I swallow and nod, wipe my eyes. “It’s so weird,” I rasp.
“What is?” he asks softly.
“Not remembering, I guess.” I mess with the hemline of my shirt, feeling like a broken freak.
“It’s kind of weird for me too, but it’s okay. It will really be okay.” I look at Josh out of the corner of my eye, and he adds, “Can you believe that?”
“Do you want that?” I whisper. “Are you sure?”
“I’m so sure. I never stopped loving you, Ezra. Ever. All I did since you left was want you.”
He looks like he means it. I lean in and wrap an arm around his shoulders again. He brushes his lips over my temple. “You wanna get the food to go? That way, we can really talk. I’ll fill you in on so much stuff, and you can fill me in, too.”
I nod. Miller leans his head against his seat’s headrest and gives me a crooked smile. “Thanks for finding me.” His voice is just a little hoarse. “I hope it’s worth it.”
“It will be worth it to me. Can you believe that?” I quirk a brow up.
He nods.
We walk to the restaurant’s door, shoulder to shoulder, and while we wait on the food, we sit beside each other in a booth, and Miller rubs his knee against mine. I look at him, at Josh Miller in the flesh, sitting beside me in a Waffle House at 2 a.m., and I just can’t believe it.
It was all real.
“What are you thinking?” he murmurs, leaning his cheek in his hand.
“That it’s real.”
He smiles, all blue eyes and freckles and those soft lips. “It’s so real. You want to ask me some stuff? Or you want me to tell you some stuff? Things we did together?”
I nod, and he takes my hand under the table.
It turns out to be a crazy story. We drive to a trailhead in a wooded neighborhood and eat our waffles in the dark car as he tells me how I tried to kill myself via a trestle bridge, and how I taunted him for being gay and grabbed his dick on the roof.
When we’re finished with the food, we start down the trail, our eyes catching in the dark, and then our hands. He’s rubbing my hand as he tells me the rest. About my nightmares and the way I fucked with him when he would come to wake me up. He tells me about his seizure, how I took care of him that weekend, but I also said I wouldn’t mess with him again. He got confused, and then things fell apart, and then I got heat stroke or something like it, and he took care of me.
“You wanted to be with me. You were just scared,” Mills tells me. “And now I know why.”
I can’t talk because my throat’s so tight, so I just squeeze his hand and nod.
Apparently I told him I’d been inpatient before, and he saw the pill bottles I had left over from my first stint at Sheppard Pratt.
“Didn’t you think that was weird?” I ask him as we walk back up a hill toward the trailhead where his car is.
“Weird? Nah. I was always worried you would take the pills. Like, overdosing. And I didn’t like the idea of you being alone somewhere, inpatient. So that bothered me too, just to think about it.”
I nod slowly. I believe that, based on what I wrote in that letter I never mailed. I had worried that if I told him I was back at Sheppard Pratt, he’d be upset. And it looks like he would’ve been.
I want to use his pills remark to segue into a question about the pills in Miller’s bathroom drawer, but I don’t think the time is quite right. Instead I listen as he tells me about the good times we had. He describes an old house by the lake, and how we fucked around inside and then I laid in his lap on the grass—and I can see it. I can see the mossy trees, the vast, green grass. I almost feel my face against the inside of his thigh as he sits cross-legged. When I check the details with him, he says I’m right.
“Another memory,” he smiles.
“Did we sit on a brick wall…by any chance?”
“Dammit! How did I forget that story?”
In the car, he tells me—with a huge smile—how we first kissed. How we did a bunch of crazy things to one another outside in the grass there in the cemetery.
“You even gave me…” He holds his hand up, wiggling his fingers.
My dick throbs so hard, I reach down and cup it. “I gave you a finger?” I whisper.
He’s backing out of the trailhead parking spot, his face cast in red from the car’s lights. “Yep.”
“And you were okay with it?”