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One time there was a power cut and the sudden avalanche of silence woke him the way normal people were woken by a noise.
Gavin appeared in the doorway, his unmistakable profile silhouetted against the murky orange seeping through the house from the streetlamps outside.
He was bouncing a flashlight against his leg nervously, a shitty pink and white plastic thing Geoff had given him as a joke last Christmas and he said, "I'm bored, Rye."
Ryan rubbed his eyes, digging his fingers deep so the sleep crumbs bit like glass, and said, "Alright, let's go out."
---
Gavin dozed in the car, long legs cramped and bloodless at the knees from pressing against the dashboard, and only woke up again somewhere in the countryside –the silver of dawn just beginning to lighten outside his window.
Ryan’s own was still indigo and starlight, occasional shadows of sheep and faraway farmhouse windows.
He watched as Gavin leaned his head against the cool glass and watched the darkness, fingers tapping along idly to some weird pop song on the radio. Ryan couldn’t help but tap along with him on the steering wheel and gearstick in time with the beat that blared from the speakers loud enough to shake their bowels loose.
"Where are we going?" Ryan yelled over the song. It was Gavin’s idea to get out of the house, but he’d never thought to ask the Brit where to? Only let him lead him along like a lost puppy.
"Dunno," Gavin yelled back, "I wanna see the lights since we don’t have any," and closed his eyes again.
"Nearest town is four hours away, won't get there 'til mid-morning."
"I don't care." Gavin laughed.
Ryan was aware it was probably love, this gurgle in his stomach, though he wasn't sure whether it was because of everything or in spite of everything, and he didn't want to ruin it with words like he ruined everything else.
He reached out, swiped the volume knob all the way to the right, wound down his window so the thud of music and the whip of wind filled the shitty old Mini, and Gavin grinned at him sideways like some big-nosed Adonis in skinny jeans.
"I don't care, just drive."
---
They drove until the dark behind them was as far away as the rainy clouds Gavin remembered from home.
The grass blurred in front of Ryan’s eyes the farther they drove, trying to focus his eyes on the grey dry of the highway.
The orange light got higher and higher in the sky as Gavin dozed against the window, his knee still bouncing in time to the radio. The road felt endless, as though the repeated lines along it just continued on and on into nothing until the point they couldn’t stop. Ryan hoped they did. Maybe they could just keep driving until his mind separated Gavin from his feelings, from himself.
As the hours passed, Ryan’s eyes started to betray him. He had thoughts of veering off the road by accident; Gavin shocked forward, a broken car.
He found some Motel 6 to avoid it, dust rising around it as he pulled the car to a jerked stop. It looked settled in its spot as if it had grown from the ground to meet them there.
Ryan knew these weren’t the lights Gavin wanted to see. The bright ones, vivid and different from home. Technicolor like Vegas. Instead, he got the heat and dirt of the highway, the sticky leather of the car, hot dry air blowing through like a warm blanket over your skin.
He stepped outside it and squinted into the air with hands on hips, surveying a scene. It’s vast, how Ryan imagined Gavin in his mind. Something a thousand miles away from his world, even though he was still in it.
“This is what’s here,” Ryan told him, an excuse, or an answer. Words that filled up the vastness of empty white space around them. Gavin looked at him as if he’d just realized Ryan was there, as though he’d interrupted a moment between Gavin and himself.
He waved a hand in front of his eyes to ward off the flies and looked ahead. Gavin deserved blue skies, fireworks, a bright mess of colors exploding like they did in Ryan’s head when he was alone and found Gavin at the front of his mind.
“There’s no lights,” Gavin smiled, like a cool breeze through the sticky air. “Let’s stay, though. I’m tired.”
Ryan said nothing, tried to make his mind as vast and empty as the fields of grass surrounding him. He was hyperaware of everything now, every move Gavin made next to him in the front seat, how empty it felt to look over and find him gone. It felt good sometimes and bad in others, like driving away or coming back home.
“Let’s stay until the lights are on back home.”
Gavin said nothing in reply as they walked ahead into it, leaving the road behind.
---
Gavin was humming some off-key tune to himself as he lay on the bed –a bed they’d checked very thoroughly for various bugs and educational paraphernalia.
