by Peter Styles
Angel came into view again, lips slightly swollen from their kiss. In the neon of the bar lights, his skin looked ethereal. “Chance,” he breathed. “Chance, you can’t stay here. I can’t stay here. This place will crush us. Let’s run away. Let’s go somewhere else, just you and me. Let’s go be disgusting gays somewhere else.”
Chance looked into the glowing eyes of this ghost, this weirdo, this fearless thrill seeker who had given him more attention than every person in this stupid town combined, who made him feel things he was beginning to think he would never feel again.
“Okay, Ghostie,” he said, vision blurring. And then he passed out.
Chapter 8
A mere moment to make a mistake, but an entire night to dwell upon that moment.
Angel sat on the floor near the nightstand, drawing mindless patterns in his song notebook with a pencil held between two fingers. Only moonlight and the glow of the alarm clock provided a way for him to see what he was doing, not that it was much of anything at all. No, he was doing it just to do something. Two things were killing him, the first being that he couldn’t play any music.
The second was the reason he couldn’t play: Chance lay snoring in his hotel bed, conked out and drooling on the pillow. Angel closed his eyes for a moment, reliving once again the utter panic that shook through his entire body as the man collapsed. Then, the sickening wave of relief when he realized that Chance had not died from a heart attack, but had become sloppy drunk after only one bottle of beer and was now passed out.
As anyone in that situation would do, Angel looked around for help. Then, he realized that the Bullpen would do nothing for the two men they just kicked out for kissing. So, he shuffled around in Chance’s pockets until he found the car key and then drove them both to the hotel. The lady at the front desk raised an eye at them as they came in but she hadn’t said anything, perhaps assuming it was best not to ask.
And so the waiting game began as hours passed. Night deepened. Angel dozed in and out, woken often by discomfort. Dawn light eventually came pouring in through the gap in the windows, strengthening from a wash of grey into a bright beam that slashed across Chance’s eyes and finally woke him.
“Ugh…My head…”
Angel leapt to his feet, heart starting to pound. “Chance!”
“Ugh! Not so loud!” Chance sat up in bed and then leaned over, holding his hands over his face. His voice was muffled, distraught and confused. “My head.”
“Sorry,” Angel whispered in return. His chest ached with sympathy. “It’s called a hangover. Your first?”
Chance didn’t reply, rubbing his fingers over his pale face. Angel only watched for a moment, observing the way the pale skin went even whiter beneath those pressing fingers, and then he moved over to his backpack and fished out a bottle of aspirin. The sound of pills rattling around inside made Chance groan loudly, but there was nothing to be done for that. Filling a cup with water from the bathroom sink, Angel went and sat down on the edge of the bed. Gently, he took one of Chance’s hands and held it in his while placing four aspirins in his palm.
“Take those. And then drink all the water. Slowly.”
Chance squinted at him with his one uncovered eye, veins standing out darkly in the whites. “Why?” he moaned.
“Because dehydration makes hangovers worse.”
No wonder that stuff kicked your ass, though, Angel thought, looking at the man up and down. No meat on his bones, probably nothing substantial in his stomach; poor thing never stood a chance.
He watched on as Chance took the pills one after another, observing with some amusement that his tactic was backwards from the way most people did it. Rather than popping the pill and then taking a drink, he sipped at the water and then dropped the pill in his open mouth before swallowing.
That’s a cute little quirk.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Chance said, rubbing his forehead now between slow sips of water. “I get woozy taking cough medicine.”
Angel laughed softly. “I guess I should be glad, though. You probably wouldn’t have kissed me otherwise.”
Recalling the moment when their lips touched, he couldn’t help but to slip one hand between his legs. Not to fondle himself but as a reflex, remembering the intensity of his hard on.
Chance didn’t look at him, focusing intently on the water in his hand. His knuckles turned white with tension, nails digging into the foam cup. “How’d I get here? I guess we’re in the hotel.”
“Yeah,” Angel said. “I took your car. Sorry. I would have asked permission but…you know. You were kind of out of commission so I couldn’t ask.”
“It’s fine.”
Awkwardness descended swiftly between them. Angel closed his eyes, scooting back on the bed to lean against the headboard.
“Angel?”
“Yeah, Chance?”
Still examining the cup of water, Chance said, “I can’t run away with you.”
Angel sighed, tilting his head back as he kept his eyes closed. No, of course not. What he’d said after they kissed was a spur-of-the-moment declaration and not something that could be taken seriously at all afterwards. Except, at the time, he really had meant it. This place was a deathtrap. Angel saw it on the faces of all those men he performed in front of. They were all unhappy, stagnated here.
He couldn’t bear to see Chance turn into one of them, stuck in his job at the graveyard for as long as his grumpy coworker. That was no way to live. It was fine if that was what he wanted, but it wasn’t fair if there were literally no other opportunities for him if he changed his mind about it.
They could go off. He could show Chance how to be a drifter. They could…
“I know,” Angel said. He sighed again. “I know you can’t. And it was stupid of me to ask. We barely know each other.”
