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Swelter-summer in notoriously mild-temperatured Beacon Hills brings a daze of hot and hotter days. Late July burns relentlessly like a candle with an infinite wick. The next town over fucked up their power grid with everyone running their air conditioning into the dust; days of blackouts across the whole city. Here, four days of high temperatures and dry, cloudless skies make a dead-grass-hot-asphalt-languorous-summer landscape of Beacon Hills. Even the ice cream trucks are sweating.
Theo, for the better half of a week, has melted in his truck, reconstituting himself into a dewy sludge only at night when the heat breaks and liquefying once more when the sun reappears. Day five is his breaking point.
He wastes gas for an hour basking in the glory of his truck’s AC. Spends another loitering inside the grocery store’s frozen section. He’s not the only resident to have come up with this idea, if the throng of idlers with faces buried halfway in the dairy fridges and microwave meal freezers without purchasing anything is anything to go by. He passes the next hour hanging around the Sheriff’s Station, sitting in front of the portable fan on Parrish’s desk asking unwelcomed questions about open cases and making false police reports until he’s declared a “cool-air thief” and gets threatened with arrest. It was a shitty fan, anyway.
The air’s thick as hot fudge when he leaves. He’s an ant beneath a magnifying glass. Heat throbs over and under his skin. Theo used to get fevers after experiments, after being pumped full with syringes of substances his body fought instinctually. Real bad ones. The kind that left him in a daze of delirium, shaking like a leaf, nothing but cotton between his ears and a headache so fierce he was convinced the doctors took a hammer to his skull and cracked it wide open so that his brain would leak out like egg yolk. Same kind of burning out here, and he can’t tell if it’s the memory making him nauseous or the heat. He idles in his truck, still parked in the lot of the Sheriff’s Station, for another hour with his AC on full blast. Quarter tank of gas left.
The coolest place Theo knows is the tunnels—so perfectly shielded from all things warm, lively, and not at all reminiscent of the sun—but he’d sooner keel over from heat exhaustion than return there of his own volition. He’s got a contact list full of mostly-burnt bridges but it’s too hot to rekindle any ashes, so he instead drives down street after languid street thinking of a big-housed someone who’ll try hard to act bothered at the presence of a sweaty intruder but will let him mooch air anyway. Probably.
Hopefully.
It’s been a while since their world shakily unfurled into something normal, left them to pick up their discarded youth off the hospital floor, brush off the blood, and attempt to make it fit again. Theo has tried hard not to feel cast aside but he doesn’t know what place he has in a world that doesn’t teeter between chaos and disaster. His little misfit kingdom toppled by something called temporary peace.
He expected a text. That’s all. The first full moon after the battle at the hospital, when the Anuk-Ite was dead but its memories not quite yet buried. A message sent out of desperation, maybe. Liam, out of control. Theo, the opposite. Something that sounded like need. Something that would keep him from driving past the city limits, never to look back. But all he’s gotten since is a stretch of quiet, a heatwave, and melted purpose.
So, hello, Pinecrest Drive. Hello, Dunbar-Geyer home with its sand-colored exterior and wilting honeysuckles. Hello, Liam—splayed out shirtless beneath the meager shade of a small dogwood tree on his lawn instead of inside his air-conditioned house, red-cheeked and glistening as he runs a frozen water bottle over his forehead. A heat mirage.
Theo turns off the ignition. His truck sighs in relief. Rolling down the window only to lament the fist of hot air that billows inside, he says, “Weird place to cool off.”
“Funny,” Liam mutters. He doesn’t bother sitting up or peeling himself off the grass. Just lets his head flop over toward Theo while the rest of his body remains in stasis. “At least there’s a breeze out here. Our thermostat is busted. Feels like a fucking sauna inside even with the fans on. My dad’s gonna pick up one of those external AC things when he gets off work.”
He climbs down from the truck and draws nearer, sidesteps a pair of Wayfarers discarded in the brittle grass beside Liam’s knee, asks, “When’s that?”
“Not soon enough,” Liam sighs. He moves the water bottle down to his neck. Beads of condensation trail along the slope of his throat, pooling in the recess of his collarbone. “What are you doing?”
“Enjoying the weather, clearly,” Theo says, shifting on his feet. He swipes a hand through the hair plastered to his forehead, tugs at his damp shirt. The AC dried him sticky. A new layer of sweat threatens to form over the first. His t-shirt and mesh shorts feel like thermal pajamas. Liam stares up at Theo, one hand shielding his eyes from the midday sun over his head and Theo hates how unfamiliar they are now.
“You know what I mean. Here. Haven’t seen you in weeks. It feels like everyone’s out of town right now, so I just assumed you were too. Or something.”
Dreams stifle him lately. The bad ones he has at night—skin sticking to the leather of his backseat, fogging up the windows with his labored breaths—and the ones he used to have for his life. Dead ambitions. The grandiose ones with claws and fangs and eyes that shone red. He’s been looking for new ones. Or something. He used to be good at badness and now he’s a clumsy nothing.
