Archive of Our Own

summer, 2008

idaho falls, idaho. 

It’s the middle of the afternoon on a random Wednesday when Ricky receives the call. He’s not in the habit of picking up calls from unknown numbers, but he’s already hit “accept” before he even gets to think about it. Maybe some part of him knew it was important. People always talked about having hunches, uncanny flashes of premonition, like walking onto a street they’d never seen before but somehow remembering seeing it. He’d never felt it before, but maybe this was it.

“Hello?” He tilts his head to clasp the phone between his ear and his shoulder, his hands busy searching for the transport card he knows is in the front pocket of his messenger bag somewhere. 

“Hello? Is this Ricky?”

“Yes, it is. Who’s this?” He gives the bus driver a polite bow, making sure the card scanner beeps before he slides the card back into his bag’s front pocket. He catches hold of a support pole to keep his balance as he lets his free hand take over holding his phone up. 

“It’s me, Gyuvin’s mother. Do you remember me?”

Ricky wonders where she got his number. He’d changed it after he left, and given it to no one. “Yes, I do. Um, is there a reason you’re calling?”

“I’m afraid I have some bad news, Ricky-ah.” She sounds just like she used to. Ricky spent afternoons at Gyuvin’s place all the time when they were younger. She used to make them cheese quesadillas in the afternoons, and frozen ice lollies during the warmer days in summer.

“Bad news?”

“Yes. I’m so sorry I had to be the one to tell you this, but…no one else knew how to contact you. Only Gyuvin had your current number. I hope you understand.”

Oh, right. He’d given his new number to Gyuvin on impulse before he left. It’d been so long he’d almost forgotten, and Gyuvin had never contacted him using this number anyway. 

“Understand what?”

“I’m sorry, Ricky. Your family was out for a road trip over the weekend, and…there was an accident. They’re gone.”

“I’m sorry? They’re dead? All of them?” He tries to keep his voice down. He’s on public transport, after all. 

“Yes, your parents and your sister. I’m so sorry, Ricky. You should come home as soon as possible.”

He doesn’t remember much of what else she said, or what he said back. The bus is still moving. He doesn’t even realize where he is until he’s two stops past his destination. 

You should come home as soon as possible, she’d implored. Right. There were burial arrangements to be made. Funerals to plan. Three funerals, to be exact. Three burials. He was an orphan now. He let the word sit in his mouth, like a piece of candy that wouldn’t melt. Come home, she’d said. Ricky wanted to laugh. He’d stopped thinking of Rexburg as “home” since the day he left.

But none of this was her fault. No one wanted to be the bringer of bad news, but someone always had to do the difficult job. She wouldn’t have known, anyway, why he’d left, turned his back on the town he’d grown up in one sunny afternoon in the middle of spring in his last year of high school, just months before he was set to graduate. Why he’d cut ties with every single person he knew, left everything he’d ever known behind and never looked back. 

Unless Gyuvin had told her something. But Ricky couldn’t do anything about that. He’d never been deluded enough to think he had control over anyone else.

He locks the apartment door behind him and sits down on the bed. It still hasn’t sunk in just yet. His parents, dead. His younger sister, dead. All dead. 

He remembers, suddenly, their family pet Lucky. Lucky was a golden retriever-labrador mix, and he must be really old now, what, ten? Eleven years old? They’d had Lucky since Ricky was in fourth grade, adopted him from a shelter in the next town over. If they’d gone on a road trip, they’d either brought Lucky with them, or left him with someone else for the weekend.

He scoffs to himself a little, at the absurdity of it all. Whole family dead and I’m worried about the dog, he thought. Imagine what someone else would say about me if they knew what I was thinking. “Kid must be crazy. Doesn’t he care?”

Doesn’t he? 

He’s packing a bag before he’s even really aware of it, just a couple of sets of clothes, clean underwear, his laptop and charger, glasses, extra shoes. He loads his duffel bag into the passenger seat of his car and locks the seatbelt over it for good measure, and he gets in. 

The radio roars to life as he turns the key in the engine. It’s an old car, one of the only models from the used-car dealer yard he could afford, but it’s good enough to drive, and God knows beggars can’t be choosers. He pulls out of the apartment building’s garage and drives. It’s late afternoon now. He’ll probably be in Rexburg by eveningfall. 

“So, bye-bye Miss American Pie,

Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry,

And them good’ol boys were drinking whiskey and rye,

Singing this’ll be the day that I die,

This’ll be the day that I die.”

His car pulls into the driveway of 9011 Amaranth Avenue around half-past eight. Sunsets in Idaho always ran late in the summer. It was still light outside as he poked around the garden, looking for the rock his family always hid their spare key under. He found it, pressed into the damp earth along the pathway. He’d forgotten what had happened to his old key. Probably left it behind. 

The house looks the same, mostly. The television’s bigger and there are new throw pillows on the couch and there’s a guitar resting on a stand in the corner of the living room, but everything else seems largely unchanged. It’s uncanny. He feels like he’s standing in the entryway of someone else’s house; an unwelcome presence. An intruder. His eyes trace the family photos lining the mantle. His photos are still there. 

He shrugs his jacket off his shoulders. He wonders what his parents tell people about their son. They’d probably made up some story, something easy to explain to people. Whatever the story was, it wouldn’t be the truth. They couldn’t have people thinking their son was a deviant.

The word still burns going down his throat, after all these years, like he’d swallowed something that wasn’t meant to be swallowed. No one had ever called him that again after he left, but he could still remember how it sounded coming from his father’s mouth. 

The sun is setting now, the house slowly growing dark as the light streaming in through the windows fades. He flips a few switches. Under the yellow light of the stairwell, he can almost hear his mother’s voice calling him for dinner. 

But she’s gone now. Everyone is gone now. The prodigal son returns to find an empty nest. Repentance is wasted without someone to repent to. 

Someone’s footsteps sound along the driveway. He’d forgotten to close the front door. Ricky turns around.

“Hey.”

He doesn’t know quite how to feel. The man standing in the doorway is visibly older. His hair’s different from how it used to be; it used to fall across his forehead. It’s shorter now, combed back neater. His shoulders are broader than Ricky remembers. Under the yellow porch light, his eyes are as bright as they used to be. 

“Hey.” 

He hadn’t seen Kim Gyuvin since the day he left. 

“My mother told me you’d be coming back,” Gyuvin says, taking his hands out of his pockets. “My condolences.”

Ricky nods slowly. He doesn’t know what to say, and anyway, he doesn’t really feel the desire to say anything. 

“You look good,” Gyuvin continues, a soft smile crossing his face. “How’ve you been?”

“You had my number this whole time.” 

Gyuvin nods. “I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me.”

He’s right. Ricky doesn’t dignify him with the pleasure of knowing that he is.

“Can I come in?”

Ricky sets his jacket down over the back of a chair. “No.” He closes the front door before Gyuvin can say anything else. Dust motes spin in the silence that lingers, before the sound of footsteps on the porch fades slowly into the night. 

His bedroom had been left pretty much untouched since he left. It smells a little musty, like he supposes all rooms do without air circulation, but he leaves the window open while he showers and washes up and that seems to do the job just fine. Summer nights in Rexburg always ran warm, anyway. Back in middle school, during the warmest nights in July, he and Gyuvin used to sneak out of bed at night to lay blankets on the garage roof and drink lukewarm beers they stole from the fridge. 

The memory brings him some amusement. Beer had tasted awful to them, back then, it wasn’t until high school that he finally began developing a better tolerance for alcohol. Now he was around alcohol all the time; he worked four nights a week bartending at this place five blocks away from his apartment building called Jerry’s. He’d had to call in and ask for a couple of weeks off for personal reasons, but Jerry hadn’t minded. Take as much time as you need, he said, family’s family. Anyway, they’d just hired a new part-timer, so Ricky figured they would get by just fine without him for a while. 

He rummages through his duffel bag and finds a pair of sweatshorts to put on. As he reaches over his desk to push his phone charger into the extension plug running from the wall, something catches his eye, and he squints to get a closer look. The corkboard hanging over his desk had accumulated a decent amount of pictures over the years, but something about it wasn’t quite how he’d remembered leaving it. 

It takes him a minute to realize what was different. Every single picture of him and Gyuvin is gone. He can still see some of the holes left behind by the pins he’d used to secure them. 

He scoffs. His mother had always had the best attention to detail. 

Ricky lays back onto the bed and tries to ignore the disconcertment in the back of his throat. He doesn’t belong in this room. This is his parents’ son’s room. He is something else. 

There’s a couple of beers pushed to the back on the top shelf of the fridge, where his father usually keeps a few. It doesn’t make sleep come any easier, but it makes him think less, and that’s something. 

Gyuvin returns before eleven the next day. Ricky hears the knocking from his room and scrambles down the stairs, pulling one hand through his sleep-mussed hair. When he opens the door, Gyuvin’s there, with a large brown paper bag in one hand. His bike’s leaning against the fence at the end of the driveway. 

“Hey,” he begins, sounding a little tentative. “Sorry, it’s early, I know. Um…my mother made some food. She figured you would be kinda busy and she wanted to make sure you were, you know, eatin’.”

