100 Days (5 page)

“You sound like Alice, you know,” Jake says fondly, shaking his head and trying to count how many times he has heard Aiden’s mom utter the words, “You’ll catch your death of cold.”

“It’s getting worse,” Aiden admits sheepishly. “I guess we really are all destined to become our mothers, after all.”

Just like that, Jake stiffens, the tension setting his spine arrow-straight quicker than the crack of a whip. His head spins: How quickly he’s seven years old all over again, the light from Aiden’s living room spilling out into the hallway, a yellow rectangle framing his dad as he kneels down in front of Jake and takes his shoulders. His grip on the blue and white string around his pastry box tightens until it cuts into the creases of his fingers, and he closes his eyes, inhaling slowly.

“I swear to god, I want to shoot everywhere in this state,” Jake says now, pocketing his phone and settling back into his seat, his left leg crossed over his right. He picks up the camcorder from where it sits on the dashboard, the plastic casing warm from the midday sun beating almost oppressively down on the RV, and flips out the screen to go through some of Aiden’s footage from yesterday. He has to do something to distract himself from the tension.

“It certainly has something,” Aiden agrees.

Jake scrolls back through the footage until he finds the panoramic shot of the Charles River that Aiden took from their vantage point by Harvard Bridge. Even with such a state-of-the-art camcorder, there is no capturing the full magic of the blue-backed skyline and the sun sparkling out over the water; it is breathtaking, cinematic, a place where anything could happen—a place where Jake
wants
to make things happen. The location is a cinematographer’s dream.

“Doesn’t it? I feel like I’ve had this blank canvas put in front of me,” Jake says. “I don’t know why they don’t use this place more. There’s so much untapped potential.”

“I can see you there. Back in Boston,” Aiden says, absently tapping his fingers against the steering wheel.

“You can?”

“Cities suit you. Don’t think I’ve forgotten the Philadelphia trip.”

“I thought we agreed never to talk about the Philadelphia trip.”

“Well, you know,
before
the whole public indecency thing… I’ve never really seen you like that. It was like you came alive; I don’t know how else to put it. Here even more so. You’re all color.”

Jake chuckles and shakes his head, trying not to notice the way Aiden’s lips strain to keep hold of his smile when his eyes catch Jake’s and the mirth fades back into that same hesitant, considering look.

“Jake, about yesterday… I wasn’t—”

“It’s fine. Really,” Jake says, cutting him off and reaching over to cover Aiden’s hand with his own. He shoots him a tight smile, wishing and hoping and praying that Aiden will just let it go, file it under the list of things that Jake doesn’t want to talk about and move on.

Aiden returns his eyes to the road, nods after a brief pause and, as he turns off the freeway, says, “Okay.”

A few quiet minutes later, they’re parked in the small beach lot behind Devon’s on Commercial Street in Provincetown, the scent and sound of the ocean waves chasing after them as they make their way around to the front of the restaurant. Jake takes in the weathered white siding of the building next door, the paint battered from the wood by the salty sea air. A few couples are seated outside beneath the black awning, and Jake can’t help but let his eyes linger a fraction too long on two boys sharing a stack of blueberry pancakes and proudly holding hands across the table. When one of them looks up over his boyfriend’s shoulder with strands of red hair falling over his eyes, Jake offers him a small smile.

“Did you see the two boys holding hands out front?” he asks Aiden when enough silence has passed since placing their orders that it has begun to feel uncomfortable. It is as if Aiden is just itching to bring it all back up again so that he can try to fix it—or something equally frustrating.

“Adorable, right?” Aiden answers, sliding his hand palm-up across the table and waggling his fingers.

“I’m not holding hands with you,” Jake says. Rather than give in to the urge to grab onto Aiden and hold on tight, he pulls his napkin from the table and sets it across his lap, giving his hands something to do. He takes a small sip of his iced tea, hoping that the cold will help clear his mind, because this is beginning to prove problematic—it’s
Aiden,
for Christ’s sake, Aiden, his best friend of sixteen years and
nothing more.
Feelings never lead anywhere good, and as Aiden himself always says, sex just complicates everything—though when Jake started putting “Aiden” and “sex” in the same train of thought, he doesn’t know.

