hell of a year.”
He splutters a little. “But-- you just--”
“Yeah, Book, I know what I said.”
That’s, finally, when it hits him. He’s had a crush on Nile Freeman for almost twelve years. She’s had a crush on him for maybe just as long.
Before his brain can really wrap itself around that though, his mouth goes and says, “I think you’ll be pleased to know I’ve graduated from dirt bikes to motorcycles. Can I show you the one I brought tonight?” He realizes it sounds like a horrible pick-up line the moment it leaves his lips.
“Please,” she says, and somehow he knows she understood it was a genuine question, not a skeevy attempt to get in her pants.
He takes her hand and leads her from the dance floor and out the double doors of the gym. Surely there are all kinds of whispers in their wake. Booker doesn’t give a fucking damn about it.
Nile follows Booker up to what must be a vintage Harley-Davidson.
“Bought her from a scrap yard in the city. Rebuilt her myself.”
Nile squeezes his hand. “She’s beautiful. Perfect proportions and shiny chrome. Function and power and aesthetics all at once.”
It’s dark, but Nile thinks he might be blushing. She nudges his shoulder with her own, “Tell me about it.”
And he does, with a spark in his eyes and pride in his voice and excited explanations of photos on his phone and comparisons to the final product before them. He spends maybe a good ten minutes talking about the carburetor -- Nile didn’t even know what a carburetor was before this very conversation -- and she feels entranced by his knowledge and his skill and his confidence.
He seems to sense her gaze on him, pauses, looks at her, and says, “I’m sorry. I’m boring you,” with that shy duck of his head.
“Watching someone you like talk about what they’re passionate about is never boring.”
“Can I show you how she runs?”
“Does it come with a tour of all the old haunts?”
“If you want.”
“I want.”
He swings a leg over the bike -- goddamn his legs are long -- and pulls it upright, off the kickstand. Nile climbs on behind him, wraps her arms around his waist.
They do tour all the places they snuck off to in high school -- the swimming hole where Nile went to skinny dipping, the bridge over the canal underneath which people used to smoke and where Nile had sex for the first time, the old schoolhouse, now missing it’s roof, too, and others -- but mostly what Nile remembers from that night is the wind in her braids and the power between her thighs and the feel of his back against her, of his abdomen underneath her hands.
When they get back to the high school, her rental is the only car left in the lot.
“Thank you, Booker,” she says, still a little breathless. “I had a really lovely time tonight.”
“I did too, Nile. I did too.”
Nile knows she’s grinning like a fool, but she can’t bring herself to stop. She’s gazing into his eyes and he’s gazing into hers. He glances down to her mouth, shifts a little closer. Oh yes please. She leans toward him, tilts her chin up. Waits for the feeling of his lips against her, something she’s imagined ever since that first dance so long ago. Maybe her eyes even flutter closed.
In the next instant, she hears the rev of the Harley’s engine, and she watches him speeding away.
She leans back against the side of the shiny SUV, thunks her head back against the glass. Surely, she thinks, this has all been a dream.
When her alarm goes off at six am later that morning -- Nana never had many rules, but you never, ever skip breakfast when living under her roof -- Nile curses into her pillow. At least, she thinks, as she drags her unwilling body out of bed, she knows last night was real.
Holy shit.