Going Left Around the World: Chapter61
Disclaimer: Brokeback Mountain and the original characters of Jack and Ennis were created by and belong to Annie Proulx. No money is being made from this- I’m just taking them out for a spin!
Summary: This is an au/au story told in the first person from Jack’s POV. Jack and Ennis both come from working-class families and bond as the outcast poor kids while attending an expensive private school. The story follows their friendship as they go off to college together and eventually become something more than friends. Love springs up, inconvenient but essential all the same, and they fight to find a way to make it work through their college years. After graduation, however, real life takes over and sends them down different paths, and the fight is on for real as they try to decide if their relationship can overcome their own insecurities and fears.
A/N: Happy birthday to me (and Roby!)! It’s the big 4-0 for me and, at the end of a couple of days of celebrating, I decided to end it with something I still love after all this time (in addition to my beautiful wife, of course!): a new chapter!
If any of you are concerned, Ennis is not poised to become a raging drug addict. He’s simply found an accessible coping mechanism for the time being, to help drown out his confusion in missing and wanting Jack.
Thank you to all those still reading - I appreciate it and, every time I post and I see your comments, I’m inspired to open up the laptop and keep the ball rolling. Thanks for sticking with it.
The guys are right on the precipice now…but I hope you enjoy reading!
jill
Chapter 61
I drove. I barely knew I was on the road much less where I was going until, almost two hours later, things started to register as familiar. With my tank on E, I pulled into the driveway of my old house. My dark, empty old house where my mom wasn’t. I got out and made my way up the walk, past the for-sale sign with its hopeful “Sale Pending!” add-on at the top, and up to the front door. I still had the key on my key ring - the same key I’d used to let myself in since my mom had started letting me stay home by myself after school back in seventh grade.
I unlocked the door and let myself in. There were no lights to turn on because I’d had everything put in storage ages ago but I could’ve found my way through that house blind. I walked past the living room, where we’d had our Christmases and movie nights, where Ennis and I had camped out as kids. I passed by the kitchen and went down the hall toward the bedrooms. I took a few steps into the room that had been mine and stopped. I didn’t need to close my eyes to picture where everything had been, and along with that, all the memories, the ghosts of me and Ennis - the kids, the teenagers, the college guys falling in love before we knew what it was. I broke out into a sweat and my stomach turned as I stumbled back into the hallway. I didn’t need Ennis right now. It wasn’t Ennis that had brought me here.
I walked a little farther down and stepped into Mom’s room. My throat closed over a sob and I swore I could still smell her perfume in there even though her things had been gone a while. I stood against the wall where her bed had been and slid down until I was sitting on the floor, knees bent and my arms draped over them. I sighed and closed my eyes. There had been more times than I could count since Mom died that I wished I could cross the hall and talk to her, drive home and see her, pick up a phone and call her. But this…this was as fucked up as Ennis and I had ever been and I had never wished harder for her.
These were uncharted waters so it was hard to even imagine what she might have told me; Ennis and I were just starting out when she died, so I didn’t exactly have a long history of her advice to draw on. I know she would have sided with me about the drugs. But what I couldn’t see, couldn’t think about yet, was what Ennis - loving Ennis - was doing to me. He was still everything to me and I needed us to work. I don’t know what Mom would’ve had to say about all that. Would she have gotten in my face and told me to open my eyes? Maybe she would have tried to gently lead me in the right direction. Or maybe she would have let me make my own mistakes and learn from them. As I sat and tried to make some kind of sense of the situation with Ennis, the drive caught up with me along with the late hour, and my head dropped down onto my arms. Before I had an answer to anything, I was out.
I woke up a while later - long enough for my neck to seize into an unnatural position - and stretched out. I patted my pocket for my phone to check the time and realized it wasn’t there.
“Shit,” I muttered.
I stood and, aside from the pain in my neck, I felt strangely better. I had no idea what time it was or how long I had slept, but I felt rested and clearer than I had before. To this day I wonder if it was just being in that familiar space, or if something happened while I slept - some kind of supernatural intervention courtesy of Mom - that got my head into a better place. I headed out of the room and paused in the doorway.
“Bye, Mom,” I whispered. I left the house, locked up and turned my car toward home.
