Peter Cabot Gets Lost by Cat Sebastian

Day 5

Commerce, Oklahoma

Peter woke with Caleb curled against his side, his pale hair sticking up in all directions and lit by a beam of early morning sunlight, making it into a halo. It seemed wildly unfair that they had to get in the car and then spend eight hours or more not touching one another.

It also seemed a little unfair that this would all be over in three days. He might have been tempted to suggest dragging the trip out a bit, but he had noticed Caleb nervously counting the money in his wallet when he thought Peter wasn’t looking. Splitting the gas money for a trip across the country might be cheaper than a bus ticket, but not if you also paid for motels and restaurant meals. That was something Peter hadn’t even considered—Caleb would probably have slept on the bus and eaten food from vending machines. And what would have been a three- or four-day bus trip was turning out to be a seven- or eight-day vacation, which probably meant Caleb was spending much more than he had intended to.

Peter’s experience with poverty was as a political issue: it was something to be fixed with jobs, programs, and education. For the Cabots, it was also the motivation for generous but conspicuous donations to charity. Poverty was one of the many topics about which Senator Cabot was frustratingly correct, and Peter had more than once thought that it would be easier to brush off his family’s disapproval if they were Republicans. But, no, they were relentless about being on the right side of history, and Peter couldn’t help but look up to them.

But he didn’t have any actual experience with poverty. He had friends who were constantly short of cash—either they ran through their allowance too quickly, or they didn’t have much of an allowance to begin with. He knew people whose families weren’t as rich as they once had been, and even some who had fallen on hard times. But he didn’t know anyone who was poor in the way Caleb was poor. He felt guilty even thinking the word, as if poor was a slur, rather than an objective fact. He had never known anyone who didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, and it didn’t take a genius to look at the way Caleb ate to know that he hadn’t always been so sure there would be more food in his future.

With one of Peter’s less well-off but still comfortably middle-class friends, he would have insisted on paying for the rest of the trip. He probably would have put his foot down long before now. And his friend would have been mildly embarrassed, then would have made all the usual noises about paying Peter back, and that would have been that.

He couldn’t do that with Caleb. He already knew how well that would go over, and he suspected that having sex would only have made Caleb even less willing to take so much as a nickel from Peter.

Beside him, Caleb stretched, yawned, and attempted to burrow under the covers. Peter caught the exact moment Caleb realized he was next to another person, because his body went still, then the top half of his face emerged from the blanket, his mouth already arranged in a scowl.

“It’s the second day,” Peter murmured. “You shouldn’t be surprised this time.”

Caleb moved his leg so it brushed over Peter’s half hard dick. “There are significant differences this time,” he said, his voice rough with sleep.

“Here’s what I think,” Peter said, speaking the words into Caleb’s wispy hair. “We get dressed and go scare up some coffee. We find a gas station and fill the car up, get an oil change, maybe buy some doughnuts. If we get to Albuquerque tonight, we’ll be in Los Angeles the day after tomorrow.”

Peter expected Caleb to be relieved, but instead he just said that it was fine and got into the shower. But he left the door open, so Peter followed him in. In short order he found himself on his knees, sucking Caleb off with the water dripping down his back and into his eyes while Caleb swore and clutched the shower curtain.

“Tell me what you like,” Peter pulled off long enough to say.

“God. Anything.”

“Tell me,” Peter demanded.

“That spot underneath. And the, um, vein. Most men like some attention—”

“I don’t give a shit about most men,” Peter said, annoyed, because did Caleb think he was supposed to be tutoring Peter in blow jobs? “I want to know what you like.” He said it hard, like a dare.

“Fine,” Caleb said, matching his tone. And he grabbed Peter’s hand and sucked two fingers into his mouth, then put one foot on the edge of the tub and guided Peter’s hand behind his balls. Peter thought that was pretty unambiguous, thank God, and pressed his fingers against the hot, wet, cleft of Caleb’s ass. He found the tightly furled skin, wishing he could see better, but whatever he was doing must have been good enough because Caleb finally let go of the shower curtain and grabbed Peter’s hair instead, guiding his mouth back to Caleb’s neglected dick.

