Peter Cabot Gets Lost by Cat Sebastian

Day 3

South Bend, Indiana

Caleb awoke to the sound of planets colliding and bombs dropping.

“What the—what the ever-loving—” he sputtered, attempting to sit up, and then dropping back onto the pillow when the effort proved to be too much.

“Sorry. Shit. I dropped my hairbrush on the bathroom floor, and then when I bent to pick it up, I knocked over my shaving kit and—anyway, sorry,” Peter said from somewhere outside Caleb’s field of vision.

Caleb winced and pulled the blanket over his head. The sounds dwindled to nearly nothing, but his head hurt too much to go back to sleep. Gingerly, he peered out from under the covers and saw Peter looking at him curiously.

“Are you hungover?” Peter asked. “From two and a half beers?”

“Shut up.”

“Let me get you some aspirin.” Peter disappeared, returning a moment later with two white pills and a glass of water. “Two and a half beers,” he murmured.

“Fuck off.”

“You’re welcome.”

Caleb struggled to a sitting position and swallowed the pills. “I don’t drink much.”

“Clearly,” Peter said, with a smile that was too far too cheerful for—Caleb checked his watch—seven a.m.

“Why are we awake right now, exactly?”

“Because the sun is shining and we can’t wait to get a start on another beautiful day?”

Caleb blinked. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“We are two men in the prime of our lives, with no responsibilities whatsoever other than getting you to Los Angeles. The world is our oyster.” Peter was smiling, but there was a thread of something a little sad in his voice, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was saying, but he wished he did.

Caleb couldn’t laugh, though, so instead he sniffed. “That’s disgusting.”

Peter laughed. “There’s coffee waiting for you on the table, next to a slice of strawberry pie, and then we can hit the road.”

“Fine,” Caleb said, annoyed to discover that his complacency could be purchased with coffee and pie.

He got dressed, aware that Peter found reasons to turn his back while Caleb was changing, as if that sort of thing mattered. Did he think he was supposed to do that because he was gay? Because Caleb was gay? Because they both were? Was Caleb supposed to avert his eyes when Peter got changed? He certainly hadn’t done so yesterday morning, nor was he planning on doing so the next time Peter changed his shirt. It wasn’t every day he got a chance to look at somebody who looked like that.

He ate the pie and drank the coffee and found that he was in altogether a better mood than he had been the previous day. Food, he reasoned, probably helped. And about that—

“Thank you,” he said, managing not to grit his teeth.

“Huh?”

“For the pie and the coffee. And aspirin. And, um, putting up with me when I’m surly.”

“You paid for the pie, the coffee was free in the office, I absolutely refuse to calculate the cost of two aspirin, and I haven’t figured out my hourly rate for putting up with surliness, so we’re even,” Peter said.

Caleb probably should have been annoyed that Peter answered his thanks with a running tally of expenses but instead he was relieved and reluctantly impressed that this man to whom money plainly meant nothing understood that it meant a great deal to Caleb. Maybe he didn’t understand precisely what it meant, but he understood that Caleb needed to pay his way, and for some reason that was enough for Peter to go along with it.

When he opened the door and was hit with a blast of morning sun, Caleb cringed. “Ahh, why is it doing that?” he cried, shielding his eyes with his hand.

“The sun? Why is it shining?” asked Peter, unfairly amused. “It often does.”

“Does it need to be so annoying about it?” Caleb grumbled, squinting and shielding his eyes with his hand.

Peter murmured something that sounded a lot like “two and a half beers.” Then he took something out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Caleb. “Take these.”

Caleb put Peter’s sunglasses on. He probably looked like an idiot. He was pretty sure that most people looked like idiots in sunglasses if they didn’t have bone structure like Peter Cabot’s. But they dimmed the sun and made life bearable, so Caleb wasn’t going to say no.

