Dan & Tyler 2 - Wintergreen (24 page)

"You will be soon," Matt pointed out. He patted Dan's good shoulder with a heavy hand. "Just get over him and forget about taking off. You'll find someone real fast in town, I bet. Now your dad knows about you, it'll be easy enough. I don't know what you go for, but you won't need to settle for jerks or geriatrics."

"For
what
?"

 

Matt shrugged. "How old did you say this Tyler was? Thirty-five? Shit, could he even get it up more than once a night?"

 

Dan gaped at him incredulously and then started to laugh. It wasn't even worth taking offense over. "Sometimes. Viagra works wonders, and when that didn't work, I dressed up as a --"

 

"Hey! TMI," Matt said, the gullible, brain-dead idiot.

"Let me get one thing straight. Our sex life was
not
a problem." "Whatever," Matt said, losing interest. He nodded in the direction of the house. "Mom's waving at us. Guess that means there's food on the table. You hungry?"

"I could eat," Dan said, suddenly aware that he was starving. Breakfast had been oatmeal, watery and thin.

 

"You won't want to leave when you've tasted Mom's fried chicken," Matt said with a touching faith in the power of grease.
Chapter Fifteen

The Seaton farm was up ahead. Tyler's hands were sweating, slippery against the steering wheel, and he was aware of his heart beating and the pulse of blood in his neck. With clinical detachment, he noted the signs of emotional stress and tried to calm down. He'd jumped off a bridge once, with bullets like rain around him, swimming for hours before deciding it was safe to make the move to dry land, all without feeling one tenth as agitated as this.

He couldn't help slowing down as he got closer to Dan's home. When he pulled over to within a few yards of the place where he'd stopped to let Dan get out four hours earlier, it was an action as inevitable as his next breath.

This was why he'd always been glad that he'd never been in love. He liked being able to decide what to do without his hormones forcing the issue.

Without turning off the engine, he looked up at the house, searching for Dan at a window, beside the barn, out in the fields… nothing. The place looked deserted in the afternoon sunlight, a postcard of pastoral contentment.

What did he expect? Dan to appear, freeze in place, and then start walking toward him, breaking into a run, with the music swelling and the -

 

His phone rang, startling him, and he swore, fished it out of his pocket, and snarled, "Yes?" into it, braced for Cole's flinty disapproval.

 

"Are you parked on the road outside?"

 

Dan sounded breathless, shocked. He could lie, hit the gas, take off… but Dan would know.

 

"Yes, that would be me you're looking at. I only just got here, though. I'm not stopping. In fact, I'm leaving right now, so --"

"
Wait there
." The urgency cut through the medium of plastic and metal like a knife, and Tyler turned the engine off so that he could hear better. "I haven't even unpacked, I can be with you in a minute. Less. Just let me tell them I'm going and --"

"What? No! Look, Dan, I just changed my mind about seeing Cole and decided to head for the nearest airport, which meant coming back this way. I was passing by, and I just… slowed down."

"You stopped." Tyler rubbed at his forehead and wondered when his head had started to throb. If it got worse, he was going to have to find somewhere to stay. He didn't get headaches often, but when he did, they turned him into a pain-dazed zombie.

"I stopped, yes, but that doesn't mean that you can come with me when I start driving again. You made your choice; I respected that. So should you."

 

There was a charged silence, and then Dan said calmly, "You stopped, Tyler. You wanted to see me again."

"And you wanted to go home," Tyler said, guilt making him harsher than he ever wanted to be with Dan. "Hours, Dan. It's only been hours, and you're ready to run
again
? You just can't stick to anything or anyone, can you?"

He expected a snarled 'Fuck you' and a buzz in his ear as the conversation ended, but he got nothing but silence for a long moment before Dan said softly, "I made a mistake. You're not going to let me put it right?"

"Mistake? You and your dad, how's that working out?" Tyler demanded.

 

"Good, actually. He's… he was worried about me. He's not shouting, and he's told me I'm welcome here."

 

"See? A happy ending," Tyler said evenly. "Glad to hear it."

"Not really," Dan told him. "He's getting married to someone with a son around my age who loves working on the farm and who's engaged to a nice girl who wants kids. They're all one big happy family here. I'm just in the way."

