Work Text:
-flume-
“This feels wrong,” David says as he squints at the illuminated sign for Willowbrook Spa.
“You’ll feel better once you’re checked in,” Patrick says, and kisses the pout that spreads across his face. “I love you. Now get out of the car.”
“Okay, but how am I supposed to relax during my hot stone massage when you could be getting mauled by a bear?”
“Mm, good point.” Patrick checks the time on the display. He still has four hours of driving, not including what is sure to be a lengthy stop at his parents’ house. “I promise I’ll keep the bear spray on me at all times.”
“Thank you. And that thermal blanket thing. In case of—” David finishes with a wave of his hand to encompass the full range of cold-related maladies that might befall Patrick in the wilderness.
“And that thermal blanket thing. Hey, I have to go if I’m going to get there before it starts snowing again.”
“Okay. Bear spray. Thermal blanket thing. First aid kit,” David adds meaningfully, his mouth twitching. “In case of rogue sticks.”
“In my bag.”
David unbuckles his seatbelt and reaches for Patrick, cupping his face. Patrick is expecting a kiss, but instead he’s met with an intent inspection.
“Have a good trip. I hope it helps,” David says.
He finally does kiss him with firm reassurance and a soft smile. Two years ago, David probably would have assumed this trip was the beginning of the end for them. Now, he just looks at him with calm confidence. Patrick shouldn’t be surprised. After all, he’s the one that put it there.
When Patrick gets to his parents' house, they are less calm and less confident.
“I packed you some extra food just in case,” his mom says, tapping the lid down on their old Coleman cooler and flipping the handle to hold it in place. “You’re sure you don’t want to wait and do this when the weather warms up?”
“January is always slow at the store and Eva can handle it. This is the easiest time to get away.”
His dad hands him an envelope. “This has all the local emergency numbers and that sort of thing. And a checklist for opening and closing up the cabin. It’s been awhile since you were there.” It probably isn’t meant to be as accusatory as it feels.
“Make sure you have a good supply of wood to keep the stove running. I don’t want you to get sick.” His mom is managing to resist wringing her hands, but just barely.
“I will,” Patrick promises.
“And everything’s... okay with David?” She fusses with the collar of his jacket until he ducks away from her hands.
“Yep. David’s great.” If she notices the answer doesn’t quite fit the question, she doesn’t show it.
“How’s the car?” his dad asks, tilting his head to inspect Patrick’s Corolla through the front window. He’s really a terrible actor.
“Just got new tires last month,” Patrick says defensively.
“This time of year, they don’t plow the last mile of Forest Service road.” His dad pulls his keys out of his pocket and takes Patrick’s car keys off the table in unnegotiated trade. “The snow can get pretty deep. Take the truck.”
“Sure.” Patrick takes the keys with only a slight tightening of his mouth. It will take less time to transfer his things than to argue about it and lose anyway. As the only child, he never gets to be in the majority.
As he’s finishing the swap, his mom jogs outside with a box. “Take some flares, too. Just in case.”
In case of what, he doesn’t know, except that flares are for people who need to be rescued. Maybe he’s not a great actor either.
After another round of hugs and I love yous and goodbyes, he’s finally on his way.
When he reaches the fishing cabin, the ground is one continuous stretch of glazed white. Patrick parks where memory tells him the gravel drive should be, a few feet away from a line of cedars. The property looks smaller and more hostile than he remembers, shuttered and vacant since the Brewers locked it up amid the last stubborn heat of summer.
When he turns off the ignition, The Killers are cut off right in the middle of “You sit there in your heartache,” and the plunge into silence is immediate and jarring. Patrick still has one hand on the wheel, gripping the curve of it with white knuckles like letting go will mean he’s really doing this, spending the week here. In winter. Alone.
He’s never really been alone here. In fact, he’s never really been alone anywhere. Not even when he first moved to Schitt’s Creek. Ray wouldn’t know how to leave someone alone if they asked him to, and Patrick never really felt the need to ask. And, after he moved, David was with him more nights than not. He loves all the energy of being newlyweds with a new house and new business opportunities. But when David planned his trip to the spa with Stevie, it just seemed like it would be easier to be alone here, on purpose, than at home by default.
He digs the cabin keys out of the cupholder and trudges through the snow to the porch, tripping over the buried first step. He hesitates at the heavy maroon door as though opening it now, in the middle of January, will let the summer escape and expose this fragile center of his family to winter’s brutality.
Maybe a walk first. It would be good to stretch his legs after the drive. He needs to hunt around for decent phone reception anyway if he’s going to keep his promise of daily proof-of-life texts to David.
He follows the deer trail uphill, their tracks making skinny divots in the snowpack. The farther up he gets, the more gusts of wind begin picking at his coat and teasing the ends of the thick wool scarf his mom slid onto the passenger seat before he left. Eventually, he has to duck his head to keep his eyes from watering. He checks his phone once or twice, but this deep in the woods he never has service.
It’s weird to be disconnected. Now that the other Roses have moved away and Stevie spends at least half of every month on the road, he’s used to a group chat or two running more or less continuously in his pocket. He’s only been out of range for an hour and he already misses it.
It’s been too quiet at home without them. The ache is constant and exhausting, designer heels and wingtips and a worn pair of Converse that no one else can fill. But the soft, constant buzzing of their chatter in his phone eases the ache a little bit. It’s a reassurance that even though they’re gone, they have no intention of disappearing.
At the top of the ridge, he wanders off the trail to a stony outcropping exposed by some long-melted glacier where he finally gets enough reception to send a text message: No bears (yet). Love you.
Let’s keep it that way. Stevie just got here. Love you too.
He stands at the top of the hill just in case anything else comes through. Like clockwork, his phone vibrates in his hand. Stevie. Next time you get the spa and I get the cabin.
Patrick smiles at his phone. Deal.
He picks up the trail again where it crosses under the supports for an old log flume, standing like withered sentinels along the edge of a deep ravine. He follows them back downhill. Most of the planks of the flume itself are decomposed and crumbling in a race to return to the earth, but a half-mile of it is still intact, from the north edge of the Brewers’ property to the old mill on the shore of Lake Vernon.
When he was a kid, he and his cousins would take turns riding down that part of the flume on their bikes and skateboards. Patrick steps into it when he reaches it, stretching his arms to each side to keep from slipping on the icy feathers formed by water that has pooled in the bottom and refrozen, buckling the boards.
When Rachel started coming up to the cabin with his family, this is where they would come to hide. Most of the time, it was just nice to talk in a place where his mother wasn’t perpetually within curious earshot. They’d prop themselves against the tapered sides, letting their ankles knock at the bottom. Sometimes they’d crouch lower and make out. He always liked that coming here meant he could anticipate where things might lead.
He’s taller now, but it still feels disconcertingly deep, too narrow at his feet and too wide at his arms. The downhill slant makes him feel like he’s being chased. When he reaches a rope he once tied to the trunk of an aspen, its frayed knot whispering back and forth against the planks in the wind, he grabs hold of it and hoists himself out. The fibers burn the surface of his palm even through his gloves. He shakes it off and trudges on through the snow.
It took him twelve years to realize he wasn’t stuck with that something-doesn’t-fit feeling, that even a painful exit from the life that was causing it was worth it. It hadn’t been that painful though. Not really. Just parts of it. Ignoring Rachel’s texts. The way his palm dwarfed her delicate ring when she gave it back to him, and how the contrast, combined with her tears, made him feel like the Big Bad Wolf. The way their parents looked so disappointed in him and the way her grandma yelled at him when they told them the wedding was off. The way Rachel didn’t say much of anything to him six months later when he came out, like she was too busy chasing her memories from shore to shore of their relationship, trying to figure out how much sooner she should have known.
After that, he practically pried open David’s heart, crawled inside, and never looked back. That was easy. Painless. Until now.