After they threw their luggage in the trunk, Caleb cleared his throat. “I take it you’ll never again let me anywhere near the driver’s side of your car, but I promise that what happened yesterday hasn’t ever happened before. I’ve never been in an accident.”

“And you weren’t yesterday. You avoided an accident.” When Caleb snorted in derision, Peter went on. “I mean it. There was broken glass on the ground all over that shoulder. Other cars have crashed there, and you avoided it. I do think that maybe you ought to take it easy this morning, though, okay? At least until the roads start to match the map.”

“Fine,” Caleb said, not even bothering to make it sound rude. Peter navigated the detours and blocked roads with a finesse that Caleb tried not to find annoying.

“I think that if we keep on this road, we ought to avoid Chicago and join up with Highway 66 a few miles to the south,” Peter said after they had been driving for a while. He reached over his visor and pulled out a folded map. “Would you check?” He passed the map to Caleb.

Caleb managed to unfold the map, and he even managed to locate Chicago, helpfully labeled in large black capitals. As for the rest of it, he didn’t have a clue. “What road are we on now?”

“Ninety,” Peter said. “Same as we have been since Boston.”

“Oh fuck you,” Caleb said without rancor. “We took about seventeen turns in the past hour, and you’re going to tell me it’s the same road?”

“There was construction, so we had to detour through local roads to get back on the highway.”

“Okay,” Caleb said, peering at the map, hoping that the number ninety would materialize somewhere to the…right, he supposed, of Chicago. But all he saw was the usual tangle of lines and jumble of words. After a few minutes he gave up and folded the map into a sloppy rectangle. “Sorry, I can’t find it.”

“Can’t find what? The route around Chicago?”

“I can’t find ninety. I can’t find anything. No, that’s not true. Strictly speaking, I did find Chicago.”

Peter flicked on the turn signal, pulled effortlessly over to the shoulder, unfolded the map, glanced at it for all of five seconds, and pulled back onto the road.

“Show off,” Caleb grumbled.

“All you had to do is say you can’t read a map,” Peter said.

“I can read a map!” Caleb protested uselessly. “There’s just something wrong with that one.”

“Oh yeah? What’s wrong with it?”

“That it’s attempting to put all this—” he gestured around them “—onto that little bit of paper. It just isn’t natural.” When he looked over, he saw Peter biting his lip to suppress a smile, so, like an idiot, he kept going. “The problem is that the world goes in all different directions, and a map is just…there, all flat and judgmental. I can’t look at one and imagine where I am, let alone where I’m supposed to go.” That was enough frank admission for one day, so he gathered up his pride. “Honestly, I think the rest of you are faking it. You look at the map, say ‘yes, yes, go east for thirty yards and then southwest for a mile and the service station will be on the leeward side of the car’ but really you’re just making it up as you go along.”

“Leeward,” Peter said, now smiling openly. “You’re nuts.”

Caleb folded the blasted map far more neatly than it deserved, then leaned over to stow it in the visor over Peter’s head. Doing so, he caught a scent of Peter’s soap, and something about the proximity and the smell reminded him that he had fallen asleep next to Peter in bed last night. He remembered tipsily insisting that Peter sit in his bed to watch the baseball game, then remembered getting sleepy, and then after that, nothing.

Caleb was overcome with a sort of retroactive awkwardness. He had spent thirty-six hours being as rude as possible to this man, nearly crashed his car, gone into fits, and then practically fallen asleep in his lap. Peter Cabot had to think he was entirely crazy.

“What?” Peter asked.

“What do you mean, what?” Caleb asked.

“You’re as red as tomato.”

“I am not,” Caleb protested uselessly. “Besides, shouldn’t you keep your eyes on the road?”

“All right,” Peter said, and turned on the radio.

Caleb realized that Peter was just going to let it drop. The man was appallingly easygoing. It was anybody’s guess how he survived in a family like the Cabots.

Or maybe he didn’t exactly survive in a family like the Cabots. After all, here he was, driving clear in the opposite direction from his father’s campaign headquarters.

