100 Days (7 page)

“This is becoming a problem,” he thinks aloud, cursing inwardly when Jake quirks an eyebrow at him. Thinking more quickly than he’s generally able to, he adds, “I, uh… I don’t think I can leave this view, you know.”

“I know what you mean,” Jake says, straightening up with a sigh. “But I’m exhausted and I’d rather not fall asleep halfway along the Brooklyn Bridge, so…”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

They ride the R train from Forty-ninth to City Hall, sharing earbuds and listening to uplifting songs about the city that make Aiden smile at Jake’s reflec­tion in the opposite window. His good mood settles warmly over him, helps keep out the evening chill while they buy hot dogs from one of the vendors in the park and step onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where he spots a gay couple walking hand in hand.

“We should hold hands,” he blurts before he can stop himself, feeling all at once as if he’s twelve years old.

Jake stares at him for a long moment and asks, “Why?”

“What do you mean, ‘why?’ Because we’re
here,
and we
can,
that’s why.”

“My hands are still all greasy from—”

Aiden rolls his eyes and grabs Jake’s hand, holds on tightly and leads him onto the bridge. They are silent as they walk in the cool night, and Aiden feels suddenly grateful for the quiet, for the fact that he can walk hand in hand with Jake without feeling like he’s overstepping some boundary or crossing some line—between him and Jake, or between them and the rest of the world. It’s a blessedly uncomplicated moment and Aiden revels in it, giving Jake’s warm hand a reassuring squeeze and earning an uncharacteristically shy smile in return.

“Wow,” he breathes at the center of the bridge, where Jake gently unclasps their hands and they look out at the spectacular light show before them.

Tom Fruin’s
Watertower
stands proudly atop a building that houses a collec­tion of artists’ studios on Jay Street, its lights switching and undulating from within the multicolored stained-Plexiglas structure, a monument to the ten thousand water towers in the borough of Brooklyn.

“Now
that’s
something I’d put in a movie,” Jake says quietly, after Aiden has spent a few minutes trying to find any sort of discernible pattern in the light sequence.

Aiden grins and asks, “What would we film here, Valentine?” It’s an old game of theirs, one that started back in high school and became a tradition.

“I’d work it into the title montage, maybe?”

“No, this place is worth more. I mean, look at it. It’s a work of art—totally worthy of the moment the two leads finally get over themselves.”

Jake bites his lip for a moment. He seems to consider something as he straight­ens, chin tilting upward almost imperceptibly. Aiden knows that look.

“So, okay… it’s a gritty romance. I’m the one with the drinking problem who’d been doing much better, but fell off the wagon. Everything had been going really well, and then suddenly everything was falling apart around me,” Jake says. He closes his eyes, rolls his neck and drops his shoulders, and it’s as if he wears another skin entirely. He approaches the side of the bridge and leans his folded arms on the rusted metal plate of the bridge wall, his eyes taking on a faraway quality as he gazes at
Watertower.
Aiden’s turn.

“And some wise, well-meaning relative said something pithy and clichéd to me, the guy who’s desperately, head over heels in love with you despite all of your flaws. I’ve been looking for you all night,” Aiden says, backing up a few paces and stuffing his hands into his pockets. “I’ve come here looking for you because it’s our place. Oh, and it’s raining.”

“Obviously. And I’m trying to figure out a way to fix everything I’ve fucked up, but I just—I just
can’t,”
Jake exclaims, dropping his head into his hands.

“And then I see you and call out your name.”

Obediently, Jake pulls his hands out of his messy blond hair and looks around at Aiden, abject guilt coloring his features. Not for the first time, Aiden wonders why Jake never wanted to be an actor. “I say the obligatory ‘what are you doing here’ line, of course.”

Aiden jogs closer, leaving no more than two feet of space between them, and looks directly into Jake’s eyes. He looks tortured, full of regret but still hopeful, and Aiden feels himself fall a little further into their silly, improvised scene. “No words, or an epic Nora Ephron speech?”

“Somewhere in the middle. No music, just the rain,” Jake says, and then tentatively reaches out to take Aiden’s arms. “You say something, and I try to disagree with you but you steamroll over me. And then, of course, I ask you what happens next.”