“My vacation was last week,” he shrugs. “There’s a great view of Beacon Hills from the other side of the train tracks.”
Liam almost laughs, because he thinks it’s a joke, but the heat smothers it. He says, “The weatherman on Channel 7 said it's the hottest day of the year.”
A yard sign staked into the dry dirt of the lawn across the street proudly declares “Congrats, Brianna! BHHS Class of ‘13.” Even the graduation cap decal looks tired and sun-bleached.
“You don’t need to be a meteorologist to know that,” Theo huffs. Sun prickles the back of his neck. He feels like a stray dog scratching at someone’s front door. The tunnels are becoming an unfortunately viable option for respite. He swung by the library in the morning but it was closed. Due to excessive heat. We apologize for the inconvenience. Werewolf hunters, civilian-led wars, a stunning lack of public spaces with functional air-conditioning. Beacon Hills has really gotta move out of the Middle Ages.
Or Theo could just move out. He keeps forgetting that’s an option. He only runs in his dreams.
“Are we sure this isn’t some new kind of shapeshifter out to get us?” Liam wonders aloud. “Like a heat demon that just...just slowly cooks everyone to death.”
He swats away a fly that lands on his knee. Says, “Pretty inefficient ability.”
“Effective, though. My dad says there were thirteen cases of heatstroke in the ER the past week.” He drops his hand, squinting through the sun up at Theo. “So how long do I have to small-talk with you about the weather until you sit down? I’m running out of ways to say ‘it’s hot.’”
There’s a weak refusal on the tip of Theo’s tongue, pressing against his teeth. But he came here to be re-purposed. And he’s AC-hopped his way around town so sitting still, even if it means being starfished on Liam Dunbar’s front lawn, slow-roasting, is tempting. Sure, he’ll be the fill-in for someone more desired.
“I’ve already gotten sunburned twice today. It just heals,” Liam adds, like that’ll convince him. And maybe it does. This is a language they both speak, finding a home in pain. “You should try it. I’m pretty sure the new skin comes back a little bit cooler. Makes for a patchy tan, though.”
“Tan? Thought you were doing your best impression of a sun-dried tomato.”
“Fuck you.”
Theo sits. He tugs his shirt off and tosses it into a sad, sweaty pile a few feet away. Kicks his shoes off and stuffs his socks inside of them. The grass is scratchy beneath him but the shade makes the heat more bearable. Liam scoots over to make more room and they’ll pretend to pick up right where they left off. Like the stifling air between them hasn’t built up over weeks of radio silence. Thanks for taking a bullet for me, have a great summer.
He never could get himself to stop keeping track of full moons.
“I’ll stay. Just for a little while,” he says.
“We can go somewhere else if you want. I hear they keep the morgue pretty chilly,” Liam jokes, head lolling toward Theo. His cheeks are pink, heat-blushed. The noise that leaves Theo’s throat is less laugh, more choke. When Liam passes him the half-frozen water bottle, his hands are slick, cold, and apologetic. He says, “Yeah. Not my first choice, either. But we could go to the beach. I was gonna go with Mase but he and Corey are on their campus visit right now.”
Theo isn’t sure when escaping the summer melt became a “we” thing. Most of their “we” things involve fighting and at least a marginal risk of death; the only threat out here is becoming heatstroke victims number fourteen and fifteen. Theo places the water bottle against his forehead and tries not to think about it being covered in Liam’s sweat. He fails. He moves the water bottle to his chest and thinks instead about how he’s been blindly searching for this kind of closeness well before the heatwave hit. The last person he touched is dead. The person before that, Liam. And before that, Liam. And Liam before that. And—
So it goes.
“That’s two hours away,” Theo points out. Liam doesn’t so much answer as he does groan and roll over onto his stomach. Blades of grass stick to the small of his back. An empty patch of shade separates them. Theo holds the water bottle tighter. He closes his eyes and focuses on how it melts further between his hands, condensation clinging to the grooves of his palms.
Theo missed his old life the most when the fevers would hit their peak and he was certain he’d die the same sick kid he came into the world as. Feeble. Naive. Unremarkable. A frequent flier in his pediatrician's waiting room. But he took for granted the comfort of a cool, gentle hand against his forehead between fever dreams. When he used to park his truck in places deemed unfit for sleeping by Stilinski’s deputies—places they would check, not like the preserve or across the tracks of the rail line that may or may not still be in service—he’d sometimes pretend not to hear the knock on the window. Would make himself extra limp and unmoving out of the hope that their reprimand would give way to concern. That maybe they’d try for the door and realize he’d left it unlocked. And they’d pull off his thin blanket, put a hand on his shoulder, or let two fingers probe his neck for a pulse; check for signs of life. All he got was the threat of a ticket.