He was reading one of the many pamphlets the motel supplied –most of which are for restaurants he was sure they’d passed and mistaken for abandoned homes, as there was nothing around them for miles-, but Ryan could see him sneaking glances up at him, something glittering behind his all-too-feminine lashes.
The pure laziness –or contentedness, he wasn’t too sure which it was now- reminded him of when kissing Gavin turned his heart into a drum, hammering with the weight and pressure to rival any machinery.
Now their kisses were slow and languid, less fiery, but no less passionate as they were before.
The first time they’d kissed, bathed in the light of a bright full moon and under the witness of billions of stars, Ryan thought he would burst. It was like kissing the sun, bright and colorful, often leaving spots dancing before his eyes.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Gavin said matter-of-factly. Ryan shrugged –having Gavin in another room would give him time to clear his head anyway. “You coming?”
---
Fireflies littered the darkness around them, hypnotic and beautiful. Gavin reached out his hands to try and catch them, but found himself distracted by the golden lights already attached to his arm.
To Ryan, the fireflies made Gavin look that much more ethereal as more and more gathered around him, almost as if he were some fairytale princess.
The small, flashing bugs shone bright on his skin, leaving trails like molten gold running through his veins. There were even several in the Brit’s hair, giving him a broken halo of moving lights. Ryan was all at once enraptured, watching spirals of smoke disappearing up into the darkness.
The spiraling fog of Gavin’s breath dancing languidly among the fireflies, curling around the small lights as they moved around in quiet rhythm, the near perfect halo of light around his head, the bright shine of his eyes as he looked on in wonder at the tiny insects.
The scene was imprinted in the back of Ryan’s eyelids like a photograph he never wanted to erase, and Ryan wanted nothing more than to kiss him right then and there.
So he did.
The fireflies scattered like startled birds flocking away from predators, but it went unnoticed, the two tied up in a passionate and cold -even with the layers of clothing they’d put on to ward off the nighttime bite- kiss.
But, even with the cold nipping at their fingertips and random fireflies buzzing around their ears, it was beyond perfect.
---
They took a ride into town the next morning, just to stave off the boredom of the motel.
It was a small place, some nameless back-of-the-world town in the middle of nowhere surrounded by nothing but wildlife and sand, but –and neither of them could place the feeling- it felt like more of a home than their apartment did.
Maybe it was the friendly faces or the smell of freshly baked everything emitting from nearly every storefront. Maybe it was the fact that none of those friendly faces silenced their hello’s and how are you’s as the two made their way, hand in hand, down the nearly empty sidewalks.
The buzz of cicadas and crickets in tandem were close enough to make music out of –which, of course, they did, humming along and adding notes to the music of the insects and the tapping of passerby feet.
The whole town seemed unfazed by the power outage, feeling as though it belonged in the untouched limits of the world. Chimneys billowing smoke from ovens, plastic open signs blowing in the breeze –it all made Ryan think of some Old Western-esque movie town the way it just blended into its surroundings.
They walked and hummed along until the daylight grew too intense and they had to retreat indoors –and only after the already-sparse shade became scarcer as the sun traveled onward.
They’d stepped into the first shop they came to –a small, but well-ventilated costume shop run by a cheery elderly woman who welcomed them with, in Ryan’s opinion, way too much enthusiasm.
Ryan wanted to leave –the sight of the horribly-made costumes making his teeth itch uncomfortably- but Gavin was already lost in the haven of loosely-sewn costumes and water based makeup, and he wasn’t about to go back out into the sweltering heat of the desert town.
All he had to do was wait. Gavin would get bored and they’d brave the heat together until the next shop.
Gavin would describe the trip between the buildings like it was some sort of quest, and to Ryan it felt like one.
One of them would mumble encouraging words and, in their minds, it would be very dramatic –but he knew they looked like fools.
Ryan grinned as he tried to imagine what it looked like to the locals –two strangers jumping under overhangs to steal kisses before fighting their way through the block, sometimes pretending like they were too weary to travel on, making the other pull them towards the next shady spot.
Gavin sidled up to Ryan cautiously and looked up at him with a look so pitiful, Ryan was hard-pressed to find a single no in his vocabulary.
“Rye, this might not be the best time, but I just found a PCV nurse outfit and I’m havin’ it.” He said, sounding totally serious.
Ryan hummed with a thoughtful smile and let Gavin drag him to the back of the shop.
