by Erin McRae
Still, Zack at least deserved some kind of choice in the matter. Aaron started walking again. “Do you want the creepy answer or the real answer?”
Zack fell into step beside him. “Why would I want the creepy answer?"
Aaron smiled into the dark. "Because I offered you a creepy answer, and you're a journalist and that should interest you."
"I just want to know if I should be alarmed by it,” Zack said cautiously.
Aaron shook his head. "You shouldn't." Probably.
"Okay. Fine,” Zack said. “But tell me the real answer first."
Aaron nodded. "So. Water expands when it freezes. And we're surrounded by it. There isn't always room for all the ice. So it breaks and buckles on the lake.”
“That makes sense,” Zack said, but Aaron wasn’t done.
Ice was a part of the life of the island, as much as it ever was at TCI, just in a different way. “It pushes up against people's wooden docks,” he went on. “It gets in the eaves and the pipes and the drains of the people who aren't here year-round. They hire some of us sometimes, to go check on their houses on the other islands. A lot of us won't do it. We're not lackeys to the summer people. They can pay to fix their damage from not knowing this place.” He wasn’t used to speaking to people other than his family about that; no one else understood. Because you don’t let anyone else know, he thought.
"Okay,’ Zack said slowly. “That is, actually, almost a little creepy.” He didn’t sound bothered by the prospect, though. More intrigued. “What's the actual creepy answer?"
Aaron drew a steadying breath of the sharp, cold air. "Seals."
Zack stopped walking again to turn toward Aaron. "Excuse me?"
"The animals? Like my ringtone?" Aaron tried to imitate the sound to make the point, like a dog barking through a wheezing inhale.
Zack flinched. "That was creepy."
"I warned you!”
"But seals are ocean animals?" Zack asked.
"Yes. Well, mostly,” Aaron said. “But that's why it's creepy. There's a legend up here, about a lost colony of them. They swam in via the Saint Lawrence, before it was called that, and got stuck. Some of them, when they realized they couldn’t make their way back to the sea, moved onto the land...for good. Not just to rest or sun but to grow tall and walk and become people."
"But not all of them?"
"No. Not all of them” Aaron said softly. “They’re calling for us to return to the water, so we can go back once again and find the sea."
"Us?" Zack asked.
"Us," Aaron confirmed. "My family has been here for years. Generations. I'm not sure we even know since when. One story goes that we got the land as a prize after the war.”
“The column... 1812?”
“That’s the one. There was no one living out here. They’ve done digs... found some hunting and fishing camps but otherwise, nothing. The indigenous people didn’t want it. Neither did us more recent arrivals. Everyone more or less agreed it was good for the occasional bit of hunting and not much more. So I guess it was the cheapest thing anyone could think of. I mean if you’re gonna reward people for service in a war you lost, why not dump them in the middle of a lake?”
"But you don't even know if that's true?"
Aaron shrugged. "There's no paperwork, and I come from storytellers.”
“Surely there’s a deed?”
Aaron shrugged. He honestly didn’t know. He knew deeds to houses were things people had. But people also usually came from places that weren’t like this.
“My dad grew up here, and his father before him, and his father before him,” he said. “Everyone he remembers always said everyone they remembered before them was from here too. So that's all any of us have. Stories fade in and out of truth, and all sorts of people are always making up tales about where they're from. Maybe the story about the war is true. Maybe the story about the seals is true. Maybe it’s both or neither. Maybe it's worse."
Zack shuddered. It might have been the cold, but Aaron wondered if he’d made a mistake telling him. Especially when Zack had no way of escaping and was stuck with Aaron’s probably-not-the-descendants-of-seals family for the next few days.
"Like I said," Aaron repeated firmly. "It's just the ice."
“Do you believe that?” Zack asked.
“Which?”
“Any of it.”
Aaron shrugged. “The seals. Sometimes. Maybe. Ari takes it seriously. It’s why she’s never left, not even to go to college. But in the end, does it really matter? We are who we are. Everyone has something that calls them home. Whatever home means for them.”
By now they’d reached the end of his family’s dock. Aaron stopped and tipped his head back, looking up at the sky. Zack did the same.
“I know in all the selkie stories it’s the human who wants to catch the seal and keep them on land with them forever. But I’d rather be the one who stays here with you.”
Aaron looked sharply at Zack, his heart suddenly pounding in his chest. He was as shocked by the heat in Zack’s gaze as much as by his words. An entire life trying to exist in two worlds, a season struggling to bring his hidden home to light, and now—after everything that had happened, and then hadn’t happened, between them—Zack accepted everything about Aaron, everything he was and might be, so easily.
“Really?” Aaron asked.
“Yes,” Zack said firmly.
Aaron kissed him.
Even in the dark, even after he’d been so terribly frightening, Zack accepted him into his arms easily. After all this time. Aaron felt calm and giddy and like he was going to fly out of his skin all at once.
Aaron loved the play between the heat of his mouth and the terrible cold of the outdoors, but if he wanted this to go anywhere, they needed to go inside.
“Can I stay with you tonight?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Zack said. “What will your parents think?”