It’s too hot to touch anything more than a cool breeze today, and the oppressive weight of his own skin is more than Theo feels capable of bearing, but Liam’s fingers are outstretched beside him, busy plucking at the longest blades of grass. So close. Sometimes desire is a cliche. The want, the can’t have. He is embarrassed to concede to needing in these small ways. His goals have shrunk immensely.
“What if we fill up the bed of your truck with the hose? Like a pool?”
“Yeah, and ruin the suspension. Sure,” Theo says, his voice a dry rumble. He thinks about downing the rest of the water in the bottle but would rather hold it a while longer. “Got any other ideas?”
Liam rubs his face on his forearm, wiping off the sweat that had gathered on his brow. “I don’t know. Think cool thoughts. Pray for rain.”
“I’m an—”
“Atheist. I know. I know,” Liam mumbles, words slow and woozy. He clambers to his feet, says, “We have popsicles and stuff in the freezer. I’ll be right back.”
In his absence, Theo feels it more. The burning. He wonders if he can sweat himself empty. Sweat himself free of ghosts. He rolls out of the patch of shade and lets the sun hold him. It’s the kind of heat that makes a person more aware of their body. He felt less real in the truck, driving down listless streets as the asphalt shimmered with road haze. The air out here nears suffocating. Settles in the creases and contours of his body, clings to his skin. The dying grass beneath him is crying out for attention and he doesn’t know how not to sympathize with it.
Summer hasn’t been good to him. He’s more vagrant than ever. Yesterday, he snuck into the YMCA for a cold shower with water pressure so robust it felt like hail. He stayed under the spray for a half hour, until his teeth chattered and the topography of his skin was littered with goosebumps and his insides turned to static. He left the locker room, worked out long enough to make his bones ache, and then did it again. In town he’s anonymous to a nightmarish degree. He stole frosted animal crackers from the convenience store and the clerk wished him a good night. Stilinski had to gut his department after they sided with Monroe and the remaining deputies have been too busy picking up the slack to pester him. His phone died and he let it go uncharged for three days; there weren’t any missed notifications when restlessness pushed him to plug it in. He remembers being important. He remembers the world being his.
Sometimes he thinks about what the Dread Doctors said about him before their magnum opus killed them. Entitled, narcissistic. He felt it then. The shine of being called a profound success in these aspects. The only thing he’s left with now is the blunt sting of the word ordinary. He stretches his limbs out farther into the sun’s scorch, daring his skin to burn and get over it. To heal.
Liam has been gone long enough to convince Theo he isn’t coming back, but when he does—bare feet slapping against the porch steps, the sound of something heavy tumbling down with him—Theo keeps his eyes closed. He doesn’t move. Makes himself look properly heatstroked. Liam’s footsteps come to a halt beside him. Theo expects a nudge, a kick to the shin. A hand on the shoulder if he’s lucky. Instead, three quick spurts of frigid water hit the side of his face and his body, pathetic thing it is, jolts.
“I can’t believe you just had the audacity to shiver. On the hottest day of the year.”
He peers through wet lashes up at Liam brandishing a neon plastic water gun shaped like a pistol in one hand and a large cooler in the other.
“It was cold,” he gripes.
“On the hottest day of the year,” Liam repeats. He drags the cooler onto the grass between them, herding Theo back into the shade. He sits and shoots a stream of water straight up into the air that he catches with his open mouth. “Sorry for disappearing. Blame my mom. She needed help deciding on a gazpacho recipe and after all of that, when I said we wanted popsicles she dumped the entirety of our fridge and freezer in here.”
He opens the cooler to reveal bottles of water, a bag of frozen grapes, a saran-wrapped plate of deli meat enveloped in thin slices of cheese balancing precariously on top of a box of freeze pops, cans of soda, a tupperware container of watermelon chunks, and an open bag of ice spilling its frosty guts across the bottom of the cooler.
“She also said it’d be nice of you to come in and say hi but she doesn’t blame you for not wanting to move in this heat.”
Theo pulls a cube of watermelon from its container and pink juice trails down his wrist. The first bite is gloriously cold, refreshing. He takes a second and third chunk of watermelon from the bag. Each bite turns to sweet mush between his teeth. This hunger is wild. He eats like there’s a hollow spot way deep inside of him that needs filling. He wants to eat until there’s none left and Liam is mad about it. Until he looks over at Theo with his sticky fingers and juice-dribbled chin and empty tupperware and his wearing-out-a-welcome smile. And Theo could say, look at this face. Don’t you hate it? Don’t you wanna put your hands all over it in the worst ways? Promise it’ll hurt?
But Liam doesn’t bat an eye at the dwindling chunks of watermelon as he tears saran wrap off the plate inside the cooler. Theo’s got a fifth piece of watermelon to his lips, sucking the juice from the fruit, before he even registers the comment. “I’ve never met your mom before,” he says.