One look at the costume and Ryan pulled out his wallet.
---
Ryan woke the next morning to the muffled sound of one-sided conversation.
The sun arched through the blinds in the way it only does in the early morning, orange and bright, reflecting off the dust. It was already warming, and Ryan pushed himself up on his elbows as the tiredness washed over him. The bed was empty beside him. It was always hard when Gavin wasn't there, and sleeping was the hardest.
The door was cracked, and the murmurs kept filtering in from outside. He could pick that accent anywhere, even when he couldn't place the words. It was familiar now, the clash of their voices, the way Gavin's rose and fell. He was about to swing his legs over the bed and onto the dull brown carpet when the door swung open, and Gavin quietly slipped inside.
"Sorry," he said as soon as he saw Ryan, holding out a hand like he was reaching for him, "had to call my parents. Don't want an Amber alert out on me."
Ryan laughed as Gavin flopped onto the bed beside him, running his hands through his hair. A phantom weight had become a real one, everything settled now that Gavin was beside him. "I think that's only for children."
"They've been worried," Gavin mumbled to the ceiling. "They called home and I wasn't there." He was tired from last night, the fun they'd had still settled in his bones, and he didn't want to remember the real world was out there. This, the road - that should be enough.
"Ryan, do you wanna go home?" Gavin said it simply, like it was a question that needed to be asked. Maybe they did. All Ryan could see in front of him was Gavin and the road, his own happy tunnel vision. It wasn't a break from real life, whatever that was. Moving along was just their new reality.
"Nah."
Gavin smiled wide and bright, in a way that made his heart hurt.
---
"Left or right?"
Gavin turned from Ryan to look at the road ahead of them. It was a dead end now, a mass of dust and desert, the highway branching in different directions.
He couldn't be sure where they were, now.
He didn't even read the signs.
He thought they'd been going for long enough to reach the water soon, if they were lucky. Hit it, see the vast expanse of blue, and promise never to go back.
Gavin let his head fall back against the headrest, and some part of it made Ryan smile, hand still on the wheel.
"I don't know Ryan, both of them sound appealing," he half-joked, shifting in his seat. He dug a shiny something out of his pocket. "Flip a British coin."
Ryan breathed out a laugh as he took it and climbed out of the car. The heat was unsettling on his skin, and he knew Gavin hated it, even more of a bother to him. He positioned the coin to flip, ready to get back in the car with its cool air, when-
"Wait," Gavin started, putting his hand over Ryan's, "which way's back?"
"Behind us," Ryan answered, and Gavin's hand left his in a way that made it feel cold. He flipped the coin and didn't bother to catch it, letting it tumble into the dirt. Gavin scuffed his shoe along the ground to clear the way.
"Tails," he mused, "that's a left, then."
Ryan wasn't sure where it would take them. He hadn't been sure of anything for a long time, since Gavin had walked into his life with a stupid grin and bright eyes, lips on his and hands on skin.
He was sure, though, that he wanted to keep driving, even when he was too tired to see the road.
As long as it ended with Gavin, above everyone else, sitting by his side.
Ryan turned to get back in the car when Gavin stepped towards him.
"Wait," Gavin stuttered, moving a little awkwardly to stand in front of Ryan. He hesitated, close enough that the air between them felt like crackling sparks.
When Gavin kissed him, it was as it always was - a calmness, a breath, cool air on hot skin. No one would ever find them here, at this stupid end of a highway in the middle of a vast nowhere.
He let his body relax back against the hood of the car, bringing Gavin forward with him, his hands next to Ryan on the hot metal. Maybe they could just stay on the highway and never get off the road. Who even knew if the lights were on back home?
Suddenly, Gavin pulled away, gone around the side of the car as quickly as he'd started. Ryan held out his hands to the sound of Gavin's laugh.
"Can't do that while you're driving," he explained with a grin, opening the door and sliding into the car. Ryan had to laugh at the nothing ahead of them, at the fork in the road. He'd get him back for that later.
The car spluttered to life underneath them, Gavin's leg bouncing up and down, a grin Ryan couldn't remove from his face.
There was something to learn from all of this, feeling nothing would change if they just kept moving forward. It wasn't true but it felt endless. Everything they saw, everything he felt grew bigger each day. He was sure all of it would consume him, eat him up and spit him out.
He kept on driving, never looking back.