Caleb had always assumed that rich people spent their summers on yachts and at parties with other rich people, not driving across the country with a near stranger, eating roadside food and staying at cheap motels. Peter was kind and patient, and he seemed to genuinely want Caleb to be happy and comfortable.

For the past day, an uncomfortable realization had been creeping up on Caleb. He had been a thoroughgoing asshole to Peter. He had been so caught up in his own misery at not being able to take care of himself that he lashed out at Peter, for no reason other than that Peter would never know what it was like to be forever indebted to other people’s charity.

“I’m sorry,” Caleb said.

“For what?”

“For being rude to you yesterday.”

Peter looked like he was trying not to smile. “And the day before?”

Caleb laughed. “Yes, Peter, and the day before.”

“Apology accepted.”

“That’s it? You’re not going to ask why I was such an asshole?”

“I kind of assumed it was because you were having a rotten day. You thought you had a way to get to Los Angeles, and then it turned out that you didn’t. That would make anybody cranky.”

“Still, I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

“True. But I didn’t mind.”

“You should.”

“Maybe I’m used to it.”

Caleb studied Peter’s profile—strong jaw, straight nose, broad shoulders, and solid frame. But he looked vulnerable, and at that moment Caleb wanted nothing more than to prove to Peter that he deserved better than whatever he was used to getting.

* * *

Northwest Illinois

The closer they got to Chicago, the more their route was diverted because of construction. Peter didn’t want to tell Caleb, out of fear that this would only make Caleb more convinced that maps, as a concept, were conspiring against him. But after they left the highway behind and turned onto a two-lane local road, Peter figured he had to say something.

“We aren’t on the road I was hoping for,” Peter said, trying to sound confident. “But it shouldn’t matter.”

“Why on earth wouldn’t it matter?” asked Caleb. “It seems like the sort of thing that definitely matters.”

“Because this road eventually has to connect with Highway 66. We’re headed southwest, and Highway 66 goes south from Chicago, so we eventually have to meet it.”

“You realize none of that was intelligible to me, right?”

“As soon as the words left my mouth. Anyway, we should be on the highway in an hour or so.”

“You have a lot of faith in—”

“In the cardinal directions continuing to exist? Yes, Caleb, yes, I do. Besides, an extra couple of hours won’t matter, right? When do you have to be in Los Angeles, anyway?”

“My job starts on June thirteenth, but I’ll need to get there a few days early.”

It was only June third. “We have plenty of time. The extra hour we spend on local roads won’t matter.”

“If you say so,” Caleb said, because of course he had to get the last word. “When do you have to be there?”

“Hmm?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake. The convention is July eleventh. That’s when you have to be in Los Angeles. Thank you, Caleb.”

“Thank you, Caleb,” Peter repeated dutifully. “Want to hear something dumb?”

“With bated breath.”

“I forgot completely about the convention when I offered to go with you to Los Angeles. All I was thinking was that California is nice and far from Cape Cod.”

Peter could feel Caleb’s eyes on him and wondered what the other man saw, what he was thinking. Would he think that Peter was shirking his duty? That he was lazy and entitled and disappointing?

“Where exactly are you supposed to be right now?” Caleb asked.

“My family’s summer house. And after that, I was supposed to campaign with my parents and the rest of the family. We would have flown out to Los Angeles together for the last day of the convention. At least that was the plan when my father’s secretary mailed me the itinerary last month. Maybe things have changed. They sometimes forget to let me know.”

“So you’ve gone completely AWOL. Will your father be cross? Strike that, it was a stupid question. Will there be consequences other than your father being upset with you?”

Peter was momentarily stumped by the question. He wasn’t sure how to explain that his family’s disappointment was bad enough, however much he ought to be used to it by now. But would there be other consequences? He was twenty-two. They didn’t really have any power over him, except the ability to withhold his allowance. And even without that, Peter had his own money, largely from a trust fund that had come under his control on his on his twenty-first birthday. It wasn’t a huge amount, but it was enough so that he didn’t need to worry about a roof over his head.