Now there’s an itch along his spine, not painful, but uncomfortable. It’s not something-doesn’t-fit. Not quite. It’s not even about David. Not really. But it’s triggered by the realization that their life cannot remain just theirs, that there will be decades of birthdays and holidays and vacations with people who are most familiar with the parts of himself he’d rather not revisit, with people he isn’t sure how to be himself around anymore.
What it all comes down to, what it always comes down to, is that Patrick is faced with two problems that should be easy to solve together, but aren’t. The first is letting people from his past see who he is now. The second is letting David see who he was then. He’s never been great at either.
The cabin materializes out of the woods, its steep roof and deep eaves and rough-hewn log walls lovingly restored and maintained. David isn’t here with him because the more he thought about bringing David to this place, the more uneasy he became. David knows he was the kid with the idyllic childhood full of summer cabins and close family and supposed one true love, but that doesn’t mean he has to see it. They’ve unlocked all those boxes in theory, but Patrick’s never really had to show him what’s inside. He wants to. But he wants to see it first, alone. Unpack it first. Alone.
-lump sum-
When he gets back to the truck, Patrick clears a narrow path in the snow and begins to unload totes onto the small porch. His dad must have replaced the decking last summer; it still has the green tinge of treated lumber.
His dad and his uncles went to a public auction in search of a car and ended up buying this defunct logging encampment, sight-unseen, with a dream of turning it into a fishing retreat. When Patrick’s mom and her sisters-in-law used to tell the story, settled into camp chairs around the fire pit on the rocky beach, Patrick couldn’t imagine his very responsible, very routine-driven father taking a gamble like that.
He still can’t. But. Maybe it’s not that different from quitting his job, moving halfway across Ontario, and deciding to partner in an immersive boutique retail experience. His gamble paid off, too. Just like with the cabin, it gave him a place and people he could belong to.
He unlocks the cabin at last and drags everything inside. Dim shards of winter light seep through the shutters, catching dust floating in the cold, damp air, the kind of damp that makes his skin feel papery thin and sore in a hurry. He needs to get a fire going if he has any hope of warming the place up enough to sleep tonight.
He’s glad to see there are enough logs under the stove for the night. He sets a few on the grate and lights kindling below them, monitoring the growing flames until he’s confident the fire will hold. He spots a Rose Apothecary candle on the table by the couch, and lights that too, touched to see it here. It’s the Cedar and Suede scent that David uses in their bedroom, and the scent of it flares his nostrils and takes his breath away. Home.
He checks the fire again and then pulls out his dad’s list of tasks to open the cabin. He surveys the outside for any damage from weather or animals, turns on the breakers, kicks the well pump into action, pulls sheets off the furniture, and sweeps up the dust and cobwebs. His dad was right, it’s been years since he’s done this, but his body settles into performing the tasks in their decades-honed sequence.
Before he was old enough to help, Patrick used to sit on the tailgate of the truck while his dad unbolted the shutters and split logs, chucking them on the pile with a loud, rhythmic clap. His mother would sweep out the winter dust and air the packed-up linens on the line. Together, they would unearth lost and forgotten bits of the summer before.
“See, I told you we left this here!” his mom would cry. She was always met with a frown, starting somewhere between his dad’s eyebrows, and some accusation of planting it to toy with him.
“I would never!” she would insist, tilting her broom away from her hip oddly—or, he supposes, in a manner that would come across as coquettish to someone who is not her five-year-old son.
Patrick usually grew bored of their game and wandered off in search of snails while they played it, wide smiles blooming across their faces as they grew more and more entrenched in their positions. Until he found his own person to argue with, the game used to mystify him. Now he can see there was a comforting settling-in pattern to that, too.
Even with the eaves laden with icicles and the months since its last use, the cabin looks well-tended. He can imagine his mom fussing with the herbs in the pots on the porch while she mutters about something she read online to get the deer to leave them alone. Can see her on the stepstool brushing a fresh coat of paint on the shutters.
She’s never been much for fishing, but she loves tending. So when she spends weekends here, she tends. It’s what sets their cabin apart from the other Brewer family cabins scattered along this acreage of lakefront. It belongs to Marcy as much as to Clint. You can see it before you even set foot in the door.
It’s hard to believe that this summer, it will be occupied by strangers. To celebrate his dad’s retirement, they’re going on a big vacation to Scotland and Ireland, paid for by listing the cabin as a vacation rental. Patrick is supposed to clean out his junk and take anything he wants to keep. He could have waited and come in the spring, but he’s been dreading this whole thing since they told him, and he wants to get it over with. He also wants to deal with this project separately from the rest of his family, to not have his cousins and aunts and uncles peering over his shoulder while he decides what’s important to him.
He doesn’t even know if there is something important to him here. He left so much behind when he moved, convincing himself he didn’t need any of it so that it would be easier to go. Part of him is hoping he was wrong, that he’ll find things that matter to him here. Things he needs. He feels so distant from his family sometimes, so at a loss to explain why none of this was enough. It would be nice to discover that this place, at least, if not the stuff, is something that connects them.
When he’s done tucking away food in the cupboards, extra blankets in the sleeping loft, and towels in the bathroom, he putters around restlessly for an hour or so, flipping through books and opening drawers.
On the end table, a yellow stoneware crock that used to belong to his great aunt holds a bundle of dried sedum. The first time he had sex with Rachel—on the sun-faded green pullout sofa while his parents were out in the boat for the day—they knocked it off and cracked it. They were already half-undressed and resolved to deal with it later as she closed her mouth around him. He raked his fingers through her hair as he came, not even to be sexy, just because he couldn’t help himself. The whole thing was awkward and clumsy, but it also felt potent, a way of saying yes, you. He told her she was beautiful, and she really was. She smiled at him afterwards; her eyes glowed like the sunlit summer around them. They laughed through it with a carefree confidence of we’ll figure it out.
They did figure it out, sort of, but somewhere along the way they stopped laughing. He hopes someday he’ll be able to think about that without hot shame splattering across the surface of his skin.
The cabin is filled with almost forty years of Brewers, objects treasured at summer’s start and abandoned by summer’s end. He finds his jar of oddities collected from the woods and two library books he left here by accident. He mowed lawns to cover the replacement fee. He discovers the remnants of a pot-holder-making kit with a bag of colored woven bands, a partially solved Rubik’s cube, and a list he and Rachel started together on a sheet of graph paper called, Ways We Will Not Be Like Our Parents. He realizes with a small smile that he’s managed to avoid a few of them, and some of the others aren’t as horrifying as they were then. He tells David he loves him in front of anyone who will listen.
As he looks around, it seems like his entire childhood has been deposited here, little by little. Now, he’s about to remove it in one lump sum. He wonders if it’s normal for your childhood to feel so distinct from adulthood. If it’s something unique to being queer. Or magnified by it. Sometimes he feels like being gay takes his childhood memories and destabilizes them, turns them into moments he might have known sooner, should have seen what was coming.
Here, without other voices to drown out the memories, they feel like they’re shouting from the walls. Maybe it’s something about letting winter into a place designed for summer. The winter strips the leaves and warmth and sunshine and replaces it with hard, brittle branches and a frozen lake, and the constant reminder that underneath its lush beauty, the wilderness is unyielding. In the summer, it’s easy to forget winter is coming. In the winter, there’s so much space to long for summer.
-skinny love-
It’s snowing outside, feather-light flakes that seem to fall from both the earth and the sky, swirling in the middle, confused about where to land. Patrick watches it through the pair of windows next to the green couch. The wood has burned down to embers and he’s shivering, even under all the blankets. He should get up, put a little salt on the walk so it doesn’t freeze over, add wood to the stove, eat breakfast. Or maybe, by now, lunch. Instead he’s just been staring at the bin of his stuff that he spent yesterday filling.
At the top, balanced on an old fleece-lined coat that has been too small for him for at least fifteen years, is a Discman CD player. Yesterday, he moved a canvas bag on the hooks by the door and the player thunked against the wall like a heavy stone. The headphones were in the bag too, bent out of shape, the foam covers dry and brittle.
