by Arden Powell
“I love you,” Kris said instead. It tumbled out of his mouth like he couldn’t contain it a second longer, alive and spoken in the same instant it occurred to him. He loved Rayne, completely and absolutely, and now he’d finally said it aloud. He kept talking, too engrossed in cataloging every feeling to panic. “I know you think this is the drugs talking, but I need you to know—I love you, more than I’ve ever loved anything. You’re everything to me. It’s not a crush, or a— I love you.”
Rayne touched Kris’s hair, his cheeks, his mouth. “I love you too. You’re beautiful.”
Kris felt beautiful, and if Rayne said it, it must be true. Rayne breathed beauty; he bled and sang and exuded it with every minute he spent on Earth. He was beauty incarnate. Kris reached out with one trembling hand to rest it on Rayne’s shoulder, where the wild roses twined under his shirt. Though Kris couldn’t feel them through the fabric, he imagined them pulsing with a life of their own. He imagined laying Rayne down and stripping him bare and tracing every one of his tattoos line by line, until he had them ingrained in his mind’s eye, never to fade. Opening his mouth, his thoughts raced a thousand miles ahead of his body, intending to say these fantasies aloud, safe in the dark glowing crush of the crowd. Rayne looked at him with soft wondrous eyes, his lips parted as if waiting with baited breath for Kris to speak.
“Rayne . . .”
They both moved in at once, as if in slow motion. Kris’s heart thudded in his chest like it was underwater, his blood rushing through his veins and tingling in his lips in anticipation of the—
“Sorry, am I interrupting?”
Kris froze as his heart skipped faster and his blood spread through his face in a wave of heat. He turned to find Calloway standing a few feet off, watching them with a smile, even as a faint line furrowed his brow.
“Cal.” Rayne smiled and held out his hand. “You made it.”
“You sure I shouldn’t come back later?”
Kris wished Cal would. He had forgotten, in that rush of love and understanding, that Calloway was coming, that that had been the plan all along. He was so close to telling Rayne everything—they were on the same level, he and Rayne, bonded by the music and the neon lights. He’d been going to tell Rayne with more than words—they had been so close!—but he’d needed to make sure Rayne knew what he was saying first. But now, with Calloway here, his certainty stuttered. He didn’t know what to do.
“No, stay,” Rayne said, taking Calloway by both hands and drawing him closer. “We were waiting for you.”
“You’re both very high.”
“You’re not?”
Calloway shook his head. “I stopped all that when I quit the cult. I don’t even drink anymore.”
“You can dance, though.”
“Yeah, I can dance. Rayne, listen.” He glanced at Kris, but when Kris didn’t say anything, he continued. “I know where a few guys from the press are hanging out. If we go over there now, by tomorrow everyone will be talking.”
“Okay,” Rayne said, tracing the lines of one of Calloway’s tattoos up his arm until it disappeared under his sleeve. Kris squirmed, longing to do the same to Rayne, somewhere quieter and more private.
“Rayne.” Calloway was laughing, his touch gentle as he caught Rayne’s hand. “Are you listening?”
“Yeah, I am. We’re going to find the press. Kris? Will you be okay staying with Angel?”
Kris had lost Angel somewhere in the crowd. He pictured her dancing with a hundred strangers under those incandescent jelly lights, swimming through the sea of bodies like a minnow dancing under the waves.
“Kris,” Rayne repeated.
He and Calloway both looked concerned, clearly waiting for Kris’s response. Kris could see their auras, shimmering around their silhouettes like heat waves. Calloway was attracted to Rayne, he realized, even beyond the basic friendly attraction that had prompted him to agree to the publicity stunt in the first place. They were still holding hands, Cal’s thumb brushing Rayne’s almost unconsciously. Kris watched as tiny sparks of light like fireflies jumped from the point of contact.
He had missed his chance. No—he had given his chance away when he’d told Rayne to agree to the whole scheme. It was supposed to have made things easier, but it had made everything impossibly worse. His thoughts whirled uselessly. He was too high to solve this problem, too high to . . .