He planned on telling Caleb exactly none of that, as he didn’t think hearing about trust funds and allowances would exactly put a smile on his face.

“No,” Peter said simply, and the truth of it struck him like a blow. He was an adult. He didn’t need to be afraid of his father’s anger. His father didn’t have any control over him. His father didn’t have to matter to him one bit.

And yet, all of that did matter—not to his freedom or safety, but to something deep within him. If he weren’t a Cabot, then who the hell was he? And what kind of idiot was he to throw it away?

“Ha!” Caleb said, interrupting Peter’s thoughts. “Will you look at that?” He pointed to a sign. “Highway 66. I’m impressed.”

“You really shouldn’t be.”

“You’re not the boss of me,” Caleb said, and Peter could hear the smile in his voice.

It was nearly noon. Peter realized that he was going to have to institute regular mealtimes, because if he waited for Caleb to speak up, they’d never eat again.

Peter himself was used to eating at all hours. He could skip a meal and then make up for it the next time he ate. Caleb was evidently cut from a different cloth. He needed regular feeding, or he got prickly and anxious.

“The Chicken Basket,” Peter announced.

“The sheep bucket,” Caleb declared promptly. “What game is this?”

“It’s a restaurant coming up ahead,” Peter said, reaching out a hand to flick Caleb on the shoulder, as he would do to any of his friends who were being smart asses. But as he was about to do it, he hesitated. Maybe Caleb didn’t like that sort of playful horsing around. Maybe, also, Peter didn’t want to touch Caleb in the way he’d touch any old friend. But he had hesitated too long, and now his hand was hovering in the general vicinity of Caleb’s arm, and he had to do something with it, so he let his hand drop onto Caleb’s shoulder.

Only he must have miscalculated, because now his hand was on the back of Caleb’s neck, touching the fine short hairs there, his fingers wrapping around to the soft skin of the other side, feeling the pulse beneath his fingertips. He went totally still in some combination of horror and embarrassment and weird, misplaced arousal, and he felt Caleb go equally still. He wanted to look over and see what Caleb’s face was doing, but he needed to keep his eyes on the road, so he let himself imagine how confused and disdainful Caleb must look.

But then Caleb relaxed under Peter’s hand, sort of softened into the touch, until Peter’s arm was almost around Caleb’s shoulders. It felt so right to be touching him like that, while also somehow feeling new and strange and terrifying. When Peter finally pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant, he was reluctant to take his arm away.

He was worried that Caleb might let things be awkward, but on the way inside their shoulders bumped and Caleb griped about something he had read in the paper and it was fine, it was good. He knew he was smiling like an idiot.

“What are you going to get?” Peter asked when they were seated at a gingham-covered table.

“We’re at a place called the Chicken Basket.” Caleb pointed to the name at the top of the menu, as if Peter needed the reminder. “I will be eating a basket of chicken, thank you. I will accept no substitutes,” he said grandly.

“A sound plan.”

“I think this basket contains an entire chicken,” Caleb said in obvious delight when the waitress brought their lunch. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to eat all this.”

“We’ll make a heroic effort.”

As they ate, Caleb declared that his mother’s fried chicken was better, and something like wistfulness crept across his face.

“Do you ever get homesick?” Peter asked.

Caleb chewed and swallowed. “I feel homesick for the way I wish things were,” he said. “I miss my mother and my sister and even my stepfather, and I’ll send them whatever they need, but I’m not going back.”

“Any reason in particular?”

Caleb huffed out a laugh and looked down at the table. “It’s hard work pretending to be the person they think I am.”

“And who’s that?”

“My father’s son. Righteous. Strong. Not…” He gestured obliquely at himself, and Peter didn’t have to ask what he meant. It was no picnic growing up bent anywhere.

