“Looks like your plan worked.”

  They kiss again.

  * * *

  —

  There is a part of Ryan that thinks: It’s about time.

  To be in this bed with someone he cares about. To have his room witness who he’s become, what he is capable of doing, who he is capable of loving.

  It feels amazing, and it also feels like part of the goodbye.

  Yes, there’s a part of him that can be here with Avery and enjoy the heat of their bodies, the humor of their words, and the fact that the world feels right-sized for once.

  But the other part of him…well, the other part of him is still listening for the first sign of the garage door.

  * * *

  —

  The kissing grows intense, but then it slows. They lie there facing each other, Ryan running a hand over Avery’s arm, up to touch his face, to confirm he is, in fact, here. Avery runs his hand under Ryan’s shirt, rests his palm on Ryan’s heartbeat as it, too, slows back to its everyday rhythms.

  No music is playing, and no music is needed. All Avery hears is breathing and thoughts, breathing and thoughts.

  “We should bring the things to the truck,” Ryan says. “Before they get back.”

  Avery says okay, but they take another minute to lie there, to exist in that twofold space, before sitting up, putting their sneakers back on, and resuming their task. When Caitlin texts to say things are wrapping up soon with Ryan’s parents, Ryan and Avery move even faster. In truth, it doesn’t take long, since they’re leaving all the green bags behind. They’re only taking the things Ryan wants to take.

  Once the truck is loaded, Avery asks Ryan, “Are you forgetting anything?”

  And Ryan smiles and says, “I’m sure I am. But that’s okay, you know?”

  * * *

  —

  The whole week, when Ryan was imagining this moment, it was a big cleave, him planting his flag on the side of After and banishing all vestiges of Before. But that’s not how he feels, now that he’s gotten to it. He may never live here again, but he’ll be back. Right now, it’s just him closing the door, locking it, and driving off.

  * * *

  —

  They arrive back at Caitlin’s house around the same time she does. The three of them empty the back of the truck, and then she says they need to sit down at the kitchen table and have a talk. Ryan and Avery both appreciate that Avery is automatically included.

  “How did it go?” Ryan asks.

  “It went better than I expected,” Aunt Caitlin reports. “I might even say much better than I expected…although that probably says as much about my expectations as it does about what actually went down.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Well, the strange part is that they seem more confused than angry. They genuinely don’t understand what they did to make you want to move in with me. I told them it wasn’t my place to explain—that’s between the three of you, and it’s not something that can be resolved secondhand. But I told them it wasn’t a whim or a phase, and it wasn’t you ‘acting out,’ which is a phrase my sister likes to use for anything that doesn’t conform to her standards of behavior. That’s nothing new. I said, from what I can tell, there was a time they could have made it right, but that time passed without any effort on their part. They say they didn’t see it, they didn’t know for sure…and I can’t honestly say whether they were telling me that, or just telling themselves that, if you know what I mean. They want you back, but they didn’t talk about any changes that would happen on their end if you returned. They just want it to be like it was.”

  “According to them.”

  “Of course. Their version of like it was. But, in fairness, they also recognize that isn’t going to happen, and they said they were grateful that you could come here, and that you haven’t gone any farther or done anything else.” Caitlin turns to Avery now. “I won’t lie—they definitely think you had something to do with this.”

  “It was a Big Gay Brainwashing!” Ryan proclaims sarcastically.

  Aunt Caitlin chuckles, but she also shakes her head. “I’m sure that’s part of where they’re coming from. But they also know this is your first time. And everyone, gay or straight, can be a fool when it comes to their first time.”

  Avery and Ryan blush a little. Caitlin chuckles again, and pats Avery on the hand.

  “Don’t you worry,” she says. “It seems to me you’re erring on the side of good foolishness, not bad foolishness. To which I say: Carry on.”

  “Do you mind if we wait until you leave the room?” Avery asks.

  Now Caitlin swats at him. “Respect your elders!”

  Both of them laugh, but Ryan wants to finish the conversation from before.

  “So how did you leave it?” he asks. “With them?”

  Caitlin becomes serious again. “I promised them you’d go to school every single day, get your work done, and stay out of trouble…which, from what I’ve seen this past week, is a pretty easy promise to make. I also promised I’d try to get you to talk to them…and I want to try, not just for them, but for you. They also offered to give me some money for your room and board, which was a decent thing for them to do. And I took it, because let’s face it, Ryan—I’m a one-slice-of-pizza person and you are an only-one-slice-left kind of guy, and while that is very complementary, it also means buying a whole lot more pizza than I was planning to buy.”

  “You know I’ll chip in,” Ryan says.

  “No, sir. You weren’t paying your way with your parents and you’re not going to pay your way with me. Your money is still your hard-earned money. Spend it on something besides room and board.”

  Now Ryan is tearing up, which makes Avery tear up, too.

  “Okay, okay,” Caitlin says, standing up and looking away before it’s three-for-three. “Go unpack your things. Last night while you were asleep, I cleaned out the small dresser by the washing machine. You can use that for now, until we can get you something bigger.”