He made himself smile and relax and meet their questioning gaze. “I’m good. I’m okay. You guys go . . . go do your thing.”
Rayne glanced at Calloway before letting go of his hands and stepping in close to Kris again. Kris leaned in instinctively to meet him, their bodies hot and too complicated for him to consider with his mind like this. He touched Rayne’s arm, trailing up to his shoulder and his neck. The wild roses again. He leaned in—
Calloway gave a polite cough from over Rayne’s shoulder.
“Kris?” Rayne said, softly, like he didn’t understand at all.
“I need water,” Kris said abruptly. Rayne and Calloway needed to convince the world they were dating, and Kris had no place in that. Cal’s aura shimmered like gossamer, all wound up in Rayne’s. Kris pulled his hand back, missing the touch before it was even gone, and retreated a step, forcing distance between them until his head cleared. “I’m going to walk outside,” he said. “I want to see . . . everything.”
Angel reemerged from the crowd, flushed with sweat from dancing.
“Will you be okay by yourself?” Rayne asked. “It’s still your first time on molly.”
“I’m good,” Kris said firmly. “I’ll meet you at the bus later, okay?”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Keep dancing. Go find your paparazzi.”
Rayne smiled, his hesitation melting away like it had never been, and Angel pressed a bottle of water into Kris’s hands. “Remember, if you feel weird, just find festival security,” she told him. “They’ll get you back to us.”
“I’ll be okay,” he promised. Angel kissed his cheek, and when he touched it after he found that her lipstick had left a little mark on his skin.
Calloway took Rayne by the shoulders, and leaned in close to whisper something in his ear, and Rayne smiled and laughed, low and dark and full of promise. Kris slipped from the tent before he had to see them kiss, leaving behind the jellyfish swimming through the air above the dancers’ heads, and into the night air. It was crisp and fresh and it filled his lungs with the sweetest taste he could imagine, the kind he hadn’t known since childhood—like bonfires, with pinprick stars in the void, fireflies, and frogs chirping, forever out of sight. It was a relief to replace Rayne, and all the feelings Rayne evoked—love like he couldn’t even articulate—with the air and the stars and the insects, if only for a moment.
He walked in no particular direction at all. Half the time he spent staring up at the sky, watching the constellations shimmer in and out of existence, and the other half winding around tents and dancers and makeshift campsites under the open sky. He felt connected to every single person he passed. They were all children, all finding themselves on the same planet, all spinning through space and time and life together. They were all love. He hummed to himself as he walked, skipping between Rayne’s lyrics and songs he remembered his mother singing to him when he was a child. He basked in the beauty of the world and the fate that had led him to this particular moment, this moment out of a million, billion possibilities, and then he saw the peacock.
He had wandered to the edge of the festival grounds where tents were scarce and people were scarcer, but it was lit up with pot lights that bathed the desert in a golden glow. Looking around, he cast glances over his shoulder, but there was no one nearby to confirm that the bird was real.
The bird looked at Kris with bright eyes and bobbed his head. He was the most strikingly regal creature Kris had ever seen, but what a peacock was doing in the middle of the Mojave Desert, Kris couldn’t guess. The peacock didn’t seem lost, in as far as any peacock could seem
lost or not, but he obviously didn’t belong. Unfortunately, Kris and the peacock were the only living beings in sight.
“Hey there,” he said.
The peacock strutted closer, his head cocked as he regarded Kris with frank curiosity.
“I’m Kris. What are you doing out here?”
He didn’t answer, for which Kris was grateful. Instead, as if pleased to have found an appreciative audience, the peacock spread his tail feathers in a magnificent fan, and Kris’s knees buckled in the face of such overwhelming splendor, and he sank to the ground to stare.
He needed to find Rayne.
The thought came to him unbidden but, once in his head, was undeniable. Kris didn’t want to experience this alone, and Rayne was the only person Kris could imagine appreciating it as he did. Rayne and the peacock were kindred spirits, after all, bound by the mandala on the back of Rayne’s head. Kris dug his phone from his pocket and texted him, his fingers skittering over the letters.