It was almost three o’clock in the morning when I pulled into the driveway. The lights inside were on, so I knew Ennis was waiting. I headed up the walk and turned my key in the lock, blew out a long breath and went inside. The door had barely shut behind me when Ennis came charging in from the living room. His eyes were dry but the puffy redness gave him away.
“Jesus, Jack, where the hell were you?” he asked and wrapped his arms around me. I didn’t move, just stood there like a corpse while he held onto me.
“Just driving,” I said, my voice hoarse.
“For six fucking hours?” Ennis said as he took a step back.
I shrugged. “Apparently.” I dropped my jacket onto a hook by the door and started into the house.
“Where are you going?” Ennis asked frantically.
“Bed.”
“But what about -? I mean…Jack, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. What should I do?”
I turned to him partway down the hall. “I’m not talking about this right now. I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m going to bed.”
I went into the bedroom and started peeling off my clothes. Once I was down to my boxers, I pulled back the covers and slid underneath. “I guess I’ll take the other room,” Ennis said. “If you want me to.”
I rolled over to face him. “You go wherever you need to, Ennis.” My eyelids slipped shut and I flopped my head down on the pillow as Ennis disappeared from the doorway. Through the haze of almost-sleep, a few minutes later I heard footsteps come down the hall, quiet rustling in the room. I felt the dip on the other side of the bed as Ennis got in beside me, where he needed to be. And, it turns out, when he wasn’t there, he got so very lost.
Ennis tiptoed around me the next day. While I didn’t want to punch him in the face anymore, I wasn’t feeling all that charitable either. I spoke when spoken to, went out for groceries without a word, and made myself a sandwich for dinner which I ate alone, standing in the kitchen. When I finally settled on the couch and spaced out to an episode of CSI, he caught up with me. He came in and perched beside me on the edge of the couch.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” I answered, not taking my eyes off the TV.
He grabbed the remote and clicked the TV off. “Jack. Look at me.”
I sighed and turned my head to face him. “What do you want me to say?”
“Anything!” He threw up his hands. “That you hate me, that we can fix this…where the hell you went last night.”
I turned away and stared some more and debated which one of those I felt up to answering. I started with the simplest one. “Home.”
“What?”
“Last night. I went home. My old house, I mean.”
“Jesus, Jack,” he whispered and dropped his head into his hands.
“I didn’t realize that’s where I was going until I was almost there. I still have the key. I went inside. I sat there thinking about stuff and fell asleep.”
He sniffed and wiped at his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he rasped.
“Been saying that a lot lately. What for?”
“That your mom wasn’t there.”
He caught me off guard with that one and I looked back over at him. “Yeah. Me, too.”
“And I’m sorry I’m the reason you went looking for her. It should be me who…. But I keep fucking it up. I’m not even here for you most of the time.”
“No, you’re not.” He had my attention but I wasn’t ready to let him off the hook.
“Shit.” He flopped back against the couch. “I don’t have a good excuse. My head…it’s a fucking mess. My parents, how I grew up, with all the church bullshit and the rules and the endless fucking expectations - this doesn’t fit with any of it.” He gestured between the two of us. “But I don’t want to lose it, either. Don’t want to lose you.” He sat quiet for a few seconds. “Guess I’m still kind of in shock, even after all this time. I never in a million years would’ve thought that I’d be….”
He trailed off. “What?” I prodded, fully expecting a response like “a fag”, but cautiously hopeful for “gay”.
He scooted closer and brought a tentative hand to my face, his thumb tracing the thick stubble on my cheek. “In love with you,” he whispered.
Well, fuck. Not what I was expecting and damn near impossible to ignore. I covered his hand with mine. “I love you, too.” I wanted to lean in and kiss him, just bask in the cheesily romantic moment since we said those words so infrequently. But I took a deep breath and continued. “But what you’re doing…. Ennis, I can’t force you to do anything, but I’m not okay with this coping mechanism of yours.”
“I know,” he said and dropped his gaze. “I’m not lying when I say it’s only been a few times.”
“Okay.”
He looked up at me again. “I just feel…extra fucked up. Like you came up to see me and we were together again, and you left and we weren’t. I mean, we were - I don’t mean that I…with some other guy.”
“Or girl?”
He shook his head. “No. And then I come home at Thanksgiving and we’re together and I go back and we’re not, and now….”
“Yeah, I see the pattern,” I said.