Ricky takes the offered bag with a grateful smile. “Thanks. Tell her thank you for me.”

“Yeah. And you probably don’t want me around so, that’s fine and all. I’ll get goin’.”

“No, wait.”

Gyuvin stops in his tracks and gives him a curious look. Ricky sighs, running a hand down his face. 

“M’sorry about yesterday,” he says finally. “I was just…in a mood. Shouldn’t have bitten your head off.”

“No, I figured. It’s okay,” Gyuvin answers, with that little lopsided smile he always did that used to charm all the girls. “It’s good to see you again. It’s been a while.”

“Yeah, it’s been a while.”

Ricky deliberates for a long moment in his head. “You wanna come in?”

“If you’ll have me, yeah.”

He closes the door behind Gyuvin. “Just give me a couple of minutes to get dressed and wash up. I’ll be right down.”

Gyuvin nods, wandering into the living room. He’s as familiar with this place as Ricky himself is, probably, just as Ricky is with Gyuvin’s. When Ricky comes back downstairs, with a shirt on and his hair brushed, he can hear faint strains of guitar music floating up the stairwell. Gyuvin’s sitting on the arm of the couch, plucking softly at the guitar Ricky saw yesterday. 

“Was in the spring, and spring became the summer,

Who’d have believed you’d come along?

Hands, touchin’ hands,

Reachin’ out,

Touchin’ me, touchin’ you…”

Ricky smiles, crossing his arms over his chest. “Sweet Caroline. Love that song.”

“I know,” Gyuvin answers, looking up. “We used to sing it in the car all the time. This your guitar?”

Ricky shakes his head. “Think it’s my sister’s.”

“Better be careful with it, then,” Gyuvin says, putting it back onto the rest. 

Not like she’s going to be around to be upset about anyone breaking it. He’s sure they’re both thinking it, but he’s not going to be the one to say it. 

Ricky pushes the curtains open, letting the mid-morning sunlight wash over the living room. “How’ve you been doing?” 

“Good,” Gyuvin answers cheerily. “I’m in college now, Idaho State. I mean, it’s summer, but I’ll be back to it in a bit. You in college?”

“Yeah. Community college. S’all I could afford. Didn’t wanna take out too big of a loan. It’ll be hell payin’ it back.”

Gyuvin’s eyebrows furrow. “What do you mean, it’s all you could afford?”

Ricky laughs softly, more of a scoff, honestly. “I never told you why I left, huh?”

“No, you didn’t.” Gyuvin turns his gaze down to his shoes, tracing the shadow the sunlight casts on the ground. “Just…one day you’re here, next day you’re gone and I’ve got a note in my mailbox with a number you’re telling me not to give anyone. I figured you’d talk to me if you wanted to, and you didn’t, so I figured you didn’t want to. My mom told me not to go around askin’ questions.”

Silence drags on uncomfortably long before Ricky figures out exactly what he wants to say. “Wasn’t your fault that I left,” he says finally. “Sorry.”

“Didn’t think it was,” Gyuvin answers, amused. “I wish you’d have called, but it’s alright.”

Gyuvin turns his eyes up to meet Ricky’s now. He’s always had a way of seeing right through him. Without the hair falling into his eyes, his gaze is almost uncomfortably sharp. “Did you want to leave?”

Ricky feels his nails dig into the softness of his palms. An old habit he’d left behind when he moved out to Idaho Falls, but something about being in Rexburg, something about being in this house, something about being around Gyuvin brought it back to him. “No. They kicked me out.”

He wants to scoff at the warmth that wells up behind his eyelids. Stupid, stupid. He hates how small the words make him feel. Like just saying them out loud was an admission of fault.

Gyuvin nods slowly. For some reason or another, he doesn’t look like the answer had surprised him all that much. “I guessed it was somethin’ like that. My mom told me to stop takin’ the Amaranth Avenue shortcut to get to school. I guessed it was because your folks didn’t want to see me around anymore.”

There’s something unspoken he’s laying on the table. Gyuvin knows he’s no longer welcome in the house he used to think of as his second home. He knows the real reason why Ricky was kicked out. How could he not know? He’d been a part of that reason. A great part of it, in fact. 

Gyuvin knows. Ricky knows he knows. But something about it all just makes it so hard to say out loud. 

He stands up, pushing off the windowsill and heading for the kitchen. “I’m doin’ fine. I’ve got an apartment down in Idaho Falls.”

Gyuvin follows him. “Is that where you’ve been? Idaho Falls?”

“Yeah. The apartment’s rent-controlled, so it’s manageable. I’m working nights at this bar near my place.” He fills a glass with water from the tap and takes a few long gulps. When he turns back, Gyuvin’s leaning against the countertop. They used to be the same height in junior year. Ricky doesn’t remember him being so tall.

“I missed you. After you left.” Gyuvin’s voice is quiet, but the words sound almost like a challenge, like a dare. Like he’s daring Ricky to listen, not just hear. 

All of a sudden, the kitchen feels too small for both of them. Ricky wants to say something back, something biting. Biting enough to push Gyuvin away, or at least, far enough away that he can stop feeling like he can’t breathe. He hates the way his shoulders tense, like a deer in the silent forest hearing the click of a shotgun. 

Ricky takes another gulp of water and empties the rest into the sink, pushing past him out of the kitchen. 

“Ricky-”

“I’ve got a long list of things to do today. I need to go and meet with a lawyer.” Ricky stops at the threshold of the living room, looking back. “I think you should go.”

Gyuvin’s gaze fixes on him like he wants to argue, but he decides against it. He reaches into his pocket and offers a small white card. “My mom wanted me to give you this, too. It’s the contact of an estate lawyer. For the will stuff.”

Ricky takes the card. His hand brushes against Gyuvin’s for a moment, and just for that moment, he almost feels like he can’t breathe again. He sets the card down on the dining table. “Thanks.”

Gyuvin leaves without saying anything else, closing the front door with a soft click behind him. For some reason, the inexplicable urge to wash his hands comes over him, but he swallows it. He picks up the card, looking over the details. It’s a lawyer’s namecard, with a name, a number, an email, and a business address. 

He flips it over. Written on the back, in familiar handwriting, is another phone number. In case you lost it, the note below reads. Ricky leaves the card on the dining table and goes back upstairs. 

He spends the rest of the morning and the better part of the afternoon combing through his parents’ bedroom searching for a will. He doesn’t know all that much about probate laws, but as far as he knows, a will’s the first step to figuring out where all their assets are supposed to go. But by the time it’s half past four and the sun hangs high in the sky, he’s found nothing.

It’s possible that they didn’t leave a will behind, right? Neither of them were past the age of fifty-five. Maybe they’d simply never considered the possibility of dying this early. 

The lawyer will probably know what to do, he thinks. He’s out of his depth here. Everything since coming back to Rexburg feels out of his depth, but this especially. He’d spent the past three years running from his parents’ expectations. How strange it was that all he wished for was for them to tell him what to do one last time. 

Ricky heads back downstairs, takes the card he left on the dining table earlier, and heads out to the car. 

The rest of the day passes by in a haze. The lawyer tells him to come back in a week. There’ll be a petition filed and signed by a judge by then, appointing him the administrator of his family’s estate. Since there’s no will, all assets go to him by default; the house, the bank accounts, everything.

Well, not the car. That particular asset is likely in the junkyard by now, if the police are through with investigating it. 

There’s so many things he has to do he feels overwhelmed. He has to go to the funeral home and make arrangements for all three of their funerals. He has to find out if they have burial plots picked out, and if they don’t, he has to make the decision on whether to have them buried or cremated. And when the lawyer finishes filing that petition or whatever it is he’d said he had to file, he’ll take over the sum total of everything his family had ever owned, and he has to be responsible for all that, too.

He wonders what he’ll do with all that money. Pay off his student loans, probably. Maybe even use it to apply to a better school, a more expensive one, in another state. There’ll be enough money for that. Even if his parents scrapped his college fund after they kicked him out, he’s sure they had a good amount set aside for his sister. 

He feels like the most callous person in the universe. Barely a week after his parents’ death and he’s thinking about how to spend their money. Any well-adjusted person would be grieving. 

I am grieving, he thinks. A knee-jerk defense. 

Is he really? There’s a better word out there than “grief” for what he’s feeling, he thinks, but as for what that word is, he’s coming up blank. He’s just feeling something. He’s actively feeling something. Labeling is overrated. 

Ricky pulls the car into the parking lot of the Albertsons on his way back home. He needs a bunch of groceries, just simple stuff like eggs and milk and bread and cheese. By the time he re-emerges from the front doors of the supermarket, a bag in each hand, a light shower has begun over the town.

Weird, he thinks. Idaho summers are usually dry. The world's always changing.

The light drizzle turns into a heavy downpour by the time he’s turning out of the Albertsons parking lot. It makes no difference to him until he pulls down a side street and something jolts the entire body of the car, sending him veering off the center of the road.

Shit. There’s no worse time to pop a tire than right fucking now.