The Discman was Rachel’s. She would pack a year’s supply of batteries for a weekend and sit out on the small front porch, her legs swinging off the edge, a thick case of CDs in plastic sleeves open next to her. Even if that image wasn’t seared into his mind, her name is scrawled right there on the silver lid in purple Sharpie, centered between two bubbly flowers. Rachel.
The Discman was Rachel’s. And the last time he was here, so was she.
After he got his job at Rose Video, he saved up enough of his earnings to buy her an iPod Shuffle for Christmas, which she used most of the time at home. But when they came to the cabin, she would stubbornly tote along the old Discman and all of her CDs.
“Why do you keep using that thing when you have the iPod?” he’d asked her for the eleventh time that first post-Shuffle summer. By then, the Discman was worn down to bare plastic at the corners and started skipping if it wasn’t on a perfectly flat surface.
“I like it,” she said with a shrug. “An album is a story. Start to finish. This seems like a place where you shouldn’t shuffle.”
He was so annoyed at the way she said shuffle. He grew ever more impatient at the click and pop of the player when she switched CDs, the sound the zipper of her CD case made as she opened and closed it, the creaking plastic as she flipped restlessly between Norah Jones and Iron and Wine and then put in Joni Mitchell for the fiftieth time. Some days, it seemed like the abandonment of the iPod was her way of saying, You’ll never really understand what I want.
Before the Shuffle, though, music always brought them together. She showed him her CD collection the first time he ever went to her house. The case was open and in disarray on her bed. She’d just bought A Rush of Blood to the Head and was in the process of moving every single CD to the next sleeve to make room for it next to Parachutes. Patrick fell a little bit in love with her on the spot, her commitment to alphabetical order by artist added to the list of things that meant they were destined to grow old together, alongside her dry sense of humor, her ruthless fastball, and the way her chapstick made her taste like strawberries.
Patrick still loves the taste of strawberries.
Yesterday, he tossed the player in the bin without really looking at it. Today, when he finally emerges from the cocoon of Brewer-made quilts, he realizes there’s a disk inside. He pushes eject.
It’s For Emma, Forever Ago. He and Rachel fought about it once when they were broken up, her insisting that he’d borrowed it and was refusing to give it back, him asking why on earth he would want to listen to an hour of whiny falsetto, much less stolen whiny falsetto, that reminds him of one of the worst periods of his life. Which. Yikes. He really was a dick sometimes. The worst part was, she knew he was saying it to hurt her. He still loves Bon Iver, too.
He digs through the bin under the sink, unearthing a small backup flashlight with fresh batteries. He switches them over to the Discman and lets out a small “Ha!” when the disc starts to spin. The sound is awful through the battered headphones, but it works. It starts skipping until he sets it on the kitchen counter, and finally the opening bars of “Flume” are squeaking out.
At first, the presence of highly-produced sound is a relief. His phone is four versions old and has no space for his music library, even if most of it wasn’t stored in the cloud. So he’s been immersed in the silence of the woods, enough to realize it’s not very silent. Yesterday he jumped at the brittle crack of ice fracturing on the roof, followed by a scrape as it slid down and shattered with a percussive pop on the ground. If he steps outside, he can hear even the slightest wind whispering through the forest, knocking the bare branches together like a haunted drumbeat. But the wilderness isn’t nearly loud enough to drown out the roar of errant thoughts in his head, to keep memories from scratching at his brain. For that, music has always worked best, and even though he’s been here two days now with nothing to do but sort things into bins, keep the fire going, and heat up a meal, this is the first time he’s felt like he can rest.
Around the third track, the music stops being soothing. “Skinny Love” was Rachel’s favorite. The sound quality really is terrible and his brain fixes it by filling in her smooth alto from memory. If he closes his eyes, he can picture her, head back, hair falling in a red wave, tapping against the nearest surface as she sings the my my mys. The longer the song goes on, the more it starts to feel like the fresh snow outside, beautiful but falling so quickly that, if he’s not careful, he’ll lose all trace of the path out of here.
Patrick pauses the player and leaves it on the counter. Maybe guitar will work better. He never makes much time to play it at home, so it seemed like a good idea to bring it. He tunes the guitar and plays around, looking for a song in the jumble of his brain until his fingers are very definitely trying to figure out the chords for “Skinny Love” without his permission. With a weary sigh, he gives in.
The song hurts. It hurts. At home, whenever something makes him feel like this, he tries to distract David or digs himself into work. Now, it feels kind of nice not to fight it.
The act of learning a song has always been something that helped when Patrick was feeling like this. It seemed like he could gain some of the wisdom of the person who wrote it. When he learned “The Best,” it made him feel brave. But this song makes him feel like he’s dismissing everything he felt for Rachel as a veneer, as less than real. “The Best” was exactly how he felt—is still exactly how he feels. But “Skinny Love” is just not. Even when he was a dick to her, even when they couldn’t give each other what they wanted, his love was full and round and wide. It’s important to him to make the distinction.
He wants to figure out how to make the same distinction with his family, but that’s more complicated. This place is a constant reminder of that. They moved across town when he was fifteen; this is the closest thing he has to a childhood home. Yet he hasn’t been here or anywhere else that belongs to them in years. He’s created so much distance without really meaning to, and now that he finally gets to tell them how happy he is and why, it’s not as simple as picking up where they left off.
David is gorgeous and funny and interesting and so right for Patrick, and he’s proud to be an ‘us’ with him. He’s proud to share pictures, and stand up at the altar with him, and talk to his parents about the store and their life together. But he can tell, when he spends any amount of time talking to his extended family, that they can see how much he’s changed. He can’t tell how some of them feel about it. He doesn’t want them to blame David for the loss of the parts of him they miss. And he’s not sure he wants David to see the parts they miss, either.
More than anything, he wants to stop feeling like an outsider when he’s with them. He wants he and David as a pair to fit in with his family as seamlessly as he and Rachel did. Like David belongs to them, too. He’s frustrated it isn’t easier, that he’s still trying to control it with distance. It seems unfair that he has everything he’s ever wanted, and yet somehow he keeps finding new things to want.
Eventually Patrick gives up on “Skinny Love” and sets the guitar back in its case.
-the wolves (act 1 & 2)-
Days in, it’s still weird imagining this place that’s so synonymous with his family as a temporary home for strangers. He keeps rearranging the Save and Donate and Toss bins, loading up things that he wouldn’t think twice about leaving here if the cabin were set to be occupied by Brewers again, but that feel weirdly private to leave exposed for someone new to find. But the more he clears out, the more vulnerable everything left behind seems.
The thing he’s moved the most is his copy of A Naturalist’s Guide to Ontario, which he doesn’t really need anymore. But it has his name in his grade-three handwriting on the inside cover and an inscription on the title page:
Patrick,
I hope this answers all your questions and sends you off in search of more.
Love,
Grandma
There’s a list tucked inside, torn from one of his wide-ruled school notebooks, of everything he’d found in the woods and the page numbers in the book that helped with classifying it. It feels personal. His. And if he hadn’t flipped through this book twenty times, trying to decide whether it should stay or go, the list might’ve been lost.
There’s a version of him that existed before David, but sometimes he forgets there’s a version of him that existed before Rachel, too. Rachel was talented and smart and well-liked and being the innermost of her inner circle involved a little bit of performing the role of the guy who deserved that. At least until he’d done it for so many years that it became part of him. But before, he was kind of a stoic kid, a boy who was so interested in solving the puzzles of nature that his grandma skipped the Kid’s Book of Animals and got him a serious guidebook, four-hundred illustrated pages of native flora and fauna. That kid toting his heavy guidebook and loose notes all over the woods never had to perform as anyone other than himself.