“It’s not that!” Chance said suddenly. He spun on the bed to face Angel, grabbing at his hand with an earnest expression. The corner of his mouth curled up in a grimace at moving too quickly, but he recovered. “I didn’t lie last night. I like you. A lot. Um…I’d like to…get to know you better.”
You shy thing, you.
“But it’s just what you said, about how we couldn’t run from the bar because people would think we’d done something wrong when we didn’t. I don’t want people to think I had to leave because I believe in what they think about people like us.”
Angel shrugged a little. “I did say that. But sometimes, you also have to know when to cut your losses. If we ran away together, you wouldn’t ever have to worry about coming back here. What people think then wouldn’t matter because you would never know.”
“But I would know, you know?” Chance reached for his hand but stopped halfway, drawing back shyly. Angel crossed the gap for them both, taking the man’s smaller, softer hand in his. The contact felt good and right, even if they didn’t match up perfectly. “I would know for the rest of my life.”
“Maybe you’d stop caring.” Angel squeezed Chance’s hand lightly, gazing into his eyes. They were deeply green, like seaweed or something else equally exotic, and framed from beneath by a scattering of acne scars. “I know I did.”
Chance looked at him, hard. “What did you run away from?”
Words caught in the back of his throat, a messy tangle. All he could do was look away.
I wish I could tell you. I wish there was enough time to get to know you, so I could trust myself to tell you.
That was a story he told no one, one he kept close to his heart. Not even his guitar ever heard that particular melody.
“I’m sorry I asked you to do that.”
Chance gave a funny little smile. “It was kind of flattering. What did I call you at the end, there?”
“Ghostie.”
“I like that.”
Angel did, too.
As if they couldn’t help themselves, they leaned in towards each other and kissed again. Brief and chaste and sweet, it ended not in a pulling away but a
curling together; wrapping his arms around Chance’s thin frame, Angel buried his nose in that curly mop of brown and breathed in deeply the scents of shampoo and hard work. His heart ached, and his arms tightened. He was only twenty-eight and already feeling so tired. Chance was even younger than that and looked as though he, too, was weary. There was no fairness in it. None at all.
“You know…”
His heart sped up at the wondering contemplation in Chance’s voice. No doubt he could hear his accelerated heartbeat but there was no hiding it. “What is it?” Angel breathed.
Chance spoke slowly, clearly thinking aloud. “I haven’t taken a vacation the whole time I’ve been working. I probably have a week or two of time to put aside.”
What are you hinting at?
“Angel,” Chance said, “I have no idea how we could ever make anything work. I hardly know you. I really like you but I don’t know you. I don’t think I could be a drifter, but I don’t think you’d ever want to settle down. And that’s even if we actually…are compatible, you know? That’s getting way into the future. It’s just that I don’t have any real-world skills. I don’t know how I’d ever get a job anywhere else. Five years of graveyard maintenance…that’s not a lot.”
Each word struck like a hammer against Angel’s heart, forging him into a wretched thing of despair. And yet, even as Chance drifted into silence, he felt as though there still might be something left unspoken.
“But?” he pressed.
“But…I don’t see a reason why…we couldn’t like, go on a road trip? A small one?” Chance blushed the darkest Angel had ever seen him blush yet, not just pink or red but the deep scarlet of flower petals. He once again resembled a thorn-headed fairy, a true rose. Angel wanted so badly to pluck that flower, but knowing that he had to enter into this carefully or else be cut. “I…That might interfere with your plans, especially because we’d have to come back here at the end of it. But…”
Angel kissed him again, tangling his fingers in those unruly curls. He couldn’t help but to smile, knowing that he didn’t have anything to celebrate yet but already getting his hopes up. All those years he spent learning not to do that and here he was, so many of his personal rules already blown out of the water. Where else was there to go from here but further into the air? And if he fell…well, he would gladly fall just for the chance to experience this.
“We can do that,” Angel said. “We can definitely do that. If you want a road trip, I’m your man.”
Chance grinned, clearly relieved. “Great. That’s so great! Here, I think I should get home now but let me give you my number…”
And Angel watched as Chance headed out the door. He clutched that phone number in his fist, watching and craning his neck until Chance moved out of sight. And then he dove back into the hotel room, hardly knowing what to do with himself. Did he celebrate? Fear for his future?
All of those things and more. But mostly, all he did was smile.
Chapter 9
Work was like a dream. Chance drifted through, weightless and untouchable. For once, he couldn’t focus on anything concrete or physical. The ground beneath his feet might as well not have existed. Tools seemed to pass right through his fingers, especially since he kept dropping them. The first time that happened, Rocky laughed his ass off. However, by the ninth or tenth time, the old man looked a lot less amused.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he finally demanded, standing in front of Chance.
“Ah!” Chance gasped, startled out of his daydreams. He blinked, looking sheepishly up at Rocky from where he was bent over picking up his shovel. For a moment, he had to struggle to remember exactly where he was and what he was doing, with the shovel being the only clue he had. Then, everything came rushing back in on him. Snatching at the shovel by the handle, he clutched it close to his chest and snapped straight up.