Ricky hunches over the steering wheel with a sigh that feels like it’s coming from deep in his bones, banging his fist on the horn a couple of times. It isn’t anywhere near as satisfying as the movies make it look. He doesn’t even know how to replace a tire, and anyway this old thing didn’t come with a spare tire when he bought it from the dealership, so it’s not like he could have replaced it even if he knew how.

He flicks his hazard lights on. Jesus Christ. There’s only one tire shop he knows of in Rexburg and they close at six on weekdays. He could leave his car here and walk home, but his groceries would go bad in the trunk, and even the idea of walking all the way back to Amaranth Avenue in the rain lugging two bags of groceries already has him at his limit.

Honestly, this is all too much for him right now. His second day back in Rexburg and everything is as shitty as he expects it to be. Stupid town.

The road lights up with the headlights of another car behind him. He looks in the rearview mirror. A silver Volvo pulls over a distance away, and the driver comes out with an umbrella in hand, knocking on his window. 

As he rolls down the window and takes a good look at the man leaning down with concern written all over his face, he’s reminded that misfortune always comes with friends.

“Oh, Ricky. It’s you. What’s wrong with your car?”

“Popped one of the back tires,” Ricky answers, with a sigh. “I don’t have a spare.”

“Okay. I can drop you off, alright? The auto shop opens at eight tomorrow morning.”

“I’ve got groceries in the trunk.”

“I’ll get those for you. Just hold on a minute.”

He hears the trunk open, then close. Gyuvin, to his credit, doesn’t seem to have held a grudge over the way Ricky practically threw him out this morning. But he’d always been a fundamentally good person. It was like he was just wired that way. 

“Thanks.” Ricky pushes the passenger seatbelt into the connector until he hears the click. “And, uh…sorry. About this morning.”

“You’re doin’ a lot of apologizing,” Gyuvin says, starting the engine. 

“Yeah, maybe, but at least I mean them,” Ricky retorts, a little defensive.

Gyuvin cast a bemused glance towards him. “Fair. Apology accepted.”

Ricky says nothing more, and for a few minutes they drive in silence. 

“Did you go see the lawyer yet?”

“Mhm. Turns out havin’ a family member die is a huge hassle.”

Gyuvin laughs softly, caught off guard. “You wouldn’t imagine. If you need anything, you can just call. Anytime.”

“How am I supposed to decide if my parents should be buried or cremated? I’m twenty-one years old. I couldn’t even buy alcohol until two months ago.”

“If it helps, I still can’t,” Gyuvin offers. Ricky laughs, in spite of it all.

“I don’t know anything, Gyu,” Ricky muses, running a hand over his face. He gets chatty when he’s tired. Right now, he’s so exhausted he’s pretty much delirious. “I mean, I never did anything right. Even when they were here.” 

Gyuvin glances over at him. “Why do you say that?”

“Why do you think?” Ricky’s voice comes out harsher than he intends for it to. Suddenly, all he can feel is bad; he feels sorry for snapping at Gyuvin, he feels stupid for not knowing how to change a goddamn tire, and he feels inexplicably sick being in this car he knows he’s not supposed to be in. He tries his best to blink back the tears welling up in his eyes, but it’s pointless. 

The car pulls over at the side of the road. Gyuvin’s still looking at him, despite how awful he’s been acting all night. Rain pummels down on the windows, obscuring the view of almost everything outside. Obscuring them from everything outside. 

“Rik, what’s wrong?” Gyuvin leans over the center console, and a large hand smoothes along his shoulder and back. Ricky feels a fresh wave of tears, and he bites back a frustrated groan. Doesn’t he understand he’s not helping? Ricky wants to lean into his touch so badly it makes him sick to his stomach. 

Gyuvin rubs comforting circles into Ricky’s heaving back, waiting silently for him to say something. For a long moment Ricky doesn’t want to say anything, because maybe if he does, Gyuvin will stop, and he doesn’t think he can bear it.

But he should say something. It’s only polite. “M’okay,” he says finally, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Sorry.”

“You’re sorry again. Don’t be sorry,” Gyuvin says softly. “Why are you sorry? Tell me what’s wrong.”

“My whole family’s dead,” Ricky answers. “I left my car at the side of the road. What isn’t wrong?”

Gyuvin nods, a wry smile crossing his face. “You’re right. That was a stupid question.”

“Yeah.”

Ricky’s sure there’s some science involved in this; the inertia that makes it so much easier to go on crying when you’re already crying. He tries his best to stop his shoulders from heaving, but nothing much seems to work, and he can still feel Gyuvin’s eyes on him, watching silently. 

Gyuvin takes him by the shoulders suddenly. The streetlights cast a wedge of warming glow onto his face. His eyebrows are furrowed, like he’s just argued with someone. He used to get that look in his eyes when he couldn’t decide something. Ricky wonders what he’s deciding now. 

One of Gyuvin’s hands trails up to the side of Ricky’s neck. His thumb brushes against Ricky’s jaw, and the urge to pull away rises in his throat like bile. 

But it’s close to midnight, on a quiet street in the middle of the pouring rain. No one can see us now. Does that make this any less wrong?

No, he decides. It doesn’t. But he feels so horrible inside and Gyuvin’s thumb tracing the line of his jaw feels like a shot of morphine in his veins. Resistance is futile when your city walls are already crumbling.

“What…?” Can Gyuvin even hear him, over the pounding rain? His hands are warm. He has always run warmer than Ricky. 

Gyuvin pulls him close and presses his lips to Ricky’s, and for a good few seconds Ricky thinks of absolutely nothing. 

His thoughts start coming back to him slowly. Gyuvin’s palm against the side of his neck, holding him steady. The warmth of his breath on Ricky’s face. His hand is touching something solid, a shoulder. 

He should pull away. He should want to pull away. But it’s so achingly familiar, in a town that feels like a stranger to him, and tonight he just can’t find the strength in him to be what he should be.

When Gyuvin pulls away Ricky takes a deep breath, and it doesn’t shudder on the way in. 

“You’re not cryin’ anymore,” Gyuvin says softly. His hand lingers along Ricky’s jaw for a brief moment. “Good. It worked.”

His hand falls away from Ricky’s neck and he turns back to the wheel, putting the car back into drive. As the car pulls into Amaranth Avenue, he doesn’t quite know what to think. 

Gyuvin backs easily into the driveway of Ricky’s house. “Don’t open the door first. I’ll bring the umbrella to you.”

He reappears at the passenger-side door, holding an umbrella over Ricky’s head. “I’ll get the groceries from the trunk,” he says. “Go unlock the door first.”

Ricky fishes around in his pocket for his house keys. Behind him he can hear the trunk slam, and the rustle of plastic bags. The door swings open. He reaches out to take the grocery bags from Gyuvin, but Gyuvin’s already walking past him, wiping his shoes off on the mat before heading into the house. Ricky follows, flipping the light switch for the hallway. 

Gyuvin reappears in the hallway a minute later, without the bags of groceries. When he reaches out, Ricky flinches without even thinking about it. His shoulders are tense. He’s sure Gyuvin can see it.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to kiss you again,” Gyuvin says quietly. He’s standing a little too close for comfort, but he lets his hand fall back to his side. “I just needed to give you a distraction.”

He turns away, heading for the door. Something about the wash of the lone hallway light on his shoulders makes Ricky want to reach out and touch them again. 

“Are you busy tomorrow?”

Gyuvin looks back, over his shoulder. “Not particularly. Why?”

“Do you know how to change a tire?”

Ricky’s fingernails dig into his palms. The pain is sharp, sharp enough for his eyes to go out of focus. Gyuvin smiles. “See you tomorrow, Ricky.”

When Gyuvin shows up at his door again the next day, he has a brown paper bag in hand. “Sandwiches,” he says, holding it up. “From Lumiere’s. I thought you might have missed these.”

Lumiere’s is the bakery two streets down they used to pass by every day on the way to and from school. They were known for their pastries, but Ricky had always liked their sandwiches best. He hadn’t eaten at Lumiere’s since the day he left Rexburg. 

“Why are you being so nice to me?” He knows it’s a ridiculous question. There has never been a moment in his life where Gyuvin was not nice to him. Even back when they used to have those silly fights, Gyuvin had always been the one to give in first. 

But this isn’t a fight. Ricky reasons that Gyuvin can’t possibly fight with someone he no longer knows. 

Gyuvin does that curious head-tilt he often does when he’s confused. Ricky had always thought it made him look vaguely puppy-like. “Do you want me to stop…?”

“No.” The answer comes out before he can even think. “Just…you should be mad at me. Or something. I don’t know why you bother.”

“Mad at you for what?” Gyuvin counters. “You already apologized for snapping at me yesterday. Last I checked, you haven’t done anything else for me to be mad about.”

“For leaving.”

The mid-morning sun forces him to squint. In the backwash of the light, he can’t shake the comfort that washes over him from just having Gyuvin look at him. 

Gyuvin nods slowly. “You did do that, yeah. But that wasn’t your fault.”

“It was my fault.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

Ricky’s gaze flicks up to him, a challenge. Prove me wrong, it says. You can’t. 

“Are you going to slam the door in my face again?”

Ricky scoffs quietly. “No.”

“Then, can I come in?”

Ricky lets him in. Gyuvin sets the brown paper bag down on the dining table. “Eat. Maybe you’ll be less cranky, then.”