“Aw, Jakey,” Aiden whines, with his most pathetic wounded puppy expres­sion. Jake looks up and concentrates on the exposed white beams and the checked, cylindrical light fixtures suspended over the tables. “Come
on,
everyone else is doing it.”

“Those are the exact words you said to me in Philly, and look how
that
turned out,” Jake says archly, glancing around at the other patrons. Granted, he sees a smattering of same- and opposite-sex couples holding hands—but they don’t exactly form a majority. “And besides, not
everyone
else is doing it.”

“But they could if they wanted, and isn’t that the point?”

“Can we just talk about how you’ve already started making plans to retire here, instead? Because I saw the look on your face down by the beach.”

Finally withdrawing his hand with a sigh, Aiden shifts his gaze from side to side and fiddles with his fork. “Not true.”

“So
true, Aiden Calloway. Come on, you don’t think about what it’ll be like to be old?”

“All the time.”

“I knew it.”

“I think it’s going to be fantastic. Who really wants to be young forever?”

“Ask a senior citizen.”

Aiden snorts. “I guess. But just picture it—a little house down by the beach, plaid robe and slippers, newspapers in the morning…”

“Sounds pretty perfect,” Jake says, “and just like your grandfather.”

“We talked about it a few times,” Aiden says, tracing circles on the table­cloth. A sad smile tugs at his mouth. “I miss talking to him on Sunday afternoons.”

“I miss him, too,” Jake says quietly.

“You know what I miss the most, though?”

“What?”

“His sense of humor,” Aiden says. “Whenever I’d ask him what he wanted for his birthday or Christmas, he’d always say, ‘Make sure whatever you get me is something
you
like, because you’re getting it back when I die!’”

Jake laughs his first real laugh since yesterday and relaxes into his seat; the resid­ual tension drains from him until he can almost feel it soaking out through the soles of his shoes.

“Eggs Benedict?”

Jake glances up at the waitress he hadn’t noticed approaching and nods. The smell of hollandaise sauce intermingled with applewood-smoked bacon is heavenly, and he swallows thickly as his mouth begins to water. Suddenly he feels ravenous.

After the waitress has slipped their bill onto the table and excused herself, Aiden tears off a piece of his French toast with his fork and asks, “So what’s the plan for tonight?”

“Go to the RV park, get signed in, watch our movie and then head to A-House,” Jake answers.

“Ah, so
that’s
the reason you brought those leather pants,” Aiden teases. “The Halloween costume was just a convenient cover.”

“The place has
three
bars, Aiden. And if you don’t watch it, I might have to tie you up and leave you there for the bears to feast on.”

“But…” Aiden trails off with an exaggerated look of faux puzzlement. “How did you know I like that?”

Jake just laughs, shakes his head, and takes another bite of his brunch.

647 miles

Day Nine: Rhode Island

It’s been a little over a week since they left Brunswick, and Aiden can already feel a shift taking place. Something he can’t put a name to has burrowed beneath the layers of his skin and taken root, is spreading outward, and the farther back he tries to follow the thread, the more lost in his own history with Jake he becomes.

Aiden decides that it’s just a sex thing. And that’s fine. He can put the sex out of his mind, because sex only ever complicates things. He found that out for himself after those two fumbling encounters with one of his roommates back in London—not to mention what happened to his parents when his father decided that his mother wasn’t enough anymore, that none of them were.

No, what he and Jake have is special, sacred, the kind of friendship that just doesn’t come along every day, and both of them work hard at it.

So… why does he feel as if this thing that has begun to simmer in his gut is only the beginning?

“Aiden.”

“Hmm?”

“Have you been listening to a word I’ve been saying?” Jake asks in an exas­perated tone. He buries his hands in his pockets as they continue ambling around downtown Providence, walking through City Hall Park toward the river.

“Sorry, I was just…” Aiden trails off, not knowing how to finish the sen­tence. He shakes his head. “What were you saying?”

“I was
saying
that there are all these movies where Death appears as a per­son, an entity, like
Meet Joe Black.
But what about Life?” Jake asks. “Where are the stories where
Life
appears and coaxes someone back from the edge, or makes them see everything it has to offer?”