“But what you don’t know…what I don’t say, I guess, is this is what I want.” He pulled me closer and our foreheads met. “This is what I miss like fucking crazy when I’m away. And it’s what I don’t have and it’s got me kind of -”
“Fucked up?” I supplied.
“Yeah.” He sighed. “You deserve so much better. Better than what I’m giving you now. Maybe better than I ever will. But I want you to know…I’m trying. I know it might not seem like it, but….”
“I know,” I said and finally gave in and brushed my lips across his. I know now that what he was actually doing was struggling - in a way I never have, even to this day. But we were both dealt some tough cards back then, and all we knew to do was cling to each other when we had the chance. And right then, we had the chance.
So, here’s what happened: for the rest of the break, I had the perfect boyfriend. Let me clarify: Ennis and I had hundreds, maybe thousands of good times over the years. Everything from winning our Little League championship to the new millennium in Niagara Falls. He was always Ennis and, somewhere along the line, I fell ridiculously in love with him. But this Ennis - the Ennis who was home for the rest of break - was Ennis 2.0.
He wasn’t running around wearing a rainbow flag or anything, but he came as close as he ever would. We did lots of our usual stuff - hanging out, ordering pizza, watching whatever. But he also cooked me dinner. Like, a real dinner - steak and potatoes and beer cooked on our little indoor grill thing. We saw a few people from school who were around and, while he didn’t throw an arm around me or anything, he stuck close by - closer than he would’ve dared before. The kicker was the movie, though. He picked some lame-ass movie that we just had to go see and as soon as the lights went down, I felt his hand slip into mine. Unreal.
Josh found the whole thing a little hard to swallow.
“He held your hand? In public?” he repeated into the phone.
“Yeah, man. Well, not totally public I guess. The theatre was dark. But still, it’s like a thousand miles ahead of where we were even before he left for school.”
“Yeah,” Josh said and cleared his throat.
I sighed. “Just say it.”
“Say what?”
“Whatever’s bugging you!” I exclaimed. Josh may not have been my boyfriend (yet) but I could read his signals like a Magic 8 Ball.
“It’s not…. I mean, don’t you think it’s…weird?”
I laughed. “Hell, yeah, it’s weird. But I’m not complaining.”
“I know, I just….”
“You’re worried? Because you sound worried,” I said.
“Yes, I’m worried!” Josh exclaimed. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m not trying to be an asshole but…people don’t make changes like that overnight. At least not ones that stick. Ennis has been in so much denial for so long. This one-eighty is kind of hard to believe.”
He had a point and somewhere in the rational recesses of my brain, I knew it. “I know. I get it. Maybe it won’t last once he’s back at school and everything. But for now isn’t it good practice, at least?” I tried to lighten the mood but it didn’t fly.
“Jack,” he said softly. “Do you really want to be someone he practices on? Someone anyone practices on, let alone someone you love the way you love him?”
I was quiet for a few seconds. “Fuck,” I muttered. “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do? He’s only here for another week and…it’s good. It’s really good.”
“I don’t know,” Josh said. “Just try to keep some perspective, I guess. It is good that he’s trying, stretching himself. But you also know he’s been having a hell of a hard time with all this. He’s still that guy, too. I just want you to be careful. You know, don’t fly too close to the sun and all that.”
“I hear you.” And I did. It was the listening part I had trouble with. “I’ve got to go. He should be back from the gym in a few and we’re supposed to do dinner out.”
“Okay. Keep me posted, okay? I know he has to head back to school soon, so if you want to hang out, just let me know.”
“Yeah, that sounds good.” I had already filed Ennis’s return to school under “Not Dealing” in my head. “Later.”
“Yep. ‘Bye,” Josh said and hung up.
Ennis and I kept on the way we had been, all over, under and around each other for the rest of the time he was home, but I had no idea how close to the sun I was.
When Ennis went back to school, I was bummed, for sure. But things had been so great I felt more confident about us than I had in probably forever. I sent him off (with a few tears - from both of us this time) and I called Josh for the distraction he’d offered (totally platonic). We met for coffee and then hit a diner for a bite to eat - exactly what I needed. There was no long school break until the end of March, which seemed like forever. Ennis said he was pretty sure he could swing a long weekend around mid-February so he could come home or I could go to him. That was only about a month away and it was enough for me at the time.