“I’m not cranky,” Ricky retorts. He reaches for the paper bag anyway. 

Lumiere’s makes the best grilled cheeses with peppers baked into them. He can smell them even from here, and it’s making his stomach growl. Unwrapping one of the sandwiches, he takes a big bite, and lets out a sigh of pleasure. They’re just as good as he remembers them being.

“You can have ‘em both,” Gyuvin says. “I already ate.”

Ricky fixes him with a hard stare. “No you haven’t.”

Gyuvin laughs, raising his hands in surrender. “Yeah, I haven’t. You just look hungry enough to eat both, but I’m done being Mr Nice Guy. Gimme.”

Ricky unwraps the other sandwich and hands it over, grinning. It feels so natural. Everything between them used to feel so natural. Ever since he came home, he’s been inundated with the looming feeling that he’s trying to put on shoes that don’t fit anymore. But sitting in the dining room eating sandwiches from Lumiere’s with Gyuvin almost makes it feel like they could be the same people they were all those years ago. 

Gyuvin finishes his sandwich in silence. When he’s done he gets up from where he’s been sitting, reaching for Ricky’s discarded wrapper and crumpling it further in his hands. 

“You started goin’ through all that yet?” He gestures to the pile of mail sitting at the far end of the dining table. 

Ricky shakes his head. “Been avoidin’ it.”

Gyuvin flips through the top few envelopes in the growing stack. “Want me to help?”

Ricky studies Gyuvin’s hands in the light. Some people had ugly hands. Gyuvin always had nice hands. Still does. He tries not to remember how they felt on him, but of course, trying not to think about something never does any good. “I don’t know.”

“You want me to go?”

Ricky shakes his head again.

Gyuvin pulls out the chair next to Ricky’s at the dining table, and sits down. His father used to sit there for dinner; after dinner he’d reach for the letter opener Ricky had bought him for father’s day one year, and slice open the envelopes his mother had brought in for the day. 

He has no idea where his father’s letter opener is now, or if he even continued using it after Ricky left. Ricky watches as Gyuvin’s fingers pry carefully at white envelopes, his eyebrows furrowed in quiet concentration. 

He pulls his chair closer to Gyuvin’s. The legs drag on the wooden floor, and Gyuvin glances up at the sound of the dull screech it makes, looking a little startled. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah.” Gyuvin stares at him for a long few moments before turning back to the stack of mail in front of him. Ricky waits until he’s looked away before resting his forehead on Gyuvin’s shoulder. 

Gyuvin freezes under him for just a second, and his breath catches in his throat. Muscles ripple beneath the fabric of his shirt sleeve. Ricky breathes in the smell of sweat and pine until he thinks of nothing else. Gyuvin finishes opening the rest of the letters with the arm Ricky isn’t resting on. 

“Most of these are bills,” he says softly. The big pile of letters are separated into smaller piles now, the opened envelopes discarded in a neat bundle. Gyuvin pushes one of the letter piles towards him. “Electric company, water, insurance stuff. Nothin’ scary. Rest of ‘em aren’t important.”

Ricky hums into Gyuvin’s shoulder. He doesn’t look up. Neither of them move for a long time, a time Ricky can’t really seem to measure in his head. He’s sure Gyuvin’s arm must be sore, but neither of them move. It’s almost a game. You pull away first, because I’m not going to. 

Gyuvin’s voice is a soft rumble, his throat a little raspy from not speaking for a while. “Are you tired?”

“Yeah.”

“You wanna lay down?”

Ricky hums again, low in his throat. “No.”

There’s no point lying down. He doubts there’s any bed in this house he’d sleep well in, at least, not with everything humming under his skin the way it is. But Gyuvin doesn’t know that, and he doesn’t feel like explaining. 

Gyuvin’s palm brushes across the small of his back. “Come on. Let’s go for a drive.”

Ricky looks up reluctantly. “Where?”

“Does it matter?” An amused expression ghosts across Gyuvin’s face. “Come on.”

Ricky pushes himself upright. His neck aches from holding still too long, like the rest of him hasn’t caught up yet, and his vision is a little fuzzy, still. Gyuvin’s Volvo is parked in the driveway. Part of him wants to ask where they’re going, but the other part of him is relieved enough being out of that house that he doesn’t care where they’re going as long as it’s away from here. The car backs out of the driveway and pulls into the street. 

They pass by familiar streets, familiar sights. The middle school. The church. The park with the pond that used to have ducks but no longer does. A piece of empty land has been built up into a mall. They don’t talk.

Gyuvin fiddles with something in the centre console. Music plays, loud enough to be heard over the hum of the engine, soft enough if he wasn’t paying attention he wouldn’t be able to hear the words. It’s an ABBA song. Their high school theatre club had done a rendition of Mamma Mia sophomore year. Ricky had been in it. Gyuvin had come to watch. 

“Waterloo, I was defeated, you won the war,

Waterloo, promise to love you forevermore,

“Waterloo, couldn’t escape if I wanted to,

Waterloo, knowing my fate is to be with you.”

He doesn’t remember falling asleep, or much of anything else, really. When he’s conscious again it’s afternoon, and the sun hangs high in the sky. He looks out of the window. Open fields surround them on both sides. 

“Where are we?”

Gyuvin glances over at him. “I’m takin’ you somewhere.”

Ricky suddenly remembers his car, sitting up straighter in his seat. “My car…I still gotta go get my tire changed.”

“We’ve been by the auto shop already,” Gyuvin answers. “They’ll drop your car off at your house. Should be done by the time you get back.”

“But they don’t have my-” Ricky feels around in his pocket. His keys are gone. 

“Gave ‘em your keys,” Gyuvin finishes. “Didn’t wanna wake you. Sorry.”

“Oh.” Warmth prickles in the back of his neck, like the drape of a blanket. Something about living alone for years has made being taken care of feel so foreign. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Gyuvin answers, smiling. “I’m taking you someplace, by the way. You’ll see when we get there.”

“Ominous,” Ricky retorts playfully. “You could be selling me to a cartel.”

“Yeah, m’gonna wrap you up all pretty with a bow and send you over.” 

Ricky scoffs quietly, and says nothing. He doesn’t recognize where they are. From the look of the trees and the fields and the plainness of the roads they’re driving on, they must be between towns somewhere. 

“You can have the AUX,” Gyuvin offers. “Change the music if you want.”

Ricky shakes his head. “S’okay. This is good.”

Another ABBA song is playing now. Gyuvin must have a CD in. 

“If you’re all alone, when the pretty birds have flown,

Honey I’m still free, take a chance on me!

Gonna do my very best, and it ain’t no lie,

If you put me to the test, if you let me try…”

Gyuvin turns off the main road at some point, onto a dirt path leading between copses of trees. “We’re here, come on.”

Ricky pushes the door open and steps out. His joints protest, stiff from sleeping curled in place. “Where are we?”

“It’s my secret spot,” Gyuvin answers, with a grin. “Found it a couple months back when I was runnin’ errands for my mom. I’ve been here a few times since and I’ve never seen anyone else. I don’t think anyone owns this place.”

Gyuvin keeps walking, weaving through the trees and stepping over the roots protruding from the damp earth. A small structure stands in the distance, silhouetted against the dappled light falling between the branches and leaves above. The exterior is overgrown with crawling vines and moss, but it looks stable enough. 

“Is this somebody’s house?” Ricky ducks under a low-hanging branch, careful to watch where he’s putting his feet. 

“That’s what I thought at first,” Gyuvin says, walking up the front steps and nudging the door open. “But the inside was completely empty when I found it. It’s like someone built this place and just…forgot about it. Looked like no one had been here in years.”

Ricky peeks through the door. The inside is much cleaner than the outside; the floors are clearly swept often, there’s a rug laid over the wooden planks and a loveseat sitting in the corner he remembers seeing in Gyuvin’s house in the past. There’s curtains hanging in the windows, and a radio and a lantern sitting near the windowsill. “Did you steal a bunch of stuff from your house?” he asks, a smile slipping out despite himself. 

“Nah, my mom was doing spring cleaning and wanted to clear some stuff out, so I brought it here,” Gyuvin replies. “No reason to throw away perfectly good furniture.”

Ricky nods slowly, looking around. “This place actually looks pretty nice.”

“I know, right? It’s pretty cozy during the warmer months. There’s no electricity, so I don’t come here when it’s cold out,” Gyuvin says, closing the door behind Ricky. “I haven’t even shown you the best part. Come on.”

Gyuvin opens another door at the other side of the small house. The door opens out to a deck paved with the same wooden planks as the rest of the house, overhanging a bubbling pond below. Tall spruces dot the surrounding scenery, and beyond them the landscape unfurls in soft green and gold. 

Ricky leans down, looking into the water below. “Somebody built all this and just…left it?” 

“It’s almost too good to be true, huh?” Gyuvin sits down on the deck, letting his legs hang over the edge. “There’s fish down there in the pond. I tried to feed ‘em some bread once, but I think they were too tiny to really eat it properly. Anyway, I come here sometimes when everything gets too much. It’s quiet, at least.”

Ricky nods slowly, sitting down beside him. “Is everything too much for you now?”

