Page 8 of Road Trip

CHAPTER

EIGHT

MATT

1809 miles to go

Memphis, TN, to Amarillo, TX

I hadn’t known how much keeping secrets from Jacob had been weighing me down until I wasn’t keeping them anymore. But the next day, now that I wasn’t in a constant state of high alert, watching everything I said and did so I didn’t give myself away, I found myself enjoying the trip. Or maybe that was because I knew these were the last days Jacob and I would spend together, and I was determined to wring every ounce of enjoyment from them I could.

I know. Shockingly positive for a miserable little asshole like me, right?

But it turned out that my mom had actually been worried about me—I knew this because she’d told me so repeatedly, at volume, when I’d called her—and despite the fact she was mad as all hell, hearing she cared enough to worry had untwisted some of the knots I’d tied myself up in. I’d convinced myself that she’d forgotten I existed, too busy with her shiny new boyfriend, but that was just my naturally suspicious nature kicking in. My mom always said I could find the cloud to every silver lining, and she wasn’t wrong .

I wasn’t going back, though, no matter what Mom said about California being a bad idea. Zeke and I were never going to be best buds, and I was sick of feeling like an intruder in my own home. Besides, my dad had always said I could live with him when I was older, so this was the best solution all round.

Jacob and I had talked when we’d stopped at Memphis. I’d asked if he’d be wigged out sharing a tent with me now he knew I was gay. He’d glared at me and told me to fuck off with that bullshit. So I guessed we were all right on that front. The other stuff? We were getting there. I knew he was still mad that I hadn’t told him I was moving, and I didn’t blame him. But I’d had my reasons. Jacob couldn’t keep a secret to save his life, so really I’d done him a favor by not telling him, a fact I pointed out. We both knew he would have felt obliged to spill his guts to his parents and it would have been a whole mess, and then we wouldn’t be having this epic road trip right now. Lucky for me, Jacob also couldn’t hold a grudge to save his life. Not when it was me anyway.

After Memphis, we blew through Arkansas and most of Oklahoma in two days of driving, stopping mostly for meals and to stretch our legs. We saved money by camping, this time at the side of the road instead of at an actual campground, and showered the next day at a rest stop. It was what Kerouac would have done, if beatniks had camped. Or showered.

I still wanted Jacob, and I still wanted him to want me. That hadn’t changed. But there’d been a shift in the air between us. Like, Jacob and I had always been physical. We punched each other’s arms and wrestled and grabbed each other all the time. And I’d kinda thought that maybe Jacob would back off now he knew I was gay. But if anything, he was even more touchy-feely. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince me or himself that my sexuality didn’t matter, but after another night of what felt like having his hands on me every time I turned around, I wasn’t sure I could take much more. It was the worst kind of torture. Or maybe the best. I couldn’t decide. I soaked up every touch like the touch of the sun’s rays because I was shameless and a little desperate and it was so close to what I wanted. But it would never be anything more. Jacob was straight.

I guessed I was holding on to one more big secret after all—namely that I loved him and always had and probably always would. And what was the point in telling him?

Once this trip was over, we’d be over too.

“People are gonna ask us what we saw on this road trip, and the answer is just gas stations and rest stops,” Jacob said as we stretched our legs somewhere in the flat nothingness between Clinton and Elk City.

I leaned against the car and watched a woman walk a little dog around on the dry grass by the parking lot. “What else should we see?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Things. Places. More than the highway.” He raised an eyebrow. “Things you can chronicle.”

“Maybe I’m chronicling the interstate network,” I said. “On-ramps and off-ramps and fast food places. You drive for days and everything looks the fucking same, and the only way you can tell you’re moving at all is that at some point all the Hardee’s turn into Carl’s Jr! It’s one of Dante’s circles of hell probably, but I don’t know which one.”

“Is that another book you haven’t read?” he asked me, one corner of his mouth lifting up in a grin.

“Yup. Like, I try to be all edgy and disaffected and full of existential angst, but it turns out there’s a lot of assigned reading. So I decided it’s easier to just be a dick instead.”

His grin grew. “Well, you’re doing it right.” He looked at the lady with the dog. “We should have brought a dog on this trip. We could have killed it on Insta.”

“We have very different ideas of what a road trip is for,” I said, although who was I kidding? I’d follow an Insta of Jacob and a puppy in a heartbeat.

“Yeah, and your way is depressing.” He knocked his shoulder against mine, his grin faltering for a moment as his words skirted too close to the truth: that every hour brought us closer to California and to the end of our last summer together. And at the rate we were driving, it would be over far too soon.

