rson who was able to put me back together, the one person who, for a time, belonged just to me. It may not be that way anymore, because there are others now who depend on him. Others who need him as much as I once did.
And I don’t know what the future holds beyond this moment. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Or the day after. I don’t know what my mom will say. What Bear and Otter will say. What I’m going to do with my life. What I’m going to do to make things right. I just don’t know.
But for now, none of that matters. For now, I’m again with my best friend in all the world, and he holds me as if I’m something precious. As if I’m something fragile. And if nothing else goes right, if all the world crumbles around me in an earthquake I can no longer stop, I’ll look back and say at least I had this moment. This moment when it’s just Dom and me and everything is finally out in the open and laid bare for all to see.
Well, almost everything.
Unable to stop myself (of course), I ask, “So, you’ve got to be at least bi, right?”
All Dom does to reply is laugh.
I’M DRIVING. The sun is rising. We’ve just crossed into Montana. We’ll hook around and into Idaho and eventually into Coeur D’Alene. Kori texted me at some point with her address. Seems it wasn’t hard to find, but then nothing can stay lost for very long these days, especially on the Internet. Maybe I’ll stop. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just keep driving until the car runs out of gas. And maybe then I’ll just walk until I can’t walk anymore. I don’t know. It’s one day at a time for me now. That’s all I can do, but I think it’s for the best. One day at a time.
You don’t have to do this, the text read. I hope you won’t. But here it is.
I hope I won’t do it, either. But it feels necessary. It feels like the end of one thing and the beginning of another. And I want this to end.
For me. For Dom. For us, if there can be an us.
But this has to end. This thing.
I think Dom’s asleep until he says, “Stacey knows.” His voice is low.
“What?” I ask.
“About you.”
“Does she?”
“For a long time. After you left, things got… difficult with me.”
“You were lost,” I whisper.
“Yeah. For the longest time.”
“We screwed up, huh?”
He snorts. “That’s one way to put it.”
“Was she mad?”
“Nah. Not her. I think she knew before I ever said anything. I wasn’t the… easiest… person to live with after you left. Then Ben came and I pushed you away. I had to make sure they were okay. That I’d do right by them.”
“What happened?”
“You were always there. Turns out it’s hard to push someone away when they’ve taken your heart. She knew. I thought I was doing the right thing, but she knew. She finally asked me one day what I was going to do to get you back.”
“What did you say?”
“I thought about lying. That I didn’t know what she was talking about. But by then, we were already over and we both knew it. We made better friends than anything else. So I told her I didn’t know what to do.” He laughs to himself. “She told me to man the fuck up.”
“And did you?”
“I was getting there,” he says. “But then I heard you were coming back and I waited. I told myself that you’d come back and I’d find you and we’d hash this out and we’d see what we’d see. So I waited.”
“Until you could arrest me, huh?”
He smiles. “Something like that.”