---
They hit the next town at nightfall, the sky lit with unkempt stars.
It was further than he thought. He didn’t mind being the driver, marking spots on a map, plotting the distance between gas station and food stops, but it and the heat tired him down to his core.
The nights were always a blur. He marked them by pulling into motels and collapsing into the sheets with Gavin.
Sometimes they made a mess of them, exhausting him in the best way, living off Gavin's sounds and the pressure building. Other times he closed his eyes and pulled Gavin towards him like a comfort. The one thing keeping him grounded on the open road.
That night, he stepped out of the car and their bed was the furthest thing from his mind. In the desert, there was barely a light, not like back home. The stars were always blocked, or maybe they were alive and he just never noticed. Out here alone millions of stars pinpricked the sky, dotting it like freckles on skin, shining bright against the black sky.
He stopped to look as Gavin walked ahead, eyes on his phone, waiting for reception out of nowhere.
"Hey," Ryan started, moving fast to keep up until he was in the right place by Gavin's side. "Look up."
Gavin slid his phone into his pocket and arched his head backwards. Their shoulders brushed; the concept of space between them as empty as the fields of dust. It was quiet for a long moment. Not the quiet when you come home after a long day, when you lie next to someone at night. The kind of quiet that can only exist in a place where there's almost nothing, where you have to make something out of it yourself.
Where it's you and someone else, and you're all you have in what's left.
"Wow," Gavin breathed, and Ryan turned to look. He saw Gavin's neck, his eyelashes, the smile on his face. "Sort of makes you feel insignificant down here."
He wondered how he ever looked at someone else and thought it was love, as though everything was nothing until now.
"Yeah," Ryan told him, and after a long moment turned back to look at the sky himself. He was aware it was probably love, the way Gavin looked at him, though he wasn't sure if it was because they were here, or if it would fade away as the desert did, a memory in a rear-view mirror.
He felt Gavin's fingers reach out to touch his, making him release a breath into the humid air. Gavin's right, he thought, as he was about some things when the stars aligned. It's insignificant.
It could all wait, until they got home.
---
The air conditioning is already broken, leaving Ryan's back effectively glued to the leather seat, his mind fills up with the possibility that this road-trip may have been a Very Bad Idea.
Gavin is flopped across the passenger seat, limbs reaching haphazardly in every direction, wild hair pasted to his forehead. He reaches around his own leg to wiggle the dial, hoping for some far-out radio station to fill the silence.
"No station for miles, I’m afraid.” Ryan explains with a sigh as Gavin lowered the volume a few notches.
Ryan glances in the rear view mirror, watching the flatland of nothingness roll on into the distance behind them.
Gavin gives up on the radio after a while and leans back against the seat. Ryan’s sure he’s gone to sleep, but Gavin opens a single eye to frown blearily at him.
"Rye," he rasps, "When I die of heat stroke, I give you permission to dump my body."
"Forcibly removing your dead body from this car sounds like a lot more trouble than it's worth.” Ryan comments, tapping his thumb against the wheel absently.
Ryan' neck is stiff, and his eyes are beginning to ache with the never-ending fields they've been driving through for the past four hours.
"I suppose you would have to, sooner or later. Could you imagine the smell decomposing would give off in this heat?” Gavin mumbles almost incoherently.
Ryan frowns. He does not want to imagine any sort of smell in this heat.
The air is utterly still, dead with humidity. This heat-wave has permeated Texas’ countryside for the last month, ruthless and inescapable, and the two of them are directly within its clutches.
“If it’s going to be this bloody hot,” Gavin pointed out, “We may as well find a beach to die at.”
And so they had set out for Palacios, a good two days drive away in Ryan’s beat up van –with its chipped paint, dents, and inability to start on every third try, it was more of a tragedy than an actual vehicle.
“Why is it going to take us so bloody long, Rye?” Gavin had complained when Ryan told him how long it would take.
“Because we are on the other side of Texas, Gavin. Six miles that way and we hit the border of New Mexico.” Ryan had grumbled right back, already knowing he would have to sit through Gavin’s pouting through half the trip.
Gavin is a pitiful, sweating heap of spaghetti limbs next to him, and continues to barely maintain a vertical position as Ryan drives them along the highway, ignoring the car’s disapproving coughs.