The book is dog-eared and loved and this is the perfect place for it. It should be here. He puts it back on the shelf, makes himself a cup of tea. He drinks it slowly, leaning up against the short run of cabinets, and then sets the mug on the counter and moves the book to the bin of things to take home with him.
He needs to get out, clear his head, or he’s going to end up taking the whole place with him and then David is going to have plenty of ammunition the next time Patrick asks him if he really needs to use more than half of the guest room closet for clothes that he never plans to wear again.
It’s almost dark, but he has enough time to split more wood for the fire at least.
He pulls the ax from the closet and grips it experimentally with his heavy gloves. He takes off a glove and then his ring, setting it on the windowsill above the sink like he does at home whenever he’s going to work in the yard or tend to the garden. The shiny, still-unblemished gold looks wrong here on the rough pine surface, reflecting the dull winter sun. He slides it back on his finger. It might be nice to have the reminder of it pinching between his hand and the handle of the ax.
Patrick brushes the snow off the stump they use for splitting wood and throws his arms and shoulders into the satisfying, steady thwack of the blade dividing logs into two. When he finishes splitting enough wood for another day, he leans on the ax handle to catch his breath, his chest heaving against the crisp, dry air.
He takes off his gloves and lets his hands cool off. He has a blister on the ridge of his palm, right below his ring finger. It’s not too bad yet. He puts the gloves back on and keeps chopping.
The last summer he was here, he and Rachel came for a week in August. They kayaked to one of the tiny islands in the middle of the lake and got out to dangle their feet in the water off the rocky shoreline. They skipped rocks across the surface and Patrick remembers feeling like Rachel sent him hopping wildly across the smooth water too when she said, “Can you believe a year from now we’ll be married and starting a family?”
She reached for him, her ring still out-of-the-box shiny and glittering in the sun, and squeezed his hand before it could start shaking. She read him, because of course she did, and made him tell her why that felt fast. Until Schitt’s Creek, she was the only person he really let know him like that. His cousins mostly expected him to keep them in line and buffer their parents’ threats to ground the lot of them, not tell them his secrets.
Rachel was different. When his grandfather died, he stood stoic at his funeral and let his mother drain her tears into his suit coat. He played “Angel From Montgomery” on his guitar, his grandpa’s favorite. He kept minis of tequila in his pockets for the people he knew would want them. When it was over, he went to Rachel’s and she took him for a drive. They ended up in a park somewhere, curled up together in their winter coats and hats and mittens, her wiping his tears away before they could freeze to his cheeks. He’d never felt like he could be that soft with anyone else before. And even with David, it took Rachel showing up and David slipping through his fingers to lay it on the line, to cry in front of him and tell him he was different, and not just because of the obvious.
Later, when he had more answers, he would get angry sometimes at how good she’d been at reading him, and yet somehow she’d missed this huge thing. How he’d relied on her to know him. How he’d let himself off the hook when it came to the hard questions, expecting her to have all the answers. How he’d grown used to her having them. And then, how he’d felt betrayed when she couldn’t answer the biggest question of all. It was so deeply unfair to her, to expect her to know something about himself that even he didn’t know. Some days, he still has to harness the blame for all of that not knowing and put it back on his own shoulders. Or, ideally, hopefully, eventually, toss it off of both of them.
Patrick splits logs until his back aches and his shoulders are on fire and his palm is bleeding and he’s sweat through all his layers of clothing. The chill wicks back to his body and skates along his skin. He has enough wood for the rest of his stay, so he drops the ax against the side of the cabin with a thud and stacks the wood on the porch under the eave.
While he was cleaning earlier, he found a strand of fairy lights. After dinner, he twists them through the rafters in the sleeping loft and settles into the quilts on the bed, his eyes tracing the constellations of glowing spheres on the ceiling. Some of the bulbs reflect in the family photos on the wall shelves next to the bed, and he follows the pin pricks of light across the smiling faces. His mom changes a few of them out each year. There’s a new photo of his cousin’s oldest child with Clint, holding their latest catch. There’s a photo of Clint and Marcy with Patrick at his birthday party. There’s even one of the photos Ray took, a big group shot with his parents and the Roses clustered around David and Patrick, newly married and beaming. He realizes one of the others is from the wedding, too. One he hasn’t seen. His dad and two of his uncles at the reception, three pairs of Sinatra blue eyes glinting back at him.
It occurs to him that Rachel isn’t the only one he resents for not knowing, or not suspecting. And with his family, it’s not just resentment. It’s anger. There was never pressure on the timing to find a girl, get married, have kids. But there was never an alternative, either.
He didn’t know it was possible to feel so deeply comfortable around a family until he met the Roses. Maybe it’s because they aren’t always nice and that doesn’t seem to bother them. Maybe it’s just being introduced to them through David, as the person David gives him the courage to be. He never feels pressure to satisfy expectations, the way he sometimes does with his own family.
The longer he’s been here, the more it feels like his anger and love burn from the same place. They don’t seem to have a beginning or an end, they’re just part of him. Sometimes, when it comes to his family, to the people he trusts with more of himself, the anger and love fire away in his chest together.
There used to be a poster in the loft with the Tale of Two Wolves that his mother acquired during what he thinks of as her Chicken Soup for the Soul phase. It was supposedly a Cherokee legend about a battle of wolves inside everyone, one angry, jealous, and spewing doubt, the other the bearer of joy, peace, and love. As the legend goes, the boy asks his grandfather which wolf wins, and the grandfather replies simply, “The one you feed.” He remembers liking the picture more than the story.
He can’t imagine how hard it must be to raise a child, to watch your mistakes cause them pain, to watch others’ mistakes cause them pain, and not be able to fix it. They’ve been trying so hard to fix it, to close the distance, but every time they try, it reminds him how far they all have to go. He loves them so much. But sometimes the anger is so much hungrier and more demanding. He’s still looking for the strength to stop feeding it.
-blindsided-
Beneath a thin, glassy sheet of ice, the water in the creek is crystal clear. It’s deeper than he remembers. In the summer, algae coats the submerged logs and various leafy underwater plants grab onto the jagged banks or crowd each other for territory on the muddy bottom. Most of the growth is gone now, hiding from the bitter cold until spring's rescue, so he can see all of the smooth, round rocks littering the bottom, edged by the drooping snow.
“A sand and stone color palette,” he says with a thin smile. His voice sounds odd after so many days on his own. Too sharp, too loud. He licks his chapped lips.
Below him is the rocky ledge where he used to sit as a kid, sweeping aside the needled leaves of bladderwort in search of minnows and frogs. He wraps his arm around a sapling to keep from slipping on his way down. He doesn’t need to add hypothermia to whatever is wrong with him lately. David would never forgive him, and he’s got enough to deal with without that.
He drops a rock and it splits the icy surface with a satisfying crescendo of breakage. He pokes at a deep red maple leaf in the water with a nearby stick; it dislodges and begins to flow downstream. He pokes at another leaf, this one brilliant gold, which spins for a second in the current before it follows the first. He doesn’t think this creek has a name. He wonders if it’s connected to Schitt’s Creek somehow, or if they both flow into the same body of water eventually. They watched a video in grade six about the earth’s water systems and Ms. Haddock, always attempting to inject humanity into science, insisted that all people in the world were connected by water in one way or another.
He remembers hopping in the old canoe his parents kept behind the shed, pulling a map out of his pocket, and pretending it could take him to anywhere he chose. To Rachel’s house ten blocks over. To his grandad’s an hour away. To his grade four pen pal in Vancouver. To his cousin Molly studying abroad in Peru.
As he watches the ice etch its way back across the void, Patrick tries to picture the Roses on their veranda outside their new house in the hills outside L.A., the Pacific Ocean a distant but shimmering field of blue. And then Alexis, and the selfie she sent them the week after she moved, of her and a new friend on a client’s yacht in the Hamptons. Patrick remembers bracing himself, frozen with his paint roller drip-dripping on the dropcloth, worried that all of David’s crushed dreams would flash across his face. Instead, he just smiled at the picture, and then looked up at Patrick and smiled wider.
