by Cari Z
“You’re the one who wants to stop every other mile to enjoy the ‘cultural attractions,’” Aaron said, putting the air quotes in just to annoy. It worked, if the head shake that Tyler threw at him was any indication, and he grinned. “If I’m walking around outside with you, then I expect you to look like a fully functional human being and not an overgrown five-year-old.”
“Flannel pj’s are still pants!”
“They’re not pants enough.”
“I’mma make you listen to Creed for this,” Tyler vowed as he pulled a pair of jeans on over his boxers. Aaron looked away. “Or Nickelback. We’re not even gonna glance in the direction of NPR for the next five hundred miles. I want you to know that.”
“We’ll see.”
In the end, they compromised on the music—mostly inoffensive country singers instead of the news or bad pop artists—and were on their way. Aaron let Tyler drive, and while they stayed on familiar roads, it hardly felt like anything momentous was happening.
It wasn’t until they got onto I-40 and started in on the stretch between Knoxville and Nashville that Tyler finally said, “You’ve gotta stop lookin’ back, Aaron. You’re gonna hurt your neck.”
“I didn’t even realize I was doing it.”
“I know.” Tyler looked over at him. “You’re about thirty miles into your vacation so far. How’s it feel?”
“Not… amazing,” Aaron confessed. “I know—logically I know that everything that needs to be taken care of is. Pam’s on top of it; my cases are covered; I don’t have to worry about my clients. I shouldn’t worry about them—that’s the whole point of taking some time off, right? I’m supposed to rest and relax and clear my head. But I’m just not sure that I can.”
“Well, we’ve got a long way to go,” Tyler said with surprising diplomacy. “Distance’ll make it easier. So will distraction.”
Aaron paused, then reluctantly smiled. “That’s part of why you want to stop so much, isn’t it?”
Tyler nodded. “That and the fact that five hundred miles isn’t even a day’s drive. We’ll get to St. Louis too early and have nothin’ to do if we don’t slow things down along the way. It’s not about the destination.”
“It’s about the journey. I know.”
“It’s about all the shit you can get up to on the journey, yeah,” Tyler agreed with a grin.
Tuesday morning traffic heading into Nashville was just as bad as Aaron thought it would be. Aaron wasn’t the one driving, though, and he was still tired enough from the previous night that it was pretty easy just to put the seat back and fall asleep to the lull of the stop-and-go. Tyler woke him up exactly twice on the way to Memphis: once to look at the picture of a mule on a cliff and once to see where the infamous Buford Pusser had died. Both were a little anticlimactic.
“You’ve got to be a real badass to walk around fighting with moonshiners and bears and all that shit and have a name like Pusser,” Tyler said as they walked toward the memorial, which was nothing more than a sign with the man’s name on it where his car had exploded.
“I don’t know that I believe the bear story,” Aaron said, stretching his arms above his head as they walked. Tyler’s car was roomy compared to his, but his spine still didn’t really care for being stuck in one position for hours on end. At least at work, he could get up and move around every half hour… and he really needed to stop thinking about work.
“It’s true! Buford Pusser was shot, stabbed, beaten, hit by a car, and he wrestled a bear and lived to tell about it before his car was sabotaged.”
“His car being sabotaged wasn’t proven, though, right?”
Tyler nudged Aaron’s shoulder with his own. “You’ve got to keep a sense of perspective with stories like this. Kills all the romance of it to say that he just got into a drunk accident.”
“The romance of it?” Aaron chuckled. “What kind of romance are you talking about?”
“The kind that sweeps you up and carries you away, even if it’s kind of a rough ride. Something bigger than yourself, something with legend. Tennessee is the land of legends, Aaron. We’ve got Elvis, Jack Daniels, Davy Crockett. And we’ve got Buford Pusser, and he wrestled a damn bear and was blown up by a bunch of criminals. Got it?”
“Yeah.” Aaron nudged Tyler back. “I guess I get it.”
“Good.” They stared at the memorial sign for a few more seconds, and then Aaron said, “Okay, let’s go to Gus’s for fried chicken, I’m starving.”