Don’t get me wrong. I was excited for San Diego, and I couldn’t wait to see the look on my dad’s face when I turned up. He’d always said in the birthday cards he sent that it was a shame we lived so far apart. But starting a new chapter in my life meant closing the door on the old one, and I wasn't quite ready for that to happen yet. So I said, “Well, we have time. Maybe we can go and see some shit. Like, I dunno, the Grand Canyon?”

Jacob’s face lit up. “Yes! We can take an extra day there. It’ll be awesome!”

I grinned back at him and he slung an arm around my shoulders affectionately. I leaned into the touch like the sad, greedy little gremlin I was and quietly celebrated adding an extra day to our trip.

We made it to Amarillo, Texas, just after lunchtime. It was hot, dry, and, as far as I could tell, built mostly out of concrete, right angles, and exhaust fumes. If there were nicer parts, I-40 kept us away from them.

“Do you want to see the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame?” Jacob asked me as we passed a sign for it. He wasn’t stupid enough to ask twice. “There must be something we can do here.”

“We can do lunch.”

“Well, obviously. I meant apart from lunch.”

“How the fuck does a horse even have a hall of fame?” I asked.

Jacob drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “That seems like the sort of question we could answer if we actually went.”

“Do you…do you really want to stop at the horse hall of fame?” I asked.

He looked wistful for just long enough for me to worry that he really did want to go before he broke and laughed. “Fuck, no. But let’s find something to do. ”

I pulled out my phone and looked up “things to do in Amarillo.”

“Hey! There’s a zoo!” I’d never been to a zoo. It was one of those things my dad had always promised we’d do, but in the end he’d never found the time.

Jacob gave me a serving of side-eye. “So, horses are a no go but a zoo is a yes?”

I rolled my eyes. “The horse place doesn’t have actual horses, dumbass.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “The zoo sounds fun. Let’s do that after lunch.”

We found a taco place that looked good and smelled even better and had our lunch. Then we pulled up directions to the zoo on the GPS and drove out there. We paid our admission, and when we went inside, it was honestly way cooler than I’d thought it would be. It was made better by Jacob keeping one hand on my hip and guiding me around the clusters of parents with strollers and the groups of little kids oohing and aahing over the animals. His palm was warm, pressing against the sliver of bare skin where my shirt had ridden up and making me shiver. I kept waiting for him to notice and pull his hand away, but he seemed completely absorbed by the map he was clutching in his other hand.

We checked out the birds first, then the amphibians—which didn’t take long since there were only two—with Jacob’s hand resting on my hip the whole time. When he finally did move his hand, it was a relief and a disappointment all at once.

The ghost of his touch had faded by the time we reached the bears, and as we watched them wandering around their enclosure, I said, “At least we’re not camping in bear country.”

Jacob’s brow furrowed. “I mean, I don’t think we are.”

“Nah, there’d be signs.”

The furrow deepened. “Like, bear shit? What does that even look like?”

I bumped my shoulder against his. “No, but they have actual signs that say Watch Out for Bears. Right? ”

“Dunno.” He grinned and bumped me back, and we went to find the spider monkeys.

We spent the rest of the afternoon looking at the animals, and I made sure to take plenty of photos. I even sent one to Mom, hoping it wouldn’t make her lose her shit all over again. I got that she was pissed I hadn’t told her I was leaving, but it had also taken her days to notice because she was so busy with work and now with Zeke. And I wasn’t being some pissy teenager who didn’t like Mom’s boyfriend. Zeke was fine, but his lease ran out soon and Mom had as good as said he was moving in. Not wanting to live together in an already cramped double-wide with very thin walls wasn’t the same as not liking the guy. Though if he could learn to have a conversation that wasn’t about his collection of nine guitars and his plans to start a band, that’d be great. The point was we’d all be much happier if I was in California with Dad.

Mom didn’t respond to my text, and I wondered if she was at work or if she was ignoring me.

“You okay?” Jacob asked me. “You wanna go see the cats again?”

“The bobcats?”

“No, the regular ones.”

A cat on a leash had met us when we’d arrived. Like, just a house cat. That was weird, right? But I liked weird, and Jacob liked cats, so we went back to see the cats again. Jacob crouched down and petted the cat and it purred loudly at him. He was wearing a big dumb grin, like the cat was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen, and with the way the sunlight was bouncing off his messy blond hair, it almost looked like he had a halo.

