Page 29 of Freedom
Jake snapped the phone shut and sagged against the dresser. He wasn’t sure if he’d been yelling at Roger or just trying to make a point. If he’d been too defensive (Watch the ones that insist there’s nothing going on, Jake,Leon had said.They’re the ones trying to convince themselves), or if he was just on the level he needed to be because for the first time in a long time, this thing between him and Tobias felt like it was going good, like the bad old days were really in their past, and he desperately didn’t want to fuck that up.
And yet, he wasn’t sure if he knew how to avoid doing exactly that.
Talking a deep breath, Jake retrieved the handcuff key out from under the dresser, stashed it and the handcuffs in his duffel, and let himself out of the room to find Tobias.
He was right where Jake had expected, curled in the one cozy chair in the living room, out of sight of the front door. When he looked up and saw Jake, he smiled like a flare lighting up a dark night.
“Hey, you wanna go for a walk?”
“Sure.” Tobias put the book he’d been reading back on the shelf (look at that, just grabbing a book like it belonged to him; Jake didn’t know how he could hold this together when he was so proud of every damn thing Tobias did).
When they left the bed-and-breakfast, Tobias’s hand brushed Jake’s, and Jake thought about the last time they’d gone for a walk: some truck stop in the middle of corn fields, no one around, Tobias leaning close against him and slipping his hand in Jake’s.
If anyone, even Roger, thought he would gamblethisaway on hunting, then they didn’t know Jake Hawthorne as well as they thought they did.
Chapter Six
The next morning, rainrolled across East Liverpool, and Jake took the poor visibility as an excuse to delay heading out. They smuggled the hotel’s continental breakfast of stale-but-still-delicious donuts, a spotted apple, and strong coffee back to the room, and Tobias dug into the local and regional newspapers, looking for anything that might be a new hunt. Jake opened his laptop, tapped out a couple things—not even a sentence’s worth of letters, by Tobias’s estimation—and then stared outside at the sheets of gray rain pounding the vehicles in the parking lot. Tobias made careful notes on the margins of his newspaper articles about curious real customs that probably weren’t supernatural but that he still wanted to ask Jake about, styles of commentary and shades of implications that he didn’t really understand and Jake would. Every now and then he glanced at Jake, who never looked away from the window, ignoring the computer in favor of the damp and gray.
Tobias’s fingers itched for the laptop. He could probably find a hunt in fifteen, thirty minutes with an internet connection and a few of the specialized search engines he had learned about in FREACS. Maybe he could figure out most of those cultural references without wasting Jake’s time or watching him struggle to explain such basic real things to a dumb freak. Not that those were the words Jake would use, because he was too nice.
He was nice, and nothing made him look happier lately than when Tobias dared to act like a real, seizing a real’s privileges. Last week, Tobias had asked the waitress at the diner for a clean fork, since the one he had inside his napkin roll had some weird sticky substance on the tines. Before, Tobias wouldn’t have thought twice about it—maybe he’d have stuck it in his own mouth to clean it off. He hadn’t even been conscious of why he decided to speak up.
After Jake’s face had lit up like Tobias had done something truly incredible, the likes of which he couldn’t even imagine (how he wished he could, how he wished he knew how to make Jake look like that every day), it had taken Tobias a few minutes to remember his reasoning before he spoke to the waitress. He still stuttered and stumbled badly over the request, unable to make eye contact for more than a second, but his thought was that ordinary reals wouldn’t have accepted a dirty fork and that using it would have drawn negative attention and disgust, if not be a big enough giveaway of his nature that would have someone on the phone to the ASC. Tobias wasn’t certain that Jake knew that was what he had been thinking, but he still thrilled at how he was learning to instinctively make the right choices, the choices that made Jake happy, even if just considering those same choices would have made him shudder and lock up completely just a short time ago.
If Freak Camp (the Director) had taught Tobias anything, it was how to adjust rapidly to new expectations.
With that thought in mind, Tobias breathed in and held out his hand toward Jake’s laptop. “C-can I use that if you’re not?”
Jake glanced back at him—surprised, but not (not, not, not) displeased. “Blast away.” He made an expansive, sweeping gesture toward the computer, and Tobias cautiously pulled it toward him. His fingers moved slow at first, careful with Jake’s computer in a way he might not have been with any other real’s, but picked up speed as Jake didn’t even glance back to watch him.
The internet didn’t have much information about a local high school fundraising for their art and music department, a mention of which had snagged his curiosity in the newspaper. But another story on the news home page caught his eye, stopped his hands and breath for a moment. He pulled himself hard out of his frozen state with a deep, shaky breath. It wasn’t as though such things were new to him. No, this was entirely familiar, though not something he’d seen since he was in the Administration library. It was different now, with Jake. Now he could do something about it. And it would give them the opportunity for an entirely different sort of hunt.
Tobias read the article carefully, making mental notes of the key details, and then cleared his throat, pushing the computer back around to Jake. “I found something.”
Jake started from where he’d been staring out the window, then, still looking distracted, took the computer. Tobias wondered about his reverie, if he had been thinking of past hunts or mornings like this with his father, if he missed them, if getting Tobias had been worth giving them up. Tobias had so many questions he was afraid to ask, not sure he even wanted the answers.