Aaron laughed. “That’s not the problem,” he said, although he did not know the answer to the question. “Last I checked, we were broken up, and I told you this wasn’t about anything. No expectations. And yet, here we are.”
“The best, least surprising surprise,” Zack replied. “So yes, of course you can.”
THEY SLIPPED BACK INTO the house as quietly as they could, which wasn’t very between the whispering and the boots and other layers that had to be discarded right in the entrance way.
Downstairs in Zack’s room, Aaron got undressed as quick as he could before diving under the blankets on Zack’s bed. He remembered the first time they slept together and how he had curled up under the covers on the bed in Zack’s Saint Paul apartment, simply holding his cock in his mouth. It had been so strange, and soothing, and intimate, but this—his parents’ house, their peculiar reunion with still unexamined consequences—was not the time for anything but the sort. And there were plenty of ways to make their bodies bright with the simpleness of hands.
“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE get back to Minnesota?” Aaron asked. His head was pillowed on Zack’s chest, and Zack was lazily combing his fingers through his hair. The room was dark around them, lit only by the glow of the bedside lamp. The pilot light on the water heater hissed quietly, and in the distance he could still hear the snapping of the ice. Or the seals.
“What do you want to happen?” Zack asked.
Aaron didn’t miss the note of caution in his voice, and hoped he wasn’t about to get dumped again. Among other things, he could hardly storm out of his own house.
Evasion seemed safest. “You mean besides making the Olympic team?”
“I figured that was a given,” Zack said. Aaron could hear the smile in his voice. “I don’t want to mess up your deal. I also don’t want to assume that I know what you want... or what’s best for you.”
“Thank you for that lovely change of pace,” Aaron said, sarcastic. Then, he tried to be realistic. Which was difficult, with Zack’s skin lovely and warm against his. “I can’t...I sh
ouldn’t. Take my eye off the ball for the next few weeks. Nationals is everything when it comes to team placement. Also I just won’t have time. It’s a logistical question as much as a focus one.”
Zack nodded. “That’s more than fair.”
“But,” Aaron said. “When that’s all done and the team assignment is out, for better or for worse, I’ll have the bandwidth for things off the ice. And once I’m done with, or know I don’t have to worry about, the Olympics, you should feel free to tie me up and have ridiculously hot sex with me as much as you want.”
“Provided I ask first. And you say yes,” Zack said.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Aaron said.
Zack gave him a teasing smile. “You say that like I don’t know you get off on my asking permission.”
Aaron wanted to lean in, to kiss the smile off Zack’s mouth and return to what they’d been doing, but there was something else he needed to do. He’d told Zack about the seals, he’d gone to bed with him again, but there was one more thing he wanted to share. One more thing he hadn’t told another soul, except Ari.
“Speaking of permission,” he said, rolling the edge of the sheet between his fingers. “There’s something else I want to tell you. If that’s okay with you.”
“Of course,” Zack said, without hesitation, and Aaron loved him for it.
“So, something peculiar happened while I was in St. Petersburg...”
He told Zack the story of his surprise placement and the excitement and his subsequent walk around the city to work through his energy. Of the barking he’d heard in the water, of the dark eyes that had watched him. The soft, warm muzzle against his fingers. The man he’d met on the promenade after, not knowing if what had just happened had been real or a dream: They came for you.
Aaron knew it was a lot. Especially coming on the heels of his story about the origins of Whisker Island’s inhabitants—his ancestors. But he’d invited Zack here because he’d wanted to bring his two worlds together, and for that to happen, he needed Zack to understand all of him. Even the parts he didn’t entirely understand himself. And Zack didn’t recoil, didn’t even frown, didn’t dismiss anything Aaron told him.
Which, somehow, made Aaron feel more secure in his own skin. Like maybe stories could be true without having to be hidden, like maybe they could be true without destroying him.
Zack dragged a hand up and down Aaron’s back while he talked, the sensation soothing. When he’d finally finished, worn out by the day and the sex and the stories, he closed his eyes, intending only to rest.
He fell asleep before he knew it, Zack’s heart pounding beneath his ear like the surf on the shore.
Chapter 28
A WINTER STORM
Whisker Island
ZACK CRAWLED SLOWLY back to consciousness to the sound of footsteps and voices from overhead. Aaron was curled up against him, a warm lump of unconscious boy, and for a moment the world seemed normal again. He worried about what his parents might think if they came down here and how awkward breakfast might be. But those were small, halfway familiar concerns, and unimportant in the face of this place.
He couldn’t keep what Aaron had told him last night out of his head. The local legend about the origin of the island’s inhabitants, Zack might have been able to rationalize or dismiss. There was no reason to take it any more or less seriously than any other bit of folklore he’d ever heard on his travels. Aaron’s encounter with the seals in Saint Petersburg. That would have been easy to dismiss if it had happened to anyone not from this place. As it stood, having happened to Aaron that was much harder to push aside.
Certainly Aaron hadn’t just made up the story; it was simply too strange. And if he really had encountered seals in a river in the middle of Russia, seals who had apparently been looking for him...were the Lake Erie seals real too—and was Aaron really related to them?