We can plan and plan and despite all of it, the last thing we expect to happen is the thing that does. It turned out that I saw Ennis sooner than I ever expected. And that sun is really fucking hot.
TBC
Summary: This is an au/au story told in the first person from Jack’s POV. Jack and Ennis both come from working-class families and bond as the outcast poor kids while attending an expensive private school. The story follows their friendship as they go off to college together and eventually become something more than friends. Love springs up, inconvenient but essential all the same, and they fight to find a way to make it work through their college years. After graduation, however, real life takes over and sends them down different paths, and the fight is on for real as they try to decide if their relationship can overcome their own insecurities and fears.
A/N: Happy birthday to me (and Roby!)! It’s the big 4-0 for me and, at the end of a couple of days of celebrating, I decided to end it with something I still love after all this time (in addition to my beautiful wife, of course!): a new chapter!
If any of you are concerned, Ennis is not poised to become a raging drug addict. He’s simply found an accessible coping mechanism for the time being, to help drown out his confusion in missing and wanting Jack.
Thank you to all those still reading - I appreciate it and, every time I post and I see your comments, I’m inspired to open up the laptop and keep the ball rolling. Thanks for sticking with it.
The guys are right on the precipice now…but I hope you enjoy reading!
jill
Chapter 61
I drove. I barely knew I was on the road much less where I was going until, almost two hours later, things started to register as familiar. With my tank on E, I pulled into the driveway of my old house. My dark, empty old house where my mom wasn’t. I got out and made my way up the walk, past the for-sale sign with its hopeful “Sale Pending!” add-on at the top, and up to the front door. I still had the key on my key ring - the same key I’d used to let myself in since my mom had started letting me stay home by myself after school back in seventh grade.
I unlocked the door and let myself in. There were no lights to turn on because I’d had everything put in storage ages ago but I could’ve found my way through that house blind. I walked past the living room, where we’d had our Christmases and movie nights, where Ennis and I had camped out as kids. I passed by the kitchen and went down the hall toward the bedrooms. I took a few steps into the room that had been mine and stopped. I didn’t need to close my eyes to picture where everything had been, and along with that, all the memories, the ghosts of me and Ennis - the kids, the teenagers, the college guys falling in love before we knew what it was. I broke out into a sweat and my stomach turned as I stumbled back into the hallway. I didn’t need Ennis right now. It wasn’t Ennis that had brought me here.
I walked a little farther down and stepped into Mom’s room. My throat closed over a sob and I swore I could still smell her perfume in there even though her things had been gone a while. I stood against the wall where her bed had been and slid down until I was sitting on the floor, knees bent and my arms draped over them. I sighed and closed my eyes. There had been more times than I could count since Mom died that I wished I could cross the hall and talk to her, drive home and see her, pick up a phone and call her. But this…this was as fucked up as Ennis and I had ever been and I had never wished harder for her.
These were uncharted waters so it was hard to even imagine what she might have told me; Ennis and I were just starting out when she died, so I didn’t exactly have a long history of her advice to draw on. I know she would have sided with me about the drugs. But what I couldn’t see, couldn’t think about yet, was what Ennis - loving Ennis - was doing to me. He was still everything to me and I needed us to work. I don’t know what Mom would’ve had to say about all that. Would she have gotten in my face and told me to open my eyes? Maybe she would have tried to gently lead me in the right direction. Or maybe she would have let me make my own mistakes and learn from them. As I sat and tried to make some kind of sense of the situation with Ennis, the drive caught up with me along with the late hour, and my head dropped down onto my arms. Before I had an answer to anything, I was out.
I woke up a while later - long enough for my neck to seize into an unnatural position - and stretched out. I patted my pocket for my phone to check the time and realized it wasn’t there.
“Shit,” I muttered.
I stood and, aside from the pain in my neck, I felt strangely better. I had no idea what time it was or how long I had slept, but I felt rested and clearer than I had before. To this day I wonder if it was just being in that familiar space, or if something happened while I slept - some kind of supernatural intervention courtesy of Mom - that got my head into a better place. I headed out of the room and paused in the doorway.
“Bye, Mom,” I whispered. I left the house, locked up and turned my car toward home.
It was almost three o’clock in the morning when I pulled into the driveway. The lights inside were on, so I knew Ennis was waiting. I headed up the walk and turned my key in the lock, blew out a long breath and went inside. The door had barely shut behind me when Ennis came charging in from the living room. His eyes were dry but the puffy redness gave him away.