I snapped a photo, then slipped my phone in my pocket and crouched down to pet the cat. It hissed at me, its back arching, and Jacob laughed. I flipped him the bird, only noticing the toddler watching me when he waved his middle finger enthusiastically in my direction. Shit. I pretended I hadn’t seen him and stood and stretched, hoping that if we got out of there, his mom wouldn’t come for me. “We should go. We need to find somewhere to camp.”

Jacob straightened as well, but the way the corners of his mouth were curled up told me he’d seen what the kid had done and he was gonna give me shit about it later. I didn't mind. I’d pretend I was offended, sure, but in reality there weren’t many more days left for Jacob to tease me, and I’d tuck it away in my memory bank along with all the other times, just like I’d tucked the drawing I’d done of him when we were sitting around the campfire away for safekeeping in the back of my sketchbook. It was one of the best drawings I’d done, but I’d been too honest. I might as well have drawn cartoon hearts all around it and practiced signing Matthew Mercer in cursive with how obvious my feelings for Jacob were. Which was why it was now in the back of the sketchbook, face down and out of sight.

We looked around Amarillo for a while longer, taking in the sights, before we drove west and took a bunch of back roads until we found a place we could camp for the night where we wouldn’t run into anyone and they wouldn’t run into us. We got there just before dark and set up. We were getting pretty good at pitching our tent, and we finished up just as the last of the daylight melted into colored streaks across the sky.

Jacob settled on a log by the firepit and lit the campfire. Then he heated our canned franks and beans in the cheap shitty saucepan we’d grabbed at Walmart. He tipped it onto our tin plates and we ate in comfortable silence. The flames danced and crackled as we ate, and the firelight lit up the planes of Jacob’s face, his teeth gleaming as he grinned at me.

I grinned back. Yeah, this was pretty great.

After we’d eaten I found some sticks and we made s’mores. I only set two marshmallows on fire this time, which was a new record for me. There was a full moon, and it gave everything a magical glow. We joked around and shot the shit like we always had, and it felt like things between us were getting back to normal. When I caught Jacob smothering a yawn, I nudged him with my elbow. “Let’s go to bed.”

He opened his mouth, probably to argue, but when the yawn escaped, he gave me a sheepish look. “I guess.”

I got it. I wanted to stay awake too, knowing we only had a few nights left. But it had been a long day, and I was fighting off sleep myself. I stood and stretched, and we made sure to put the fire out properly before we took turns in the tent changing into our sleep shorts. We settled in on our mats, and it wasn’t long before Jacob’s breathing had turned deep and even. I lay there listening to him for a while and resisted the urge to reach out and trace the soft curve of his belly with my palm.

I might be weird, but I drew the line at creeper-level weird.

I rolled away from Jacob’s sleeping form and closed my eyes, and when I slept I had weird dreams where I was flipping off a bear while protecting Jacob with my pointy marshmallow stick.

I woke with a start and sat bolt upright, unsure why my heart was beating out of my chest. Jacob jerked awake as well. “Did you hear that?” he whispered.

“Hear what?”

A loud crash came from just outside, followed by a rustling sound and what sounded like an animal snuffling around the door of the tent.

Oh shit.

Jacob turned to me, eyes wide. “Is it a bear?”

Shit. Had we ever found out if Texas was bear country? I couldn’t remember. My stomach twisted with fear. “Stay still,” I said in hushed tones. “They can sense movement.”

Jacob blinked. “That’s the T-Rex in Jurassic Park .”

The snuffling noises grew louder, followed by the sound of claws scrabbling in the dirt. Cold fear coursed through my veins. I tensed, ready to do something, although I wasn’t sure what. Run? Fight? Curl up in a ball and cry? The snuffling got louder, and then there was a series of…squeaks? What the fuck?

I wasn’t any kind of wildlife expert, but I was one hundred percent certain bears didn’t sound like cartoon aliens. Well, ninety-nine percent anyway. I leaned over and grabbed the flashlight, and with a bravery that I absolutely didn’t feel, said, “I’m gonna go see what it is.”

“No, wait!” Jacob gripped my arm and for a second I thought he was gonna volunteer to go instead, but he just said, “I’ll come with you.”

I thought he expected me to argue, but I thrust the flashlight at him and said, “Okay. You hold the flashlight.”

He took it from me and shuffled over to the tent opening. Once I was next to him, he grasped the zipper. “Ready?”

To be eaten by a bear? Fuck no.

“‘Course. What are you waiting for?”

Jacob swallowed loudly, and then he yanked the zipper up and shoved the flashlight outside, sweeping the beam of light from side to side.