Liam pops a turkey and provolone roll into his mouth with a shrug. “She knows who you are.”
“You talk about me?” Theo asks. He didn’t mean for the question to be serious, but the words float out more vulnerably than intended and the silence that transpires afterward lingers too long. The meat and cheese roll-ups have begun to sweat and, really, it’s kind of gross, but Theo needs something to do with his hands so he goes about tearing off fleshy pieces of roast beef and swiss cheese and nibbling at them bit by bit, drowning every bite with a gulp of cold water.
Liam tips his head back and scrunches his eyes shut, face turned toward the sky. The long line of his body drinks up the sun. His shoulders are browned and peeling. Quietly, he says, “I talk about all my friends.”
Theo trains his eyes on the grass, where their shadows waver and melt together. He wants to ask what’s that got to do with me but his silence wins out over his curiosity. Liam rips the top off a strawberry freeze pop with his teeth and spits the strip of plastic into the grass.
“You know, I can’t believe it took a heatwave to get you to come out of hiding for something other than a pack meeting.”
“I haven’t been hiding,” Theo says.
Liam picks up the water gun and squirts him in the face for that, even though it’s true. The summer has made him more present, if anything. Less truck-stuck. Trips to the rec center, the drugstore, the gas station, the 7-Eleven, the animal clinic; anywhere to not boil and become one of those cases of a kid left in a hot car. At night he feels like he’s sleeping in the belly of a fire-breathing dragon. He hadn’t known it would be this hard. The unsteady, obligatory living that happens after survival. He’s more tired than he ever was fighting to stay in the pack’s good graces.
Theo thinks—hopes—he has reached a point where he’s allowed to miss parts of his old life. Not the things that would get him punished. But the sense of direction, of purpose. Conviction in everything he did.
“Dude, get real,” Liam groans, lazy, exasperated. “Movie night, Theo. We’re going to lunch, Theo. Hey, there’s a UFC match on, Theo. We’re playing video games, Theo. Nothing.”
“Bullshit. No one ever mentioned me by name,” he argues.
Liam frowns around the gnawed-at end of his freeze pop. “So what? They were sent in the pack group chat. The one that you’re in.”
He could point out that being pack-adjacent isn’t the same as being pack, that an invitation doesn’t mean a warm welcome, but suspects Liam knows this already and would just rather not acknowledge the line that separates them.
Or Theo could say there was homework. It’d be true. He had homework. For summer school, which is an endeavor he’s too embarrassed to even admit out loud, but he had summer school. Six weeks. Which meant holing up in the library to study because if he ever fucked up his 4.0 on summer school courses after years of flawless grades despite his labrat home life, he would never forgive himself. He could tell Liam that. Use it to reason away why he disregarded all the texts that weren’t business matters. But that would mean drawing attention to the fact that he didn’t graduate on time because he spent the last quarter of his senior year buried in a supernatural prison and sometimes his chest still gets tight when he thinks about that.
It’s hot. He is trying to shed layers. Not lug around the past with him.
Liam’s lips stretch into a wide, strawberry-red grin like there was something to be won in this. “What, no rebuttal?”
A headache pounds behind his temples in time with the thump of a basketball being dribbled by some kid two houses over and Theo is pretty sure it’s not the heat, but that his body is allergic to remembering things.
“Come on, tell me how you’re going to weasel out of every pack outing in the future.”
He had to fill out a form with an address for his diploma to come in the mail because summer school slackers and kids who took too many sick days and people who get locked in a personalized hellscape for a few months don’t get graduation ceremonies. He didn’t have an address to write down. Told Ms. Martin he’d pick up the diploma from the office instead and now it’s been mocking him from the pouch on the backside of the driver's seat for a week.
“When you’re quiet I can almost forget how annoying you are,” Theo grunts.
Liam levels a glare at him that he feels more than sees. “You came over here, asshole.”
Theo blindly reaches into a cooler and pulls out a freeze pop. Orange. His least favorite flavor. He presses it against his forehead instead, uses it as an icepack. He thinks they get along because they don’t. He and Liam. There are no pretenses of playing nice to spare feelings. But he wanted conversation, not confrontation. Mindless chatter and halfhearted bickering and stories and Liam nerding out over myths. He wanted to bake out here and have Liam drag him to safety. Wanted to surrender himself to something nice, for once. He wanted cool hands. That’s all.
“I just—” he cuts himself off, swallowing defeat. “I just thought your AC would be working.”
But it isn’t. So he’ll think cool thoughts. Like snowdrifts. Igloos. Or the time his body was unable to thermoregulate after an anesthetic cocktail courtesy of the Dreads and he spent an evening shivering so fierce even his shadow was dancing.
His body still does that sometimes. Shakes. He’s not sure that it’s a remnant of drug-induced hypothermia anymore.