You have to see this, he wrote. Come find me by the lights.
The peacock strutted closer, apparently annoyed by Kris’s lapse in attention, but preened, appeased, when Kris raised his phone to snap a picture. It came out blurry and unidentifiable, but he sent it anyway.
Rayne texted back a series of question marks.
“Okay,” Kris said, staring at his phone screen. “This isn’t going to work.” He pushed himself to his feet, swaying unsteadily as he found his balance, and held out his hand to the peacock. “I hope you’re a cooperative kind of bird, because it’s really important that Rayne meets you.”
The peacock rustled his fan, blinked, and seemed to shrug. Kris took that as consent and proceeded with his plan. The peacock was amicable enough about letting him approach, and though Kris was nervous about putting his hand in range of the beak, the bird didn’t startle or snap or appear remotely concerned about the strange, drug-addled human trying to touch him. In fact, he seemed perfectly at ease with the idea.
“Good boy,” Kris said, like the peacock was a strange, colorful dog instead of a misplaced exotic bird. The bird’s feathers were soft, and so bright they seemed to glow when he touched them. Kris shuffled nearer, and the peacock obligingly folded his tail down, and allowed Kris to pick him up and tuck him under his arm, his tail trailing to the ground behind him as he settled in against Kris’s side.
Warmth unfurled in Kris’s chest at his success. Rayne was going to love it.
Kris didn’t remember passing out, but the next thing he knew, he was waking up again. It happened slowly. He drifted out of his dreams bit by bit, until his brain was awake but his body wasn’t, and another indistinguishable amount of time passed before he could convince his eyes to open. He would have been happy to float in the ether awhile longer, but Rayne approached his bunk—Kris recognized his footsteps even half-asleep—paused, and said, “What the hell is that.”
Kris blinked. His mouth was so dry his tongue was glued to his palette, and he had to unstick it an inch at a time before he could talk. It felt like he’d been clenching his jaw in his sleep. The trade-off for a night of life-altering revelations, he supposed.
“What?” he croaked. He rolled over—a wave of dizziness followed him, with nausea on its tail—and found himself face to face with a very large, very glossy blue bird. “Oh.”
“Kris, why do you have a peacock in your bunk?”
The bird cocked his head at Rayne and bobbed closer; Kris put his arm around the peacock to keep him from escaping.
“I have an explanation,” Kris said, “but it involves a lot of drugs.”
“You had one hit of MDMA, the same as the rest of us, and no one else appropriated a wild bird.”
“I don’t think it’s actually wild,” Kris said, fishing around his bunk for his water bottle. The bird nestled in under his arm and regarded Rayne with an appraising eye. “It seems pretty friendly.” He took a swig, wincing as the water burned its way down his parched throat.
“Should I ask where you got it, or should I keep my plausible deniability?”
“I didn’t steal it,” Kris protested. He sat up, fighting how his head spun at the movement, and ducked out of the bunk to join Rayne on the bus floor. The bird perched on the edge of the mattress and ruffled his wings. “He was just wandering the grounds, all by himself. I wanted to show you.”
“That’s what you were texting me about?”
“It was too dark to take a good picture.”
“So you brought it back to the bus, but then you fell asleep before you could show me,” Rayne guessed. “Did you use it as a pillow all night?”
“He didn’t mind,” Kris said awkwardly. The peacock screamed pleasantly. “Anyway, it’s a present. I said I’d get you a peacock, and I did.”
Rayne stared at the bird. The bird stared back.
“I was having some kind of revelation last night about life, the universe, and everything, and the peacock seemed really important at the time. You have to admit it’s perfect for your look. Like, it’s not an elephant, but it’s pretty good.”
“It is,” Rayne agreed, his reluctance plainly slipping fast as the bird stared him down.
“And I couldn’t just leave him wandering the desert. Peacocks aren’t supposed to be all the way out here. The coyotes would get him.”
“They would.”
“So?”