Gyuvin shakes his head. “Not for me. Figured everything might have been too much for you. Since you came back.”

Late-afternoon wind pushes through the spruce trees in the distance. Ricky tries to put a name to the feeling in his chest, but nothing comes to him. 

“Thanks,” he says finally, after a long pause. “For bringing me here.”

“S’nothing, really,” Gyuvin answers, shrugging his jacket off and laying it on the deck behind them. “Come on, lay down. The weather’s nice today. Sometimes it’s too sunny.”

Ricky almost protests – he doesn’t want his hair to get dirty – before he realizes that’s what Gyuvin put his jacket down for. He almost wants to say something, but he stays silent and lies back on the deck, closing his eyes. Gyuvin is right. The weather’s not too cold and the sun’s not too bright and the smell of crisp, fresh nature is all around them.

They lie together in silence for a long time, long enough for the sun to warm Ricky’s cheeks. He doesn’t open his eyes when he speaks again. “Does your mom know?”

“About this place?” Gyuvin’s voice is a little raspy, like he’d almost fallen asleep. 

“No. That you’re here.”

“Oh, she doesn’t care where I go,” Gyuvin answers. “She keeps telling me to get out of the house. S’pose she’s sick of me after havin’ me home all summer.”

Ricky glances over at him. His brows furrow. “You know that’s not what I’m asking.”

He opens his eyes, then. As he blinks away the residual fuzziness in his vision, Gyuvin glances over and his gaze falls on Ricky. 

“She’s always known.”

“What do you mean, she’s always known?”

“I mean, I think she’s always known. She’s never asked me, like, in my face,” Gyuvin continues. He watches Ricky like a hunter watches a rabbit from afar. Wondering if they’ve made a wrong move. “But yeah. I’m pretty sure she knows.”

Ricky turns his gaze back up to the sky. The sun burns into his vision, forcing his eyes closed again. “And she never said anything to you about it?”

Gyuvin lets out a soft huff. “No.”

“She never said anything about me?”

“I wouldn’t have cared if she had,” Gyuvin says, before Ricky can even really finish his sentence. “If my parents are mad about it, that’s not my problem. I’ll just leave, like you did.”

Ricky laughs softly. “It’s not that simple.”

“It was simple enough for you.”

Ricky turns back to Gyuvin. “Is that what you think? That it was simple for me?”

Gyuvin’s expression twists, like he knows he’s misspoken. “I didn’t mean-”

“Good, because it wasn’t,” Ricky continues, not caring that he’s interrupting. “It wasn’t simple, and I didn’t have a choice. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Silence drags on for a long few moments between them. “Sorry,” Gyuvin says finally. “I wasn’t trying to say that it was easy, or anything. I know it was probably awful.”

Ricky nods slowly, biting his lip. He knows Gyuvin has never meant harm. “What were you trying to say, then?”

Gyuvin ponders his words for a few seconds before speaking. “I’m just saying that if that’s the price to pay for being happy…I don’t know. You only gotta pay it once.”

A smile ghosts across Ricky’s face. “That’s your first mistake.”

“Hm?”

“Thinkin’ you only gotta pay it once. You pay the price once, and every day after that you pay it again, and again, and again. Never stops.” Ricky pushes hair out of his eyes. “Still think it’s worth it now?”

Gyuvin lets out a quiet sigh. “We could go somewhere. Anywhere else. Brighter horizons.”

“Yeah? Where would you go?”

Gyuvin shrugs. “I don’t know. Never thought that far. S’pose it’d have to be somewhere there’s no one else.”

“Like that’s easy to find,” Ricky retorts, grinning. 

“Easy enough,” Gyuvin counters. “Maybe I’d come here. There’s no one around.”

“And what would you do during the winter? When it snows so hard you can’t even get into your car?” Ricky sits up a little, leaning on one elbow. “You’d sleep in your loveseat and freeze?”

Gyuvin gives a rueful grin. “You’re right. Gotta get this place hooked up to the grid. I’ll be all set, then.”

“What about water?”

“Pond right down there,” Gyuvin answers without missing a beat. 

“Fish pee in that water, you know.”

“M’not afraid of a little fish pee.”

“Yeah? There’s no bathroom. What happens when you need to go?”

Gyuvin looks Ricky in the eye, his face completely straight. “Again, pond’s right there.”

Ricky lets out a laugh, collapsing back onto the ground. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Yeah. I gotta start thinking through things more.” Gyuvin’s arm shifts and Ricky feels it brush against the back of his palm. For a moment Gyuvin freezes, as if he’s contemplating whether to pull away. 

Ricky hooks one finger around his palm. Don’t, he wants to say. Don’t move away. Stay right here. 

He doesn’t say it, but Gyuvin listens anyway. His thumb brushes over Ricky’s knuckles, a soft, barely-there press of warmth. He shouldn’t want this, he knows he shouldn’t. 

People act differently when they’re observed than when they’re not. Scientists have studied it for decades, the general populace has known it for even longer. They perform better when they think they’re being watched; work harder, run faster, wait for a bin to throw their trash in instead of just dropping it on the floor. People do the right thing when others are around. 

Gyuvin is around, he thinks. But it’s not really the same. In the grand scheme of the universe, he and Gyuvin are more like one singular entity. Two clumps of living, breathing cells, intertwined like candy melting together on a warm summer day. 

“No one’s watching.” He says it so quietly he wonders if he even said it at all. 

Gyuvin looks over at him. “Hm?”

What happens to people, he thinks, when they stop being observed? When they’re left to their own devices, closed off from the rest of the world, from watchful eyes that only ever do more harm than good? When no one has to do the right thing, what happens then?

He leans over, presses his lips to Gyuvin’s softly, and closes his eyes. 

The sun warming the back of his neck is the first thing he really registers in his head. Gyuvin’s chest is solid under him, rising and falling shallowly, like a thrum of a bird’s wings. Hands wander over his shoulders before moving up to his neck, pulling him impossibly closer. Gyuvin tastes like summer. Ricky can’t even begin to describe what that tastes like. 

He gasps sharply as he pulls away, pressing his forehead into the crook of Gyuvin’s neck for a long few seconds as he catches his breath. Warm fingers drum softly over his back, with no particular rhythm to them. 

“What was that for?” Gyuvin’s voice is no more than a low rumble. His chest hums gently with every word. 

Ricky breathes in the smell of sweat, smoke, and damp earth. “No one’s watching me now.”

“Yeah?” Gyuvin’s fingers card themselves through his hair, and a tingle travels down his spine at the feeling. “I’m watching.”

Ricky looks up then. Gyuvin’s dark eyes glow so light in the sun they’re almost hazel, piercing right through him. He smiles, and he feels the corners of his eyes wrinkle. “You’re me,” he answers. “It’s not the same.”

“If I’m you,” Gyuvin asks slowly. “What does that make you?”

“Me?” Ricky rests his chin on Gyuvin’s chest. Gyuvin’s sure he looks awful from that angle, but he wouldn’t be able to tell from the way Ricky looks at him, like he’s the only beautiful thing in the world. “Easy. I’m you.”

“If you’re me,” Gyuvin muses, his hands coming up to hold Ricky’s face gently, “then you know everything I’m thinking right now…everything I’m feeling…”

A slow smile spreads across Ricky’s face. “I do,” he says softly.

“Then you’ll know how much I want to do this…” 

A solid, calloused palm presses against his side, pushing his shirt up his torso, and he swears every neuron in his head stops firing. He closes his eyes and buries his face back in Gyuvin’s chest. His breath stutters in his throat to match the one echoing in his ears. In, out. In, out. 

“Can I…?”

Ricky nods. “Please…”

Gyuvin nudges him onto his back, gently. The sunbaked deck is warm under him as he lets Gyuvin take his shirt off, pulling it over his head and tucking it aside. His eyes flutter open, and he slips his hand beneath the hem of Gyuvin’s shirt.

“Take this off…” It comes so softly it almost sounds like a plea, but Gyuvin knows what it really is. He reaches down and sheds his shirt without a second thought.

“Better?” He leans down and kisses Ricky again. Hunger creeps up his throat, heady and hot. 

“Better.” Ricky smiles into the kiss, and pulls him back down. The smooth pressure of Gyuvin’s chest on his makes his heart jump in his chest. He’s so unbelievably broad, his shoulders so wide he thinks if they wrapped around him and held tight he would never escape again. 

His body moves of its own volition, pressing against the solid lines of Gyuvin’s hips. The slow drag of friction sends sparks of dull pleasure through him, and he breathes out a soft moan. 

One of Gyuvin’s hands comes back up to his face, his thumb caressing the soft sharpness of Ricky’s jaw. “Rik…are you sure? You know you don’t have to…”

There it is again, that wrinkle between his eyebrows that appears when he’s fighting a dilemma in his own head. Ricky presses a gentle kiss over the furrow. “I know,” he whispers. “I’m sure. I want to. You trust me, right…?”

Gyuvin nods, the movement fast, jerky. “I trust you.”

Hands fumble with the button of Ricky’s pants, and he lets himself surrender to sensation and nothing else. 

