Page 92 of Make Me Fall (Water, Air, Earth, Fire 2)

We climb in and I study him, sitting on the other end of the shredded bench seat in his casual clothes, his hair a bit mussed. I can’t believe he’s here, that I’m not lost in some kind of dream it’s going to hurt so much to wake up from.

I’m scared to get us stuck in the snow, so I only take the truck far enough up the road to get out of sight of the house, jouncing so hard through the ruts that Gray has to grab his seat with one hand and the skeletal dashboard with the other.

As soon as I cut the engine, the cold starts creeping in through the bad joins in the doors. I dig an old army blanket out of the backseat and slide over to sit between his legs on the passenger side, pulling the itchy green cloth over us. He wraps his arms tight around my chest, his breath warming the back of my head as we look out over the fields, toward a row of dark trees in the distance that marks the path of the river.

“It kind of sucks here,” I say. “Everything’s old, the drinking water tastes like rocks, and everyone has snakes in their basements. But in the summer, it all comes in green, like a jungle. The corn grows up past the top of your head—your head, not mine—and it’s the most peaceful place you can imagine. I don’t think I could ever leave.”

“I’ve had about twenty-six hours of flying to think things over,” he says quietly, after a long moment of silence where his thumb strokes the curve of my stump over and over, like he’s never going to stop touching me again. “I don’t need a perfect job right now. I need time. Everyone else, Victor and Oliver, they’re all healing and I just keep hurting myself over and over, chasing something I might not even want.” His arms pull me closer, surrounding me in that rich, leathery smell, and he turns my face to the side until he can rest his forehead against my temple, his nose in my ear. “You thought I’d never want to move with you to Iowa, but all I want is you. You’re the only world where I make sense. The rest will come later.”

Twisting around, I straddle his legs and rest my forehead against his, losing myself in his eyes. He always has these beautiful words that help him to make sense of things, to explain how he feels, to tell me who I am. Maybe someday I’ll catch up, when I’ve read as many books as him, but for now I can’t find a way to tell him how I feel except to kiss him again. We make out in the same slow, deliberate way we did on our first night together, like time is never going to end.

“Being a gay couple here might be awful,” I tell him when we finally stop for breath, my mouth raw and tasting of him. “But I’ve known these people my whole life. They’re ignorant, not hateful. Once they come around and accept you, you’ll have the most terrifying army of seventy-year-old women on your side. They’ll tear into anyone who does you wrong and feed you a lot of questionable casseroles and things made of Jell-O and pretzels.”

A grin plays around his mouth. He can’t keep his hands off me, running them all over my body under my clothes, stroking my neck and hair, playing with my ears. “And how do I get them to accept me?”

“You can start by learning all the different kinds of tractors.”

“I already figured them out on the drive here.” He holds up fingers, proudly counting them off. “You have red ones, and green ones, and black ones, and some of them come with spiky parts sticking off the front…What? Why are you staring at me like that?”

“I’ve never fucked in the backseat of this truck, but you make me want to change that right now. Though it would probably fall apart into a pile of bolts.”

Both of us stiffen when my phone rings. I pull my hand out of his jacket pocket where I was keeping it warm and answer, my heart thudding when I see my aunt’s number on the screen.

“Hi, Erin. Oh, I see. Let me check.”

I hold the phone away from my ear. “They want to know what kind of piethat manlikes to eat.” And if I doubted for a minute that he really wants to be here with me, even in a place like this, it all disappears at the eager hope in his smile.

I still remember the dreams I used to have, back when I thought I was straight. The faceless man who came to me at night and teased so much pleasure out of my body, who was rough with me sometimes and gentle others, who taught me what it meant to desire someone regardless of what they look like. Who taught me I could be desired.

Maybe I wasn’t dreaming about sex at all.

Okay, that’s definitely not true.

But maybe in the end they were always just dreams about someone who loved me. Someone who waited so long to be loved. Until we found each other at last, like the bright edge of sunrise before the darkness disappears.

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