Liam asks, “Why, something wrong with your place?”
Theo levels him with a long, tired look. Liam’s freeze pop has been sucked dry, the wrapper tossed aside in the grass where bees congregate in the sticky remnants. Theo’s slowly turns squishy, more full of juice than ice, like one of those water snake toys he used to steal from Tara’s room. Shit. His mind’s melted and gone slippery. Makes memories easier to come by. The past left him but he can’t leave the past behind. He is decomposing. A salted slug. He’s gonna be honest because that takes less effort. He closes his eyes and curses all of the world’s heatwave demons for this slow, grueling, embarrassing murder.
“It’s parked in your driveway right now,” he admits.
There’s silence like a tumbleweed drifting across an empty desert. Theo cracks one eye open, then the second. Liam sits up and his brows furrow so deeply they meet in the center of his forehead; his eyes are all pity-oozy and Theo wishes the water gun was closer so he could spray the expression off Liam’s face.
“Dude—”
“Don’t,” Theo warns. He’s no second-in-command by any means, but he has been around the McCall pack long enough to sense the stirrings of some awful, emotional outpouring. Their sentimentality is more contagious than the bite.
Something about the summer has always made Theo fall apart in stages. Some slow chipping away at his self-assuredness. Used to be watching the human kids from afar when he was younger. Seeing that out-of-school freedom, all lemon-bleached hair and tan lines and chlorine-scented skin and laughter like a foreign language. The sun rarely touched him from the sewers.
Liam is like those kids—right here but just out of reach. And maybe that’s the chisel. That out of reach is all he’ll ever be. He goes restless, reaches into the cooler again but all he pulls out is a handful of ice cubes from the bottom of the container that smell of plastic. Theo shovels the ice in his mouth and lets it melt anyway, welcoming the ache of brain-freeze.
“We’re gonna talk about this,” Liam says, and Theo suspects he did that on purpose. Waited for him to be unable to offer a rebuttal. “When it’s not so hot that I’m sweating my fucking brains out, we’re gonna talk about this, alright? I’m serious.”
Theo lets out a low hum that falls short of agreement but isn’t an outright objection either, and he thinks he wants to keep scooping handfuls of loose ice into his mouth forever because then they'll never have to talk about it and he can pretend he doesn’t feel his most pathetic here, trying to fit into a life that wasn’t ever really his to begin with. A bumblebee lands on his wrist but it must realize there’s nothing sweet about him because it only hovers half a second before buzzing off.
The ice melts and leaves Theo empty-mouthed, scrambling for something to say. He wants Liam to forget this the way cloudy days make people forget the sun. He rolls over onto his stomach, rests his head on his forearms, and obscures his admission with a murmur of, “Saw a guy stuffing his pants with frozen peas in the Quik-Save freezer aisle earlier.”
“You’re kidding.”
Theo grins, slow and lazy. Says, “Wish I was.”
“Guess that’s one way to stay cool. To each their own,” Liam exhales. And then his eyes do that nervous thing. The quick glance in Theo’s direction, and then away. And then back at Theo. Away again. And Theo knows Liam’s still thinking about the thing that he wishes he’d ignore but it’s been a while since he felt like he’s taken up space in anyone’s mind and maybe he can tolerate being held in Liam’s thoughts like this, if only briefly.
When the Anuk-Ite was around, back in the tunnels with Mason, Theo’s heart leapt into his throat and stayed there like it trusted in his reticence enough for that to be a safe place to hide. His heart’s still in his throat. But around Liam—like in his truck, like in the elevator, like now—all he wants to do is open his mouth, bare it. Call it heat delirium. Call it anything but wanting.
“I would’ve showed up, you know,” Theo mumbles, twirling brittle blades of grass around his finger until they snap. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t think they were meant for me. The invites, I mean.”
Something in Liam’s eyes soften and he’s staring at Theo with the kind of gentle attention that really fucking dooms a person. The way chewed gum will melt against pavement on a sunny day and remain there forever—that’s how much Theo wants to stick around. He wonders if this type of delusion is a symptom of heatstroke.
Liam says, “Well they were.”
They might be a couple of rotisserie chickens out here but the heat isn’t so bad when you’re not the only one burning.
Down the street, a few children dance around in the erratic spray of a revolving sprinkler. One of them squeals so loud it sounds like she’s fighting for her life and, damn, has it been some time since that sound didn’t spell danger. Theo’s halfway sure he and Liam both held their breath until the screams devolved into laughter and he thinks that maybe not all fear is supernatural.
Sweat drips into his eyes so he shuts them through the sting. Decides to keep them that way and realizes he’s found something like comfort out here, with his head pillowed on his arms as he lies in dry, scratchy grass, his backside pinking up beneath the sun, cooking in Liam Dunbar’s front lawn on the hottest day of the year. On the verge of sleep a brain flirts with both reality and dream. Time moves like a swimming pool full of melted freeze pops and Theo thinks he’s imagining it. Liam crouching over him, the hand on his shoulder, his name spoken like a plea.