A pair of yellow eyes glowed in the darkness about ten feet away from us, and Jacob let out a squeak of his own. Because it wasn’t a bear sitting outside our tent. It was so much worse than that.

It was a fucking skunk .

We both froze, staring. “What do we do?” Jacob whispered.

The skunk shuffled toward us, squeaking and clicking, and panic set in. “We fucking run !”

I grabbed the car keys from where they were sitting on top of Jacob’s backpack, scrambled out of the tent, and took off for the RAV4 at a sprint that would have made Usain Bolt proud. My heart pounded against my rib cage as I pressed frantically at the unlock button on the key fob, then yanked the back door open and threw myself inside. I lay there panting, and a second later Jacob piled in next to me, grabbing the door and yanking it shut as he sprawled half on top of me. We stared at each other for a second, our chests heaving, before he said, “What do we do now?”

I considered it. There was no way I was going back to the tent and risking getting sprayed. And I didn’t want to get out of the car in case the skunk was pissed and lurking outside, looking for revenge. Really, there was only one thing to do. I shoved the keys at Jacob. “Obviously, we get the fuck out of Dodge.”

Jacob stared at me for a heartbeat, then the corners of his mouth twitched up and he said, “This isn’t Dodge, dumbass. It’s Amarillo.”

It was probably the adrenaline, but that dumb joke was suddenly the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I lost my shit laughing, shoving him in the chest, and he laughed right along with me. I mean, the whole thing was pretty fucking funny when you thought about it. We were trapped by a skunk, wearing our sleep shorts in a RAV4 in the middle of the night. Still, at least we had the keys.

“We should move, though,” I said once I’d stopped laughing. “Like, drive away so he thinks we’re gone. Then he might leave too.”

Jacob eyed the passenger door dubiously. “What if he’s right there in front of the tire or something? I don’t want to run over him.”

“He’s not right there,” I said, just before there was a flurry of squeaking and chittering from directly under the window.

Jacob bit his lip. “If we drive away, someone might steal all our stuff. You think we could distract the skunk then grab the tent?”

It was my turn to throw him a doubtful look. But I wasn’t willing to risk opening the doors. “You remember what happened to Michael, right?”

This kid we went to school with had gotten sprayed one time and he’d smelled rank for weeks. Six years later, his nickname was still Skunk. Anyway, point was, I wasn’t going to spend my last days with Jacob smelling like ass. And he had a good point about someone stealing our shit. I couldn’t afford to replace everything, and neither could he. “Okay,” I said finally. “We sleep here.” I eyed the back seat doubtfully. Then I leaned forward and started to shimmy through the gap between the seats, twisting and squirming as I made my way to the front passenger seat.

“What are you doing?” Jacob asked in a strangled tone, just as I found myself wedged halfway over the center console.

I glanced back to find that my ass was about an inch from his face. The waistband of my sleep shorts had rucked down far enough that the top of my ass was visible, and Jacob was staring wide-eyed like he couldn’t believe I was pulling this shit.

Awesome.

I heaved myself forward and half climbed, half fell into the front seat, cheeks burning. “I figured I’d sleep in the front so we had more space, is all.”

“Oh,” Jacob said quietly. “Right.”

I hitched my shorts up, settled in, and reclined the passenger seat…and found myself staring into the light of the full moon. It did not hit my eye like a big pizza pie. It hit my eye like the interrogation lamps they shone in the prisoner’s face in one of those old spy movies. My pale skin glowed, making me look like some sort of alien.

Fuck. There was no way I could sleep like this. I let out a groan.

“What?”

“Moon’s too bright. And my shades are in the tent.”

Jacob let out a sigh. “Get back here then. We can both fit.”

I contemplated staying where I was for the sake of my sanity, but in the end I caved. If I had to choose between the sweet torture of Jacob’s skin against mine and the literal torture of sleep deprivation, I was going to go with the one that at least felt good.

“Fine.” I clambered into the back seat. “But I get to be the little spoon.” That way there was no chance of me waking up humping Jacob’s leg.

“Sure,” he said. He shoved at some of the crap that was on the back seat, sending it tumbling into the footwell. “See? Plenty of room. And at least there are no skunks.”

Plenty turned out to be a stretch. When we lay down, we were smooshed up against each other with Jacob’s head resting on my shoulder and my ass squarely against his dick. We both pretended not to notice. I closed my eyes and took slow, deep breaths, relaxing into Jacob’s hold where he’d slung a casual arm around my waist.

This could work. As long as nobody rolled over or popped a boner, we’d be fine.