Aiden considers the notion for a moment. “I think that’s kind of
our
job, you know? We’re the ones who’re living, who’re supposed to seize the day, and do all of it in the face of everything else.”

“Hmm. Maybe you’re right.”

“What was your favorite line?” Aiden asks. Some of the lines in the script had made him want to sit up and punch the air.

“His ‘one candle wish,’” Jake answers after a few moments, eyes fixed straight ahead. “That he wants his friends and family to wake up one morning and say, ‘I don’t want anything more.’ Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

“Never wanting anything? I don’t know. Going after the things we want… it’s what drives us, what defines us.”

“No, that’s not what defines us. What defines us is whether or not we
do
go after the things we want, because either way, life ends up changing,” Jake says thoughtfully, and Aiden has to admit that there is hardly room for argument.

“I’m not sure if I’ll ever be done wanting things. Done… baking,” Aiden says.

“That’s a good thing. Trust me.”

“How so?”

“You’re done baking when you settle.”

“Like… settle down, get married, have kids?”

Jake shakes his head. “When you settle for all you think you’re ever going to get out of life. That’s the timer going off,” he says. “Anyway, what was
your
favorite line?”

“Oh, uh…” Aiden begins, reaching up to scratch the back of his neck as if he’s thinking about it. Really, it’s just to buy himself time to remember anything other than the line spoken just sixteen minutes in by Anthony Hopkins himself, the line about not being able to say you’ve lived if you can’t say that you’ve tried to find that deep, passionate, crazy love. He can’t say that’s his favorite line; what would Jake think? What would he
say?
Jake would know. He would know right away what’s been going through Aiden’s head for the past couple of days, and then things would just become super awkward. They have over three months of this road trip left, and he has to think of something else… the only problem is that he can’t. All he can remember are the words that had hooked him.

“Ade, seriously, what’s up with you tonight?” Jake asks, stopping to face him with concern in his eyes. “Are you coming down with something?”

Aiden swallows.
“Don’t blow smoke up my ass; you’ll ruin my autopsy,”
he says, with as genuine a smile as he can muster.

Jake looks puzzled for a moment, and then the corners of his mouth turn up ever so slightly. “Of all the great lines in that movie, you pick that one?”

Aiden shrugs, and Jake shakes his head.

“I would have thought you’d pick something like…” Jake trails off and inclines his head toward the river. “Do you hear that?”

Aiden mirrors the motion, meeting Jake’s eyes when he hears it, too: music, faint and uplifting. “Free gig?”

Jake lifts his head to sniff the air, and a slow grin curves the line of his lips. “Tell me you can smell smoke, too,” he says, his eyes sparkling in the yellow glow of the streetlamps bordering the park, lighting their way to the water.

A quick, deep inhalation and Aiden nods—the scent of woodsmoke is barely detectable, just undercutting the smell of freshly cut grass. Jake’s grin gets even wider. He tucks his fingers into the crook of Aiden’s elbow and then they’re running, faster and faster toward the river. Jake’s grip falters but their pace doesn’t, and Aiden calls out, “Jake, what’s going on?”

“I heard about this but I didn’t think there was going to be a show today!” Jake calls over his shoulder, and beckons Aiden on. “You’ll see when we get there!”

In what seems like no time at all they come to an abrupt halt on the bridge just past Exchange Terrace and Aiden slots himself into the teeming crowd next to Jake. A band is set up behind them on Citizens Plaza; the song they play is one that Aiden recognizes from a study playlist one of his roommates in London had made. It soars over the heads of the people gathered to watch what is happening on the water: heat, and light, and fire.

Stately, torch-lit gondolas glide along the water, past floating braziers that burn and crackle brightly in the night. Leaning slightly over the bridge railing, Aiden can feel the heat on his face and see a long line of bonfires stretching off into the distance, lighting thousands of spectators lining the banks of the river.

Jostled by people wanting to get close to the edge, he moves closer to Jake and stands behind him with his hands resting on the bridge wall, one on either side of Jake’s body. They’re pressed closely enough together that Aiden can smell the spicy top notes of Jake’s cologne over the scents of cedar and pine infusing the night air, and once again he tries not to feel like too much of a creep when he leans even closer to speak into Jake’s ear. “What
is
this?”