"Have they said that?"

 

"No. They don't need to."

"Right." Tyler looked away from the house and at the road ahead, stretching out, waiting for him. He should go. Toss this phone out of the window so that Dan couldn't call him again and just go. "You can just tell instinctively."

"Yes, you sarcastic son of a bitch, I can." Look at that; he'd gotten Dan angry. Good to know that he hadn't lost the knack. "I've already told them that I'm not stopping. Said I'd be gone in a day or two. That was before you did your little drive-by."

It took a second or two for Tyler to get his voice under control. "And just where the
hell
were you planning to go?" Not so controlled; he sounded like one of his drill sergeants bawling out a recruit with soup stains on his uniform. "Out on the road again? Hitching? Where to this time?" "I don't know!" Dan took a ragged, audible breath. "Wherever you were, I guess. Or I
was
. The way you're talking now, telling me you'd be there when I needed you was just words. You were glad to get rid of me, weren't you?"

"Boy, when you decide to play stupid, you should get an Oscar," Tyler said tiredly. "No, I wasn't glad to get rid of you. I still don't know why you wanted to leave me, though I'm glad you've made things right with your dad. It's just -- you can't keep doing this, Dan. You change direction more times than a pinball and just about as randomly. I can't deal with it." He'd never laid his feelings out like this before, spread out to be picked over, rejected, but it had to be done if he was going to make Dan understand. "I never expected you to stick around for long. You're… young, not just in years, and I'm not. God, there are days I wake up and feel about ninety. I could have handled you leaving, or finding someone more your age, a better fit, but this going, coming back, going again… no."

"Yeah," Dan said too calmly for it to be genuine. "Okay."

 

"That's it?"

He could almost hear the shrug. "Sure. I mean, I just got shot at and watched you blow someone away, but that doesn't mean that I'm entitled to freak out, does it? Shit, you must think I'm a complete waste of space."

"Dan --"

"No," Dan continued, his voice louder now, sparking and fizzing with annoyance, a snap, crackle, pop voice. "I'm a scream-like-a-girl coward who runs home to his daddy first time things get rough, right? No way a hardass soldier like you would give me time to get over what happened, because you can't imagine
needing
any time. You don't see her face when you close your eyes, you don't dream about blood on you, sticky, thick, hot like… like jam, like raspberry fucking jam --"

Tyler could hear Dan fighting not to cry, and it was killing him. "I see all of that. More. I did it to her, remember? But I did it to save you, and I don't regret it. She was dead the minute she went rogue, Dan, living on borrowed time. And of the two of us, I'm the one trained to deal with this shit, not you, and I never thought you were a coward. Ever. You saved my life. And, yes, you're entitled to a meltdown -- but why the hell couldn't you have let me take care of you for once? Why couldn't you trust me to know what it was like and help?"

He rubbed his hand across his eyes, his headache worsening by the minute. If he didn't find a quiet, dark room to ride this out, he was going to throw up soon.

"I didn't -- you weren't listening --" Dan was stammering now, lost in a misery Tyler shared. "Tyler, please --"
"Don't," Tyler said. "Don't --" He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, which helped to stop the world from breaking up into rainbow shards. "I'm going to find somewhere to stay in town. I can't drive anymore; I'm beat."

"One of your headaches?" Dan said, sounding refreshingly concerned and normal, as if they weren't in the middle of the kind of scene that Tyler had no experience with at all. "Shit, Tyler, come here. Dad will let you stay, and you can't drive like this."

"I can make it to town," Tyler said. He'd seen a place that would do as he'd driven through that morning, the bright blue of its sign and the silver rocket hanging from it catching his eye. "I'll check into the Satellite Inn. Think about what you want to do, Dan. I mean it; make up your mind one way or the other. I'll be there until ten tomorrow."

"I can go with you?" The eager hope in Dan's voice almost made Tyler cave and tell him to grab his gear right away. He could sleep off this migraine with Dan beside him, Dan's breathing even, his body fitted snugly against Tyler's…

"We'll talk about it tomorrow," he said, refusing to commit himself. "If you decide it's what you want, maybe. If it's not… hell, come and say goodbye anyway. We can do that, at least, but right now --"

"Yeah. You go and get some rest." Dan sighed, his relief evident. "God, you don't know how much I've missed you."