  Ryan and Avery retrieve the dresser, which used to hold sewing scraps and other odds and ends. It doesn’t quite fit in the den, near the couch, but Avery figures everyone’s willing to be a little odds-and-ends right now.

  Ryan starts the unpacking with his duffel bag. The couch still has his sheets on it from when he slept there, made like it was a bed. Now, instead of moving things to the dresser or anywhere else, Ryan puts the contents of the duffel bag out on the sheet one by one, as if taking an inventory. His laptop, the cords. His charger. The unexplained notebooks. The books from his bedside table and his schoolbooks. A few pens Avery didn’t notice being thrown inside. Then some of the clothes that he consigned to the duffel instead of the black or green trash bags.

  As he does this, Avery realizes he left behind the comfy flannel he put aside.

  “Oh man,” he says out loud, and when Ryan asks him, “What?” he explains.

  “That’s okay,” Ryan replies. “There’s something else I wanted to give you.”

  He reaches in and pulls out a shirt so tightly rolled up that Avery didn’t even notice it when it was passed into his hands to put into the duffel.

  “It’s my secret shirt,” Ryan says. “I always kept it in the back of my drawer.”

  Avery has no idea what he’s going to find when he unrolls it; from the outside, it looks like a regular blue T-shirt. But once he opens it up and takes a look, he laughs at how obvious it is: On the front of the shirt, there’s a rainbow jumping from a cloud.

  “I know, I know—it’s so corny. But picture this: I’m in sixth grade, and Mom and I are at Target. I’m bugging her to go to the toy section, like I always do, and I’ve worn her so far down that she tells me to go ahead, that she’ll meet me there after she’s done getting hairspray or dishwashing gloves or whatever. So I prance my way down the aisles, and along the way I see this shirt in with all the Star Wars shirts and the Pokémon shirts and—well, you know the kind of shirts they have at Target. And my first thought is that someone’s made a mistake, that this shirt should be in the girls’ section and not the guys’ section. I tell myself I should probably just move it back to the girls’ section, so I pick it up…and I realize, no, it’s a guy’s shirt. And I kinda like it. I’m not making the connection here between rainbow and gay, right? Not consciously. But that connection is inside somewhere, because I can’t put down the shirt. It’s a men’s extra small, so it can fit me. A little big, but it fits. But just as sure as I know it’s a shirt I need, I also know there’s no way in hell my mom is going to buy it for me. So I grab a couple other shirts along with it, and I go into the changing room. And while I’m in there—I’m not proud of this, but I’m not not proud of it, either, you know? While I’m in there, I take off the shirt I’m wearing, put on the rainbow shirt, tuck it into my pants, and then put the original shirt on right over it. I button to the top button so you can’t see underneath. Then I walk back out and put the other shirts I brought in on the I’m-not-going-to-get-this rack, real smooth, so no one will be able to tell there’s one shirt missing. The shirt’s not nice enough to have one of those electronic sensors.

  “I rush to the toy aisle, where my mom is already looking for me. Because she has the laser-stare thing down good, I figure she’ll spot what I’ve done right away. But she doesn’t! Not then, not when we’re checking out, not when we’re driving home. I’m wearing an extra shirt and she can’t even tell. It’s like, not only is the shirt invisible, but it makes me invisible in a very good way. That’s how it became my secret shirt. Every now and then I’d wear it under something else; it looked a lot like a Superman shirt I also had, so I think my parents assumed it was that shirt. I told my mom I wanted to do laundry as a chore, and she thought I was being a good son, but really it was so I could sneak in my secret shirt every now and then without her noticing. There were a few close calls, when she told me she’d help me fold, et cetera. But it’s stayed a secret all this time. Eventually, I didn’t fit into it anymore. But I still liked knowing it was there, keeping all my other shirts company.”

  “Wow,” Avery says. “This is a very powerful shirt.”

  “Yeah. And I guess what I’m saying is, I’d like you to have it. I think it will fit you. It won’t have to be a secret shirt anymore. It can just be a shirt that I love.”

  Avery’s first reaction is Oh, no, I can’t…and that’s exactly what he says, making to hand Ryan the shirt back. But Ryan won’t take it.

  “Really,” he says. “It’s yours.”

  Avery’s second reaction is to accept it, to accept it for what it is, for what it means. Accept all of it. And instead of pushing it away, be grateful.

  “Thank you,” he tells Ryan. Then, “I just need you to hold it for a second.”

  Ryan takes it, and Avery, right there in Caitlin’s den, takes off the shirt he is wearing, puts it down on the couch, takes the secret shirt from Ryan’s hands, and puts it on. It’s not a perfect fit, but Avery likes it even more for that, that it keeps some of Ryan’s shape.

  “Nice,” Ryan says, taking in the sight of Avery in the shirt. He didn’t realize how much this would mean to him, too. When you wear a secret openly, it stops being a secret. It starts being something you can take pride in. It’s hokey for this particular shirt to make him feel that way, but he respects that his sixth-grade self wouldn’t find it hokey at all. His sixth-grade self would be scared and maybe a little ashamed and definitely a little intrigued by this turn in Ryan’s life. But most of all, at the most essential level, he would be astonished.

