by Kallysten
“You’ll tell me if I’m wrong.” Calden pressed his hand over Eli’s on his chest. “Like you told me about this.”
“Can’t. I don’t read your diary.”
Calden tilted his head to one side, narrowing his eyes as he asked, “Never?”
“Never,” Eli confirmed. “You asked me not to. I promised.”
“I don’t remember that promise, either. Something else I’m missing. Do you understand how frustrating it is?”
Eli understood, yes. He’d watched Calden be frustrated by lack of information before he’d started writing the diary. It was the same frustration he could see in him now, had seen in the past few weeks, though without realizing the extent of it. The only difference was that, before, he’d wanted more information about everything in his life; now, he wanted to know more about his relationship with Eli. And while Eli had tried his best to be Calden’s memory, Calden was right: there were things Eli simply didn’t know, and things he didn’t believe Calden needed to know—things they might disagree about, but did Eli have the right to decide for Calden?
“How about…” He looked at the diary again, remembering it in Lana’s hands. “How about a second diary. One we’d both read.”
One they’d keep in the bedroom, out of reach of intrusive visitors.
“And both write in,” Calden said, practically beaming. “It’s our story after all.”
Our story. That, if anything, sealed it for Eli.
“All right. We can try that.” Standing from the sofa, Eli held his hand out to Calden and helped him to his feet. “But only after you’ve had another few hours of sleep.”
It was a measure of how tired Calden had to be that he didn’t protest again and let Eli lead him toward the bedroom.
“You could start writing while I sleep,” he said instead.
“If it’ll get you in bed without argument, then all right, I’ll do that.”
“What would it take to get you in bed?”
Eli laughed as he opened the bedroom door. “You know, before September, I’d never have guessed you were that interested in sex.”
“I’m not,” Calden said, shrugging out of his dressing gown. “I’m interested in you. I want to know what you look like when your brain short-circuits from pleasure.”
Delivered as Calden slipped into bed, the words were an invitation, the kind Eli was always careful to obtain before anything happened between them. Today, though, it wasn’t enough, not when balanced against the deep shadows under Calden’s eyes.
“You will know,” he said, drawing the sheet over Calden before sitting on the edge of the bed. “But only after you’ve had a good twelve hours of sleep.”
Calden scoffed. “Twelve hours? I never sleep that long.”
“When you need the sleep, you do.” Eli brushed Calden’s hair from his forehead. “And you very badly need the sleep.”
“But—”
“I love you,” Eli cut in softly. “And I’ll still love you when you wake up. And I’ll get to see your face when you hear it again like it’s brand new.”
Calden’s eyes closed even as he gave an odd little smile.
“What do I look like?” he mumbled.
Eli’s fingers ran over Calden’s hair again. “Like you’ve just finished some incredibly complicated surgery.”
“Multiple organ transplant, at least.”
Eli chuckled. “If you say so.”
“Maybe even a multiple transplant in a case of situs invertus. Mmm, yes, nice...”
“Always so romantic,” Eli murmured as he brushed a kiss to Calden’s brow, but Calden looked like he’d already drifted into sleep.
Leaving him was always hard, but Eli reminded himself yet again that Calden needed some rest, and left the room. In the office, he looked for a few moments through the mess in which Calden had found a notebook months earlier, but in the end he went out. Between the note taped to the front door, written in Calden’s hand and asking him not to go out if he’d just woken up and was alone, and the simple fact that Calden was exhausted, Eli was fairly certain he had enough time for a full shopping trip, and indeed when he came back and peeked in, Calden was still in bed, deeply asleep.
Eli put the groceries away before sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, a new notebook, and a pen. He thought for a few moments before putting the pen to the first line of the first page.
You asked me before when that first line became true, and I couldn’t answer you. I’ve been thinking about it, trying to figure it out, and I still don’t know. I’ve felt this way for as long as I’ve known you. Which is stupid, because what idiot falls in love with the most arrogant student in the class? Maybe that’s why I didn’t see it for what it was. Or maybe I didn’t want to jeopardize our friendship and our work relationship. Either way, I didn’t recognize it in myself, not for all the time we were friends, and not even when I fought so hard to have you reinstated after your overdose. Others saw it, but not me. Bryce saw it, I suppose. It’d explain why he was always so wary of you, why he thought I’d end up with you sooner or later. I wouldn’t have cheated on him, that’s not who I am, but when he first said the word separation, I didn’t argue.
Lifting the pen off the page, Eli reread what he’d written so far. He wasn’t sure that was what Calden wanted from a new diary, and it’d be easy to tear out the page and start over, but there was a reason why Eli’s thoughts had taken this path, and he could see where the path led.
Not what Calden wanted, maybe, but possibly what he needed.
I didn’t mean to talk about him. I meant to talk about us. But now that I’ve written this, I wonder—is this why you fear so much that I’ll leave you? Because you know I left my husband of a few months to be with someone else? It must make me look like a very fickle person. But you know me better than that. I believed in you when everyone thought your career was over, when you yourself thought you were finished as a surgeon. I hope you can believe me in return when I say this: I love you, and I’m not going anywhere. Not without you.
