“I don’t have episodes,” Zachary protests but he can barely get the statement out. It’s getting harder to breathe, every breath is confusion and ice. His hands are shaking.
“It’s always worse in the winter,” Dorian says. “We’ll get through it.”
“I—” Zachary starts but cannot finish. He cannot steady himself. The ground no longer feels solid beneath his feet. He is having some difficulty separating reality from fantasy. “I don’t—”
“Come back inside, love.” Dorian leans in to kiss him. The gesture is casual, comfortable. As though he has done this a thousand times before.
“This is a story,” Zachary whispers against Dorian’s lips before they reach his own. “This is a story that I’m telling myself.”
He raises a still-trembling hand to Dorian’s lips and pushes him gently away. He feels real. Real and so
lid and comfortable and familiar. This would be easier if he didn’t feel so real.
The chatter and the music from the house fade, as though someone or something has turned down the background volume.
“Are you wearing pajamas?” the idea of Dorian asks.
Zachary looks up at the sky again. The clouds have parted. The snow has stopped.
The moon looks down at him.
“You’re not supposed to be here right now,” Zachary calls up to the moon. “I’m not supposed to be here right now,” he says to himself.
Zachary turns back to this idea of Dorian dressed up as his date to his mother’s annual winter solstice extravaganza that delights him almost as much as it scares him and says, “I’m afraid I must be going.”
“What are you talking about?” Dorian asks.
“I’d like to be here,” Zachary says, and he means it. “Or maybe in a different version of here. And I think I might be in love with you but this isn’t actually happening right now so I have to leave.”
Zachary turns and walks back the way he came.
“Might be?” Dorian calls after him.
Zachary resists the urge to look back. That’s not really Dorian, he reminds himself.
He keeps walking, even though part of him wants to stay. He continues through the moonlit snow, moving away from the house even though it feels like moving backward. Maybe it was a test. Go backward to go forward.
He walks toward the door in the field but as he gets closer he can see there is no door. Not anymore.
There is only snow. Drifts of it that continue into the woods.
Zachary remembers the map he opted not to include in his inventory. Two buildings surrounded by woods. But he cannot see the farmhouse anymore, he only knows the direction it should be in, if it is there at all. He tries to remember which way the arrow pointed on the map, which part of the woods it indicated, or even where the stag had been, but he cannot and he decides he doesn’t care.
If this is a story he is telling himself, he can tell himself to go forward.
Away from here.
He looks up into a star-filled sky. The moon stares down at him.
Zachary stares back.
“We’re not supposed to be here,” Zachary yells up at the moon again.
The moon says nothing.
She only watches.
Waiting to see what happens next.