  * * *

  —

  Aunt Caitlin doesn’t see Ryan’s sixth-grade self as she walks into the room. At least not separately. When she sees Ryan now, she’s always seeing his younger selves and how they’ve all added up into this near-man. Which is its own astonishment, truth be told.

  She’s come in to suggest they all go on an excursion. She clocks that Avery has changed his shirt, and that Ryan has just done something he wasn’t sure he could do. She knows this from a glance. But the rest of it is a mystery to her, and she is fine with it remaining a mystery. She wants Ryan to have mysteries under her roof, as long as they aren’t harmful ones. And this one is clearly the opposite of harmful. Risky, yes, in terms of how much Ryan is giving his heart. But not harmful.

  “I thought,” she tells the two boys, “we’d go out and buy an actual sofa bed.”

  * * *

  —

  Ryan and Avery don’t have to choose.

  They can have the destination and the detours.

  Neither of them expected to spend part of their afternoon at a place that proclaimed itself to be a “sofa emporium”—when they walk in, Avery asks Ryan, “Do you think the Emperor of Sofas is actually here today?!?” and both Ryan and Caitlin crack up. When the salesman asks Caitlin if these are her two sons, she says a simple no, and then when the salesman is out of hearing range mutters, “Wrong on so. Many. Levels,” which cracks the boys up again.

  Ryan hasn’t forgotten where he’s just been or what he’s just done. He’s aware of what kind of check his parents must have given Caitlin if she’s in the position to get a new sofa bed. But he decides not to swim in those currents. He decides to swim instead on the surface, in the sunlight. The salesman has given them free rein to try out whatever bed they’d like, so Ryan and Avery are hopping from one to the next, giving each a rating of one to five stars. Sometimes the mattresses are too thin; sometimes Ryan and Avery can feel the bars beneath, like they’re in a bear trap waiting to spring rather than a place for dreaming. Those get one star.

  Caitlin wishes they could see themselves like this, the ease with which they share their space, the lightness with which they move. They’re not her sons, and they’ve been through plenty that has required them to grow up faster than many of their peers. But right now she can see them clearly as kids. Kids, playing. Kids, knowing the task isn’t asking for any responsibility on their part. There is something sublime in seeing them goof around. Standing there, waiting for them to figure out which sofa deserves five stars, she wishes them nothing less than a future of endless goofing around.

  Maybe they share the same wish, because they spend much more time in the sofa emporium than any other customer that afternoon. They narrow it down to three sofa beds. Then two. They pull Caitlin onto each, so she can help judge. Lying there, snuggling in, staring up at the ceiling, it feels like home. The particular sofa bed becomes immaterial. The three of them bouncing, laughing, pretending to sleep—that, more than anything, is five stars.

  * * *

  —

  Ryan still wants it to be a date. They stop for a late lunch, get back to Caitlin’s. His stuff is everywhere, and he knows he needs to sort it out. But Avery doesn’t have to be here for that.

  Ryan wants them to go somewhere, to do something, to share something besides the new logistics of his old life.

  He wants them to go somewhere they’ve never been together. Do something new. Discover new things about each other. Because building a love is not like building a house. You still add to the foundation even as you live in the rooms.

  He gets an idea and checks the weather on his phone. It looks like it might work. When Avery’s in the bathroom, he tells Caitlin about it. She smiles and tells him to go ahead. It doesn’t matter if he leaves his possessions all over the den. They can figure out where everything goes soon enough.

  Avery returns to the room and knows something’s up.

  All Ryan needs to say is “Let’s go” and Avery follows.

  * * *

  —

  They secure the canoe in the back of Ryan’s truck. Ryan puts the destination into his phone, but won’t tell Avery where they’re going.

  “Now it’s a date,” Ryan says.

  Avery shakes his head and says, “It’s always been a date.”

  * * *

  —

  Date. From the Latin, traced to the word dare, which means:

  To give.

  To grant.

  To offer.

  * * *

  —

  When it goes right, this is what Ryan and Avery do.

  They give. They grant. They offer.

  They do this when they show up for the hard parts. They do this when they drive off toward the destination. They do this when they veer on the detours.

  They do this when they kiss.

  They do this when they sing along to the radio, as they are doing now.

  They do this when they share their thoughts, their lives, their bodies, their hopes.

  They give.

  They grant.

  They offer.

  And they receive.

  * * *

  —

  It takes them two hours to get into the park, then twenty more minutes to get to the lake. On the map, it’s a blue patch in a green expanse, separate from all the streets and cities of the world. At some point, it was set aside as national land, and a hundred years later, Ryan made his first trip here, not as a driver but as a passenger, Caitlin taking them on a long hike. He’s always meant to return.

  It is nearly dusk, and the park closes at dusk. Avery doesn’t notice the sign that says this, and Ryan has chosen to ignore it.

  The lake sits beautifully indifferent to the time of day. Its surface is still, reflective.

  “We have the place to ourselves,” Ryan observes. Which is exactly what he’d been hoping for.

  “Just us and the bears,” Avery says. He makes it sound like a joke, but he’s definitely scanning the woods for bears.