“Jesus, Jack, where the hell were you?” he asked and wrapped his arms around me. I didn’t move, just stood there like a corpse while he held onto me.
“Just driving,” I said, my voice hoarse.
“For six fucking hours?” Ennis said as he took a step back.
I shrugged. “Apparently.” I dropped my jacket onto a hook by the door and started into the house.
“Where are you going?” Ennis asked frantically.
“Bed.”
“But what about -? I mean…Jack, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. What should I do?”
I turned to him partway down the hall. “I’m not talking about this right now. I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m going to bed.”
I went into the bedroom and started peeling off my clothes. Once I was down to my boxers, I pulled back the covers and slid underneath. “I guess I’ll take the other room,” Ennis said. “If you want me to.”
I rolled over to face him. “You go wherever you need to, Ennis.” My eyelids slipped shut and I flopped my head down on the pillow as Ennis disappeared from the doorway. Through the haze of almost-sleep, a few minutes later I heard footsteps come down the hall, quiet rustling in the room. I felt the dip on the other side of the bed as Ennis got in beside me, where he needed to be. And, it turns out, when he wasn’t there, he got so very lost.
Ennis tiptoed around me the next day. While I didn’t want to punch him in the face anymore, I wasn’t feeling all that charitable either. I spoke when spoken to, went out for groceries without a word, and made myself a sandwich for dinner which I ate alone, standing in the kitchen. When I finally settled on the couch and spaced out to an episode of CSI, he caught up with me. He came in and perched beside me on the edge of the couch.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” I answered, not taking my eyes off the TV.
He grabbed the remote and clicked the TV off. “Jack. Look at me.”
I sighed and turned my head to face him. “What do you want me to say?”
“Anything!” He threw up his hands. “That you hate me, that we can fix this…where the hell you went last night.”
I turned away and stared some more and debated which one of those I felt up to answering. I started with the simplest one. “Home.”
“What?”
“Last night. I went home. My old house, I mean.”
“Jesus, Jack,” he whispered and dropped his head into his hands.
“I didn’t realize that’s where I was going until I was almost there. I still have the key. I went inside. I sat there thinking about stuff and fell asleep.”
He sniffed and wiped at his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he rasped.
“Been saying that a lot lately. What for?”
“That your mom wasn’t there.”
He caught me off guard with that one and I looked back over at him. “Yeah. Me, too.”
“And I’m sorry I’m the reason you went looking for her. It should be me who…. But I keep fucking it up. I’m not even here for you most of the time.”
“No, you’re not.” He had my attention but I wasn’t ready to let him off the hook.
“Shit.” He flopped back against the couch. “I don’t have a good excuse. My head…it’s a fucking mess. My parents, how I grew up, with all the church bullshit and the rules and the endless fucking expectations - this doesn’t fit with any of it.” He gestured between the two of us. “But I don’t want to lose it, either. Don’t want to lose you.” He sat quiet for a few seconds. “Guess I’m still kind of in shock, even after all this time. I never in a million years would’ve thought that I’d be….”
He trailed off. “What?” I prodded, fully expecting a response like “a fag”, but cautiously hopeful for “gay”.
He scooted closer and brought a tentative hand to my face, his thumb tracing the thick stubble on my cheek. “In love with you,” he whispered.
Well, fuck. Not what I was expecting and damn near impossible to ignore. I covered his hand with mine. “I love you, too.” I wanted to lean in and kiss him, just bask in the cheesily romantic moment since we said those words so infrequently. But I took a deep breath and continued. “But what you’re doing…. Ennis, I can’t force you to do anything, but I’m not okay with this coping mechanism of yours.”
“I know,” he said and dropped his gaze. “I’m not lying when I say it’s only been a few times.”
“Okay.”
He looked up at me again. “I just feel…extra fucked up. Like you came up to see me and we were together again, and you left and we weren’t. I mean, we were - I don’t mean that I…with some other guy.”
“Or girl?”
He shook his head. “No. And then I come home at Thanksgiving and we’re together and I go back and we’re not, and now….”
“Yeah, I see the pattern,” I said.
“But what you don’t know…what I don’t say, I guess, is this is what I want.” He pulled me closer and our foreheads met. “This is what I miss like fucking crazy when I’m away. And it’s what I don’t have and it’s got me kind of -”
“Fucked up?” I supplied.