“Just like that,” Caleb said on a sigh as Peter pushed a fingertip into him. And that must have been okay, because a minute later Caleb was coming, and Peter mustn’t have swallowed in time because some of it was now on his chin. Caleb was looking down at him like he wanted to eat him alive. It was an expression that Peter had never seen on another person but now wanted to see every minute of his life because it was his new favorite thing in the world.

Peter jerked himself off before even getting back to his feet, all while Caleb kept looking at him like that, and then a washcloth came out of nowhere and Caleb was cleaning his face for him.

When they checked out, dividing the bill according to Caleb’s rules, Peter was afraid to even look at him, sure that if he did the motel clerk would see too much in his expression and they’d wind up in an Oklahoma jail. Only when they got to the car did Peter let himself look. It was Caleb’s turn to drive, and he stood at the door for a minute, idly passing the key chain from hand to hand.

“Do you ever put the top down on this thing?” he asked, so the next thing Peter knew they were back on the highway, the breeze hot and fast in his face, Caleb wearing Peter’s sunglasses and a song about El Paso on the radio. Peter wanted to take the moment and put it in a box and bury it deep inside his pocket where he would never lose it.

* * *

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Caleb followed the line of ink on the map all the way from Boston to Oklahoma City. Peter had started drawing in their route at about Springfield, Missouri, and Caleb didn’t know why he had bothered backtracking all the way to Boston. But whatever the reason, now Caleb could follow along all the places they had been and could see for himself how far they had come and how near they were to their destination.

“Where do you want to get lunch?” he asked, preferring to think about that rather than examine his feelings about the end of their trip. They had switched places about an hour earlier, and now Peter was driving while Caleb did what would be called navigating if he could read a map, but was actually just reading aloud street signs and complaining about Peter’s lax usage of turn signals and poor parallel parking skills.

“I just saw a sign for pizza,” Peter said, maneuvering onto a side street and snagging a parking spot. “Do you like pizza?”

“Everybody likes pizza, but what kind of pizza do you think they have in Oklahoma?”

“I don’t care. I just want it,” Peter said.

And so they had pizza, sharing a pepperoni pie between them, and it turned out to be not so different from the pizza Caleb had eaten in Cambridge.

“Do they have pizza where you come from?” Peter asked when he had finished eating and was playing with his empty coke bottle in a way Caleb probably shouldn’t have found obscene.

“I mean, not in Hickory Creek. There isn’t much of anything in Hickory Creek.” For no reason, he pulled the map out of his pocket and spread it out on the table before them. He positioned it so it was right side up for Peter, but then it was upside down for him, so he moved his chair around the table to sit beside Peter.

He traced his finger down the eastern seaboard, then went inland at North Carolina. “Right there,” he said when his finger crossed the state line. “Right in that corner.”

Peter squinted. “Mountain City?”

“No, but not far from there.” He pointed at the empty, green corner of Tennessee that he would never see again. “It’s not on the map. It’s not even a town, really, just a dozen or so houses, none too close to one another.”

Peter touched the spot on the map where Caleb’s finger had been, as if it mattered to him, or to anyone. “What was it like?”

Caleb could have given him an easy answer, could have told him more about Judy or about the animals. “We had a one room schoolhouse. Well, until high school, and then the new pastor drove me to get the bus into town every morning.” The gratitude and shame, inseparable as always, churned in his stomach.

Caleb dug his nail into the Formica edge of the table, unwilling to meet Peter’s gaze and have to guess what he was thinking.

“The school bus stops closer to the house now, so my sister only has to walk about a mile or so.” He looked at the distance between Tennessee and California, so far apart they barely fit on the same map, the Pacific Ocean hanging off the table on one side. Sometimes he had to remind himself that he wasn’t running away from his family, that it wasn’t anything personal. Well, mostly it wasn’t personal. When he tried to imagine spending the rest of his life making sure his mother never had the slightest hint about where his preferences lay, he felt like an animal who had been caught in a trap and needed to set about gnawing off a leg. Still, after he got his first couple of paychecks, he’d be able to send a bit of money home. He might even be able help pay for whatever books or new clothes Judy needed, or anything else she might need to get to school and not be too badly mocked by the other kids.

“You know, I’ve never met anyone who went to a one room schoolhouse,” Peter said.

“Yeah, well, probably you only know people who went to private schools.”

“I’m trying to tell you that you’re exceptional,” Peter said, knocking his knee against Caleb’s.