“Christ. That sounds familiar.”

Caleb held up his pop bottle for Peter to clink his own against it. “Here’s to being secret disappointments to our families.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m an open disappointment.”

Caleb’s eyes lit with something Peter was pretty sure was anger. It made Peter feel positively cheerful. “Because of the, er, thing we have in common, or something else?”

“I just generally pale in comparison to my brother and cousins.”

“I bet they’re assholes.”

Peter opened his mouth to protest, purely out of habit, but then he thought of his secondhand car and the number of times his family had forgotten to include him in plans. “You’d win that bet,” he said.

They went through the usual routine of dividing the check, made easier this time since they had ordered the same meal. Peter insisted on leaving an extra dollar for the waitress in addition to the fifteen percent tip Caleb calculated, and Caleb went along with only a minimum of grumbling about rich people and their airs.

On the way out they paused at the register to browse through a rack of postcards. They bypassed several bearing pictures of log cabins and variations on the Land of Lincoln theme, and instead bought a stack of postcards bearing photographs of the Chicken Basket.

* * *

St. Louis, Missouri

Peter had the most distressing habit of shucking layers of clothing as the day heated up. By the third day of this, Caleb had memorized the highly distracting disrobing ritual. In the morning, Peter left the motel in his usual cotton slacks, a shirt that somehow remained uncreased despite days in a suitcase and which he wore with the top button undone, and a V-neck sweater. By the time they stopped for lunch, he would have already lost the sweater, flinging it carelessly into the back seat of the car.

The next step was rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, exposing forearms that were dusted with dark hair. This was all bad enough, but then he would undo the next button on his shirt, giving Caleb a horrible glimpse of the dip of his throat and the faintest hint of clavicle. Then, at about three o’clock, when the day was at its hottest, he would sigh, as if in defeat, and unbutton his shirt the rest of the way and take it off.

That left Peter in a short-sleeved undershirt of a whiteness that Caleb was certain could not be achieved with normal laundry powder and was probably a secret that rich people kept to themselves, passing it down from generation to generation. It seemed to Caleb that Peter could have purchased undershirts at least a size larger, because the ones he wore strained across his shoulders and barely seemed to contain his biceps. Caleb spent a good portion of the afternoon trying not to ogle, or at least trying not to ogle too obviously.

After leaving the Chicken Basket, Caleb drove while Peter searched for a radio station. They had long since lost the signal for any Chicago stations and hadn’t yet come to the next city. Every time Peter managed to find a station, it disappeared a few minutes later. Caleb would have given up ages ago, but Peter seemed content to spend the afternoon moving the dial by the tiniest increments, only to have to do it again almost immediately.

“Hey, I think we must be getting near St. Louis,” Peter said after a while. “They’re talking about the Cardinals game.”

Caleb was grateful for the context clue that let him know that the Cardinals were the team from St. Louis.

“Are we making good time?” Caleb asked. He had a vague sense that it took a week to drive across the country, but this was their third day on the road and he didn’t think they were halfway there yet, if his shadowy recollection of fourth grade geography was anything to go by.

“We’re not making bad time,” Peter said. “If we were in a hurry, we could shave a day off our trip, but we aren’t, so there’s no need to kill ourselves.”

Ordinarily, Caleb would have insisted that there was every reason to hurry, that he couldn’t risk missing his scheduled first day of work, but he found that he trusted Peter to get this right. He seemed so competent, so sure of himself, that Caleb was content to believe that he was in safe hands. It was an enormous and unexpected relief not to have to worry about every detail of life, for once. Peter decided when to eat, when to stop for the night, when to fill the car up with gas, where to turn off the main road. After years of being on his own, it felt like a vacation.

“You know,” Peter said, looking up from the map, “we could see the game tonight. The Cardinals are playing the Orioles, and I don’t think the stadium is far from the highway.”