“I think she’s happy,” he said.
“I think you’re happy, too,” Patrick realized. And David just nodded and looked around at their half-painted living room and nodded again into a kiss.
That was three months ago, when it still seemed reasonable to be a little shaken at the rapid pace of change in his life.
The Roses wanted to leave since the day he met them. For some reason, knowing they wanted to leave was different from them leaving. He’s not even sure why. He wants good things for them. He wants them to have the lives they want. It’s just… Tears sting his eyes and he dabs at them with the thumb of his glove.
He remembers sitting on that chair outside the hotel, waiting for them to get the news they wanted. He remembers being blindsided when David assumed they would move, too. He remembers taking some of David’s joy by not being happy about it.
He’s left home before. He’s left people he loves before, left a good life in search of a better one. Is that what it felt like for them, when he told his family he was leaving? He feels awful now, realizing how much harder it was to be the one left behind.
The longer he spends here the more obvious it is why he needed this time alone. Alone is not just something he came here to find. It’s something he brought with him, stuck to his shoes and wedged between his ribs. It took being here, where the distinction between lonely and alone is non-existent, to really see it.
Even before the Roses, he’d been putting distance between himself and the life he left, as though the mere mention of Rachel and Sunday dinners with his family and his job at the venture capital firm would set him adrift again. He wonders if that distance happens naturally when you have to keep coming out, announcing that you have stepped from one reality to another. When you’ve spent so long not getting to be yourself that you naturally pull away from the circumstances that built the lesser you. Or maybe it’s just what happens when you wait until you’re thirty to spend enough quality time with yourself to listen to what part of you has been saying all along.
‘Rachel’ is just another word in his relationship with David now. It’s not like it was before, when they first started dating. Not a person who could show up and ruin everything. Or a reminder that, because he didn’t say anything to either of them, she almost did. But there’s still that little bit of ache, of watching Rachel come and David leave, like magnets turned in the wrong direction, pushing away at the poles. There’s still a sense that those magnets can’t connect. Ever. It’s okay, now, to say her name, but he rarely does.
Either way, he knows, he knows he has to find a way to reconcile the world that exists here, the life of his family, his past, the fact that he was so deeply loved by everyone but himself, with the person he wants to be. He should do this more at home. Hike. Get outside. Be alone. It’s always been easier to trust himself when no one else is talking.
It’s warmer today ahead of an angry winter storm which is supposed to bring in the next cold front. Patrick takes his gloves off while he walks and picks up a pinecone, scratching it lightly across his palms as his footprints hit the dirt beneath the snow. Now that he’s getting used to it, there’s a comfort to winter here, to the way snow blankets everything with its brutality and then recedes again, a sort of forced slowing down. The snow offers a chance to stop and reflect, and then continue on. Or start again.
-creature fear-
The storm knocks at the windows and shakes the cabin so vigorously that Patrick is starting to worry he’s going to end up upside-down over Lake Vernon, relegated to history like the rest of the Brewers’ things in this place. The storm gets so bad that his heartbeat picks up with it, sending him into strategizing and contingency planning. He makes a mental list of what he’ll do if the power goes out. If a tree falls on the roof and exposes him to the gaping maw of winter. If a tree falls on the truck and leaves him stranded. In his mind he locates the chainsaw and the matches and the thermal blanket that he promised David would be on him at all times but is, at this moment, still in the truck.
As uncomfortable and unsettling as it is, listening to the wilderness rampage around him, fear is something he knows. He used to live so much of his life in the paralyzing grip of it. It’s new to actually feel it take him over, to consume him like a wild creature, leaving him out of breath and jumping at every noise.
It’s a small mercy, as his mother would say, because the only reason he can feel it consume him is that it’s no longer his constant state. So much of this week has been about remembering things he left behind, but here, finally, is something he’s proud to be rid of.
After another roaring gust of wind and snow, sending the shutters smacking against their frames, Patrick climbs down from the loft to burrow into the couch, just in case. He can keep a better eye on the fire, see the truck through the window, observe to deter his imagination about what might be happening. He sets the Discman on the little side table and lets Bon Iver drown out the worst of the wind. He can almost pretend the howling is coming from the CD, like the weather is just being Auto-Tuned.
He tries not to dwell on who he was with Rachel versus who he is with David. Until he got here, he tried not to dwell on Rachel much at all. There was something about leaving, something about going somewhere where no one knew him, where expectations were only founded on who he was in any given moment and not the person they’d known for thirty years, that set him free. He doesn’t usually see any benefit in looking back. But it hasn’t been all bad, to compare himself now. He has a long way to go, but he’s come some distance already.
He’s definitely made mistakes because of fear where David is concerned. Not telling him about Rachel. Not telling him his parents didn’t know about them. Being an asshole about the robbery. Taking so long to come visit his parents, and then not even bringing David when he did. Heck, not calling their first date a date, just in case David didn’t want it to be. As perfect as it ended up, if he had it to do over again he’d ask him outright. So David would know from minute one how much he wanted him.
But he also remembers Cabaret, remembers telling himself and everyone who asked that it just seemed like something fun to do, until one night, after a long day of rehearsal and choreography, when he broke down and cried and cried and cried.
“It’s good to be free,” he said.
And David. David just said, “I can tell,” and tucked him into his shoulder and cried with him.
Playing the emcee was weird and uncomfortable at times, but something about stepping into that role, playing someone so performatively queer, gave him the freedom to drop the act the rest of the time. To just be himself. To take his time figuring out what that meant. First, it meant marrying David Rose. Next, it could mean anything, and he’s not scared of that anymore.
He closes his eyes and listens to the tinny music and lets the fear wash over him. The storm will pass, the fear will pass, and he’ll move on. And his old life, threatening as it might sometimes be, doesn’t get to decide what shape his future takes.
-team-
The storm has pushed on by early evening, leaving a clear blue glow in its wake magnified by the slice of moon pulsing off the freshly-fallen snow. Patrick discovered on day three, while he was debating digging out the ice fishing equipment, that he can get decent reception on the lake. He slides carefully onto the ice, trying to ignore the disconcerting shift and crack of it underneath his boots. It’s thick enough to hold; he checked. But it still feels like walking on water.
He turns on his phone to see that being out of communication has resulted in several text messages from David and at least one panicked voicemail.
There’s also at least a hundred new messages in the Rose Family group chat and a message from Elliot on the baseball team, asking if he wants to go to a hockey game in Elmdale together with some of their other teammates. They’ve never really hung out except for drinks after the games, but he’s been thinking, lately, that he would like deeper friendships. So maybe he’ll go.
Another text comes in from David, so he presses the call button, hoping he’s still on his phone and that the signal will hold.
“Listen, I still have contacts at twelve embassies and was ready to mount an international search party. Also hi. I assume this phone call means you have not been eaten by bears.”
“I have not,” Patrick says, trying to muffle his laugh with a gloved hand. “Sorry. There was a storm.”
“Your dad told me. I think he meant it to be reassuring but I just ended up worrying about you being sucked up by a polar vortex, so.”
“I don’t think that’s how those work.”
“Anyway, you should know I looked online for hunting knives and wilderness GPS tracker things and I was about to drive to you and start cutting open wolves like the huntsman.”
This time, Patrick doesn’t bother to stifle his laugh. “God. I miss you.”
“Hm. Me too.” Patrick can almost hear the way David’s shoulders squeeze together, the pleased smile that spreads across his face when he discovers they’re thinking the same thing at the same time.
“I almost wish I’d waited longer to call, just to see you show up all outfitted for that.”
“I have a fabulous ethically-sourced fur stole for camouflage at the ready. It’s too bad my mother’s wigs are in LA. Emelda would be perfect for this.”
“The image in my head is probably nothing like the image in yours, but you should know I’m very impressed. And a little turned on.”
“You should be. Are you having fun?”
