Page 61 of The Forbidden Summer
Does he shift in the sheets and feel the shape of the space I used to fill?
I think about the way his fingers used to find mine in sleep, like magnets, like instinct.
Does his hand slip inside his briefs and touch himself while thinking of me?
Maybe he hears a song on the radio, or catches the scent of sawdust in the air, and I flash through his mind like lightning, brief but burning.
Maybe he closes his eyes and sees my smile. My stupid carved heart. My hands. Woody, the statue I carved in honor of his dick, sits outside in the clearing beside the fire pit. Does he stare at it and think of me? Of the way I made him laugh that day, despite how hard he tried not to?
God, I hope I’m still with him.
Even if it’s just in the way his chest tightens when the bed feels too big. Even if it’s just in the way he misses me like I miss him. Not in big, loud ways. But in those quiet, aching ones that sit just beneath the skin.
My mother may have said she understands, but she looks at me differently now.
It’s not overt, there’s no anger in her voice, no slamming doors or hushed whispers behind my back. But it’s in the way her smile sometimes falters when she thinks I’m not looking. The way her eyes linger a little too long on my face, like she’s trying to figure out who I am now, or maybe who she thought I was.
She still makes dinner for me. Still asks about my day. Stillsmiles at me when she walks through the door. But there’s a hesitation tucked into her warmth, a slight pulling back that wasn’t there before.
Like she’s loving me through a filter she didn’t mean to install.
Maybe it’s confusion. Or grief. Maybe she’s mourning the idea of a son she had carefully stored away in her heart, and now she’s trying to make room for the real version of me, the one who loves a man she used to worship with child-like innocence. The one who has found a kind of happiness that doesn’t look anything like what she pictured.
I don’t blame her. But I feel it.
In the stillnesses between our conversations.
In the way she sometimes changes the subject too quickly.
In how she hasn’t said Père’s name since I told her.
Greg is even worse. He makes wide circles around me, like he’s afraid of having to talk to me.
It makes me feel smaller in my own skin. Like I have to re-earn something I didn’t know I was at risk of losing.
Her acceptance. Her comfort. Her full embrace.
And maybe that’ll come with time. Maybe she’ll learn that this part of me doesn’t make me a stranger, it just makes me whole.
But for now, her eyes tell a different story than her words.
And I feel the space between us more than I ever have.
My mom’s vacuum drones in the background as I’m half-watching some mindless show, trying not to count the hourssince I last heard from Père, when the news flashes across the screen.
WILDFIRES RAVAGE NORTHERN MINNESOTA
Evacuations Underway Near Stony Creek
My heart stops.
I sit bolt upright, the remote clattering to the floor.
The news anchor’s voice drones on—words like ‘unprecedented heat,’ ‘strong winds,’ ‘difficult terrain,’--but all I hear is Stony Creek.
Pathfinder’s Lake.
The cabin.