“Ah,” Caleb said, because that seemed more polite than telling Peter exactly what he thought about the prospect of spending hours in a stadium watching a game he neither understood nor cared about. He tried to know enough about sports to not sound like an idiot when they came up in conversation, but he personally had no interest in them whatsoever.

“Or we could not do that,” Peter said, the smile audible in his voice.

“No,” Caleb said, striving for politeness but pretty sure his horror was all too apparent, “if you want to, we should.”

Peter laughed. “Jesus, don’t strain yourself, Murphy.”

That was the first time Peter had called him by his last name and Caleb didn’t care for it one bit. That was probably how he spoke to his friends and teammates and it felt unnecessarily…platonic, maybe. But it wasn’t as if there was any real possibility of there being anything else between them, was there? Caleb usually could sense when a man was interested in him. Well, that might have more to do with the fact that most of his encounters had taken place in situations where intent was undeniable—getting picked up in a gay bar was nothing if not straightforward.

There had been that moment when Peter touched Caleb’s neck before lunch, but Caleb was ninety percent sure that was an accident and that Peter had needed to have about fifteen existential crises about it. Caleb didn’t have the energy to be anyone’s existential crisis.

“No, really,” Caleb said, trying to sound sincere and polite in a manner he knew by rote. “If you want to go to the game, we should go. It’s no bother. I’m grateful that you’re driving.”

Peter was silent for a moment. “I’m grateful that you gave me an excuse to go AWOL. We’re even.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“It is for me.”

There was another moment of tense quiet, during which Caleb could almost hear Peter trying to frame his thoughts in a way that wouldn’t upset Caleb, and that only made Caleb feel more tense.

“It’s true that this is my car, not that I bought it or anything, but if you feel like you need to be grateful, then I can’t stop you. Even so, you’re still a person and your preferences matter. If you don’t want to watch a baseball game, then I don’t want to go with you. I would just spend the whole time feeling awful about having dragged you out there. We’d both have a bad time.”

“Now I feel like a wet blanket.”

“You’re anything but a wet blanket. Even when you’re in a snit, you’re pretty fun.”

Caleb felt his cheeks heat. He didn’t particularly enjoy compliments, always feeling vaguely dishonest about accepting them but also crummy about not being confident enough in himself. “Yes, well, the fact that you think so probably speaks to the caliber of the rest of your acquaintances,” he said tartly.

“Nope. My friends are varied and fascinating.”

Caleb made a sound that he was very much afraid was a harrumph and devoted his attention to changing lanes for no reason.

He knew he should have returned the compliment. Caleb had been determinedly ungracious and stingy with kindness, not just with Peter but in general. It was getting to be a habit. It was getting to be a part of him. He cleared his throat. “You’re appallingly easygoing and probably too kind, if your treatment of me is any indication. You exude goodwill. I worry that you’ll be taken in by the first sad story you hear, and that you’ll wind up destitute and disappointed in humanity.”

Peter didn’t say anything but Caleb could feel his gaze.

“Is that supposed to be a compliment or an insult?” Peter eventually asked.

“I wish I knew,” Caleb sighed. “A compliment, all right? Here, you should take your sunglasses back.” Caleb took off the sunglasses and handed them to Peter. “You’re squinting into the sun. You’ll get wrinkles and lose your looks and then where will you be? Besides, you look better in them than I do.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Peter said. And then, musingly, “I think you just called me handsome. Twice, even.”

“I did nothing of the—”

“Too late, you can’t take it back.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Lalala,” said Peter, his fingers in his ears.

Caleb didn’t even try to hold back his laughter.

* * *

Carthage, Missouri

It was late by the time they checked into the motel. They had driven through most of Missouri that afternoon, only stopping for gas and dinner.

“I will fight you for that shower,” Peter said after dropping his suitcase onto the bed.

“No need.” Caleb collapsed onto the other bed. “I can’t move. How can sitting still be so exhausting?”

“Everything is exhausting when it’s ninety degrees.”