(next chronological chapter)
Epilogue - June 2nd
The hardest part is waiting for Eli to wake up. He can get awfully grumpy when Calden cuts his sleep short—or at least, that’s what Calden wrote in their book. Eli penned in an answer, pointing out that not everyone has frighteningly abnormal sleep patterns. Calden answered that there is nothing frightening about it… and that conversation continued for a full two pages over a couple of weeks.
Calden paces as he waits, sitting at the piano and getting up again without playing, practically bouncing from wall to wall with nervous excitement.
Finally, finally Eli wakes up, as the water running in the bathroom announces. Calden starts the coffeemaker—the notebook says Eli likes it when Calden makes coffee for him—but Eli comes down before the coffee is ready, and Calden can’t bear to wait a second longer.
“What’s going on?” Eli asks, yawning, as Calden drags him to the living room. “Can you give me two minutes—”
“I gave you almost eight hours. I was waiting for June second, and it’s been June second for seven hours and thirty-seven minutes. Here. Sit down.”
Eli looks pained as he sits on the sofa. “We don’t usually celebrate June second, you know,” he says with a sad smile.
Calden doesn’t reply and presses a couple of pages he tore from a medical journal into Eli’s hands. Eli looks at Calden sitting next to him, then at the pages, his eyes running briefly over them before he gives him a short nod.
“I’ve read this before,” he says. “It’s one of the longest and most detailed studies of a patient with anterograde amnesia.”
“So you know about the maze,” Calden says, barely suppressing his grin. “And how—”
“The patient solved it progressively faster, even though he had no memory of solving it previously, yes. It’s the same principle as muscle memory. It’s why you can learn new pieces on the piano and get better at them over a few—”
/> “Ask me about my memory palace,” Calden cuts in, smiling widely.
Something shifts in Eli’s expression, minute but still noticeable. Not hope; not yet. The hope that hope is possible, maybe.
“Tell me about your memory palace,” he asks quietly.
“Ask me about the pond,” Calden says, his smile widening a little more.
“Tell me about the pond.”
“Ask me how many stepping stones were in the pond.”
“How many stepping stones were in the pond?”
“Before the illness? Seventeen. There used to be seventeen stepping stones in the koi pond.”
Seventeen memories linked to Eli. His favorite food. His middle name. The name of his dog when he’d been a kid. The number of stitches it had taken to finish the reattachment of his arm. The exact color of his eyes on a sunny day, their color under a cloudy sky or under the fluorescent lighting at the hospital. Other small details that made him who he was—that made him the person Calden loved.
Eli blinks, licks his lips, and asks in a murmur, “How many are there now?”
It took a long, long time. A text file on Calden’s phone lists the first day Calden tried to create the memory cues, along with all the days after that when he found nothing new in the pond and tried again, the first day when something—a glimmer over the water more than anything else—appeared in the pond, and all the small steps after that until now.
It’s not a cure, not even a solution because Calden didn’t know it was there, wouldn’t have known to look for it if his phone hadn’t told him to check.
But it is… something. Progress. The proof that Calden’s brain might be trained to remember in new ways—or not so new; he’s been using the method of loci for more than half his life, after all.
“Twenty stones,” he says.
His hand shakes a little when he points at his left arm, then at the two lines on his chest, framed by tattoos representing the molecules of chemicals associated with love. The diagnosis should be in a different place of Calden’s memory palace because it’s not strictly related to Eli, but correcting it now would take more effort than he cares to exert at the moment.
“Twenty stones, including three new ones linked to these tattoos. Three new stones. Three new memo—”
He can’t finish, not with Eli’s mouth pressing hard against his for a harsh, desperate, all-encompassing kiss.
It’s okay. They can talk about it later. They have all the time in the world. It’s not like either of them is going anywhere.
The end
Excerpt
Moonlust
When Jay reclined far enough in his seat, making the bolts that held it down creak and complain, all he could see was stars. The walls over his head and in front of him were solid metal, like the rest of the Danaus, but here the smooth panels doubled as screens. At that moment, they might as well have been glass. He had turned on all of them—let Kar complain about wasted energy—and they reflected perfect images of what lay beyond the hull of the ship.
They were too far from any system Jay had visited while growing up so the constellations weren’t anything he recognized, but stars were old friends, wherever he went. Distant and cool, maybe, sometimes too silent, but always present.
“Receiving coordinates.”
Jay ignored the computer’s announcement with a flash of satisfaction at his small rebellion. He didn’t need to be there to receive that data. Kar had just been trying to piss him off.
“And he did that quite well,” he muttered to himself. “Jealous bastard. Just because he isn’t getting any…”
The flash of an idea burst into his mind. He sat up abruptly, already grinning, and turned to the computer panel to the right of the navigation display. The Danaus was a fine ship, but rudimentary. Its systems had been outdated long before Jay had decided that hacking was a lot more fun than programming. His instructor had disapproved, especially after Jay had snooped in his personal files and found a few very enlightening videos. Years later, his mother still blamed the incident for Jay’s preferences as far as the gender of his partners was concerned. He was the only person he knew who could match her stubbornness—and dared to.
