Chapter Text
PART ONE
Unspecified Safe House, Rural Oregon
The bench needs to be refinished. Another season or two and the polyurethane will wear away completely. The weather is too unpredictable in this part of the country for untreated wood to be used as outdoor furniture. The combination of hot dry summers and frigid wet winters results in repeated, microscopic warping of the wood around the screws, expanding then retracting then expanding again. Sooner or later, the bench will just collapse.
John digs a splinter out of the armrest with his thumb. The needle-thin end punctures into his sensitive nail bed. Pain twinges. Unflinching, he peels up the splinter and flicks it towards the railing, just as he has been doing for the past ten minutes. A small matchstick pile of wood fiber is growing on the sun-weathered slats of the porch.
It doesn’t matter. Not like Val will notice.
“Hey, Soldier.”
The voice comes from his periphery. A screen door off to John’s left separates the porch from the cabin interior. The hinges squeak when a familiar figure pushes it open and steps into view, approaching on sock-clad feet. John hesitates a moment, before tilting his head up.
“Hey.”
“It’s early,” Bobby says.
He’s right. The sun has barely risen. The morning air is pale blue and still, smelling of pine. When he was younger, John would wake up shivering on chilly mornings, legs too long and body too lean to insulate him against the chill of a Georgia winter day. Now, he’s endothermic to a fault. Always running too warm for his own good. He almost misses the chill.
Despite his declaration, Bob holds a mug in each hand. Steam rises, matching the subtle clouds of air that puff from his lips, evidence of his steady breaths. He was asleep when John slipped out of bed, and he’s since had time to make coffee. More time has passed than John thought.
John faces forward again. A few hundred feet away, an overgrown pond holds court beneath a couple of fir trees.
“Nightmare,” he offers.
One of the mugs enters his field of vision. He accepts it gratefully with both hands. Heat blooms through the skin of his palms. If he were cold, it would be an extra blessing.
“Room on that bench for me?” Bob asks.
This is one of those mornings where John and his body are two separate things. Nodding, he shifts, even though he was already tucked into the corner, angles his body toward Bob as the other man steps over the pile of wood splinters and lowers himself down. Bob leaves no room, pressing himself shoulder to hip along John’s side, winding his arm along the back of the bench until his fingertips can tease John’s tee shirt. He crosses one knee over the other. His bare toes brush John’s pajama pants.
“Hi,” he repeats, this time a whisper.
This close, John is overcome by all the beautiful things about him. The watery morning sun catches on the golden strands in his hair, brightens the deep blue of his eyes. He smells warm, like sleep, and sex, and morning breath. His lips are parted. Gentle and searching, he glances at different points on John’s face, taking note of whatever residual markers of insomnia have dragged John outside at six in the morning. John wants desperately to kiss this man. Always does. His body, being its own entity this morning, does not.
He turns back to the pond again. Lifts the mug to his lips and takes a sip.
“It’s instant,” Bob says regretfully. “And maybe expired. I found it in the cabinet.”
John swallows a mouthful, appreciating the burn. Gruff, he says, “It’s good, baby, thank you.”
“Maybe next time I’ll sacrifice some space in my go-bag for a packet of Stumptown.”
John flickers a smile. Bob is good at this. He always seems to get an immediate sense of when he’s speaking to John’s vocal cords and not so much to John. He doesn’t chase unreciprocated statements, just continues to speak new ones into the air, like standalone journal entries that require no feedback.
His fingertips tug and play at the shoulder of John’s shirt. The sensation narrows John’s focus inward, bringing him another few inches closer to his own eyes, his own skin. He breathes. Sips. Listens to his partner’s murmured words.
After a while, he finds that his lips are his own again. When he speaks, he speaks, and not just his tongue.
“It was, um...” Bob quiets beside him while John searches for the words. “It was the, um, Good Morning America interview again.”
The fingertips on his shoulder pause, then resume their stroking. Firmer this time, more rhythmic.
John focuses on the touch. He has had so many iterations of this dream before that it has carved some kind of irreparable neural pathway into his psyche he will never entirely escape from. Some versions leave him gagging himself awake, tasting blood in his mouth and searching for a friend he will never see alive again. But that wasn’t last night, which almost makes it worse.
“It’s...stupid. It’s...” He shakes his head at himself. Takes another salvational sip of coffee. “It’s the same dream I had for a week before the real interview. Just me, fucking it up. Not knowing what to say. Completely mundane.”
The imagined crowd was always deadly silent. Watching. Judging.
Bob waits for a beat while his fingers maintain their tender rhythm. Then he asks, “How is that stupid?”
“Does that even classify as a nightmare?” John once dreamed that he did the entire interview with Lemar’s severed head in his lap, blood soaking into his pants, the interviewer too paralyzed with fear to stop stuttering out her inane questions. All the while, Dream John just kept smiling. “More like a teenage stress dream.”
“Also one of the highest stakes moments of your life.”
“I’ve been in war, Bob.” He hears the bite in the statement, and pulls back a few inches. Bob does not deserve his emotional collateral. Not first thing in the morning, and not ever.
The other man just hums. “Pretty sure a nightmare isn’t defined by the content itself. It’s how it makes you feel.” He must read the skepticism on John’s face, because he continues, “You know I peed myself when I was nineteen because I had a nightmare about my social studies teacher being a vampire.”
Startled, John finally shifts all the way around. The absurdity pops his defense like a balloon.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Well.” John is surprised to feel the telltale bubble sensation of laughter in his chest. He lowers his coffee mug onto the arm of the bench, hiding the place where he picked a chunk out of the wood. “That still doesn’t prove your point. Vampires could be scary.”
“Two things,” Bob says. He gestures with the mug, as if holding up fingers. “One: I hadn’t even been in school for like five years at that point. And two: I had just watched Breaking Dawn --”
“No.”
“-- Part Two . Yes.”
“Bobby.”
“Peed myself, John.”
John is laughing before his body thinks to stop him. He reaches out and cups Bob’s face. He tips forward until their foreheads can press together, and chuckles openly into the placid air. A couple birds take off from a nearby tree. The hand on his shoulder rises up to cradle the back of John’s head, and Bob joins in his quiet mirth, bumping their noses together.
After a minute or so, the peace of the secluded cabin seeps back in. They stay close. Bob strokes through John’s hair, tucking a strand behind his ear.
John exhales all the air in his lungs. “Maybe someday I’ll stop giving a shit. Then I won’t be so...” Petrified. He swallows the word.
“The world has given you a lot to be afraid of. It’s fucking cruel out there,” Bob whispers. “But today, for right now? We’re safe. I’ve got you.”
John tilts his face up. Bob leans forward and presses their mouths together at last, a tight seal of reassurance. The pressure undoes the last of the tension in John’s body. The dream slithers away back into the recesses of his brain, to the dark place where it bides its time. Though he knows it won’t ever really set him free, Bob is right. Here, on this porch, on this private chunk of land where the world can’t find them, he’s not alone in it.
--
Click. The photographer pulls back, glances down at the screen of her camera. After a beat, the image materializes. Even at a quarter mile, the telephoto lens captures the moment in crystal clarity.
She smiles in disbelief.
They just never learn.