Page 1 of After the Fade, Vol. 1 (Asheverse: B-Side)

Couples Camping

Hollow Folk: Vie and Austin go camping.

I

We stopped at a C-store somewhere before we reached the mountains, before dawn, to buy supplies. Beef jerky. Trail mix. A Coke for the drive. Austin kissed me when we were standing by the refrigerated case; he still tasted like toothpaste.

The old man behind the counter wore a trucker hat that said You Vote with Your Money, I’ll Vote with My Gun , and he shook his newspaper to make sure we knew he’d seen us.

The door rang as a crew of boys stomped in. They were our age. They had Sheridan High School jackets and shirts. They did a lot of whispering, and the word faggot floated around like a turd that wouldn’t flush. While we were waiting for the old man to ring us up, one of them, a big all-American bastard, knocked the beef jerky off the counter and stood there, waiting to see what we’d do.

“Forget it,” Austin muttered to me.

And it was his vacation, so I forgot it.

We rode into the canyon at dawn, and by the time the sun was up over the steep walls, picking out each needle on the lodgepole pines, we found a spot to camp: a long, grassy stretch along a hard bank of rounded river stones, where Austin stomped down a bed of nettles and studied everything like he’d spent his whole life outdoors. He had his hands on his hips. I could see the hollow of his throat. I was thinking I might like camping after all.

“This is the middle of nowhere.”

Austin moved to check the horses, and he crooked an eyebrow at me.

“What?”

“This is not the middle of nowhere.”

“I just spent God knows how many hours with a horse trying to kill me.”

“Sugar wasn’t trying to kill you.”

“My balls are like pancakes after all the times she tried to throw me.”

He looked like he was ready to tell me that Sugar hadn’t tried to throw me, but then his other eyebrow went up. “Pancakes?”

“And now we’re officially in the middle of nowhere.”

“And your balls are flat.”

“And my balls are flat.”

“Poor baby.”

“Yeah.” I shivered, even under the heavy coat; late March in Wyoming wasn’t anything to joke about. The calendar might say spring, but the mountains still said winter. “Remind me why I’m here?”

“To spend time with me.”

“I like spending time with you.”

Austin blew me a kiss and then started working the saddlebags loose. Sugar was nosing at the grass. She was thinking about kicking me, I was pretty sure. Austin’s horse, Jimpson, looked a lot happier for some reason.

“I like spending time with you in a lot of places. Your bed. My bed. The shower.”

“The mountains.”

My nose was starting to run, and I could feel it freezing on my upper lip. “Not exactly.”

“Trust me.”

“Fatal last words.”

“Why don’t you set up the tent?”

So I set up the tent. Badly. And when Austin had finished with the saddlebags, he took over the tent. He put it up correctly. I supervised.

“Does it look ok?”

“Where do the beds go?”

Austin laughed. Then he wasn’t laughing. “Oh.”

“Yeah, I was just joking.”

“You know there aren’t beds, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. I told you I was just joking.”

“They’re called cots when you camp.”

“That’s why I said beds. It was a joke.”

“And I didn’t bring cots. I just packed sleeping bags and some pads to insulate us from the ground.”

“Yeah. Insulation.”

Austin got his arms around me. I tried to squirm away, and he kissed me on the nose. And then on the mouth. And then I wasn’t trying very hard to get away.

“Thanks for doing this. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

Arms around his neck, I looked over his shoulder at the tent. The very small tent. The very, very small tent.

“Did you bring lube?”

He laughed into my neck and gave me a joking, blow-off kidney punch. “You’re a dog sometimes.”

“So you did bring lube.”

“Got your bear bell?”

I jingled it at my waist.

“Vest?”

I undid a quarter inch of the coat’s zipper to reveal the fishing vest with snippers and line and a million flies and hooks.

“Bear spray?”

“I know I said I’d like to try some new stuff with you, but bear spray and a bear bell and fishing hooks weren’t really on the top of my sex toy list.”

He gave me a smirk that should have melted the snow for ten feet in every direction. “Maybe you need to broaden your horizons.”

“Maybe I’m a good boy. Maybe I don’t do those kinds of things.”

Austin’s throaty chuckle just about had me climbing out my skin. “Come on. I want to show you the surprise.”

He took a set of reins in each hand and started up the hill, guiding Sugar and Jimpson. I trotted around Sugar—a wide berth, in case she was still thinking about putting a hoof through my forehead—and said, “They don’t sleep in the tent, right?”

“What?”

“That was a joke too.”

“I thought you told me you’d been camping before.”

“Yeah, I have.”

I didn’t tell him I’d only been once, with Gage. We’d cooked smores over a fire and slept in the back of his mom’s minivan and gone for McDonald’s at 5:30am when we couldn’t sleep anymore.

“It’s going to be fun.”

I nodded. I glanced back at the horses. “But are they going to get cold?”

Austin’s grin softened his features. “Aww.”

“Don’t make that noise.”

“It’s cute. You’re worried about them.”

“I don’t want to drag a dead horse out of this canyon.”

“I think it’s really sweet.”

“I’m just being practical. I don’t want them trampling me in the middle of the night.” I glanced at Sugar; her dark, liquid eyes held all of me in a reflection. “I don’t trust her.”

Austin laughed the rest of the way up the hill, and he was still laughing when he followed a wide trail through a break in a line of blackberry bushes. I stopped in surprise when I was what was on the other side, until he bumped my ass to get me moving again.

In front of us, maybe a hundred yards down the slope, stood a log cabin. It wasn’t very big—I was guessing three rooms at most—but a gravel road hung off it like a tail, and an LP tank hugged the cabin’s rear. Blue puffs of steam came off the furnace exhaust, drifting over the roof of a small outbuilding that I guessed was a stable. But it wasn’t the cabin or the LP tank or the pennants of steam trailing in the wind or the stable that stopped me there, with blackberry thorns prickling my neck. It was the car in the driveway. It was the goddamn, motherfucking Porsche planted on the gravel.

It was Emmett Bradley’s car.