“Close-up shot, and I tell you that we’ll figure it out…
pause…
together,” Aiden says. Jake looks down with a hesitant smile, and Aiden—Aiden’s assumed character—tenses in anticipation.

“Switches to a profile shot,” Jake says quietly, looking at Aiden through his long eyelashes. “
Watertower
’s perfectly framed between us, and we lean in…”

Though he doesn’t move a muscle, there’s a challenge in Jake’s eyes, and for one endless moment everything is at a standstill. Cars and pedestrians alike have stopped in their tracks, the thick clouds overhead no longer move, and even the lights inside
Watertower
are frozen.

“Aiden…”

It’s a reverent whisper; Aiden shivers, and that’s all it takes. Whatever spell briefly befell them is broken, swept away by the chill breeze that washes over them both, and Jake shakes his head as if to clear it as he steps back. Aiden wants to say something, wants to speak around the lump that sits heavily just above the dip of his collarbone, but Jake is already looking back at
Watertower
, taking a deep breath that makes his shoulders rise.

“Something like that?” Jake asks, his voice strung tight.

Something like that, but something more,
Aiden thinks.
Something where I’m not afraid to kiss you because of what it might mean for us, where it’s an act of faith—the likes of which I’m not sure I have.

Aiden clears his throat and hums an agreement he doesn’t believe in. Maybe they need to go out, somewhere they’ll be forced to interact with other people, and get out of this intense little bubble of two they’ve formed. They’re sinking into new habits that feel somehow old, as if they’ve always done exactly this but never took the time to wonder if there was more under the surface.

All he knows is that something has to give, and soon.

964 miles

Day Fifteen: New Jersey

“You want him, don’t you?”

“Yes. Wait, what?”

Jake drags his eyes away from Aiden, who is dancing and talking to one of the other engagement party guests, and glances up at Andrew Fleischman, who stands next to him at the bar. Andrew wears a knowing expression, and takes a slow sip of his Negroni while he watches Jake over the rim of his glass.

“Aiden,” he says. “You want him.”

“No, I—”

“Every time I’ve looked over at you, every single time, you’ve had your eyes glued to him,” Andrew continues. He slides onto a stool and signals the bar­tender for a refill for Jake, who has been playing it safe with vodka-cranberries for most of the evening. It’s his turn to drive in the morning, and he doesn’t want to be hungover. “So why aren’t you doing anything about it?”

“That’s none—”

“Of my business, I know. Indulge me.”

Jake regards him coolly for a moment, this tall, dark and handsome thirty-something professional with whom he’s been acquainted for approximately three hours. By rights, neither he nor Aiden should be at this party.
That’s what I get for not looking around corners with a mirror,
he thinks, a move which might have prevented being taken to the pavement by two handsome strangers running late for their own engagement party and the wicked bruise that’s already blossoming purple and red along his hip.

He wishes he could go back to a far simpler time in his life, when he could just walk away without it being seen as an act of cowardice. Didn’t things used to be so much less complicated? They certainly seemed that way yesterday, when he and Aiden spent the whole day wandering the Ocean City boardwalk, checking out the shops and ducking seagulls, and finally heading to the movies to catch a revival screening of
Empire Records.
Before they made a last-minute decision to head up to Hoboken and check out the waterfront, Aiden had threatened to buy him a neon yellow T-shirt bearing yet another awful slogan until Jake reminded him that he could only get away with one obnoxious T-shirt per year.

Except that Jake let his eyes flutter closed each and every time Aiden’s arm brushed his at the movie theater, it was as though nothing had changed between them; as though these moments of push and pull that they’ve been experiencing had never happened; as though he hadn’t wanted to take Aiden’s face in his hands right there on the Brooklyn Bridge and kiss him until neither of them could breathe.

“We’re best friends,” Jake says, leaning his elbow on the bar and cupping the back of his head. “We have been since we were six. It just… it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“Why not?” Andrew asks, his tone as conversational as if he’s simply enquiring about the weather and not the very foundation of Jake’s entire moral code.