“It’s cold here,” Patrick says.
“Shocking.”
“I know. On the plus side, the stars are unreal tonight, so.” He looks up as he says it, taking in the swirling, prickling patterns he can’t begin to identify.
“Well that sounds nice. You do love a starry night.”
Patrick smiles. “More when there’s someone to share it with.”
“Well.” David’s voice thickens. “I’m here now.”
They talk for a few more minutes, until Patrick’s cheeks feel stiff from the cold and his nose is running enough to be distracting. After he says goodbye and I love you, he looks up at the sea of stars again. Patrick almost wishes he would have asked him to come; then they’d be sharing this for real. Next time, he will.
-for emma-
It’s still clear and cold the next morning. The snow clings to every individual branch and needle of the trees along the shore. He feels like a smudge across the sharp white, pristine landscape as he skids onto the cold gray ice again. His finger hovers over Rachel’s contact. She’s gone by a lot of names in his phone. Pet names, nicknames, names with and without emojis, and versions of Do not call and SRSLY STOP and other attempts to keep from running home in that direction. Now, it’s just her name with her phone number and her parents’ home number, which he can’t seem to delete even though they probably don’t have the landline anymore. It’s the number he used to call her on even before they started dating, when they’d talk for hours until her mom would yell at her to do her homework.
If he closes his eyes, he can still dial it by memory.
He pushes her cell number instead. Rachel picks up on the second ring.
“Patrick, hi,” she says, curiosity threaded through her tone.
“Hey.”
“What’s up?”
“Um. I just. I found your old Discman cleaning out my parents’ cabin. I’d thought I’d check to see if you wanted it before I toss it.”
“Oh, gosh, I wondered what happened to that thing. Um. No. That’s ok.”
“What about the Bon Iver CD inside it?”
“I knew you still had that!”
“You left it behind!” he cries, laughing in spite of the annoyance that flares up at the old, stupid argument.
“I still have the one I bought to replace it,” she says. “So I guess that one’s yours.”
“Thanks,” he says. “That’s so generous of you.”
She laughs softly on the other end of the line, and then it’s quiet. He should say goodbye but there’s something about her voice that seems to call all of his questions to the surface.
“Uh. Remember when you came to Schitt’s Creek?”
It’s such a stupid way to ask it and he deserves the irritated huff of breath that blows against her microphone. “Really?”
“Sorry. Of course you do. Anyway, when we talked, did you—” Patrick sniffles as his nerves prickle and his nose starts to run. “Were you… Were you mad at me?”
“This is kinda heavy for a surprise call on a Friday morning, Patrick.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I just. Nevermind. You’re right. I shouldn’t be bugging you with this.” The storm left the air noticeably more biting. His voice sounds brittle. He clears his throat.
“I was furious with you.” The way she says it now, like she knows exactly how to deal with his bullshit but is still annoyed to be doing so, eases the tightness in his chest. He almost laughs. She speaks again, more gently, “I just didn’t know if I was allowed to be.”
“Why wouldn’t you be allowed?”
“I was the first person you came out to. I didn’t want to make that a bad experience for you.”
Patrick sinks to the surface of the ice. “Yeah. That was. God, Rach, I’m sorry you had to do that.”
There’s background noise on the phone, like she’s moving around. Then it’s quiet again. “Sorry, I wanted to shut my office door. I mean, it’s my own fault for coming there.”
“No, it’s not. I could have said something sooner. If you want to yell at me now, I can take it.”
“How do I refuse an offer like that?” she says, and he can hear her smile. “‘Hey, Rachel, here I am, in the middle of your work day and years too late. Do your worst.’”
He laughs at her pretty good impression and pulls his toque off with one hand to reposition it. The silence hangs for a minute. “Are you still mad at me?”
She hesitates.
“I would understand, if you are,” he says, and realizes it’s true.
“I’m not mad at you. I’m sad at you.”
For some reason, that’s so much worse. It hits him right between his shoulder blades. “Can I ask why?”
Rachel’s sigh is long-suffering. “I’m sad that, when you met the person who was right for you, I didn’t rank as something important enough to tell him. And I’m sad that, when you figured out what was going on, you didn’t tell me. I was asking the same questions you were, you know. Wondering if something was wrong with me. If I’d done something wrong. I would never want to push you to tell me something you’re not ready to tell me, especially something like that, but it would have been nice to know something.”
Patrick gets the feeling that there’s more, and that it’s all more complicated than that, but the cold has traveled through the soles of his boots up to his knees and he doesn’t want to push her.
“I’m sorry I left without saying anything.”
She laughs. “You’re not. You would do it again.”
“I would do it differently.”
“Okay.” He hears a light tapping from her end of the call. “Hey. I have to get back to work.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“If you want to call me the next time you’re in town, I’d be open to sitting down. Talking for real. Only if you want.”
“I would like that,” he says. It feels good, actually, to talk to her. Even when they slip into their familiar back and forth, he doesn’t feel like he loses himself.
“Patrick. Are you okay?”
“Sure. Yeah,” he says, too slowly to hide behind the confidence of it.
“Why did you call, really?”
“I guess I’ve just been thinking about things. About how I left things with you. And my parents. I just feel bad for getting wrapped up in my own stuff, I guess.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, you’re not exactly the center of my universe. I have my own stuff to get wrapped up in, too.”
Patrick laughs, thick and wet. “That helps. I guess.”
“Good,” she says, and the smile is back in her voice. “I really gotta go, though.”
“Yeah, okay.”
As they say their goodbyes, he looks out across the surface of the ice, mottled and crazed white, rough where it thawed and refroze before winter set in for good.
-re: stacks-
Patrick is done with his purging and organizing a day early. He puts lids on the bins so he won’t keep resorting them, and stacks them up by the door. It’s kind of overwhelming seeing everything dragged out of untidy corners and nooks and stacked up neatly like that.
He’s debating just leaving today, seeing if he can book a massage with David before they have to go home. He’s always loved the woods, but he wouldn’t mind a day at the spa now. The constant seepage of memories, like cold through the cracks in the windows and under the door of the cabin, has made him tense.
The sound of the diesel engine is unmistakable, punching through the hum of the forest with its mechanical rumble, drawing him out of his head. He peers out the window above the sink and sees a truck come to a stop behind his dad’s. There are two figures in the front seats; one of them cuts an unmistakable silhouette.
Patrick slips into his boots and runs out to meet David, who is woefully underdressed and picking his way gingerly through the snow in his hightops. He kisses him first, relishing the familiar feel of him, still warm from the drive and smiling against his lips.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“I used some of the thirty-five hours and seven minutes when I couldn’t reach you to pack. And after you called, I guess I just... wanted to come. Is that okay?”
“Yes. God, yeah,” Patrick says, eager to kiss that tentative look off his face, bumping noses in his excitement and missing half of his mouth in the process.
David tugs at the folded band of Patrick’s toque. “I hope I’m not interrupting your sulking.”
“Sulking?” David takes one look at Patrick and Patrick concedes. “Fine.”
David nods to the cabin. “Please tell me it’s warmer in there than it is outside, because I’m about to turn into one of those ice people.”
Patrick hesitates. “It’s a little warmer, yeah.”
“Okay, I just came a very long way. The least you could do is lie.”
Patrick doesn’t lie, but he does steal another kiss.
“You all good?” Patrick’s uncle Jim calls from the driver’s seat. Which is when Patrick realizes he’s just kissed David in a very familiar manner in front of the one uncle who didn’t come to the wedding. And well, fuck it. He slips his arm around David’s shoulders.
“We’re good. You want to come in? I’m about to make tea.”
“Nah, I want to get back before dark. Nice to meet you, David.”
“Thanks for the ride,” David says through clattering teeth.
“We’ll have to swap hunting stories again sometime.”
David’s smile tightens as his voice raises an octave. “Mmhmm, can’t wait, Jim.”