He only really registers waking up after eveningfall. The woods are quieter around them but noisier at the same time, the chirp of crickets and the croak of toads carried through the gentle twilight breeze. The last edges of dusk still color the edges of the sky purple and blue. Gyuvin lies beside him, breathing evenly, eyes closed. Ricky leaves a soft kiss on the top of his head as he reaches down to do up his pants again. There’s still some residual stickiness, but he supposes that can’t be helped. 

“Mm…Rik?” Gyuvin’s arm snakes around his waist, pulling him closer. The evening air is balmy enough for them to be comfortable without their shirts on. “Jesus…what time is it?”

“I don’t know,” Ricky mumbles back, rubbing his eyes. “Late. We should go.”

Gyuvin peppers a few kisses over Ricky’s cheek before sitting up with a groan. “You’re right. There’s a drive back.” He reaches over and grabs both their shirts where they were discarded earlier, handing Ricky’s to him. Ricky takes it silently, pulling it over his head. 

The drive back to Rexburg is spent in peaceful quiet. The lingering buzz of Gyuvin’s body on his leaves him feeling laid bare, like someone has opened him up and left him for the world to see. But as the car cruises along the freeway, he reminds himself there’s no one looking at him but Gyuvin. He takes that sentence and wraps it around himself like a fuzzy blanket; no one else but us. No one else. 

The feeling fades as they pass through Rexburg’s city limits. Lights stream through the windows now, from shopfronts and restaurants and the driveways of houses, and he straightens up in his seat, his hands rubbing against the fabric of his pants mindlessly. Gyuvin glances over, but he says nothing. As the car turns down Amaranth Avenue, the headlights illuminate the bumper of his car in his driveway. 

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” 

Ricky nods, though in the dimness of the car he supposes Gyuvin can’t really see him. “Yeah. See you.”

He steps out of the Volvo and closes the door behind him. He lingers by the door for a few moments, but only when he’s closed the front door behind him does he hear the car pull away. His nails pick unconsciously at healing scabs in his palms. The house stands silent around him. 

He doesn’t see Gyuvin tomorrow, or at all for the rest of the weekend. By sunrise the next day he’s out of Rexburg, on the freeway headed in the direction of Idaho Falls, the trunk and the backseat of his car loaded with packed bags. Clothes, mostly, and stuff like books and CDs, things he hadn’t had the luxury of taking with him back then. In a small plastic folder carefully tucked away sits all the photos he’d carefully unpinned from the corkboard in his room, photos from middle school dances, high school homecomings, summer camps and road trips and the like. There was one picture with Gyuvin in it. Ricky had found it stuck to the back of a photo of him and his middle school friends standing outside a cornfield, yellowed at the edges as most of them were; a picture of Gyuvin sitting on top of the range rover his father used to drive, holding an abnormally large handful of burning sparklers away from his face with a wide grin. He doesn’t remember taking that picture, or even having it, since he’d never laid eyes on it again after pinning it up. Probably taken on the fourth of July some year. 2004, maybe? 2003? The date’s missing from the corner, so he can’t tell.

He’s turning into his apartment building’s garage before the clock on the dashboard says it’s seven. He takes his time unloading his bags, taking three trips back and forth before he’s finished carrying everything upstairs. He’ll spend the weekend unpacking and doing chores; putting the clothes through the laundry once before folding them up and sorting them into his drawers, making space on his bookshelf for his yearbooks and the old sketchbooks he used to doodle in. He’d even pinched the extra toaster from the Rexburg house. His old one had just thrown in the towel, and it wasn’t like anyone living in that house was going to need to own two toasters concurrently. 

He’d taken his sister’s guitar too, after spending a good half hour hunting around the house for a case to put it in. He sets it beside his, between his bed and his desk, making a mental note to pick up a new guitar stand the next time he’s shopping. 

Ricky had never really been able to make up his mind on his sister. She never contacted him after he left, but then again, he’d orchestrated that on his own by leaving his old phone behind without giving anyone the new number. Even if he had, he supposed his parents would have stopped her from calling. Besides, she’d only been thirteen when he left. She might not even have known the real reason why he left at all. 

Well, he would never know, now. He had to come to terms with that. She’d always been a nice girl, though the age gap had stopped them from being closer. If there was anyone for him to grieve, it would be her.

His phone rings in the middle of Saturday afternoon, as he’s in the midst of tuning his sister’s guitar. He glances over at the number. He doesn’t recognize it, but he’s not in the habit of ignoring calls anyway. 

“Hello?”

“Ricky?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

A sigh. “It’s Gyuvin. Are you alright?”

“Oh.” He sets the guitar back down, leaning it carefully against the edge of his table. “Yeah, I’m alright. Sorry, I forgot to call before I left. I was going to.”

“Where are you?”

“Home. I was packing some stuff.”

“Oh…your car wasn’t in the driveway earlier when I passed by.”

“I mean, I’m not there. I came back to Idaho Falls.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes more sense.” A few moments of silence pass before Gyuvin speaks again. “Do you know when you’ll be back?”

Ricky bites his lip, looking around his apartment. He’s filled, suddenly, with the urge to never leave Idaho Falls again. “No. Sorry. Maybe in a couple of days.”

“...Okay. Call if you need anything, alright?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Mhm. Okay, bye.”

The line goes dead, and he places his phone face down on the nightstand, lying back on the bed and digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. The funerals are in a week and a half, and he has to meet with the lawyer again at some point to settle the ownership of his parents’ estate. The thought of going back to Rexburg puts a sinking sort of dread in the pit of his stomach. There’s nothing for him in that town; he’s known that since the day he left. 

He kicks his shoes off and flops face-down onto the bed. Sometimes, if he lies still enough, the memory of Gyuvin’s hands on his skin comes back to him. The only thing that stops him from remembering is burying his face so deep in his pillow it’s hard to breathe. It makes the inside of his chest burn, but it works, and it’s better than feeling. 

He spends nine more days in Idaho Falls before he heads back to Rexburg. He pulls into the driveway of his parents’ house past midnight; the funeral’s at ten tomorrow, at the church five streets away. He doesn’t know much else of the details, he’d left the planning up to the Bishop and the owner of the funeral home. Both of them had known his parents better than he had, anyway. What did he know about flower arrangements?

He pops two sleeping pills before he gets into bed. It’s the first time he doesn’t remember falling asleep since he came back to this house. 

The funeral only starts at ten, but he’s up with the sunrise, buzzing with a nervous dread that makes him want to sink into the bed and climb the walls at the same time. He gives up trying to go back to sleep after a while, heading downstairs and putting toast into the toaster with his toothbrush foaming in his mouth. He eats without tasting the food – a good thing since he knows factually it probably tasted like crap – before going back upstairs and staring at himself in the bathroom mirror. 

The only good thing he can think of, as he inspects his own reflection, is that he has no eyebags. Other than packing away the things he’d brought, which didn’t last him long, being a finite amount of things and all, he’d spent most of his getaway back home sleeping and playing his guitar. At least he looked…well-rested. Nothing else was right. His hair wouldn’t lay flat, and one of his shoes had a hole in them, and he had absolutely no idea what to wear to the funeral. He’d never owned a proper suit, and after he left home he hadn’t had the money to buy one, but the idea of showing up to his parents’ funeral shoddily dressed makes him so sick to his stomach he makes it to the toilet just in time to throw up his breakfast. He spends ten minutes gargling tap water in the sink before he stops tasting acid in his mouth. 

His father had many suits, he knew that as a fact. There was sure to be one that fit him. Ricky takes a deep breath and steels himself, his hand on the doorknob of his parents’ bedroom.

Come on, it’s just a door. 

He scoffs a little, at his own ridiculous behaviour, and goes inside. A thin layer of dust coats everything inside. It’s been almost a month since the last time anything in it was touched. He’s in and out of the room as fast as possible; he grabs the first suit he lays eyes on. Thankfully, a white shirt and a pair of black dress pants are already arranged on the same hanger. His mother always liked to keep things organized. 

Ricky strips down to his underwear, fingers pushing the buttons through the holes carefully. The pants are a little big on him, the shirt and the blazer fit him just fine. The fabric is soft from wear, but everything feels like a fever crawling up his skin. He shouldn’t be wearing his dad’s clothes. He shouldn’t be standing in their bathroom, skulking around their house like an apparition, ghosting around their town like he’s welcome here. He’s not. 

He goes back downstairs to look at the clock hanging over the living room entryway. It’s barely eight. He contemplates making breakfast again; there are only two slices of toast left of the loaf he bought when he came back, and the milk carton is running on empty. 

No, he can’t stomach any of it. But being in this house is making him go stir crazy, so he slips out the front door quietly, gets into his car, and backs out of the driveway. The roads are mostly quiet. It’s summer so there are no school buses, and it’s early; he barely runs into many other cars as he circles through the familiar streets to get to the Albertsons. He weaves through the aisles in silence, gathering his groceries in his arms. He hadn’t bothered with a cart. 

“Lookin’ sharp today, young man,” the cashier greets him, with a toothy smile. She scans his groceries with a practiced hand, hardly looking at them. “Got a job interview or somethin’?”

Ricky forces a smile onto his face, nodding. “Yeah. Job interview.”