“Yeah.” He sighed. “You deserve so much better. Better than what I’m giving you now. Maybe better than I ever will. But I want you to know…I’m trying. I know it might not seem like it, but….”
“I know,” I said and finally gave in and brushed my lips across his. I know now that what he was actually doing was struggling - in a way I never have, even to this day. But we were both dealt some tough cards back then, and all we knew to do was cling to each other when we had the chance. And right then, we had the chance.
So, here’s what happened: for the rest of the break, I had the perfect boyfriend. Let me clarify: Ennis and I had hundreds, maybe thousands of good times over the years. Everything from winning our Little League championship to the new millennium in Niagara Falls. He was always Ennis and, somewhere along the line, I fell ridiculously in love with him. But this Ennis - the Ennis who was home for the rest of break - was Ennis 2.0.
He wasn’t running around wearing a rainbow flag or anything, but he came as close as he ever would. We did lots of our usual stuff - hanging out, ordering pizza, watching whatever. But he also cooked me dinner. Like, a real dinner - steak and potatoes and beer cooked on our little indoor grill thing. We saw a few people from school who were around and, while he didn’t throw an arm around me or anything, he stuck close by - closer than he would’ve dared before. The kicker was the movie, though. He picked some lame-ass movie that we just had to go see and as soon as the lights went down, I felt his hand slip into mine. Unreal.
Josh found the whole thing a little hard to swallow.
“He held your hand? In public?” he repeated into the phone.
“Yeah, man. Well, not totally public I guess. The theatre was dark. But still, it’s like a thousand miles ahead of where we were even before he left for school.”
“Yeah,” Josh said and cleared his throat.
I sighed. “Just say it.”
“Say what?”
“Whatever’s bugging you!” I exclaimed. Josh may not have been my boyfriend (yet) but I could read his signals like a Magic 8 Ball.
“It’s not…. I mean, don’t you think it’s…weird?”
I laughed. “Hell, yeah, it’s weird. But I’m not complaining.”
“I know, I just….”
“You’re worried? Because you sound worried,” I said.
“Yes, I’m worried!” Josh exclaimed. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m not trying to be an asshole but…people don’t make changes like that overnight. At least not ones that stick. Ennis has been in so much denial for so long. This one-eighty is kind of hard to believe.”
He had a point and somewhere in the rational recesses of my brain, I knew it. “I know. I get it. Maybe it won’t last once he’s back at school and everything. But for now isn’t it good practice, at least?” I tried to lighten the mood but it didn’t fly.
“Jack,” he said softly. “Do you really want to be someone he practices on? Someone anyone practices on, let alone someone you love the way you love him?”
I was quiet for a few seconds. “Fuck,” I muttered. “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do? He’s only here for another week and…it’s good. It’s really good.”
“I don’t know,” Josh said. “Just try to keep some perspective, I guess. It is good that he’s trying, stretching himself. But you also know he’s been having a hell of a hard time with all this. He’s still that guy, too. I just want you to be careful. You know, don’t fly too close to the sun and all that.”
“I hear you.” And I did. It was the listening part I had trouble with. “I’ve got to go. He should be back from the gym in a few and we’re supposed to do dinner out.”
“Okay. Keep me posted, okay? I know he has to head back to school soon, so if you want to hang out, just let me know.”
“Yeah, that sounds good.” I had already filed Ennis’s return to school under “Not Dealing” in my head. “Later.”
“Yep. ‘Bye,” Josh said and hung up.
Ennis and I kept on the way we had been, all over, under and around each other for the rest of the time he was home, but I had no idea how close to the sun I was.
When Ennis went back to school, I was bummed, for sure. But things had been so great I felt more confident about us than I had in probably forever. I sent him off (with a few tears - from both of us this time) and I called Josh for the distraction he’d offered (totally platonic). We met for coffee and then hit a diner for a bite to eat - exactly what I needed. There was no long school break until the end of March, which seemed like forever. Ennis said he was pretty sure he could swing a long weekend around mid-February so he could come home or I could go to him. That was only about a month away and it was enough for me at the time.
We can plan and plan and despite all of it, the last thing we expect to happen is the thing that does. It turned out that I saw Ennis sooner than I ever expected. And that sun is really fucking hot.
TBC