The bird fluttered down to the bus floor, measured how much room he had, and spread his fan, shaking it in Rayne’s face until he made the appropriate appreciative noises. Then, despite the extremely tight fit, the peacock began strutting up and down the length of the bus, screaming, until everyone else poked their bleary faces from their bunks to see what the fuck all the commotion was.
“Meet our new mascot,” Rayne said helplessly.
The peacock leaped up to land on Rayne’s shoulder, where he surveyed his new kingdom with a proud and godly air, his tail feathers trailing down Rayne’s back like a cape.
“You do look good,” Stef said, before retreating back behind their curtain. “We should bring it onstage next time. Now for fuck’s sake, let me go back to sleep.”
The bird pecked at a strand of Rayne’s hair and seemed perfectly content to stay on his shoulder.
“Okay then,” Rayne said. “I guess we’re keeping it.”
Kris wasn’t infused with light and love and an understanding of the universe anymore, but he still got a buzz of satisfaction from knowing his instinct to share the bird with Rayne had been the right one.
Kris found Angel sitting outside with Rikki, both drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. They sat cross-legged facing each other, Rikki gazing at Angel with unabashed attention, which Angel seemed to accept as her due.
“Morning,” Kris said. His dizziness was mostly gone, though his stomach was still churning uneasily. “You two do anything fun last night?”
“We got high; we talked. We slept outside on the ground, for some reason.” Angel grimaced. “My back is killing me.”
“You said you needed to connect to nature,” Rikki provided. “The stars were all sparking in the sky; we watched them for hours. It seemed important to you, so I didn’t try to talk you out of it.”
“Yeah, no, that was a bad idea.” She turned to glance up at Kris. “He told me more about his order’s spirituality, their god and all that. That was something.”
Kris’s eyebrows went up. “Oh yeah? Is he like you guys, that whole shaved-head, biker-gang style?”
“Oh, no. He doesn’t look anything like us,” Rikki said. “He’s the most beautiful being in all creation. He embodies it. We look like this so He won’t think we’re trying to compete.”
“He doesn’t sound very compassionate,” Kris said. “Maybe you should upgrade.”
“Reject the patriarchy,” Angel said, raising her fist while bringing her coffee up to her mouth again with her other hand.
Rikki blinked. “I wouldn’t know how to find another god. Or a goddess. Or . . . any other kin
d. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“You think they’re going to let you back in the cult?” Kris asked. “I mean the gang. Um. The family?”
“I don’t know,” Rikki confessed. “I don’t know what to do if they won’t take me back.”
Angel nudged him with her boot. “You can stay with us till you figure it out. We’ll watch out for you.”
“I don’t want to be abandoned by my god.”
“I’ll find you a new one,” she promised. “Don’t worry, hun. You’ll find the family you deserve.”
Rikki seemed doubtful, but he asked, “Can I meet yours? It’s okay to say no,” he added quickly. “Most people would rather not meet me, so I get it.” He bit his lip with a hopeful expression, but not much of one.
Angel looked at Kris. Kris looked at Rikki. He didn’t have any opposition to introducing the kid to the others, though he wasn’t sure what Calloway’s reaction would be. Cal seemed confident in having left the cult behind, but Kris didn’t want to put that to the test with the publicity stunt at stake. Though Rayne could walk away from the stunt with his career intact, the press would still have a field day trying to connect him to a cult, and Kris couldn’t imagine Brian being too pleased about that.
“We’ll avoid Cal for now,” Angel said, evidently following Kris’s line of thought without having to ask. “And try not to mention the whole god thing just yet, okay?”
Rikki nodded, entirely eager to please.
“All right, come on, then.” Angel stood up in increments, stretching her back as she rose.
“Do you know where Rayne and Cal ended up last night?” Kris asked, aiming for casual and missing it by a mile.
Angel regarded him knowingly. “I wasn’t with them, but I’ve heard some things.”
Kris swallowed. “Is that good or bad?”
“Well, it’s good for Calloway.” She took Rikki by the arm. “Let’s go find breakfast. Kris? I’ll see you around?”