“World’s your oyster,” she continues, handing him a bag. “You got this, kid.”

He takes the bag from her and bows his head politely. “Thanks.”

“Bye now, all the best!”

He puts his groceries in the passenger seat and drives home. There’s a suffocating feeling of otherness coming over him, like his body doesn’t belong to him at all, like he’s nothing more than a watcher through his own eyes. He puts the juice away in the fridge, the bread into the bread tin, the cereal up on the shelf. There’s mail in the mailbox to bring in again. It’s full now, almost overflowing, after he’d left it untouched for ten days. More bills, probably. Credit cards, insurance plans, tax refunds. At least the mortgage on the house was paid off. The amount of mail is almost absurd, really. 

Ricky sets the pile of letters on the dining table, and the envelope on the very top catches his eye. It’s big, a full page-sized white envelope, addressed not to either of his parents like every other piece of mail is, but to the family of. He still doesn’t know where his father’s letter opener is. He pries at the seal with his thumb, tearing the envelope open. 

Enclosed are the official state-issued death certificates for the following:...

He slides the certificates back into the envelope, sets it back down on the table, and heads out the door. 

People are already milling around the main sanctuary of the church when he enters. It’s half-past nine. 

“Hey, son.” The Bishop comes up to him, a folder of some sort in his hand, and a cup of coffee in the other. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you around these parts. I’m terribly sorry we had to meet again under these circumstances.”

Ricky nods quickly, wiping imaginary sweat from his palms onto his pants. “Thank you, sir. I, uh…I haven’t been in town these past couple of years. Moved out to Idaho Falls.”

“So I heard,” the Bishop answers with a warm smile. He’s a father, as far as Ricky remembers. He remembers going to Sunday school with his kids. “Your parents told me you were out there gettin’ a good education. Must have been hard bein’ on your own, son.”

He bites his lip and lets his gaze fall to the floor. Sunlight spills in from the open double doors, washing over his sneakered feet. He feels a strange sense of invincibility, all of a sudden. Yes, that’s right. He’d been away from home the past three years learning to stand on his own two feet, getting a college education and forging a path for himself. That was the story. Everyone knew that, so it must be true. 

He imagines that thought forming in his hand, imagines holding it out in front of him like a shield. No weapon formed against thee shall prosper. No one in this town knew the real reason he was forced out of his loving home. No one knew about the deviance that once bloomed inside him like a deadly poison. No one knew anything at all. The thought is almost enough to make his stomach stop churning. 

“Yes, sir,” he says, looking up, mirroring the Bishop’s smile. “It hasn’t been easy at times, but I figured, can’t be livin’ under my parents’ roof forever.”

“Well, I’ll make sure the rest of the stuff is set up,” the Bishop says, giving him a firm pat on the back. “I’m sure people will be coming in any minute. Your family was very loved in the community. They volunteered here almost every week.”

The Bishop turns away to talk to someone else, and Ricky lets out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. The quiet buzz of chatter echoes through the sanctuary. How jarring, really, that the town would soon file into the room and sing the praises of the people who had turned their backs on him without mercy. 

He sits in one of the pews at the very back, without moving, without speaking, until enough people have filled the place that the Bishop stands at the altar and calls for quiet. He supposes, then, that he should move to the front, the pew usually reserved for the family of the deceased. It’s empty; he slides into his seat with his head bowed to avoid obstructing the view of anyone behind him. 

He remembers bits and pieces of the ceremony, but most of it barely registers in his head. There’s singing, and preaching, and speeches from teary-eyed older ladies. He stands and sits when everyone else does. By the time the Bishop steps away from the altar, his mouth is dry. Some water would be nice, but he didn’t bring any with him. 

Someone takes his arm and leads him to the very front of the church. Three caskets lie in a row, with white flowers adorning the top. He’d agreed to it being a closed-casket ceremony. That was the recommendation, the director of the funeral home had told him, for most deaths by injuries. He’s glad he made that decision now; he can’t imagine standing up here, accepting condolences with his head bowed, shaking the hands of people he hasn’t seen in years, with his parents’ faces staring back at him. 

“Oh, my dear Ricky…” Gyuvin’s mother ignores the hand he’s already extended and puts her arms around him. He’s caught off guard for a moment, but the hug feels nice. It’s been a long time since anyone has hugged him like that, or at all, really. “I’m so sorry,” she says softly. “In many ways, I felt like I failed you.”

“You didn’t fail me,” he answers gently, hugging her tight. “You did your best. Thank you for being a mother to me.”

When she pulls away her eyes are wet, and she dabs at them with a handkerchief. “You’ll be just fine, my boy,” she says, with a smile that doesn’t reach her tearing eyes. “You’ve got it in you, I know you have.”

The next time he looks up, Gyuvin is in front of him. He’s dressed in a neat, pressed suit, his collar ironed down, his tie knotted perfectly at the junction of his throat. Ricky extends a hand. Gyuvin takes it. 

“My condolences,” he says softly. He squeezes Ricky’s hand tight. 

Ricky pulls away after a few moments. “Thank you.” 

Gyuvin looks at him, and those sharp, piercing eyes see right through him. Ricky feels defenseless once again, laid bare in front of the entire church, as if everyone walking past could look right into him and see the decay that lies within. 

He makes it through the rest of the line before the nausea becomes too much for him. He stumbles down the first empty corridor he finds and up the stairs, blindly reaching for the handle of the first door he encounters, closing it behind him with a muted slam. It’s dusty, some kind of storage room full of boxes and furniture covered in grey plastic tarp. He sinks down against the wall, his knees suddenly all too weak to support his weight any longer. The nausea still comes and goes in waves, but he knows there’s nothing left in his stomach for him to throw up. 

The door opens and closes again, and shoes click across the floor towards him. 

“Get out!” His voice comes out louder than he’d intended for it to, louder than he’d thought it could be. Gyuvin kneels in front of him, his hands coming up to push Ricky’s shoulders back. 

“Ricky, what’s wrong?

Ricky bites back a scream of frustration. His nails dig into his palms, but the pain doesn’t do anything this time. “I said get out!”

Gyuvin’s grip on his shoulders only tightens. “I’m not getting out, so you can quit that.”

Ricky slumps over against the wall, burying his face in his hands. He’s sure he looks like a mess; his face always gets all red and splotchy when he’s crying or about to cry. “I need to go. I shouldn’t be here.”

“What do you mean you shouldn’t be here?” Gyuvin says softly. “They’re your family.”

“They hate me!” Ricky flings his hands out in front of him in a blind attempt to push Gyuvin away. Gyuvin flinches, but his hands hold tight. “They made that abundantly clear three years ago, and far as I know, they died hating me and everything about me. They would hate that I’m here…shaking hands with everyone, smiling, wearing my father’s fucking clothes-“

“Is it about the suit?” Gyuvin asks. “Because if it is, I’ll drive down to the nearest clothing store and pick one out for you right now.”

He’s patronizing him. Ricky hates it. “You don’t get it! It’s not about the goddamn suit! Everything’s just- it’s wrong. This is all wrong. All I’m good for is doing everything wrong-”

“Ricky, stop.” It’s firm enough that it shakes Ricky out of his rambling, at least for a second. “Breathe. Take a look around. It’s just the two of us, okay? No one’s w-”

“There’s a billion fucking people out there, don’t tell me no one’s watching!”

“I’m not talking about out there!” Gyuvin says, his eyebrows furrowed. “You’re in here, okay? Stop thinking about what’s out there. Stop thinking about the grand scheme of things for just a second.” 

Ricky’s stunned into silence for a good few seconds. All he does is watch Gyuvin, the way his eyes shimmer, the way he’s breathing a little harder than he usually is, the way his hands feel on Ricky’s shoulders. His touch is warm, even through the two layers of clothing Ricky’s wearing. 

“Now tell me what’s really wrong.”

Ricky wracks his mind for the combination of words that would describe the feeling in his chest that makes it hard to breathe when he thinks about going back out into the sanctuary. “I don’t know,” he admits quietly. “Everything. It’s all wrong.”

“Okay. Do you want some water?”

Ricky shakes his head. He’d wanted some earlier, but he doesn’t think he can keep anything down now. 

“Do you want me to go?”

He shakes his head again. “Just sit here? Please?”

Gyuvin sits down beside him, his back against the same wall. “Okay. I’m here.”

They’re sitting close enough for his arm to press against Ricky’s. Ricky doesn’t lean into it or pull away. 

“You left.”

Ricky’s breath hitches in his throat. “I didn’t leave. I was moving stuff.”

Even he can tell how weak of an excuse that sounds like. He watches Gyuvin’s fists clench and unclench in his lap. “Don’t you think I deserve your honesty?” he says quietly. 

God, he hates how small Gyuvin’s voice sounds. Like a child, asking for something he knows he won’t get. “I’m sorry I left.”

“Why?”

“Why am I sorry?”

Gyuvin lets out a soft huff. “No. Why did you leave?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it because of me?” he presses. “Because of what we did?”

Ricky loosens his fists, the tips of his nails are bright red with blood. Gyuvin reaches over and takes his hands slowly, carefully, like he’s afraid moving too fast will scare him away. He doesn’t do anything else, just takes Ricky’s hands and holds them as the silence between them drags on. 