But the sensation of being buried in ice has a way of making a guy snap out of a near-doze. His shiver this time is warranted, probably. The scowl too.
“What—” a few ice cubes slide down his arm like a ski slope, “the fuck.”
The cooler’s been overturned—soda cans and frozen snacks litter the grass beneath it—and the half-empty bag of ice inside it is now fully empty, courtesy of Liam dumping its contents over Theo’s back. Liam’s red in the face, but the weather makes it hard to discern embarrassment from sunburn.
“I thought you were passing out or something!” he yelps.
Some dreamthings are real. The hand, it’s still there. Cold and slick from the ice mountained on the small of his back. Theo’s gotta crane his neck to look at it—the hand, not the ice; that’s an afterthought—and maybe that’s why Liam removes it. Because he stares too long and the gesture gets misunderstood as discontent rather than an attempt to dilate the moment even further.
Liam wipes his damp palms on the front of his shorts. “Hence the, y’know, ice bath. Sorry. Here, I’ll just—”
He cups a hand against the edge of Theo’s shoulder blade, knocking a pile of ice cubes onto the grass in one long sweeping motion. And then another. And another, plowing his way down Theo’s back.
“Can I ask you something?”
Theo holds steady, clings to the dirt like he belongs to it as he memorizes the sensation of Liam’s hands against his skin. The way squirrels bury nuts on the verge of winter. He’s hoping this’ll last him a while, sustain him through the rest of summer’s dry spell.
“I have a feeling you’re already going to regardless of what I say,” he says.
Liam’s fingers still, then disappear entirely, and with all the ice gone Theo supposes he should feel less like a cadaver being prepped for an organ transplant but he mostly just feels wet and tired when Liam asks, “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone you’re living in your truck?”
Liam sounds wounded. And Theo is thinking about touch. Still. Because his brain is just as much of a loop as his existence. He was raised on a lifetime of poking and prodding and he thought freedom meant never being subject to hands again but look at him, a needy fucking wreck because a guy brushed some melting ice off his back. And he wonders what it is that Liam’s digging around for with this question. Maybe a removal of guilt. The truth is, no one asked. The truth is, why would they. The truth is, he doesn’t know how long he would’ve gone without seeing anyone had the scathing summer heat not sent him running for cover with his tail tucked between his legs.
The truth is, he is trying very hard not to let this town make a ghost of him. His head hurts again and his throat’s gone dry, scratchy and maybe he did pass out as a result of slowly succumbing to heatstroke and he’s suffering through it all for a little attention. He’s got feelings in all the wrong places. But today almost feels like winning.
He doesn’t have a satisfactory answer that won’t bare too much of himself, crack him wide open, so he stretches his fingers outward until they bump the plastic edge of the water gun. Pulls the trigger, wrist awkwardly bent backward to point at Liam, but it’s empty. He lets it clatter uselessly to the ground and rolls over onto his stomach instead. Water dribbles down his sides and pools in the crease of his shorts and Liam’s real close. Close enough that Theo can smell the salt on him. And he doesn’t know how to explain that he’s not miserable or anything, he's just alone. And it’s taken a near-decade to figure out those aren’t the same thing. Or maybe they are. It’s hot. His cerebrospinal fluid is boiling and making brain soup.
“Can we go inside?”
A beat. Liam looks beyond hesitant and Theo wonders if he misread this moment’s closeness. He glances down at his hands, figures he could tally up all the things he has on one of them. A headache. His truck. This heat. A high school diploma. Too many memories packed into one body.
“Yeah, okay,” he nods. “We can go inside.”
Maybe, on another hand, Liam.
。。。
Liam wasn’t lying when he said it was warm inside. The air’s gone stuffy and thick, but the house is noticeably cooler than outside with fans stationed in every room they pass and Theo wonders what Liam’s avoidance game is all about. He has one hand on the knob to his bedroom door before he whirls around and says, “Look, don’t say anything about the mess, alright?”
He wants to say, “My whole life is confined to a truck and you’re worried that I’ll judge your cluttered bedroom?” Maybe he’ll even throw in a “dude” because that’s Liam-speak for I’m-serious-about-this-but-in-a-casual-way. And he’s going to say it, dude and all, but when Liam pushes the door open and instead of a few scattered piles of clothing and stray socks on the ground there’s a lacrosse stick snapped in half, an overturned lamp, posters peeling from the wall leaving cracked blue paint behind fist-sized holes, a toppled metal armoire spewing clothes, and a broken mount for the shades slanted across one window, all that comes out is, “Oh.”
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Liam says. He shifts on his feet, glances around the room, and adds, “I’m going to clean it up. Seriously.”