“You’re always starving.”
“And you’re a poor, sorry soul who’s never experienced this fried chicken before.” Aaron almost had to jog to keep up with Tyler’s long legs on the way back to the car. “But you’re gonna today, and then you’ll see.”
Gus’s was jam-packed, a little hole-in-the-wall redolent with the scents of pepper and grease. The chicken, however, was just as good as claimed. Aaron ate his basketful and then got another, because he’d be damned if he was going to resort to snacking on pork cracklins and cheese straws in the car when he could be full of this chicken.
“Told you.” Tyler looked smug.
“I’m eating this much out of self-defense against your awful snack foods,” Aaron informed him.
“Yeah-huh. Keep tellin’ yourself that.”
They cut north from there, and Tyler gleefully reminded Aaron of all the dumb car games they could play when he should be keeping his eyes on the damn road instead of the license plates of the other cars.
“I swear to God, you hit me again and I’m taking the wheel,” Aaron warned Tyler after the third sock to the shoulder for an out-of-state license plate.
“You’re spoiling my fun. Fine.” Tyler gazed out at the traffic for a moment, then grinned. “Okay, what about this game? It’s super easy, no starin’ at license plates needed.”
Aaron didn’t say anything, and Tyler turned a wheedling expression on him.
“Come on, we’re still three hours out from St. Louis. We’ve got to pass the time somehow!”
“I brought a book.”
“I’m vetoing that. Play with me.”
“We could switch and you could get some work done.”
“Um, not just no, but hell no. Play with meeeeee.”
Damn it, Aaron hated that tone of voice. It was too easy to imagine that Tyler was serious sometimes. “What’s the game?”
“Excellent!” Tyler’s grin was back with a vengeance. “It’s really easy. All you have to do is read the name off the backs of the RVs we see, and put ‘anal’ in front of them.”
Aaron stared at Tyler for a long moment. “Did you get this idea from South Park?”
“Maybe, I can’t remember. It’s a good game, though. Look!” He pointed down the road. “Read the side of that.”
“I don’t have my glasses on.”
“I’ll read it for you, then. Fun Finder.” Tyler laughed out loud. “Oh my God, that’s a great one to start with. Anal Fun Finder!”
“It’s childish.”
“It’s funny.”
“You’re childish.”
“Your face is childish.” Tyler beamed at him. “Admit it. It’s a funny game.”
Well… shit. “Okay, it’s funny.”
“Damn straight it is! Get your glasses on and you do the next one.”
Aaron reached down into his backpack and pulled them out, cleaned the lenses and slid the world into focus. “Fine. Where’s another RV?”
“There’s one coming up on the right. Check it out.”
Aaron stared out the window. “Hideout.”
“No, you have to say the full thing. It’s not a Hideout, it’s an—” He looked at Aaron expectantly.
“Anal Hideout.” Aaron said it as deadpan as he could manage, and sure enough, Tyler burst into laughter. It warmed Aaron up a little just to watch him enjoy himself so much.
“You have to say it that way for all of them! Keep going.”
“We have to wait for another one to come along.”
/> “There’ll be plenty,” Tyler predicted. “Summer’s almost here. That means people start shiftin’ in the South. Like there’s much difference between the mosquitoes in Georgia and the ones in Alabama.”
“Right. Because everybody knows if you want a good mosquito, you have to come to Tennessee.”
“Exactly. Home state pride, baby.”
“Leavenworth is right on the Missouri River,” Aaron said, not quite sure why he was suddenly volunteering the information. “I remember we lived one year in a little house right on the bank, close to the railroad tracks. I was… maybe eight? The house had a screen door to keep out the bugs, but it was so hot that year that my mother opened up all the windows at night. We got whole swarms of mosquitoes in the house. I had to rig up a teepee for myself and Zach in our bedroom to keep them off us.” Aaron remembered the myriad red dots all over his baby brother’s skin, the way Zach had scratched and cried. Aaron had used so much calamine lotion on the toddler that he’d been more pink than pale.
