It’s good. It’s really, really good.
Alex lies awake that night, drunk on Shiner and way too many campfire marshmallows, and he stares at whorls in the wood panels of the top bunk and thinks about coming of age out here. He remembers when he was a kid, freckly and unafraid, when the world seemed like it was blissfully endless but everything still made perfect sense. He used to leave his clothes in a pile on the pier and dive headfirst into the lake. Everything was in its right place.
He wears a key to his childhood home around his neck, but he doesn’t know the last time he actually thought about the boy who used to push it into the lock.
Maybe losing the job isn’t the worst thing that could have happened.
He thinks about roots, about first and second languages. What he wanted when he was a kid and what he wants now and where those things overlap. Maybe that place, the meeting of the two, is here somewhere, in the gentle insistence of the water around his legs, crude letters carved with an old pocket knife. The steady thrum of another person’s pulse against his.
“H?” he whispers. “You awake?”
Henry sighs. “Always.”
They sneak through the grass in hushed voices past one of Henry’s PPOs dozing on the porch, racing down the pier, shoving at each other’s shoulders. Henry’s laugh is high and clear, his sunburned shoulders bright pink in the dark, and Alex looks at him and something so buoyant fills up his chest that he feels like he could swim the length of the lake without stopping for air. He throws his T-shirt down at the end of the pier and starts to shuck his boxers, and when Henry arches an eyebrow at him, Alex laughs and jumps.
“You’re a menace,” Henry says when Alex breaks back to the surface. But he only hesitates briefly before he’s stripping out of his clothes.
He stands naked at the edge of the pier, looking at Alex’s head and shoulders bobbing in the water. The lines of him are long and languid in the moonlight, just skin and skin and skin lit soft and blue, and he’s so beautiful that Alex thinks this moment, the soft shadows and pale thighs and crooked smile, should be the portrait of Henry that goes down in history. There are fireflies winking around his head, landing in his hair. A crown.
His dive is infuriatingly graceful.
“Can’t you ever just do one thing without having to be so goddamn extra about it?” Alex says, splashing him as soon as he surfaces.
“That is bloody rich coming from you,” Henry says, and he’s grinning like he does when he’s drinking in a challenge, like nothing in the world pleases him more than Alex’s antagonizing elbow in his side.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alex says, kicking over to him.
They chase each other around the pier, race down to the lake’s shallow bottom and shoot back up in the moonlight, all elbows and knees. Alex finally manages to catch Henry around the waist, and he pins him, slides his wet mouth over the thudding pulse of Henry’s throat. He wants to stay tangled up in Henry’s legs forever. He wants to match the new freckles across Henry’s nose to the stars above them and make him name the constellations.
“Hey,” he says, his mouth right up in a breath’s space from Henry’s. He watches a drop of water roll down Henry’s perfect nose and disappear into his mouth.
“Hi,” Henry says back, and Alex thinks, Goddamn, I love him. It keeps coming back to him, and it’s getting harder to look into Henry’s soft smiles and not say it.
He kicks out a little to turn them in a slow circle. “You look good out here.”
Henry’s grin goes crooked and a little shy, dipping down to brush against Alex’s jaw. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Alex says. He twists Henry’s wet hair around his fingers. “I’m glad you came this weekend,” Alex hears himself say. “It’s been so intense lately. I … I really needed this.”
Henry’s fingers give a little jab to his ribs, gently scolding. “You carry too much.”
His instinct has always been to shoot back, No, I don’t, or, I want to, but he bites it back and says, “I know,” and he realizes it’s the truth. “You know what I’m thinking right now?”
“What?”
“I’m thinking about, after inauguration, like next year, taking you back out here, just the two of us. And we can sit under the moon and not stress about anything.”
“Oh,” Henry says. “That sounds nice, if unlikely.”
“Come on, think about it, babe. Next year. My mom’ll be in office again, and we won’t have to worry about winning any more elections. I’ll finally be able to breathe. Ugh, it’ll be amazing. I’ll cook migas in the mornings, and we’ll swim all day and never put clothes on and make out on the pier, and it won’t even matter if the neighbors see.”
“Well. It will matter, you know. It will always matter.”
He pulls back to find Henry’s face indecipherable.
“You know what I mean.”
Henry’s looking at him and looking at him, and Alex can’t shake the feeling Henry’s really seeing him for the first time. He realizes it’s probably the only time he’s ever invited love into a conversation with Henry on purpose, and it must be lying wide open on his face.
Something moves behind Henry’s eyes. “Where are you going with all this?”
Alex tries to figure out how the hell to funnel everything he needs to tell Henry into words.
“June says I have a fire under my ass for no good reason,” he says. “I don’t know. You know how they always say to take it one day at a time? I think I take it ten years in the future. Like when I was in high school, it was all: Well, my parents hate each other, and my sister is leaving for college, and sometimes I look at other guys in the shower, but if I keep looking directly ahead, that stuff can’t catch up to me. Or if I take this class, or this internship, or this job. I used to think, if I pictured the person I wanted to be and took all the crazy anxiety in my brain and narrowed it down to that point, I could rewire it. Use it to power something else. It’s like I never learned how to just be where I am.” Alex takes a breath. “And where I am is here. With you. And I’m thinking maybe I should start trying to take it day by day. And just … feel what I feel.”
Henry doesn’t say anything.
“Sweetheart.” The water ripples quietly around him as he slides his hands up to hold Henry’s face in both palms, tracing his cheekbones with the wet pads of his thumbs.
The cicadas and the wind and the lake are probably still making sounds, somewhere, but it’s all faded into silence. Alex can’t hear anything but his heartbeat in his ears.
“Henry, I—”
Abruptly Henry shifts, ducking beneath the surface and out of his arms before he can say anything else.
He pops back up near the pier, hair sticking to his forehead, and Alex turns around and stares at him, breathless at the loss. Henry spits out lake water and sends a splash in his direction, and Alex forces a laugh.
“Christ,” Henry says, slapping at a bug that’s landed on him, “what are these infernal creatures?”
“Mosquitos,” Alex supplies.
“They’re awful,” Henry says loftily. “I’m going to catch an exotic plague.”