When Peter finished his shower and returned to the bedroom, he found Caleb adjusting the box fan so it blew directly at the beds.

“It isn’t an oscillating fan,” Caleb said. “So we have to split the difference, with each bed getting about a third of the breeze and losing the other third to the space between the beds.”

A week ago, if someone had told Peter that he’d be charmed by a man attempting to evenly apportion a breeze, he’d have thought they were nuts. Now he just smiled helplessly as he watched Caleb rotate the fan’s base by a fraction of a degree to make it point at the exact midpoint between the beds.

“Or we share a bed and each get a hundred percent of the air,” Peter suggested, the words out of his mouth before he could second guess himself. It was what he’d have suggested with anyone he was rooming with under these circumstances, and he told himself there was no reason why he shouldn’t suggest it to Caleb. “The beds are plenty big. Besides, you fell asleep on me last night and lived to tell the tale.”

“On you!” Caleb gasped. “You didn’t tell me that!”

“Yeah, and you drooled all over me and everything. It was awful.”

“I never—oh, I see, you’re being horrible. Well, tonight maybe I will drool all over you and that’ll show you.”

When Caleb went to take his shower, Peter opened the window a crack, then pointed the fan directly at one of the beds. He put Caleb’s copy of the Springfield newspaper on one side of the bed, then climbed into the other side with his book, a doorstopper about D-Day. It was funny, he thought, that after three days on the road he had barely even opened the book. Whenever he thought he might—before bed, or when Caleb was driving—he found himself talking to Caleb instead.

Caleb came out of the bathroom wearing only shorts and an undershirt, evidently having come to the same decision as Peter, which was that it was far too hot to be wearing anything more than that. But Caleb somehow looked more naked than most men did in underwear. He seemed to be composed entirely of skin that Peter was determined not to look at.

When Caleb noticed the newspaper on his side of the bed, he stilled. “I didn’t see you buy that.”

“At the gas station,” Peter said. It was three cents. He couldn’t decide whether to tell Caleb that he owed Peter a penny and a half.

“You like taking care of people,” Caleb said, and it wasn’t a question.

Peter sucked in a breath. “I haven’t thought about it. I guess so?”

“It isn’t a bad thing.” Caleb knelt on the bed. “Why do you look like I’ve insulted you?”

“I just—it sounds weak, doesn’t it?” Peter asked, not meeting Caleb’s eyes.

“What it sounds like is that your father’s an asshole,” Caleb said.

Peter stared hard at the book in his lap. “What makes you so sure this has anything to do with my father?”

“Oh, please. Are you saying it doesn’t?”

“I look up to my father,” Peter protested, and he couldn’t even make the words sound anything other than half-hearted. “He’s done a lot of good.”

“Oh God. You’re going to make me do this, aren’t you? Look at me. No, at me.” He took Peter’s chin and gently turned his head and Peter tried to look like he wasn’t losing his mind. “You are decent and good. You want other people to feel good. This is called not being an asshole. You were raised by emotionally dead rich people so you don’t know this.”

“Oh.”

“It’s nice that you bought me this paper. You are nice. I actually like you, despite being dead set on not liking you, just on principle.”

“You like me?”

“Don’t let it get to your head.”

“Too late.”

They smiled stupidly at one another, then Caleb dropped his hand and arranged himself so he was sitting on his own side of the bed. Peter found himself touching the spot on his jaw where Caleb’s fingers had been.

Peter read his book for a while, somehow never managing to turn the page. When he heard Caleb yawn, he closed the book and put it aside. “Lights out?” he suggested, and they both switched off their bedside lamps.

It should have been awkward, lying a foot away from another man, knowing he was awake, knowing there was maybe some kind of attraction between them. And it was, at least a little. Peter felt like he should have made a move, as if that was what a man in this situation ought to do. Most of his friends—and his brother, God knew—were always trying to get somebody into bed, as if trying to get into a girl’s clothes was some kind of hobby. It ought to be easier with another man, if it was true that men were constantly interested in sex.

