God, the person I’d been back then had been so confident. I’d known who I was and where I’d belonged.
Maybe that’s all this feeling was. Nostalgia. I wasn’t chasing Jake, I was chasing the past. Maybe if I could talk to him, make sense of everything that had happened between us, I’d feel like I had a place in this world again. Maybe everything would be okay.
Taking a deep breath, I opened the door to the bathroom.
The overflow bathroom was mostly for caddies and groundskeepers. It was all industrial tile, just two stalls, a urinal, and two stainless steel sinks.
Jake stood at one of the sinks, his hands clenching the sink, his shoulders hunched. He lifted his head at the click of the door closing, his eyes meeting mine in the reflection. They widened when I reached behind me to turn the lock.
I leaned back, shoulders touching the door, ankles crossed.
He turned to face me, mirroring my pose with his back against the sink, and we took a minute to study each other.
Even in the unflattering fluorescent lighting of this bleach-smelling bathroom, he still looked good. Except for the stupid mustache of course. The muscles in his forearms bunched and flexed beneath his skin as he clenched and unclenched his fingers around the edge of the sink. He was still slender and graceful but a grown man now. The long black hair I’d loved to wrap my fingers around was gone. His eyes were still as expressive. This grown Jake tried to hide his feelings beneath a glib façade, but the Jake I’d I known had felt everything more strongly than most people.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how much it had cost him to come back, how difficult it must have been. Jake held on to his grudges and perceived wrongs. The way he had left the first time had been horrible enough. When he’d left after Christmas beak that first year was worse. He never came back after that.
His eyes stayed locked on mine as I crossed the distance between us in three long strides. “I thought you had a very important dinner to get to,” he said.
“It can wait. Why are you here? The truth this time.”
A strange expression crossed his face. “I missed Sammy,” he finally said. “That’s a truth.”
“You could have just called, you know.” I tilted his face up with a finger under his chin, a curiously intimate gesture. His nostrils flared with some strong emotion I couldn’t name but felt it in my gut. “At least your face looks normal again. Except for this.”
He flinched as I reached for his mouth.
I punched him twice on the arm, hard.
“Hey,” he complained, rubbing his arm.
“Two for flinching,” I said deadpan, reaching for his lip again.
“Dick.” He batted my hand away.
I grabbed his wrist, easily keeping it still. “Stop.” I peered closer at his upper lip. “Is this a fake mustache?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“You are so weird. Take it off.”
“I can't just take it off. It’s glued to my face.”
“Take it off or I’m not going to talk to you,” I said.
“Fine. But it’s going to hurt and I’m going to blame you.”
I watched him scrub his face with soap and water and rough paper towels from the dispenser. Underneath the old-man outfit, the bad hair, and the horrible mustache, he was still the beautiful boy I’d fallen in love with. There were no creases around his soft brown eyes, no worry line between his brows. Whatever he’d spent the last fifteen years doing must not have been too hard on him. I bet he still got carded at the bars.
He straightened up, grimacing at the red mark on his upper lip. “Happy now?”
I held my hand out for the mustache.
He scoffed and put it in his pocket. “These things aren’t cheap.”
We were so close together, I could feel the heat of his body and his breath brushed my cheek.
“Well?” he said quietly. “Better?”
I reached a hand up to his hair, let it drop before I touched it. “I miss the black”
“You miss emo Jake?” he said with a grin. He ran his hands through his hair, cracking whatever product he’d put in it to tame his natural cowlicks.
“I kind of miss the skinny jeans,” I confessed. “They made your ass look great. Way better than these awful things.” I hooked a finger into one of his belt loops and bent it. More a suggestion of a tug than anything real.
He swayed almost imperceptibly towards me.
I gave in to the impulse I’d had and reached for his hair, winding a lock around my finger. He made a soft noise in the back of his throat, his hand coming up to rest on my chest. I felt his eyes on my mouth, on my chest, moving down the rest of my body. When his hand started to move, I grabbed it.
What was I doing? Had I lost my mind? I was playing with fire. And I kind of loved it.
“Eric.” The look in his eyes was so familiar. It said kiss me, take me somewhere private and do what you want with me. “Eric,” he said again, and it meant please.
I stepped back, putting space between us so I could think. “Jake. It's not that easy.” It wasn’t, as much as I wanted it to be. I wanted to slip back into his arms like sliding beneath a favorite blanket. It would be warm and safe and fit me perfectly. But when he’d run away all those years ago, it had nearly killed me. If I let him back into my life and he left again, I didn’t know if I could survive that.
He let his hands drop to his sides. “No. I guess it wouldn’t be.” He took another step forward, his tongue darting out to lick his lip quickly as his gaze dropped to my mouth again.
“Jake,” I said warningly, holding out a hand to stop him from moving closer. He held up his hands in surrender and stepped back to lean against the sink again.
I shook my head. “I tried to find you, you know, but I couldn’t.”
“I changed my name,” Jake said lightly.
“Of course, you did.”
“I had to,” he continued. “Security reasons.”
“Security reasons?” Disbelief dripped from my lips. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Smart man.”
“So who should I have been looking for?” I asked.
“Carson Grieves,” he answered.
My eyebrows rose. “Carson Grieves? Really? Kind of pretentious, don’t you think? Don’t answer that. So how come you’re here. Aren’t you worried about the mob or whatever finding you? Are you even supposed to be in La Crosse?” I hoped my sarcasm was coming across.
He waved my concern away. “I’m not using that name here.”
“So it is dangerous for you to be here.”
He made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. His shrug wasn’t quite an answer. He took a step towards me, suddenly serious. “Eric, I need to know one thing. Please. Before anything else.”
“Of course,” I said automatically. The way he was searching my eyes was disconcerting. What now?”
“If you tell me what we had all those years ago meant nothing to you, that it was just some kind of summer fling, I’ll walk away right now. I’ll leave you alone forever.” His voice rang with sincerity. It cost him a lot to say it, but I could tell he meant it.