Rocky looked disgusted, his expression a perfect mirror of all those masculine farmers at the bar. Chance hated to see it, so much. It made him feel ashamed for being what he was and he really didn’t want to feel that way. He’d tried his hardest to avoid that and now it seemed like it was everywhere.
He gritted his teeth. “Sorry,” he said.
“You still feeling off or what?” Rocky grunted. “Maybe you should go to the doctor.”
“Actually, I’m feeling better than I ever have.”
“Ha! If this is you on a good day, I want the old Chance back.” Rocky stuck his shovel in the dirt and then leaned on it, favoring his bad hip. “I heard some rumors about you.”
His stomach twisted painfully, almost like he had been struck with a sudden bout of stomach flu. “I can probably tell you that they aren’t really rumors.”
Rocky nodded a little, rocking against his shovel. “You’re starting to slowly edge into unstable territory, kid. Every farmer an’ their wife knows about you now. And there ain’t no one in this town who isn’t related to a farmer. You’re heading for trouble.”
“Well, maybe I’ll have to tell the rep about that. I was planning on talking to her anyway.”
“Is that right?” Rocky straightened up slightly, looking around as though he could see their representative coming up the path. Although the strict woman resembled nothing so much as a bottle-blonde soccer mom and hadn’t ever said a harsh word in all the times she visited, Rocky disliked her. Whatever the reason behind that, Chance had never been able to figure out. “Why?”
“I’ve been thinking about taking a vacation.”
“Hmm. You know, that might not be such a bad idea for you. Wish I could join you but then there’d be a pile-up of the dead.” Rocky shook his head for a moment. “Where are you thinking about going?”
“I’m not sure yet.” Best that he didn’t actually know where Angel was headed yet, so that he wasn’t lying. “I guess it depends on how long I’ll get off for.”
Conversation tapered off slightly after that as they returned to work. Talking wasn’t feasible when the backhoe was running, luckily for Chance. He really didn’t know what else he could say without Rocky figuring out that he was hiding something; after all, who thought about taking a vacation without having any idea of where they wanted to go? That was just fishy.
The day passed slowly. Chance kept messing up, dropping things and getting numbers backwards when he said them aloud. Rocky just kept shaking his head and making comments about how Chance really did need that vacation.
Later that night, he sat down on the couch with a frozen Chinese dinner in his lap and a book beside him. He had just raised a fork to his mouth when his phone let out a faint chime. That sound used to be louder but had become muted in the days since he dropped it.
Dropping his fork with a sigh, he leaned over to grab his stupid, broken phone from the coffee table and glanced at the screen. An unknown number greeted him from the bared screen.
Probably a wrong number.
Then he read the text.
Hey, Chance. It’s Ghostie.
He smiled and curled his legs up onto the cushion beside him, nudging the book out of the way.
Hey, Ghostie, he texted back, thumbs trembling from excitement. Do any haunting today?
His heart gave a small skip as he pushed the send button. Anxiety washed over him in the moments as he waited for a reply, eating just to pass the time. The Chinese food tasted even more like paste than it normally would, difficult to swallow.
Then, another chime and he flinched with surprise even though he’d been anticipating it.
Not really, Angel had replied. “Not the season. Unexplained drafts are welcomed in the summer. Not scary.”
Chance giggled and hunched over his phone as he tapped out another text. This time, his smile stayed.
Chapter 10
This was the life, really.
Well, he didn’t mean that so much about the fact that he lay on his stomach on a bed that hadn’t had the sheets changed since the hotel opened. His face was dangerously close to the mattress and all t
he accumulated dead skin cells. He especially didn’t mean that about the fact that paying for the hotel every day was burning a hole in his pocket, or the fact that he wasn’t making any money to get any of it back. Not even a dime. Hell, not even a pity glance. Everyone knew him now. The gay musician, come to pollute the waters of their perfect little haven.
Normally he would have moved on long before this point.
But what made this special, made this hell a dream, was laying there half-dressed, giggling and texting like he was back in high school. No, like the way high school should have been. This was it, everything he had ever wanted. This was his escape, and somehow it was nothing at all. Angel never sent a truly meaningful text, and Chance revealed nothing of his own likes or secrets. They spoke of unrelated things, events in the news and the basics of their day. It was exactly like talking to a crush in the awkward days before actually asking them out on an official date, and Angel relished in the feeling. It made him feel so fresh and new, so young and not so weighed down by the woes of the world.
How did everything go today? he asked Chance, tapping out the words on the pad of a flip phone that had seen better days. It was all he could afford and it served the purpose well enough, although he wished it wasn’t so damn slow. His fingers were even slower today than usual, trepidation trembling through him. Today was the day Chance had finally been able to get ahold of his representative to ask about that time off. Everything hinged on this. The serenity of the moment could be bolstered or broken by how this went.
He sent the message and then waited, glancing over at the notebook beside him. Since he had nothing to do for any part of the day that left plenty of time to work on new songs. Just, not the one he wanted to work on.
A reply came a moment after he looked away, his heart jumping in his throat as he looked back. Then, he sagged as relief tore through him. The only word was, Good.