Page 15 of Never Landing

Gingerly, I plucked it from his grip, and there was an old picture. It was black and white, and the people were strangely familiar.

I stared for a long time, until I remembered her face. It’d started with honey cakes that she’d make and set on the windowsill. They’d smelled so good, so I would sneak up and snatch them, and she’d always bake more. I must’ve stolen a dozen before she caught me, but when she had, she hadn’t seemed angry. She’d just smiled and sat down on her porch and offered me another. She’d said my name like she’d always known me, and she’d asked me questions—where I slept and what I did and who my friends were.

I’d tell her everything, because we had such grand adventures. But sometimes, her smile would turn sad and she’d ask about my parents. I didn’t have parents, I’d told her. They were stupid. Parents didn’t let you play and made you do chores and go to bed before the sun was even down. I was glad I didn’t have parents, but I did like her cakes.

She said that she’d keep making them if I’d come back and visit her, so I did.

The last time I’d seen her, she’d had wide, pleading eyes. There were always purple circles beneath them, and her smilehad been harried. It’d made me uneasy, when she grabbed my hands so tight and said that she was leaving. Her husband was making her leave, she said, and wouldn’t I please,pleasecome with them?

I’d torn my hands from hers and run into the woods while she cried and cried. It’d been a long time before her husband had come to gather her up.

The next day, I’d watched from the shadows as he’d packed up his whole family—the sad-eyed woman and the dog and the young man in suspenders who’d loaded most of their luggage—and they’d left.

I could still feel her eyes on me as she looked over her shoulder. She stared unerringly, like she knew right where I was and would always find me, and her face had been so soft and so sad as they’d taken her away.

My breath shook on an inhale, and my hands shook as I gripped the paper, but I’d cried so much already. I didn’t want to cry anymore.

I sat down on the porch swing slowly, not wanting to wiggle it too much. I hadn’t figured out what to say to Everett yet, and I—I just wanted to sit there for a little while and pretend that it really was okay and I wasn’t alone and things weren’t changing too much.

The only thing that was different was that my friend had returned, and how could I ever be upset about that?

Biting my lips between my teeth to keep them from trembling, blinking faster than I wanted to, I leaned against his arm and shut my eyes, and if I cried again, it was only a little.

9

Everett

Iwoke to vague light in my eyes, which was weird, because I had blackout curtains in my room.

Grandma’s house, a voice in the back of my head reminded me.

But when I blinked my eyes open to the reds and purples of early dawn, it wasn’t even Grandma’s house. It was Grandma’s back porch swing. I’d slept the whole night on the porch swing? I suspected I was going to pay for that in back pain later.

When I lifted my head, it reminded me why I’d fallen asleep on the porch swing. I had an entire bottle of wine in me when I did it. Maudlin and weirdly pathetic, mooning over a picture of what Peter might have looked like in his twenties, if he’d been a doctor in the fucking nineteenth century.

That was when another sensation accosted me. Warmth. Almost like I had a blanket on my legs, except I didn’t. And also, the blanket was breathing.

Slowly, I panned to look, half worried I was going to have a coyote or something sleeping on my lower half.

But no, it was...it was a living version of the picture I’d gone to sleep staring at. A picture that was now held in the handsof...of Peter Hawking? A living, breathing, twenty-first century version of Peter Hawking. Who was asleep on my legs.

He was beautiful. Even more beautiful than he’d been as a boy, those childish, elfin features translated into more grownup, masculine ones. Full pink lips, sharp cheekbones, eyelashes so long he could comb them. There were slight tear tracks down his face, dry and mostly gone, but still apparent through a healthy layer of dirt on his cheeks. Oh, not filth. He hadn’t been rolling in the mud or anything. I might not have even noticed the dirt, but for the completely clean spots the tear tracks had left behind.

As I watched, he blinked groggily, looking up at me with Peter’s hazel eyes. All those years, and there was still no mistaking them. It was too bad the picture of Peter Hawking had been black and white, because if I’d seen the color of his eyes, there’d have been no mistaking it. They were the color of warm amber and summer leaves, and right then, with the first rays of dawn were striking them, they were even brighter. Honeyed gold.

He gave me a tiny, sleepy smile, and pushed up off my legs.

He frowned when he realized that the picture of Peter and Eloise Hawking was almost crushed in his grip, wincing and letting it go. “I’m so sorry, I?—”

He cut off with a strangled noise, eyes going round and hand reaching for his throat. Strangely, though. Clumsily. He almost hit air, overreaching his throat by a few inches and having to pull back to get to it, like his arm was too long. When he managed it, his fingers flexed, like maybe he’d found something wrong there.

“Are you okay? Should I call for an ambulance?” I pulled back, started to stand, to look for my phone, but he flailed, reaching out for me and almost falling off the swing entirely when his whole body was thrown off balance by the motion.

He caught himself, bracing his hands on the swing in front of himself and then staring at them.

“P—Peter?”

He swung his head up to look at me, his voice coming out breathy and hoarse this time. “You...you know me now? You remember me now?”

---