He waves at them before rolling his window up and rumbling back down the drive.
They go inside, and once the noise from the truck peters out, it’s quiet again. David doesn’t say anything, and neither does Patrick while he starts the tea kettle.
David sits gingerly on the sofa, taking visual inventory of the rack of antlers overhead, the soot-stained ceiling, the Brewer family photos in mismatched frames, the copper kettle heating water on the ancient stove. His mouth tightens at one corner in a way he seems to reserve for the Brewers, like he can practically feel his grip on his standards slipping in the name of roaring, abiding love.
“I feel like I should ask if you’re running away again.”
“Again?” Patrick’s temper flares. “Of course not.” Of course he’s not. Didn’t they just make promises to each other?
“It’s just. If you are, you should know I’m coming, too. My hair will begin to resemble a nest for mutant crows, and I can’t promise to be in the best mood as my knits succumb to the elements but. That is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
Patrick swipes at the tears in his eyes with a frustrated vigor. He doesn’t mind crying, not anymore. But he hates crying for reasons that shouldn’t even be reasons. He hates that David even thinks it. Hates that he’s made David have to ask it. Theirs is not a life he wants to run away from.
“Do you think I’ll ever reach a point where it feels like my past isn’t chasing after me?”
“Maybe—and this is not to discredit my earlier, very generous offer to become a vagabond with you—you could stop trying to outrun it.”
Patrick nods and ponders that as he sits down next to him with their cups of tea. That’s maybe what he’s doing here. Finally.
“Are these antique?” David asks, studying the delicate blue floral pattern on the soft white china.
“I assume. They were my grandmother’s.”
“They’re fancy,” he says appreciatively, taking another sip.
His dad didn’t even question it when his mom unpacked the box of china that first summer after her mother died. He just turned fond and kissed the top of her head, and they spent summers eating fried fish on the same fine china she’d used for big family dinners since she was a girl. They’re so out of place here at the end of a very long road from nowhere to nowhere, but he loves them, loves the way his mother said yes to wilderness and no to being wild about it.
After his week here, he can see she was always doing that, adding touches to the cabin to soften it. His dad complained once about how fishing cabins were supposed to be rough, but just once. Patrick suspects he actually loves it.
The will to bend places to suit, instead of the other way around, is something he admires about David, too. Sometimes Patrick complains about how quickly they go through candles, but he loves walking into the bedroom, the Cedar and Suede reminding him of home and work and partnership in every sense of the word.
“Oh, speaking of your mom. She told me she’d keep some things for you if you weren’t ready to take them home. She also insinuated I might not let you, so I told her about your office that you decorated yourself.”
“Hm,” Patrick says, taking a sip. “I think I did a good job with that.”
“You did great, honey.”
Patrick grins at him and takes another sip. Sometimes it’s kind of nice, being with someone who is impossible to please.
“Hey,” David says, dancing his fingers along Patrick’s shoulder. “Will you show me what you’ve been up to?”
Patrick kisses him, once and then again. Stalling. Then: “Yeah. Okay.”
Patrick takes him through the stack of boxes. He opens the tin sewing case that belonged to his great-grandmother, perfectly sized for baseball cards and a couple of arrowheads that he deemed too fragile for the other places he stowed his discoveries. There’s also a small toolbox his grandpa made him, stocked with real tools, heavy and patinated.
“I figure they’ll be useful around the house,” he says with a shrug. David doesn’t point out that Ronnie gave them (well, gave David) a nice tool set as a housewarming gift. That’s not the point of these.
Next he pulls out his Clue Master Detective Board Game, which is dented at the corners and was definitely someone else’s before it was his.
“I was thinking we could have a game night. Either when Stevie’s in town again, or just. With other people.”
“Other people?” David says, tilting his head.
“Yeah. I dunno. Twyla maybe.” He searches. “Elliot from the baseball team. Shannon and her fiancée. That’s six, right?”
“Right.” David still looks skeptical, but it’s not a no. He takes the weathered game box and studies it. “Who was your character of choice?”
“Professor Plum, an archeologist of dubious distinction.”
His mouth twitches. He’s in. “Naturally.”
There’s more, things he’s keeping and things he’s letting go. He even shows him the junk he discarded along the way, to give himself something to do with his hands while he tells David about this place, about what it means to him, to his family. David doesn’t seem bothered to find out the Brewers have accumulated decades’ worth of tangled fishing line and spent batteries and unopened kale chips, reluctant to clean too much out every year in case their summer memories would vanish along with them.
In bits and pieces, Patrick tells David about his week. About how coming here in winter, he felt exposed, like the bare trees and the barren ground, stripped of the soft camouflage of peaceful green. About how, eventually, he didn’t mind it.
He also shows him A Naturalist’s Guide to Ontario, taking it reverently from the bookshelf. He kept the list he found folded inside it, along with a few other papers and notes tucked into various places. But the book will stay. He’s decided it’s okay to leave parts of himself here for whoever comes after him, signs that this place belongs to him, too. Especially this, a link between that serious little kid and the man he’s still becoming.
After dinner, they climb up to the sleeping loft, sharing their heat through long kisses and soft stories under the blankets.
David tells Patrick that he and Stevie pretended to be newlyweds to get freebies (“It was very lucrative!”) and about how he got caught talking about his husband and so then they had revise their story into a sugar-daddy throuple situation. (“You’re a jet-setting media mogul who showers us in gifts to prove your love for us. If we ever go back, we’ll both need to arrive wearing new jewelry from you.”)
“I called Rachel,” he says, eventually, carefully, warily.
David kisses his forehead, tightening his hold. “Is it the first time you’ve talked to her since she came to see you?”
“We text sometimes. But, otherwise, yeah.”
“How was it?”
“A little strange, but good. I think. I know she’s her own person with her own life. I mean obviously we both are. But it’s weird to think of her as someone that exists outside of the two of us. Anyway she asked if I wanted to get together next time I’m in town.”
“Do you?” David asks.
“I think so.” Patrick rubs his forehead back and forth against David’s sweater before tipping his head back so he can see his eyes. “Would you come with me?”
“Sure. If you want me to,” he says. “It’s also okay if you want to go alone, and tell me all about it afterwards.”
That makes him tremble, not from the cold this time but from the trust and love and space David is offering. He knows David wants to help him close this gap with his family, with his past, and maybe it’s also a gift of trust and love and space to let him.
“Okay,” he says. “But I’m sort of worried you’ll find out I wasn’t a very good boyfriend.”
“I already know that,” David says, his grin and his eyebrows higher on one side. “It’s just, I’m sure that she can do better, whereas I cannot.”
“Ouch,” Patrick says with a laugh, too comfortable to make a show of pulling away. “You could probably do better, too, but I’m too damn selfish to let you try.”
“You better not.” David shifts down on the bed so he can give him a soft, attention-getting kiss. “Patrick,” he whispers. “Why did you need to come alone?”
“I don’t know. I was worried I wouldn’t feel like myself here. I didn’t want to seem like some mysterious creature to you.”
“When I tell you—I mean you know my past isn’t—” David stops. Sighs. “Do I seem like a mysterious creature to you?”
Patrick’s mouth twitches as he tries and fails to hold in a smile. “Yes. Sometimes. But like a beautiful one with iridescent scales? Whereas I feel like you would discover I’m a homely brown rodent who steals strawberries from the garden.”
David laughs and rubs their noses together before he kisses him. “I don’t see the problem.” He kisses him again, more thoroughly. “Hedgehogs are sort of cute. And just a little bit prickly, which I like.”
“If you think you’re going to get into my pants tonight by comparing me to a hedgehog—”
“Mmm no. I think I’m going to get into your pants tonight in spite of comparing you to a hedgehog.” David leans closer. A challenge. “Aren’t I?”
Patrick laughs but doesn’t argue. He rolls them so he has David’s thigh right between his where he can use it. “I missed you,” he says, tracing his bottom lip with his tongue, rubbing himself against David. It feels vaguely exciting to be doing this with him here, a place that is so deeply rooted in his past, but that he’s had the chance to experience in a different season.