Guilt smells like cigarette ashes and burnt coffee. Which is to say, it stinks. Liam’s expression verges on mopey and Theo considers kicking a brand new hole into one of the untouched walls just to give him someone else to blame. He hurt a room, not a person, not himself. Progress.
“Whatever. Fuck you for pretending it felt better outside than in here,” Theo grunts, brushing past Liam to take a seat on the edge of his bed. “And I’m not helping you clean up, so don’t ask.”
Right answer. Liam lets out a nervous chuckle that turns into a real one, steps over a few piles of junk to drag a box fan out from his closet, and plugs it in. He moves around the demolition zone of his room with the same self-assuredness as Jenna downstairs in the kitchen making the roasted tomato gazpacho that she implored he stay for dinner to try. That was after she ran a thumb along the patches of sunburn on Liam’s shoulders and asked with the stilted uncertainty of a human if aloe vera would help it heal faster. Theo positioned himself in front of the small fan sitting on the counter instead and imagined the breeze as a cool hand brushing against his tender spots as a salve.
She was nice. Beyond, really. Motherly is a word that Theo can’t describe but maybe that’s it. Her presence reminds him of crustless grilled cheeses with plasticky, yellow slices of Kraft and the word sun with an O. Memories that don’t feel like his but must be. Jenna donned a bright, sparkly smile—you’d think the heat didn’t even touch her—as she said, “Liam speaks highly of you,” which couldn’t have been the truth but it felt impolite to eavesdrop on her heartbeat and catch the lie. It’s one of those parent things to say. He knows because he wrote it into his Pretend-Mom’s script on the off chance that she’d encounter Scott or Stiles. Oh, boys, it’s been so long. Look at how you’ve grown. Theo never stopped talking about you.
Here, he stares at the flakes of drywall on the sheets from the holes in the wall and thinks about the full moon calendar on his phone and wonders if Liam might have been waiting on a text, too. Still working on that anger? 17 days until the next one. Maybe he can stretch his expired use-value a little further. Or maybe next week it’ll rain so hard the streets flood and he’ll knock on the door looking for a place to dry off. He knows too well how easy it is to walk into a life and stay awhile, for better or worse or both.
“You should come down here, it’s cooler,” Liam says, gesturing to the empty space on the floorboards beside him. He’s using a pair of sweatpants as a pillow, forehead resting against the cage of the box fan, alone enough down there that Theo can almost convince himself he does belong.
“You want me to lay on the floor. Like a dog.”
Sit, stay, roll over. His treat is a break from this terminal loneliness. Here’s the thing: the heat can’t last forever and Theo’s grown tired of conditional closeness but he’ll take what he can get. Throw him a fucking bone.
Liam scoffs. Says, “You’re halfway to being one already, except not nearly as loyal. Loosen up.”
The jab’s halfway between mean and honest and if Theo thought about it harder it might hurt, so he slides to the floor and shoves it down with an equally mean and honest grin and says, “You know, I actually like what you’ve done with the place,” even though Liam said not to talk about it. The mess.
“Shut up,” Liam says, leveling him with a look that falls short of cold. Their shoulders press together trying to fit both of their bodies into the radius of the fan’s breeze. He leans forward and repeats into the fan blades so that his voice gets chopped up, distorted and robotic, “Shut. Up.”
“No, really. The holes, the chipped paint. Very rustic,” Theo drawls.
Okay. He has his own mess. Clothes stuffed in plastic bags shoved beneath the seats, claw pinpricks in the backseat’s upholstery, dried bloodstains on the carpeting hidden beneath rubber floor mats, the brown paper bag of cash he calls a bank account in the glove compartment. Like attracts like. Or maybe the summer has a way of stripping everyone down to their ugly, messy truths. He’s seen too much of himself lately. Pulling back the curtain on Liam’s life is the real vacation.
“I should’ve left you outside.”
Theo searches for regret in his tone but finds none. And he thinks again about Liam’s hands, and the ice bath, and his insistence that Theo stay.
“But you didn’t.”
“Only because my mom would’ve never let me hear the end of it,” Liam says, and they’re too close to each other for Theo not to hear the stutter of his heartbeat. He’s a shit liar, but is good at guilt because his scent goes spoiled with it again. There’s regret here, but it’s Theo’s own. The truck should’ve stayed a secret, because now Liam’s gonna tiptoe around him like a minefield and all Theo really wants is for him to understand that he doesn’t care how roughly he’s handled, what matters is the handling exists.
His expression softens, and he adds, “It’s stupid. We just fended off a bunch of bloodthirsty hunters and a monster that feeds on fear. And before that, zombie cowboys who ride on lightning. And before that—”
You. Liam doesn’t say it, but the negative space around it, the silence that follows, is hard. Like the bony part where their shoulders meet. Like Liam’s fists against the soft cartilage of Theo’s nose. Like his eyes when he remembers—really remembers—who Theo is.
