Page 8 of Never Stay Gone
So Dakota did the only thing he could think to do. He grabbed Shane by the wrists and pulled him close, pressed his lips against Shane’s. His first kiss in his whole life, and it was with the boy he loved with every atom of his being.
Neither of them knew what the hell they were doing or what they wanted, and it was too confusing to figure out right away. They kept on hiking, as if they hadn’t just kissed in the middle of a desolate trail. They picked up talking about football and the colleges Shane was thinking of and what they wanted to work on over summer to up their game come fall. Then they kissed again when they took a break under the shade of a rock overhang, and again when they got back to Shane’s truck, sitting on the tailgate as they watched the sun set.
Shane had plucked an ocotillo flower from the top of one of the gnarled spines as they hiked, and he’d spun it in his fingers for half a mile before he gave it to Dakota. His cheeks had almost been as red as the blooms, and he hadn’t been able to look Dakota in the eyes. But Dakota’s heart had beat extra hard, extra fast, like he was in the middle of a football game. He’d held on to that flower all afternoon, kept it safe in the truck. Later, he had pressed it between the pages of his math textbook.
They spent every day of that summer together, with their brand-newsomethingslowly growing between them. Days spent wandering on far-flung trails, exploring every dusty, forgotten corner of their world. Afternoons whiled away beneath madrone trees in the summer rains as the desert bloomed around them. They took Shane’s truck out into the Chinati Mountains and got lost off road until it felt like they were the only two people alive. They camped beneath the stars and they slept in Shane’s truck bed and they threw the football over agave and ocotillo every day.
And they shared secret looks and slow, gentle kisses, learning the feel of each other’s body against their own. He knew what Shane’s lips and his mouth tasted like, the salt-sweat skin behind his ears and down the sides of his neck. He knew how Shane’s calloused hands felt running through his unkempt hair, what Shane’s sigh sounded like when Dakota kissed his shoulder.
Everything changed one night out in the desert, parked in the spot that had become theirs, where they were alone and they could explore each other, both body and mind. Stay up all night whispering, running their hands over each other’s shirtless chests. Kiss, and make out, and lie quietly, staring into each other’s eyes, like they didn’t know what to say or do after kissing for so long that their lips were bee-stung and swollen.
That night, the thing between them deepened. They were in Shane’s truck bed, making out under the stars as the radio played softly, crooning midnight country songs ten in a row, no commercials. Dakota had been all breathless desire and shaking hands that night, like every night, so hungry for Shane’s touch he couldn’t see straight.
Shane, on top of him, hips against Dakota’s, had slid his hands into the waistband of Dakota’s shorts and over his ass. It was the first time they’d crossed the barrier of what lay beneath hemlines. He stopped over the dip of Dakota’s hips, his fingers pressing into bone and tender skin. “Is this okay?” he’d whispered.
“Yeah.” More than okay. Way, way more than okay. Dakota mirrored Shane’s movements, biting down on his lip as he cradled Shane’s ass in the palms of his hands. Then they were kissing again, frantically, desperately, and before Dakota knew it, they were naked and gasping and everything was happening at once. Sensation, thrusting, heat, Shane’s breath against his face, hands sliding over skin.
It was over before it began, too overwhelming to last. They were both wide-eyed after, embarrassed as they wiped their bellies off. “That was my first time,” Dakota whispered.
“Mine too.”
“I’m glad it was with you.”
Shane fell asleep in his arms that night. Dakota held him until dawn, counting shooting stars in time to the rise and fall of Shane’s chest, short puffs of breath from Shane’s parted lips cooling his sweat-damp neck.
One night, they slept in the center of the football field, lying side by side on the fifty-yard line like they were out in the middle of the desert. Shane whispered all his big dreams: how he was going to get a scholarship and go play football somewhere far away. How he was going to have his name in lights and stenciled on the back of a million jerseys. Everyone was going to know his name, and he was going to make it, outside, beyond, in that big open world. He was going to leave Rustler and never come back, never in this lifetime. He’d held Dakota’s hand as he spoke, run his thumb over Dakota’s knuckles like he was writing out love letters for Dakota to decipher.
If Shane’s dreams were going to come true, it would be because Shane worked his ass off, and senior year was the year to make it happen. Dakota swore he’d help every way he could. He’d build a ladder to the stars with his bare hands if he had to: he was going to get Shane all the way to his dreams.