Get a grip, Zack told himself. Aaron had just had an incredibly exciting and emotional day. It had been dark, in a city he didn’t know. Zack had been in enough high-stress situations to know that the night and adrenaline often combined to make people think they’d seen, heard and done things they wouldn’t possibly have. A seal wasn’t even the strangest thing he’d known someone to imagine. Surely, that’s all it had been, the Saint Petersburg seals and the island’s selkie inhabitants both: A product of the imagination.
But his train of thought was interrupted by a chorus of barking seals, and he jumped, every hair standing on end.
In his arms, Aaron grumbled sleepily and reached for his phone on the nightstand.
That goddamn phone, Zack thought, thoroughly unnerved.
Aaron cracked open an eye to look over the notifications, and a frown creased his forehead.
“What is it?” Zack asked. In his current frame of mind, he thoroughly expected the answer to be calamitous.
“A front is moving through,” Aaron said, scrolling. His hair was tousled from their activities the previous night, the curls falling into his eyes.
Zack gave into the urge to push Aaron’s hair back off his forehead. “Is that bad news?”
“It might be. All weather here is risky. And we need to be able to fly to get out of here.” His frown deepened. “There’s not a lot of wiggle room in my training schedule right now. I really need to get back on time.”
“What do we do, then?” Zack asked.
Aaron set the phone back on the nightstand with one last worried look. “Watch and wait.”
LATER THAT MORNING a storm blew in. Zack watched the clouds pile up on the horizon. With nothing in between but miles of water, there wasn’t anything to slow the storm down. The world seemed to shrink as it approached, the far-distant line of the horizon fading as a wall of grey swept across the lake. Aaron watched it and kept checking the weather radar.
Zack felt his unease rise. He could—and did—tell himself that the seals were just a story. But as the world outside disappeared, he couldn’t help but wonder if the island, or the seals out beyond the ice, were trying to keep Aaron there. Where they thought he belonged.
Any outside pursuits were out of the question for the day. Everyone else sat down to play cards. Aaron invited Zack to join, but he demurred. Aaron should have some time with just his family, and he needed some time to himself.
He settled himself by the fireplace, in the same overstuffed armchair he’d dozed off in his first night here, and pulled out his laptop. He wanted to check in with the outside world, especially if they were about to get stuck here, or if the internet was about to go out, He needed a reminder that people and places outside this island even existed.
A check of his email provided exactly that. It was ostensibly the Christmas holiday, so his inbox was relatively empty, but there was a message from Sammy. His article, about Aaron and TCI, had come back to him for one last round of edits before it got sent for publication. Zack skimmed through it, mostly checking to make sure his previous edits had found their way into the piece and nothing particularly egregious had happened in editorial. When he got to the end of it, though, he couldn’t help feeling like something was missing. This article was about skating, but at its core it was about Aaron and the story of his year. As Zack had learned in the last forty-eight hours, that story wasn’t complete without a sense of this place, the island from which Aaron came and would always, Zack was sure, return.
He dashed off a last addition to the piece, just a brief paragraph describing the island, its isolation, its peace, its mysteries. Though he knew better than to mention the seals as Aaron had told the story about them last night, he couldn’t help but mention their possibility. Not something strange and supernatural like what Aaron had described, but the idea of a lost colony come inland. There were cases of it dotting the far northern hemisphere on multiple continents.
He had to find things elsewhere in the piece to cut to make the word count fit, but that turned out to be easy. He trimmed what little remained of the content he had about Cayden. In the end, he was
pleased. It brought the piece together in a way that showcased Aaron as he truly was—the Aaron that he knew—to the world.
For the hell of it, before he sent it back, he grabbed the memory card out of his camera and paged through his recent photos from the island. Without checking first, he wouldn’t dare send one that included Aaron for both legal reasons and a general sense of human decency. But he had some good shots of the landscape and the horizon that showed just how desolate it was here and how far from everything.
He attached two to the email with his final edits on the story. In case you need them, he wrote.
He hoped Sammy decided they did.
AS THE REST OF THE day went on, Zack could feel it in the air as Aaron got more and more wound. Or maybe that was just the effect of shifting atmospheric pressure, as the storm continued to roar around them. Zack tried to breathe through it, but it was hard to relax. He could hardly imagine how Aaron must feel, with his entire season riding on being able to get off the island on time.
As they were getting ready for dinner, the world outside already gone dark, Aaron’s phone barked with an incoming call.
“It’s Stephanie,” he said as he picked it up. “The pilot,” he added, as if Zack could have forgotten the hero who had landed them safely on the slightly larger landmass to the south.
He took the call into the next room; Zack exchanged worried looks with Aaron’s parents. The likelihood that Stephanie was calling to tell Aaron she wasn’t going to be able to fly out on schedule seemed high.
Aaron, however, burst back into the kitchen with a delighted whoop. “It’s going to clear!” he called. He grabbed Zack around the neck for a hug, while his parents exclaimed with relief.
“Oh, I’m so glad,” Aaron said, pressing his forehead into Zack’s chest.
Zack rubbed his back. “Me too.”
Aaron looked up at him. “So I meant to ask,” he said, “before I got distracted by the weather scare. All that stuff about the seals...Is that okay? I didn’t scare you off, did I?”