Charlie turned into the empty church parking lot. “I guess we’ve got a ways to go in the romance department,” he said.
Griffin’s heart jumped, but quickly settled when he realized Charlie was just talking about their project theme. He was making a joke. Griffin pushed out a heh, yeah.
Charlie pulled the car to a stop in one of the parking aisles, and they swapped seats. The traffic cones were out again in a new pattern. Charlie had taken the time two nights in a row to build Griffin his own personal driving course.
He followed Charlie’s directions through the course and fared well, only riding up on the curb twice when making a turn. He might have done better, but he was distracted. He wanted to ask Charlie more questions, but didn’t want to be too obvious.
At the end of his first run through the course, after packing away the traffic cones in Charlie’s trunk, he parked in a spot at the end of an aisle – somewhat crooked, Charlie observed, but technically within the lines – and shut off the car.
Griffin searched for something to say, a sly question that would tell him more about Charlie, but the words kept slipping through his fingers. His pulse picked up as the silence drew longer.
Charlie broke it first. “I’ve never had a girlfriend, actually.”
Griffin’s pulse seemed to double in speed. Then it’s been on his mind, too, Griffin thought.
“You?” Charlie asked.
Griffin shook his head. His heart was racing so quickly that he was afraid his voice would shake if he spoke aloud.
“Uh,” Charlie started. There was that rare hesitation popping up again. “I brought you a movie,” he continued, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a simple, black thumb drive. It looked just like the one Griffin had in his backpack.
“It’s called ‘Til the Morning Sun,” Charlie said, offering the flash drive to Griffin. “It’s about two lovers that meet on a holiday in the Mediterranean. The cinematography is amazing. And I really like the writing.”
Griffin reached for the drive, but Charlie’s hand flinched and his fingers half-closed around it.
“It’s about two guys,” he said. There might have been a slight tremble in his voice. “Does that... bother you?”
Griffin felt his pulse pounding in his eardrums. He shook his head, but knew the moment needed more than that. He cleared his throat.
“No, that doesn’t bother me,” he said with a careful steadiness to his voice.
Charlie’s fingers relaxed, and Griffin placed his hand over the thumb drive. Griffin’s fingers dragged against Charlie’s palm as he took the drive. He could have sworn that time was slowing down – he felt as if he was touching some forbidden material, some holy silk, and his brain was racing to memorize every nuance in its texture before having to pull away.
Their hands broke contact and time flooded back to its normal cadence.
“I have a book for you too,” Griffin said. “Open up my backpack.”
Charlie lifted the bag at his feet onto his lap. He unzipped the main compartment and reached in.
He pulled out the paperback copy of Her Beauty Engulfs Me, and his face tightened.
“Not that one!” Griffin rushed to say. “There’s a thumb drive at the bottom, the same as yours.”
Charlie placed the book back in the bag and retrieved the thumb drive. He held it up triumphantly, and that familiar, goofy smile returned to his face. “Oh yes, I’ve heard great things about this one!”
Griffin laughed – a real, unexpected laugh.
“It’s my favorite book,” Griffin said.
“I thought Moonsword was your favorite book,” Charlie replied.
“That was before I knew I could tell you about this one. It’s called Dip. It’s about two guys.”
They both let out short, nervous laughs. They had stepped over a line together – or were teetering on it, anyways. The moment in the car felt like a fragile bubble, and they were both afraid to be the one to pop it.
Griffin didn’t know what to do next, but it was late and he had to get home. Besides, things were going okay – even better than okay – with Charlie, and he figured the less time he had to ruin it, the better. He placed his hand on the door handle. “I guess we should head back.”
Griffin pulled on the handle, but before he could push the door open, Charlie reached across him and pulled the door shut. It seemed to startle them both.
He was achingly close to Griffin – his arm grazing Griffin’s chest, and his face only a few inches away from Griffin’s. Griffin felt another compression of time, an even tighter and more delicate bubble. It was broken as Charlie receded back into his seat.
“Uh, I was just thinking that you could drive us back to your place,” he said. “For practice.”
Griffin nodded, once again the only response he felt he could confidently muster.
He turned the key and started the car. It hummed to life, and both boys seemed to relax into their seats. The larger bubble containing their half-admissions to each other was gone – not burst, but more evaporated so that the moment could settle and breathe and inhabit every inch of the car in which it had been born.