“I guess maybe Kansas wins when it comes to mosquitoes, then,” Tyler said somberly. Aaron missed his laugh.
“Yeah.” He looked back out at the road. “Anal Hurricane.”
“Nice one.”
They passed an Anal Sunseeker, Anal Komfort—complete with the K. Aaron couldn’t have made that up. The only way it could have been better was if it was spelled Kumfort—Anal Competitor, and Anal Vengeance before they switched places, and then Tyler amused himself with the radio until they got into St. Louis. Tyler had found them a place for the night in an AirBNB apartment with two bedrooms and a view of the silver arch that was really the only thing Aaron knew about the place.
“Pretty,” Tyler noted as he threw his duffel bag down on the couch. The woman who owned the place also owned the apartment next to it, and had greeted them with iced tea and a plate of cookies on the kitchen counter, as well as an offer to set up a dinner reservation or a river cruise for the evening.
Aaron had laughed. “We’ll just play it by ear,” he’d said to her. “Thank you, though.”
Half the plate of cookies was gone by the time Aaron got back from putting his bag away and using the bathroom. “You are a black hole,” he informed Tyler.
“I can’t help having a high metabolism.”
“You won’t have it forever.”
Tyler snorted. “Have you seen my parents? Food don’t stick to our bones. Half the church women wanted to smack my mama for eating all the things they couldn’t in front of them and the other half wanted to use her as a guinea pig for all their least healthy recipes. Thirty years of that and she’s the same size now that she was when they got married. And she doesn’t have diabetes. I’m set, man.”
“Don’t tempt fate.” Aaron didn’t know whether he came from the sort of people who were genetically predisposed to heart problems or strokes or cancer, but he did know he had the makings of an addict. The prospect scared him so much that he never took a painkiller stronger than aspirin and fought hard to keep his coffee habit down to one cup a day, just in case. He’d have a beer with Tyler, but never more than one. “Are you still hungry?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course you are,” Aaron muttered as he pulled out his phone. “What do you want?”
“Oh, someplace with atmosphere, maybe candles and a nice view where we can get a decent wine to pair with our meal.”
Aaron stared at Tyler, who said nothing for a long moment before breaking out in a grin. “Barbecue, of course.”
“That’s what I thought.”
They settled on Bogart’s Smokehouse, caught a cab there, and spent the next hour going through plates of smoked meat and more sauces than Aaron knew what to do with. Tennessee had barbecue, good barbecue, but apparently this place was legend and he could see why. By the end of the meal, Tyler was licking his fingers clean, and Aaron had to throw a moist towelette at him to remind him not to be a heathen.
It was still relatively early, but they’d gotten up before dawn and Aaron was feeling the length of the day. He wanted his phone to buzz with a message to distract him. He wanted to check his email and see what was piling up. He wanted to check in at work and make sure everything was going smoothly, except Pam had sworn to kill him if he did.
“Let’s go to the arch.”
Aaron blinked and refocused his attention on Tyler. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Let’s go see the arch. You can go up it, you know. They’ve got a tram and everything.”
“At seven in the evening?”
“They’re open until ten,” Tyler wheedled. “We can watch the sunset or something. C’mon. I’m not ready to go back to the apartment and do old-person stuff.”
“Old-person stuff.” Jesus H. Christ. “You mean shower and sleep?”
“Yeah, exactly. I knew we should have brought my games.”
Aaron rolled his eyes. “You can survive a week without your Xbox.” It was kind of early, though. “All right, let’s go.”
“Yes!”
It was a seven-minute Lyft ride from the restaurant to the arch, and it wasn’t until they were standing at the base of it, waiting in line for their turn to ride to the top, that someone started having second thoughts. Surprisingly, it wasn’t Aaron.
“Shit, that’s high.”
Aaron checked the pamphlet. “Six hundred and thirty feet.”
“That would be a hell of a long way to fall.”
He gently hip-checked Tyler. “I’m pretty sure there are precautions in place up there to keep people from falling.”