“Want to pretend we’re seventeen and your parents left us alone for the day?” David asks, with a shocking amount of perception. They did that once after the housewarming party, but that wasn’t a place that belonged to seventeen-year-old Patrick. Not like this does.
“Yeah.” A groan escapes Patrick’s lips as David moves his thigh right where it’s at its most ruthless. “What would you do?”
“I would start by telling you that while I was missing you, I watched a YouTube video—I mean I checked out a tape—on the rules of baseball,” David says. “And I am now seventy-three percent sure I know what a short stop is.”
David says it like two separate words, and Patrick doesn’t care because his breath is hot against his neck, and he feels like he’s thawing for the first time in a week. “I don’t think high-school-David would have done that. I’m kind of surprised this-week-David did that.”
David tucks his hand under the waistband of Patrick’s sweatpants, wrapping him with his long fingers and teasing with his broad palm, not quite tight enough to white out his concentration, but close. “This-week-David was trying very hard not to freak out.”
Patrick slides his hand between David’s sleep pants and the thermal underwear he let him borrow, and just rests it on the curve of his hip. “Thank you,” Patrick says. “But next time you can come be cold and miserable with me.”
“Can’t wait.” David’s teeth graze along his shoulder as he laughs, sharp and present. His hand tightens around Patrick’s dick and he starts stroking with the precision and practice that comes from years of knowing exactly how Patrick likes to be touched. “How long until your parents get back?” he asks, voice low and heavy. “I could make you work for it.”
That sends heat licking through him, and next time they’re here, they have to do that. Right now, there’s only one thing he wants more. “Hey.” Patrick squeezes his hip until David’s eyes meet his, soft and dark. “I don’t want to reimagine the past. Tonight, I just want now. Us.”
“Then in that case, can this be the us where you refuse to keep the heat at a liveable temperature and it’s too cold to take off all our clothes?” David asks, suppressing a shiver.
“Yeah,” Patrick breathes, pressing into his hand as David squeezes playfully.
“Good. I sort of like that us.”
David kisses the me, too from his lips. He folds himself around him, generous and beautiful and Patrick’s. He keeps his hand where Patrick craves it, takes his time with his mouth on his mouth, on his neck, on his jaw, his tongue seeking and soothing. After so many days of solitude, Patrick feels raw and vulnerable and overheated by David’s touch. It’s at once the same and opposite of winter’s icy cold fingers, vivid, all-consuming, demanding. David adjusts the quilts when they slide back so none of the building warmth can escape, and Patrick feels all the bare, frigid wilderness give way to the dense heat igniting between them.
It’s a familiar sequence of long drags and drugging kisses and hands that know him. It’s the smooth curve of his shoulders and the scratchiness of his face and the piercing black of his eyes. It’s pauses to laugh and readjust and rest his weight on him and lose himself in David’s name, his favorite word. It’s slow enough that when he comes, it’s a gentle shiver along his veins, an easy, breathless soothing.
Later, cleaned up and curled up together again in the dark, Patrick brushes his lips against David’s hair. Maybe he’s had it all wrong. He’s not some new person with David. He’s the same person, unlocked. The same person, free.
-wisconsin (bonus track)-
It isn’t until they pull up at his parents’ house to trade back for their car and return the cooler (which was useful after all) and the flares (which, thankfully, were not), that Patrick realizes David has already been here.
“I can’t believe the first time you came home with me I was off alone in the woods,” he says.
“It was kind of weird. I had lunch with two of your uncles and I had to answer questions like, ‘So do we still call you a gay couple if one of you isn’t gay?’”
“Oh no,” Patrick says. He’s mortified, but he’s not terrified like he might have been. “I’m sorry. They’re trying.”
“I told them they could just call us a couple and they were very sweet about it,” David says graciously. “Hey. There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to be the one who has to do all the work. It’s not on you to teach them.”
“I know. It’s not on you, either, though. We can always buy them a book or something.”
David laughs. “Like your naturalist’s guide. Except how to deal with your queer relatives.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says, and then smiles at him as he takes his hand. “I don’t need you to field questions for me, but... I think I just need you to help me hang onto myself. You know? Until I feel like I can do it on my own.”
David’s eyes flicker with recognition as he nods. “I think you can do it on your own. But you don’t have to. I do know a thing or two about complicated families.”
Patrick wants to say so many things, make promises about taking better care of himself. Finding friends of his own and spaces of his own and maybe even a therapist of his own. Finding himself independent from who he was or who David makes him feel like he can be. But before he can put all of that into words, his mom opens the door and waves at them.
“Uh oh, we’ve been spotted,” Patrick says, waving back. “I’ll see what I can do to make this exchange happen quickly, and then maybe we can get home in time for a movie.”
“We can stay as long as you want,” David says, his eyes steady and intent. “Seriously. Stevie said she’d cover the store tomorrow since it’s Eva’s day off.”
“Oh.” Patrick nods. Swallows. “Well. I’m kind of ready to be home. But it might be fun to do the official tour at least. Since we’re here”
“Okay,” David says with a shy smile. “I think you should know that on my way through, your mom offered home videos, and I said not until you were there to narrate them. I deserve one of your VIP trophies for that.”
“Such restraint,” Patrick says, laughing.
He really is just going to return the truck and the supplies, give David a tour, maybe make out with him a little bit in his old bedroom, and make a smooth exit. But then his mother invites them for Sunday dinner with everyone and David looks at him like he wants him to say yes, and, surprisingly, Patrick sort of wants to say yes, too. So he does.
“So, Patrick, how was the cabin?” his dad asks as they’re passing food around the long dining table. “No problems? The stove kept you warm enough?”
“Yeah. It was good,” Patrick nods. Smiles. It really was.
“You have to see the place in summer,” his mom says to David. “It’s so beautiful up there.”
“I’d love to,” he says.
“Did you end up keeping anything?” his mom asks, leveling her curious gaze on Patrick.
“A few things.”
“Good. I would hate for—for you to feel like there was nothing there you wanted.” Her mouth tightens into a thin line as she says it.
“No,” Patrick says, patting her hand. “I took a lot of it with me.”
During dinner and after, when everyone sticks around to watch the hockey game, Patrick tries to just go with it. Touch David when he wants to, tuck behind him when he’s helping his mom with the dishes, kiss him in the hallway before he takes their bags upstairs, wedge under his arm and murmur back and forth about whatever comes to mind. He tries to show everyone how happy he is to be married to David Rose. This time, it’s not a performance he’s putting on for them. It’s just him.
That night, they curl up together on Patrick’s twin bed the way they once had on David’s. David rubs moisturizer into Patrick’s hands where the winter wind and bitter sun has dried his skin. His touch is careful around the area under his ring, where the blister from wood-splitting is still rubbery and bright red, and pleasantly sure everywhere else.
When he’s done, he sets the moisturizer back on the nightstand. “Did you put that there?” he asks, nodding to the frame next to it, a candid wedding photo of just the two of them.
“No. My mom must have,” he says, smiling.
“She told me she’d give us a deal on a long weekend at the cabin in exchange for us providing a discount on products from the Apothecary to stock it. So I guess that’s where you get that from.”
Patrick laughs. “I guess so. We should do it, though.”
“I hear late July is prime walleye season, whatever that is.”
Patrick smiles. “Perfect. Then maybe next winter we’ll both try the spa.”
“Mm. We can tell them Stevie left us.”
“You must have made quite an impression,” Patrick says, opening his arms so David can settle into his spot.
“Mmhmm, yes. I’m afraid we did. Hey,” he says, scratching his fingers under the hem of Patrick’s sleep shirt. “I’m glad I’m finally here with you. Are you… doing okay with it?”
“Yeah,” Patrick whispers. “I’m glad you’re here too. This feels right.”