He fiddled with the synchro program for a few moments before he asked, “Computer, report on all life systems.”
The computer droned on about air, water, pressure and so forth. Jay ignored the words but focused on the now-male voice, adjusting the pitch and speed, and even tweaking the system so that the remnants of a Carellese accent colored certain sounds. He soon had the perfect voice and stopped the computer in the middle of its inventory of all the little things that needed fixing on the ship.
That list of things to fix seemed to lengthen every time Jay heard it. Nothing life-threatening, but a long list just the same. They needed credits, and a lot of them. He glanced at the coordinates the Cisseis had sent them, wondering what they would be hunting for this time. The name of the system felt vaguely familiar, but before Jay could try to remember, Kar’s voice rose from the comm.
“Jay. The nexus is sealed. Release and start us on a course to the coordinates the Cisseis sent.”
He didn’t acknowledge the order, but he still followed it immediately. Kar could complain all he wanted. The truth was, Jay and Will did their work, and they did it well.
A few pressed buttons caused them to part company with the Cisseis. Jay looked at the coordinates again and plotted the first jump. The navigation computer checked his data automatically before revving the engines. The low, bone-rattling noise would be warning enough, but he opened the comm anyway and announced curtly, “Jump in five.”
Five seconds later, he executed the jump command. The Danaus seemed to lurch forward, then everything was still for a split second. The arrival was the part Jay liked the least. On a ship this small, the abrupt stop was often enough to make you stumble if you weren’t careful. His chair creaked. He plotted the next jump—they would need about twenty more to reach their destination, with a few minutes of rest for the engines between each jump.
The ship was about to make its third jump when Will walked in. He just had time to sit in Kar’s chair before the Danaus did its lurch-still-shudder dance. Jay threw him a quick smile in the middle of charting the next jump.
“So what was that thing about the ballet?” Will asked when Jay angled his chair toward him. With his arms thrown behind his head and grasping the edge of the chair, his biceps were thrown into sharp relief against his short-sleeved shirt.
“The what?” Jay replied distractedly. “Oh. Nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing,” Will insisted. He leaned forward, his forearms resting on his thighs, and looked at Jay intently. “Most of the time you pretend you’ve never even set foot on a Prime Planet. And suddenly you spout something about going to the ballet? Do you even like ballet?”
Jay’s irritation, which had faded with the practical joke he had prepared for Kar, floated back to the surface of his mind. Will should have known better than to question him—like Kar should have known better than to call him Jake. That was his father’s name and he would be damned if he wore it one more day. “Whether I like ballet or not was not the point,” he said, the words coming out like cracks of a whip. “And I didn’t go.”
He gave Will a look that clearly warned him against continuing and pivoted toward the navigation controls. A few seconds before the next jump, he revved the engines.
“You didn’t go, you had them come to you.” Will paused. From the corner of his eye, Jay could see him frown. “What was it you said? On your own terms?”
Ignoring him, Jay flicked on the comm. “Jump in five.”
“What does that even mean, on your own terms?”
He stabbed the jump control with a finger and turned to glare. The look was totally lost on Will, who answered it with his sweetest smile. Jay consoled himself when the smile wavered as they jumped.
“Come on, now,” Will said afterwards. “I’m just trying
to understand. Understand you.”
His eyes and attention back on jump calculations, Jay snorted. “You make it sound like I’m this deep mystery. I’m not. I’m just like you. I wanted to fly. I am flying. End of story.”
He frowned uncertainly at his math and followed the cursor as the computer checked his work. Everything cleared out, and he nodded to himself. As he started turning back toward Will—he could never ignore him for very long—his seat pivoted under Will’s grip on the back of the chair. Will stood over him, dark eyes gleaming.
“You’re flying on a small ship that’s falling apart at about the same speed we put it back together, when you could have bought the best starship on the Troen docks. You could have bought an entire fleet of starships.”
And that, right there, all this questioning, was the reason why Jay didn’t like talking about his past. No one ever understood. No one could understand that hadn’t been born in the Lodge. He wished he could have left his old life completely behind him, but no amount of money would convince anyone to remove the five tattooed lines that twisted around his neck, branding him as a member of the Lodge. You could run away from the Lodge, but it never fully let you go. He understood why, of course. Since his childhood, he had been trained, taught, molded into the decision maker the Lodge needed him to be. He wasn’t just an investment, he was also one of the wheels needed to make the entire system run smoothly—and never mind if he thought that the system was flawed, granting unimaginable riches to a few while leaving a billion others to scratch the surface of arid rocks not to die of hunger.
Unconsciously, he raised his hand to his neck and scratched at the tattoo, stopping only when he noticed Will’s too-understanding eyes following his gesture.
“Fly the best starship money can buy and then what?” He forced his hand back onto his lap, curling it into a fist. “Go back every night to a mansion so big that I can barely find my wife and kids? Decide every morning how many people will starve that day when I set the price for grain? Spend my days with people whose deepest concern is whether their new jewelry will outshine mine? Believe me, no Troen starship would have brought me as far as the Danaus has.”