“And after all that, I still have a hard time controlling my anger,” he shrugs, his shoulder knocking Theo’s own. “So much has changed. I mean, freshman year the only thing that mattered to me was lacrosse and that’s like, the last of my priorities now. I don’t know. Just thought maybe I would change too.”
Self-imposed expectations really wear a person down. Theo would say Liam should give it up but he admires his willingness to be something other than himself. Theo isn’t sure that he’s malleable like that. Peel a label off your skin and it’ll still leave a sticky residue behind. Like the nametag on his chest that said, Hello, I’m killer fuckup directionless reject piece of shit failure. It got ripped off—torn out, dismantled with the rest of him—in the Skinwalkers Prison but sometimes he swears he can still feel it.
Liam brings his mouth toward the fan again so that the blades chop up his words and muddle the meaning. Says, “I have IED, I need to learn how to repair drywall and stop disappointing my parents at the same time, and I’m pretty sure my broken knuckle healed wrong, but at least I’m not responsible for breaking the stupid fucking AC.”
He pulls away less mopey, exhaling a laugh. Like all he needed was a robot voice and some company to cope. He could teach a summer school course on resilience. Theo could use it.
“Alright, your turn.”
Theo narrows his eyes. “My turn for what?”
“I dunno. To vent, I guess,” Liam says. “Get it? Like, air…vent.”
“It’s a fan.”
“You’re impossible,” he sighs. “It’s fun, I promise. And in case you’re unfamiliar with that concept, ‘fun’ is a thing that makes people feel good inside.”
Theo spent a few hours in a coffee shop last weekend reading a book and sipping on free water refills until the barista on shift offered up samples of some new loose-leaf tea they’d just got in. There was a whole fancy demonstration and everything. The barista dropped a crusty-looking lump of tea into the bottom of a clear teapot and poured hot water over it to make it blossom into something less crusty-looking. He’s not one for drinks that taste like running a tongue across someone’s flower garden, and no one wants hot tea in the middle of a hot summer, but it was pretty to look at. Everyone’s eyes wandering over to the clear pot on display to watch this dead flower bloom. Liam’s shoulder presses harder against his and this moment feels like that. A slow unfurling.
He leans forward, until the bursts of air from the fan pelt his face with each slice of the blade, and says, “I hate the summer.”
His voice rattles back to him in a gravelly register. It reminds him of the Dread Doctors, but maybe that’s not so unique after all, because almost everything does these days.
“Said no one ever,” Liam huffs.
Theo keeps talking because the fan distorts the words enough for him to pretend they’re someone else’s. “I hate the summer and this heat and orange freeze pops and the fact that Beacon Hills has the worst air conditioning infrastructure out of all the towns I’ve lived in. It’s so hot outside that even my cells are sweating and I honestly think—”
Liam rolls onto his side, propping his stupid smiley face up on his hand to egg Theo on but in the process his foot jostles the fan’s cord and tugs it from the wall outlet and all that survives is Theo’s voice. Even the air goes heavy and still.
“—I’m one bad day away from taking off into the woods and spending the rest of my useless fucking life as a coyote.”
The words cut through the cocoon of silence; too loud and honest for the lack of interference from the box fan. This isn’t fun. He’s really got to dial back on the gratuitous honesty, all it gets him is a pitying look. Not even a commiserating hand on the shoulder. He wishes he would’ve made his heartbeat skip but his propensity for lies has given him the cold shoulder. It feels like an eternity and a half until Liam scrambles backward to stick the plug back into the socket. But when he does, all that’s left is fan blades whirring.
“Is this a bad day?”
The question is low and solemn, whispered beneath the drone of the fan. Theo half-expects the world’s saddest, most dejected dude to be tacked onto the end of the question. And Liam’s eyes get serious to a ridiculous degree. You’d think the fate of the fucking world hung in the balance or something.
“No,” Theo murmurs. “Today is fine. Today’s a good day.”
He is thinking about that tea again. The flower one. And he thinks if Liam had been there in the coffee shop during the sampling he would’ve been first in line to try it. Because Liam gives everything a chance. And maybe even a second.
“Alright. We gotta stick around to try my mom’s gazpacho,” Liam says to the fan blades with renewed resolve. He pulls back, head swiveling over to Theo. Close. Whisper-distance, which is to say almost none. “But after that, we go to the beach.”
There’s a heat that has settled in Theo’s cheeks—like a fever, but better—and he wonders if he’ll survive it. Liam is good at that. Throwing him off-kilter with an earnest look at that makes Theo think about doing something crazy. Like running into the line of fire. Trying dead flower tea. Willfully succumbing to heatstroke just for a shred of company. Or praying for the opposite of rain. But he doesn’t know what to say so he just raises his fist and lets it hover in front of the box fan. Liam bridges the gap and bumps his own against it and, oh that feels like a promise. Like a stretch of potential good days.