But he knew that wasn’t true. Peter had never wanted to make a game out of trying to get people to have sex with him. And he felt like if he leaned over and touched Caleb the way he wanted to, that it would somehow be taking advantage. The playing field wasn’t quite level. They were riding in Peter’s car; without Peter, Caleb would be stranded in the middle of the country. And while Peter knew that he’d never do that to Caleb or anyone else, Caleb didn’t know that. Peter didn’t want to put Caleb in a position of feeling like he had to go along with whatever Peter wanted.

So, even if Caleb wouldn’t mind if Peter kissed him or more, Peter would never know for sure, and that was enough to put him off the idea.

“Whatever you’re thinking about, you’re doing it loudly,” Caleb said, somehow managing to imbue his voice with an edge despite speaking barely above a whisper.

Peter smiled into the darkness. “That makes no sense.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“That it’s really unfair that some people have so much more than others.”

“Welcome, comrade.”

“Shh,” Peter said, laughing. He had come of age during the McCarthy hearings and wasn’t quite over it. “What I mean is that it’s not fair that I have a car and you can’t afford a bus ticket.” Caleb was silent for long enough that Peter worried he had insulted him.

“Plenty of people would say that it’s perfectly fair to buy your children however many cars they please.”

“Technically, my father bought the car for my brother when he graduated college, but then my brother changed his mind and wanted a different car, so I got this one.”

“Are you telling me you didn’t even get a brand-new Cadillac convertible?” Caleb asked, and then paused. “If you had told me a week ago that this would make me genuinely upset, I’d have laughed in your face.”

Peter laughed and turned onto his side, facing Caleb but only able to see his profile in the darkness. “I’m very fond of my secondhand car, so you can save your tears.”

Caleb sighed dramatically. “All it takes is three days, a couple newspapers, and a handsome face, and I lose my principles.”

“Just so you know. And I’m saying this because it’s true, not because I think you want to hear it, or because I think it makes me something special. I’d pay your way. It feels wrong that a gallon of gas is worth more to you than it is to me.” He let out a breath. Everything he was saying felt childish and obvious and he wished he hadn’t opened his mouth. “And now you aren’t saying anything so I’m pretty sure you’re going to be mad at me for the rest of the trip.”

“No,” Caleb said, making what Peter guessed was a valiant effort to rein in his irritation. “I understand that these ideas are new to you, but this is just reality for me. Believe it or not, I actually haven’t been waiting around for some rich person to buy things for me.” He laughed, and it sounded genuine and maybe even fond. “Jesus, Peter. Anyway, this is the first time in my life when I really don’t need charity—no, shut up, that’s what it is and believe me, I know what it feels like to be a charity case. I know I’m not going to get rich as a reporter, but I’ll be fine, and I’ll even have enough left over to send a bit home.”

Caleb hadn’t talked much about how he had grown up, and even if he had, Peter wasn’t sure he could understand what it meant to grow up poor in Tennessee. But Peter knew what hope sounded like. “I’m really glad for you,” he said.

“What about you?” Caleb asked. “What are you going to do now?”

Peter sighed and rolled onto his back. “And we were having such a nice talk.” For the past year, every time he thought about what lay on the other side of graduation, he felt almost desperate, like he was being crushed by something he couldn’t see and didn’t dare tell anyone about. He dreaded the idea of spending every day with his father or people like his father. But if he didn’t do that, what else was there for him? One thing about having your destiny mapped out for you was that it was really hard to steer off the route you were supposed to take.

“What do you want to do?” Caleb whispered, almost like it was a dare.

“I don’t have the foggiest idea.” Peter let the silence stretch out and eventually heard Caleb roll away.

“Good night, Peter,” Caleb said.

“Good night,” Peter said in return, but didn’t fall asleep until long after Caleb’s breathing had evened out.