“Yeah.” Tyler chewed on his bottom lip as they stepped closer to the entrance. “What about mechanical failure, though?”
“They probably do maintenance on this thing all the time, Ty. We’re not going to plunge to our deaths or anything.” Aaron was actually a little surprised by Tyler’s emerging phobia. “You’ve literally jumped out of an airplane before.” And he had, on his twenty-first birthday, a stunt that Aaron had politely refused to get in on. “How is it that you’re even remotely afraid of heights?”
“It’s not the heights, really. It’s the depths that get on my nerves. And jumpin’ out of a plane, man—that’s not even like falling, you’re too high up to have any sense of perspective with the horizon. It’s more like being in a wind tunnel.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.”
They got their own car on the tram to take them to the top. Aaron sat and Tyler took a spot next to him, but as soon as they were moving, he was on his feet, one hand pressed to the glass of the little window, the other one tapping restlessly against his thigh. “This thing lurches,” he complained after the first thirty seconds. “What the hell kind of engineer designs a train that lurches as you go up? This isn’t a damn amusement park.”
“We’ll be at the top before you know it.”
“Unless we fall to our deaths first,” Tyler muttered. “World’s worst date.”
Aaron chuckled. “Good thing it’s not a date, then.”
“Hell no, it’s not, not if we don’t live through it.”
He reached out and clasped Tyler’s tapping hand. “It’s okay.”
Tyler glanced down. “Yeah? Since when are you the optimist?”
“Since I got a grasp on statistics. We’re going to be fine.”
Tyler didn’t say anything, but he didn’t let go of Aaron’s hand either. By the time they got to the observation deck, he seemed less antsy and tugged Aaron out of their car and over to the larger, western-facing windows. Their timing was perfect—the sun was just disappearing over the horizon. The brilliant blue of the sky was slowly fading to indigo, and the high, quilt-like clouds had turned pink and orange in the fading light. Aaron didn’t think he’d ever been this high up outside of the two airplane rides he’d had in his life, and even then, the view hadn’t been this good.
“’S pretty,” Tyler commented.
“Beautiful.” It felt good, actually—kind of freeing to be so removed f
rom the surface of the earth. Like being a little closer to the sky gave him permission to let his mind wander. Aaron felt tension he hadn’t even realized he was holding in his shoulders suddenly leave, and he relaxed with an almost-orgasmic shudder.
Tyler looked at him and smiled. “Imagine the view from the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower.”
“Ha-ha. Don’t tease me.”
“I’m not teasin’ you. You could go there, y’know. You could go anywhere, see what somewhere farther off than St. Louis has to offer.”
Aaron shook his head. “I can’t picture traveling like that by myself.” Those seemed like once-in-a-lifetime trips, and it didn’t make sense to go somewhere like that when the only person he’d be sharing it with was himself.
“Nobody says you have to be alone.”
Yeah, but it wasn’t like he had prospects beating down his door either. “Let’s look out the other side.”
Chapter Six
AARON woke up to a dry mouth and a hole in the pit of his stomach. It took him a second to remember that he hadn’t had anything to drink last night. No, his feelings were entirely courtesy of the anxiety that came from realizing this was Wednesday, and they were no more than four hours away from the Kansas border. Why the fuck hadn’t they waited to leave until later in the week? The wedding wasn’t until Saturday―they could have started driving tomorrow and gotten here with just one day to kill instead of the four that loomed large in front of him.
For the first time in a long while, Aaron wished he was still on his antianxiety medications. He’d taken them all through college, a way to get past the worst of his panic attacks and depression. Eventually he’d asked his doctor if he could quit them and cut back until he’d finally stopped completely. He needed to be alert for his job, and while it could be stressful, it was purposeful the way that going to classes and doing homework had never quite managed to feel. Being a good student had never stood in the way of disappointment before, but being a good employee, especially for the government, meant that he was relatively safe. It wasn’t just staying busy. It was feeling like he was doing something more, being part of something bigger than himself. As long as he did his job to the best of his abilities, he wouldn’t be found wanting. He would have a place.