The day classes started, he gave Shane a homemade CD full of the songs they’d listened to over the summer. Country and rock, and a few sappy love songs thrown in. The last song on the CD was “Cowboy Take Me Away,” by the Chicks. He’d held Shane’s hand and kissed him and fallen asleep in Shane’s arms as that song had played on the radio a dozen times or more. It was their song, he thought. Their secret love song.
He also gave Shane his high school ring. He wasn’t suave about it, wasn’t cool by any stretch. He’d shoved it at Shane and said, “Here. This is for you,” and then turned fourteen different shades of maroon as Shane turned the ring over in his big football hands.
“My mom bought it at some garage sale. It’s not even the right year.” Dakota had shrugged. His mom had picked the ring up while she was trying to find pots and pans and plates for them when they moved to Rustler. Someone who had graduated in 1996 had given up their Big Bend High class ring, and his mom had picked it out of a plastic bin of ten-cent costume jewelry. It had a football on one side and a diploma on the other, “1996” scrawled across the center like a signet. “It was more aspirational, I guess. She said it was a good luck charm. That if I had it, I’d graduate.”
Shane had smiled at him, mostly with his eyes. “Don’t you need it, then?”
“I want you to have the good luck. You know, for bein’ recruited by those colleges.” He’d remember the look Shane gave him until the day he died.
A chain appeared around Shane’s neck the next day. When they’d sneak away after football practice during the week, or on Friday night after the game, when they’d drive all the way out to their secret spot in the desert to make out in Shane’s truck bed, he’d feel his ring pressing between their chests. Feel its solid shape, like a promise. Shane wore it every day, beneath his T-shirt or his pads and jersey. Like was carrying a piece of Dakota’s heart around with him.
To get recruiters’ eyes on him, Shaneneeded a highlight tape. Dakota taught three freshmen how to record each game on the school’s old AV equipment, and then every weekend, he and Dakota would splice the film together and pull out Shane’s best plays on a laptop Dakota borrowed from the school library. He recorded Shane answering interview questions and edited out all of Shane’s nervous stammers, the moments where he sent wide, panicked looks above the camera to Dakota. He edited out the kiss Shane blew him too, though he watched it at least fifty times before he finally deleted that one second of footage.
All that work paid off: four colleges wanted to recruit Shane after they received that tape.
He and Shane jumped up and down and screamed like toddlers when they got the letters from those coaches, as if Shane had already been accepted and was on the starting line. He saw hope in Shane’s eyes, shining so bright it almost hurt to look at him.
The day Shane turned eighteen, Dakota asked his mom to teach him how to bake, and though he tried to follow her instructions, he ended up with squat, lumpy little cupcakes. He frosted one by hand, then stuck one of those cheap Valentine’s Day sugar hearts in the center. “I <3 U,” it said. He left it on Shane’s truck seat and was too chicken to be there when Shane would have found it.
Shane never said anything, and Dakota thought maybe Shane didn’t see it, or maybe he didn’t know who put it there. But when Dakota turned eighteen a month later, Shane took him out to the Get Go grocery and picked up a cupcake from the bakery counter to give him. “I don’t know how to bake,” he’d said. “but I ordered this for you.”
Every wish he’d made on every shooting star that summer was coming true. Shane was going to college on a football scholarship, Shane was wearing Dakota’s ring around his neck, Shane was listening to the CD he’d made for him, and Shane was gazing at him with those Texas bluebonnet eyes, like there were a hundred things he wanted to tell Dakota. Dakota wanted to say a hundred things back to him. Count off every reason he loved Shane. Promise him he always would.
Dakota had no hope of going to college. He wasn’t a good enough student or football player to earn a scholarship. He was average, middle of the pack. Overlooked by everyone—unless he was with Shane. His parents never pretended they’d be able to send him to college, or even support him after he graduated. Hell, they didn’t have enough money to pay the bills most months, and they lived mostly off the grid on a combination of solar power, a diesel generator, and rainwater catchment. They didn’t have much of anything material, but they had a lot of love between the three of them. He didn’t begrudge his parents their life or the life they made for him. But he knew whatever was going to happen the day after he graduated, he had to make that future himself.
A future, he imagined, with Shane.
He started looking up apartments in each of the college towns Shane was being recruited to. Carefully worked up budgets night after night. How much would he need to make each month to afford to live in each of those towns? Could he get a job? He’d worked on ranches since he was a kid. There were probably laws against that, but if there was one thing he knew how to do, it was how to be a cowboy. He could get a ranch job near any of the colleges Shane was looking at. He could make enough, maybe, to afford a little studio apartment they could share.