“Do you regret it?” Gyuvin says finally. The sound of movement and talking floats up through the floorboards. Neither of them know how long they’ve been sitting here. 

Ricky doesn’t answer. Gyuvin withdraws his hands and gets up quietly. The door closes behind him, and his words fade to nothing in his mouth. I don’t regret it, he wants to say. Anything to keep him here. He’ll say anything. But they’re long past the point of lying to each other, and he knows Gyuvin deserves better than another half-truth dragged out of his throat. 

He sits there in numb silence until he realizes people must be looking for him. There’s still a burial for him to attend, after all. It takes him a good ten minutes before he finds it in him to get up and walk out of the storage room. 

The rest of the day passes like a blink and like a drag at the same time. He doesn’t see Gyuvin for the rest of the day; not at the burial, and not after. When he backs into his driveway and pulls the key out of the ignition, he feels almost…desolate. It’s silly. He’d spent the entire day pushing Gyuvin away, but all he wants now is for him to be here. 

He heads upstairs, shedding his father’s clothes and stepping into the shower. The water’s tepid, as it usually is in summer, and does little to clear his mind or do anything other than getting the sweat and grime off him. By the time he’s clothed and he’s run a towel over his hair enough for it to stop dripping, he’s laden down with a sense of quiet exhaustion, but something else, too. An hour of tossing and turning in his bed answers the question for him. 

Ricky sits up in bed and picks his phone up off the nightstand. He has to scroll down in his call log to look for Gyuvin’s number, from the day Gyuvin called him in Idaho Falls. The phone rings, once, twice, three times, four times. It continues ringing until the call drops, and Ricky stares at the phone in his hand as if it knows what it’s done. 

Great. Now Gyuvin’s ignoring him. He lies back down on his bed and groans into his pillow loud enough his throat hurts. 

No, he has to do something. He owes it to Gyuvin, after everything he’d put Gyuvin through since he came back. He had to be the one to go to him. Another apology, he thinks, with a wry scoff. How many times was he going to apologize before he stopped doing things he had to be sorry for?

The route to Gyuvin’s house is still so familiar it’s almost embedded in his bones, like he could sleepwalk all the way and not even trip on the huge crack in the corner pavement. He finds himself at Gyuvin’s front door ten minutes later, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands shoved firmly in the pockets of the hoodie he’s wearing. As if it makes any sense for him to be having second thoughts now. 

His phone rings suddenly, loud in the stillness of the night. He scrambles to fish it out of his pocket, his fingers missing the answer button twice in his blind panic before he finally presses it to his ear. He hadn’t even looked to see who it was. “Hello?”

The door swings open. Gyuvin stands in the doorway, his phone pressed to his ear. “You called.”

Ricky blinks at him for a long few moments before he has the sense to drop the call and put his phone back into his pocket. “Yeah. You, uh…you didn’t pick up. I thought…”

“I was in the shower,” Gyuvin answers. His towel is still hanging around his neck, and his damp hair falls into his eyes. “Why are you here?”

Ricky’s a little taken aback by his blunt question. “...Oh. Do you want me to go?”

“I never said that,” Gyuvin answers, his expression unreadable. “But you don’t seem to want to be around me, so I figured I’d stop barging into your personal space.”

“That’s not-”

“Isn’t it?” Gyuvin interrupts. There’s an unmistakable hint of ice in his tone now. Ricky supposes he deserves it. “Because all you do is shut me out and act like I’m some terrible intrusion into your life, hell, you even left Rexburg to get away from me. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to make of that.”

Ricky lets out a quiet huff. “Can we not talk about this right here?”

For a second, Gyuvin almost looks like he’s going to turn Ricky away. “Fine,” he relents. “My room.”

Ricky follows him up the stairs and exactly twelve steps to the left. Gyuvin closes the door and locks it behind them. 

“I’m not mad at you, Ricky,” he says slowly. He reaches behind him to put his towel up on a hook. 

“You should be.”

Gyuvin lets out a dry laugh. “Yeah, I probably should be. But I’m not. I just want to understand what’s going on in your head. Sometimes I think I’m almost getting there, but then the next second you’re gone again, and I never really know if I was close to anything.”

“I know it must be confusing,” Ricky answers slowly, tasting the words before saying them. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Gyuvin answers firmly. “Stop being sorry. Just-” He interrupts himself with a groan. 

“Just what?”

Gyuvin wraps his arms around Ricky’s shoulders and squeezes tight, and Ricky feels the tension drain from his body like a running tap. Ricky buries his face in Gyuvin’s shoulder and breathes in the overwhelming scent of his body soap. 

“Just stay,” Gyuvin whispers softly, by his ear. “The rest of it, it doesn’t- it doesn’t matter. We can figure it out.”

Ricky nods. His nails dig into Gyuvin’s back, but Gyuvin doesn’t pull away. “We can figure it out?”

“Yeah.” Gyuvin sighs softly, and his breath warms Ricky’s neck. “We can.”

He collapses onto the bed when Gyuvin’s arms finally loosen around him, like a puppet with cut strings. There’s an exhaustion that makes everything feel like it’s far away from him. Gyuvin flips the light off and lies next to him in silence, the warmth of his body steady and there. In the darkness, it almost feels like what they have could last longer than just a moment. 

“What do I do with all this hatred?” Ricky asks quietly. Gyuvin hears his breath shudder on its way out. “Where does it all go?”

“...I don’t know.” Gyuvin wishes he knew what to say. “We just sit with it in silence. Until it stops feeling like hatred and starts feeling like something else.”

The bed shifts beneath them. Ricky’s face presses into Gyuvin’s chest, and an arm snakes itself around Gyuvin’s waist. In return, Gyuvin presses his fingers gently into where the nape of Ricky’s neck connects with the base of his skull, massaging softly, and Ricky can’t help the mewl of pleasure and relief he lets out. There’s something about how strangely vulnerable it feels to be touched there, even after everything else they’ve already done. 

Gyuvin’s voice is a quiet rumble in the darkness. “Feel better?”

Ricky gives nothing more than a noncommittal hum. His eyes are already beginning to flutter closed. There’s a floaty, heady sort of quality to everything that makes forming words even more difficult than it already usually is. 

“Go to sleep,” Gyuvin says softly. Ricky barely registers his words as his eyes slip closed and the room around him fades away. 

─

Gyuvin never lays eyes on Ricky ever again. By morning he’s gone, the other half of the bed empty. The driveway of 9011 Amaranth Avenue stands empty for two weeks until the “For Sale” sign appears on its lawn overnight. He still drives by the place periodically, more a force of habit than anything else, but the curtains are always drawn, and the house stands silent. A moving truck shows up a week after Ricky disappears. Where are you going, he asks the men bringing boxes and boxes out the front door, where are you taking all these things? 

To the dump, they answer him. Their only instruction was to get rid of everything that wasn’t stuck to the ground. 

Who gave you those instructions, he presses, was it a man? Dark hair?

They tell him they have no idea. They only spoke with him over the phone. 

They spent three days clearing every inch of memory out of the house at 9011 Amaranth Avenue. The “For Sale” sign disappears a month later. In another month the new owners move in, and Gyuvin stops taking the shortcut through Amaranth Avenue for good. He can’t watch them put up garden gnomes and paint the roof a different color. It sickens him. 

“Mail for you,” his mother calls, sliding an envelope over the dining table to him. “Don’t know what that’s about.”

Gyuvin finishes the last spoonful of his dinner, inspecting the envelope in his hand as he brings his dirty dishes to the sink. It’s a full-sized envelope. Important-looking. He opens it carefully once he’s in his room. 

A piece of thick paper slides out of the envelope, and his eyebrows furrow as he reads the close-printed words. A title deed. It’s an address he doesn’t recognize. 

He puts his sneakers back on and heads back downstairs, getting into the car. 

“Where are you going?” his mother calls after him. It’s late. 

“Just a drive,” he answers, with a wave of his hand. “I’ll be back soon.”

The freeways are mostly deserted by this time of night. Gyuvin drives way past the speed limit, but no one’s around to see it. As his car’s navigation system brings him closer to the address on the title deed he didn’t recognize, realization strikes him. 

The house in the middle of the forest. 

He scrambles out of the car, barely remembering to shut the door after him. It’s pitch black and he can’t see more than five feet in front of him, but he stumbles through the spruce trees, putting his hands out to keep his balance. But the house is silent when he pushes the door open. No one has been here in weeks. 

The envelope’s still in his hand, a little wrinkled from where his fingers had crushed it without realizing. He digs around inside. Another piece of paper slides out. It’s small, hardly the size of his palm.

He walks over to the open window, holding it up in the moonlight. It’s a picture of himself sitting on top of his dad’s old car, holding some sparklers. Fourth of July, four years ago, or was it five?

The screeching of crickets in the distant forest grows louder as Gyuvin pushes the door open to the deck. The picture is a little warped around the edges. There’s a hole in the top, like someone had stuck a pin through it.

He holds the picture close to his chest as he lays down on the deck. All around him, the forest fades to stillness.