Griffin pulled back out of the parking space and made for the street. The night was late and quiet, and he was close to home. After only two lessons, he was already feeling comfortable behind the wheel.
That worried him a bit. He wasn’t ready for these nights together in the empty parking lot to start to end. He needed to keep coming back to this car, to this private course, to these quiet moments with Charlie.
As he turned out onto the main road, he made sure to roll over the curb for good measure.
6
Griffin had ugly cried at the end of ‘Til the Morning Sun (but he didn’t tell Charlie that).
He watched it twice in the same night, huddled beneath the bed covers with his phone in his hands, restarting it as soon as the credits had finished.
Charlie had been right – the film was beautiful, and the writing was just pitch-perfect from start to finish. The shots were full of longing and aching. The dialogue was layered with unspoken meanings. It seemed to capture something Griffin had never before realized was eluding him.
He felt like he had the first time he read Dip. It was like tuning the radio to a crisp, clear channel after a lifetime of listening to static and interference.
He didn’t tell Charlie any of that. He thought about it. He wrote it out as a text message a dozen times, but always deleted it before hitting send.
Like the leads in ‘Til the Morning Sun, he and Charlie were communicating in unspoken layers.
They’d had a few more driving lessons in the parking lot before graduating full-time to the street. Now when Charlie picked Griffin up, they worked the neighborhood roads and minor streets. They hadn’t exchanged new books or movies with each other. They hadn’t even really discussed the ones they’d traded before, other than to say that they enjoyed them, or were still going through them to take notes for their project.
In truth, Griffin was afraid to move past the point where they were. He didn’t have another book that spoke to him like Dip did. And giving Charlie anything else at this point would feel like a step backward. Like the unspoken layers that lingered in the air between them would be lost, and they’d be left with flat, meaningless words.
He wondered if Charlie was feeling the same way. He hadn’t offered another movie yet. Maybe he was waiting for Griffin to say something more about ‘Til the Morning Sun. He wanted to. But speaking threatened to bury the unspoken.
When Charlie pulled up – a bit later than usual – for their latest lesson, Griffin stepped into the passenger seat resolved to find the right words.
“Evenin’, partner,” Charlie said energetically. It was his favorite greeting, though he’d dropped the cartoonishly gruff cowboy impression a few days ago.
“Evenin’,” Griffin replied.
“Have you got about two hours to spare tonight?” Charlie asked.
/> “I’m not driving on the highway, Charlie. Not yet.”
He feigned a gasp of indignation. “I can’t believe you think I’d endanger both our lives like that.”
Griffin rolled his eyes. “I’m not that bad.”
Charlie nudged him on the shoulder with his knuckles. “We’ll see, but not today.”
Charlie put the car into drive and pulled away from the curb.
“What do we need two hours for, then?” Griffin asked.
“I’d like to watch a movie with you.”
Griffin smiled. Charlie had done it yet again – he’d found the perfect words while Griffin was still spinning his gears.
They pulled down the same street they used to take towards the church, and after a few blocks, into the church itself.
“Aren’t we watching a movie?” Griffin asked. “Besides, I thought I graduated from the parking lot.”
Charlie shushed him in a playful, giggly way. He took the car around the parking lot and behind the main church building to a back area tucked away from the road.
Griffin gasped.
There were string lights hanging aglow above one of the blank, exterior walls of the church. A projector sat in the low grass at the base of the wall, tilted upwards, and projecting a black rectangle along the length of the wall. Charlie backed the car into a parking space across from the building so that they faced the makeshift movie screen.
Charlie unclicked his seat belt and stepped out of the car. He jogged around to Griffin’s passenger door and opened it. He held out his hand. “Brave the cold with me?” he asked.
Griffin took his hand – excitement jolting up his arm at the touch – and stepped out of the car. Charlie led him to the front of the car, and then placed his other hand on Griffin’s waist. He was buzzing with anticipation.
“Hop up onto the hood,” Charlie said. “It’s the best seat in the house.”
Griffin did, reveling in the pressure of Charlie’s hand on his hip as he helped him hop up and back onto the car hood. Charlie let go once he was up there, and dashed to the back of the car. “Get comfortable!” he shouted from the trunk.
Griffin slid back and leaned up against the windshield with his legs laid out in front of him. Charlie came dashing back over and dropped a cardboard box onto the hood before climbing up himself. He took the box onto his lap and wiggled back up against the windshield shoulder to shoulder with Griffin.