“I mean… there was a time when I thought that maybe… maybe we’d end up more than what we are, but… I was just a kid. What we have now is much better. He’s my best friend, you know? He’s the most important person in the world to me, and I can’t take the risk of fucking everything up,” Jake admits, the words tumbling from his mouth before he can stop them.
Huh. Maybe there’s something to this whole confiding in strangers thing, after all.

Andrew is silent for a moment. He looks as though he’s carefully consid­ering something, and as he drinks, Jake decides to change the subject before their conversation starts striking all the wrong chords. “Anyway, this is
your
night. You should tell me the story of how you and Toby met.”

“Ha! Okay, well… I’d just moved to the city to be with my college boy­friend, David. He was already living there, had an apartment all set up for us… but I showed up a day early to surprise him, you know? Took fucking flowers and everything, and I walked in on him fucking somebody else.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. It wasn’t the greatest start to the day. Anyway, I had nowhere to go; David was the only person I knew in the city, so I just ended up wandering the streets for
hours,
all these fucking bags on my back. I must have looked like such a tourist. Eventually I ended up at this bar, and…” Andrew trails off, his voice growing soft as he looks over at his fiancé, Toby Hillard, who sits talking with two girls at a table. Everything about him is impeccably disheveled, from his wild bird’s nest of blond hair to his loosened tie, and he somehow manages to pull it off without looking like a thirty-year-old poser. “And there he was. I walked into this shitty little hole in the wall called The Crow, and he was in the middle of changing his shirt, right there behind the bar.”

“Love at first sight?” Jake asks.

“Hardly. He took one look at me and mixed me one of these,” Andrew says, tilting his glass. “We ended up talking for most of the night, he gave me a place to crash and got me a job working at the bar for a few months, and it only took me half a year to get my act together and kiss him. The rest, as they say, is history.”

“Who proposed?”

Andrew’s laugh comes out as a sharp bark, and he wipes his hand over his face. “He did, behind a fucking 7-Eleven.”

Jake hesitates, his brow furrowed, and asks, “How does that even happen?”

“Oh, he didn’t plan it that way! No, he’d spent a month doing all these things for me… dinners he could barely afford, dropping by my office with a surprise latté, taking me to some of my favorite places in the city… you know, all the usual proposal set-ups. And there always seemed to be something on the tip of his tongue, but he just couldn’t get the words out. Of course, I had no idea. We never even talked about getting married before the laws changed.

“Anyway, we were on our way back from another overpriced dinner one night and I was just… I was so
frustrated
with the way he was acting that I just picked a fight with him over the dumbest fucking thing. I don’t even remember what it was about now. We stopped for gas, and I just—I had to take a minute to get my shit together, because fighting never solves a fucking thing. So I was standing around, kicking up dirt behind this 7-Eleven and he just came out of nowhere and started in on round forty-six, going on and on about how I’m ‘so damn hard to propose to.’ And it must have been the adrenalin or something but I didn’t even blink, I was like, ‘You could ask me right here, right now, and I’ll say yes.’”

“And he asked you, and you said yes,” Jake prompts.

Andrew grins. “He got down on one knee and just looked at me like he hated me a little bit, and said, ‘So will you marry me or not, asshole?’ And after I kicked him in the shin for being such a dick about it… yeah. I said yes.”

“It’s a great story,” Jake says, surprised to find that he genuinely means it.

“It’s unique, if nothing else.”

Jake smiles despite himself, and finds his gaze wandering once more to settle on Aiden, still dancing, surrounded by smiling people and having a good time. He’s gone dressy casual tonight, the same outfit he wore for the gig at The Cannery, and Jake watches the way his hips move, how he seems to have grown into himself. When Aiden catches his eye and grins, the low light casting shad­ows across his face, Jake’s stomach drops and he turns back to Andrew.

“Jake, I don’t expect you to fully appreciate what I’m about to say to you. I’m not trying to be condescending, but you’re fucking young, and you still need to figure out a lot of stuff for yourself,” Andrew says, scratching at the stubble beneath his chin. “That said, there’s something that my dad always used to say to me, and that was, ‘Try everything once, but make the mistakes first. That’s how you learn to recognize them.’”