Next to him, Gavin's head falls back, exposing the long line of his throat. His lips are slightly parted, breath coming in little puffs that shift the sandy hair along his forehead.
Ryan swallows and stares with determination at the sparse signs randomly appearing on the near-desolate highway.
---
Gavin spends the next several hours with his head half-out the window in an attempt to stave off the heat.
At some point, he unearths a near-ancient mix-tape from somewhere in the over-flowing dashboard cubby, and with its retrieval his vitality returns.
The two fill the silence singing along to songs they only partially remembered, their incredibly loud, raucous, and terrible sing-along consumes the better part of two hours –as Gavin cannot help but put Why Do Fools Fall In Love on at least four more times before Ryan’s ready to chuck the mix-tape out the window.
More than once, Ryan catches Gavin' eyes, crinkled green and yellow with happiness in the setting sun, and Ryan has to look away.
---
Just as the sky begins to fade into a wash of pinks and deep purples –or just as Ryan has lost all feeling in his left leg-, they pass a sign that proclaims: "Welcome to Leakey!"
Gavin turns in his seat to face Ryan. His hair had dried considerably, though it stands up in several new and unusual directions, and his handsome, angled face is shiny in some places.
"What if we stayed here tonight? In some shitty motel, I mean. We're ahead of schedule, and if I spend another night in this car, my spine will collapse."
"Sure," Ryan says, straightening in his seat. The temptation of a pillow, working AC, and, more importantly, a shower -is irresistible.
"And we can head out first thing in the morning." Gavin adds. Ryan agrees again, and they turn into the first motel they come across not ten minutes later.
It certainly isn't The Hilton, but there’s a double bed, a shower, and a television with three channels. Ryan throws himself face-first onto the itchy comforter, sighing happily.
"Bed," he points out to Gavin, who deposits his threadbare bag onto the small table next to the TV –or what Ryan is sure these people think a TV is supposed to be- and digs around for his phone to call his parents.
Ryan’s not sure if it’s to check in or ask for more money, but either way he can’t find himself to care. The bed's too comfortable and the air conditioning is on full blast, the almost freezing air hitting him right on the face.
Gavin's mother and father are not wealthy, but they’re warm, and they love their son deeply.
The Frees live in a small cottage on the outskirts of the English countryside, and for Ryan, it’s filled with happy memories from every time he’d ever been invited to stay.
Soft beds, the morning smell of homemade breakfast, swimming in the small lake nearby, the massive swing Gavin's father had strung up for Gavin when he’d been twelve, which could fit both of them if they squished.
Ryan vividly remembers Gavin' hips digging into his own, one tanned arm draped over his shoulder, Gavin' slightly high, squeaky laugh in his ear.
In truth, he’d always been at least a little in love with Gavin Free.
It takes about twenty seconds for them to decide that getting uproariously drunk in their shitty motel room is a Very Good Idea, and immediately set off in search of provisions.
They wander the liquor store, comparing prices -eventually settling on a case of some off-brand beer neither could remember hearing about. The short journey back to the motel is filled with Gavin’s vibrant cheer as he excitedly talks about drinking games and making something ‘worth filming’.
Back at the room, Gavin alternates between sipping his beer and shrieking along to the crackling radio, ignorant of any neighbors they should have here. Ryan’s shouting and grinning along with him, and all-in-all, he feels really, stupidly happy.
---
They woke up early the next morning.
The dawn was still soft over the horizon, though one would be hard-pressed to find a single ray of sunlight bursting forth from behind dimly lit trees or over rooftops. The day was too dreary for it –rainclouds buffering the natural beauty of the sunrise into grey nothingness.
There was no silence, as one would expect from the earliest hour of daybreak, but there were no sounds of whirring engines or the faint hum of passing vehicles on the road to drown out the nervous early tapping of a woodpecker through the cacophony of crickets and morning birdsong.
Early felt like a hangover, lasting, throbbing, giving you the ability to become painfully aware of every sound, every movement. Every breath.
Early smelled like faded leaves massing on wet earth, combining the two scents in a moldy smelling concoction.
Early was bug bites on bare skin as you try and breathe off another night of sleeplessness in the cold morning air.
As Ryan turned to regard a half-dressed Gavin he realized something even greater, past all the drowsiness and bug-bitten skin and muggy about-to-rain atmosphere on the horizon.
Early was going home.