Opening the box, he pulled out a large navy blanket, a jumbo bag of pre-popped popcorn, and two pullover hoodies. He stashed the box behind him on the roof of the car and held a hoodie out for Griffin to take. “I didn’t want to ruin the surprise by telling you to wear a jacket, so I brought you one.”
Griffin, feeling eternally grateful that he’d stepped out of the house tonight in a t-shirt, took it happily. It was dark grey and soft, and when he pulled it over his head, he found that it smelled like Charlie. He hadn’t realized that Charlie had a smell, but being submerged in it seemed to unlock some forgotten depth of familiarity – like his brain had filed away this unnoticed piece of information, and now he was excavating it.
He took a deep breath to let himself absorb the smell, and the moment, and the fact that he was almost definitely on an unspoken date with Charlie Hess right now.
Charlie kicked off his sneakers and let them fall to the side of the car. He leaned forward and pointed to Griffin’s shoes. “May I have the honor?” he asked with faux formality.
Griffin nodded, and Charlie untied his shoelaces and pulled each of his shoes off. Rather than drop them to the ground, he leaned back and twisted around to place them in the box behind them.
Then Charlie unfurled the blanket over both of them and wiggled up against Griffin’s shoulder. His leg was against Griffin’s, and their socked feet – now free of their shoes – touched lightly beneath the blanket. Charlie opened the bag of popcorn and placed it on Griffin’s lap. “Hope you don’t mind sharing,” he said with a smile.
Griffin smiled back. “I can’t believe you did all this.”
“Well, we had to celebrate you graduating from the parking lot somehow,” Charlie said, bumping his shoulder up against Griffin’s. “Ready to watch?”
“What are we watching?”
“Inspiration,” Charlie said simply. He pulled a coiled pair of headphones out of his pocket, unwrapped them, and handed one earpiece to Griffin. They each placed their headphone in an ear, then he plugged them into his phone and hit play.
The screen came alive with the title Paradise Highway in neon letters. Eighties synth-pop music played as the letters dissolved away to reveal a lime green sports car zooming down a freeway, and the boys nestled up together beneath the blanket.
Griffin felt warm, inside and out. He took a deep breath – for the smell of Charlie’s pullover, for the feeling of their legs resting against each other, for Charlie’s kindness, and for the unspoken layers of meaning that hung in the night air.
7
Every second of those two hours on the hood of the car was permanently etched into Griffin’s mind. When Charlie dropped him off at home afterward, he was buzzing with energy – the buoyant kind that makes your chest feel lighter, and your face go numb. He tiptoed into his room, making sure not to wake his mother, and collapsed onto his bed.
He laid there for a while, still in Charlie’s grey pullover, replaying vignettes from the last two hours like spools of film being fed to a projector.
He replayed the warmth of Charlie’s body next to his beneath the blanket, and the sheer exhilaration of being so close.
He pictured the wide-eyed grin that stayed plastered to Charlie’s face during the entire movie.
He relived Charlie holding up a kernel that had spilled onto his shirt, and feeding it to him – casually, never even pulling his eyes away from the film as Griffin’s lips grazed his fingertips.
That moment was stoking a fire in Griffin’s temples, and the center of his chest, and on the crest of his lips.
He let himself sit with it. He committed it more deeply to memory – the saltiness of the popcorn, the coolness of the night air, the topography of Charlie’s fingertips as interpreted by his lips.
He laid there for a while longer.
And when he next opened his eyes, the sun was filtering in through the blinds – bright, and cozy, and warm like the memory he was waking from.
8
Griffin felt like he was floating through the next few weeks.
Time seemed to anchor on Charlie so that when they were apart it passed quickly and lightly, but their time spent together felt dense and rich like a drop of molasses making its way down the neck of a bottle.
Charlie would find Griffin in the mornings and walk him to his first period. They’d eat lunch together, outside away from the bustle and bluster of the cafeteria. They’d begun trading rapidly in books and films now – like Paradise Highway and their not-date beneath the night stars had given them permission to speak more freely again. They were no longer worried that the unspoken layers of meaning would be missed.
Neither one of them acknowledged the shift – or that fact that they traded most frequently in narratives about men in love with other men.
Night Rides Page 3