 

It hurt to smile, but Tyler did it anyway. "It's been four hours, boy. I could hold my breath that long."

 

"Felt like forever," Dan said flatly. "I'll see you tomorrow."

 

***

Dan put his phone back in his jeans pocket, a familiar pressure against his hipbone, and watched Tyler drive away. Tyler was going slowly, which wasn't all that reassuring, since it meant that his headache was one of the bad ones. Dan chewed his lip indecisively. Would it piss Tyler off if he called the motel in half an hour or so just to check that Tyler hadn't crashed into a fence or something? He'd just ask the person on the desk, of course, not bother Tyler directly, though Tyler would know what he'd done. Dan didn't doubt that.

Deciding that it probably wouldn't be a good idea, he left the parlor, a stiff, formal room, rarely used in his memory, that Alison had somehow made part of the house without, as far as Dan could see, changing anything. The couch invited people to sit on it now, and the air smelled fresh. Napping on the couch would have been a good way to spend a few hours, but if he was going to leave tomorrow, Dan wanted to go through his stuff in the basement and supplement what he had in his backpack. He'd left a lot behind when he'd hit the road the year before. He made it into the cool basement without bumping into anyone asking questions. The others had gone back to work after lunch, which had been tasty, Dan admitted, even if a bowl of salad on the table besides the fried chicken, crisp green and red lettuce curling around a rainbow of vegetables, had made his jaw drop an inch. Watching his dad biting into a strip of orange bell pepper had lowered it another inch. Peter Seaton and raw veggies just didn't go together. Dan didn't mind that his return had merited only a momentary pause in the routine chores; he was used to work taking priority, and anything else would have surprised him.

He'd had enough surprises for one day.

The boxes with his belongings were easy to find. Peter kept things organized as the best way of cutting down the time wasted looking for items he needed, and the boxes, labeled with a terse 'Dan' in black marker, were stacked in a column beside a motorbike Dan had intended to restore. The bike had cost him a summer's wages, and he'd never found time to do more than strip it down, let alone get it running again. The bike was on a tarp to protect the floor, oily stains glistening here and there, fresh enough to make Dan wonder if Matt had been tinkering with the bike. The thought brought with it a surge of possessiveness that quickly faded. Let Matt have the bike if he wanted; it was no use to Dan now.

There were three boxes, and Dan opened them all, sorting quickly through each one, brought to a halt now and then by something that held a special meaning for him. A photograph of his mom was the only item he set aside to take with him from the memorabilia, though. He'd learned on the road just how little was enough.

His clothes smelled musty, but he'd have time to run them through the washer. There wasn't much that he wanted. He'd taken his favorite T-shirts with him and lost them all, but he threw in some nice shirts in case he and Tyler ever went someplace that merited one, and added his only pair of dress pants, a relic from graduation.

When the clothing was whirling around in sudsy water, he went to find his dad. Peter wasn't going to like hearing that his long-lost son planned to get lost again, but it had to be said.

Dan could see Peter in one of the fields, tinkering with a tractor and looking, even at a distance, harried. Maybe not a good time… Without thinking about it much, he veered away, looking for someplace to sit and think. Tyler had wanted him to do that, and right at that moment Dan was in the kind of mood where he'd have done a lot more than that for Tyler.

He didn't need to think about it, of course. The Christmas morning feeling of seeing Tyler's truck in the road and the jolt of pure happiness at hearing his voice had been enough to tell Dan that he wasn't ready to walk away from Tyler. Not yet. Maybe not ever, though he didn't think that either of them was ready to think about the long term.

Tyler didn't want assurances that when he was eighty, a sprightly sixty-five-year-old Dan would be taking care of him. Dan had thought it through and realized that Tyler just needed to know that Dan wouldn’t bail on him in a crisis. Deciding that it wasn't working was okay; doing what Dan had done and turning away, not talking, apparently wasn't.
The apple tree Dan had perched in as a child wasn't an option; it had grown, sure, but so had he, and he wasn't sure it would take his weight. Besides, it was spring, and the branches were tipped with buds, fragile fruit on soft, green growth.