There were gold flecks in the tabletop, and Caleb traced his finger between them, mapping out an imaginary constellation. “I had a lot of help. The pastor. Scholarships. The church raised money and so did the 4H group. I’m grateful.”

Caleb was braced, ready to not look horrified when Peter inevitably said something about how all those people must have recognized how special and deserving Caleb was. But instead Peter looked away from Caleb and began outlining the Pisgah forest on the map. “Everybody I know had help, but it’s usually from their parents.”

Caleb didn’t know what that meant, didn’t know how he was supposed to react. “I should probably want to go back and do something good. Repay them.” He swallowed. “I really am grateful.”

“They did what they thought was right. You can make your own choices about what’s right. You said yourself that if you went back, you couldn’t have the kind of life you want.”

“Want,” Caleb echoed, disparagingly. “It sounds so selfish.”

“You couldn’t be who you are, rather.”

“Yeah.” Caleb swallowed. “For whatever that’s worth.”

Peter made a dismissive sound. “I think that you’re pretty great exactly the way you are. You’re funny and so smart and you care about things and you have opinions. And I know I haven’t known you that long, but I think that first day I got to see your worst self, and even that was okay.”

The problem was clearly that Peter didn’t know any of the rules. He didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to say that sort of thing to the person you were fooling around with because that was how things got dangerous. Peter just didn’t know anything at all, because he was a complete nightmare of loveliness and Caleb didn’t know what to do with him. Who even talked like that? And where had Peter learned to be so—ugh—sweet, because it sure as shit hadn’t been his family.

“I’m going to get indigestion,” Caleb complained, but evidently Peter wasn’t buying it.

“I meant it.”

“If you make me cry at a pizza parlor in Oklahoma, I swear to God I will hitchhike the rest of the way.”

“Okay,” Peter said, getting to his feet and letting his hand brush against Caleb’s shoulder. “I saw a pay phone down the street. Do you mind if I make a call?”

Caleb snapped that of course he didn’t mind, then waited in a used bookstore while Peter talked on the phone for so long that Caleb couldn’t imagine the number of nickels he must have needed to feed into the slot. After a while, Caleb stuck his head out of the store to make sure Peter was still there, and overheard Peter laughing so hard he could hear it through the closed door of the phone booth. Caleb felt stupidly jealous of whoever Peter was talking to.

Finally Peter strolled into the bookstore, casually bumped his shoulder against Caleb’s, and proceeded to buy five hardback books and five detective paperbacks, two of which were from the shelf Caleb had been looking at. He had done it so casually Caleb couldn’t even complain about not wanting any books.

After Peter paid, Caleb took the shopping bag from his hands in order to examine its contents. The hardbacks were all about a bunch of totally unrelated historical topics. Caleb suppressed a sigh. Something he had realized over the past few days was that Peter was smart. He was one of those people who knew at least a little bit about everything and a whole lot about a couple of things. He had a habit of sprinkling his conversation with historical trivia about everything from the railroads to minor league baseball to barn construction. And Caleb, who as a policy did not give a single shit about history except insofar as it affected the present, found himself paying close attention.

Thoroughly cranky, Caleb decided to make it worse. “Who were you talking to?” Caleb asked on the way back to the car, hating himself as soon as the words left his mouth.

“My aunt,” Peter said immediately, as if it weren’t a nosy question. “She lives in California and I asked if I could stay with her for a bit.”

“I suppose there’s no sense in trying to drive east only to fly right back for the convention.” Caleb didn’t want to imagine Peter driving along the same route they had taken together, alone in his car. He didn’t want to imagine Peter back in Boston. He didn’t like the idea that this trip they had taken together would result in their being on opposite sides of the continent. “I didn’t know you had any relatives who didn’t live in Boston,” Caleb said, and then wanted to slap himself for admitting that he paid attention to that sort of thing. Then again, Peter knew that Caleb read the paper every day, and you’d have to live under a rock not to know about the Cabots.

“I guess she isn’t an aunt anymore. She divorced my uncle.”

“Oh, right. I remember.” That had made headlines about six months earlier.

“Yeah. Anyway, she’s terrific. She, um, doesn’t like my parents very much. So she’s pretty tickled that I ran clear across the country. She tried to convince me to go to London with her and my cousin for the summer.” He laughed. “She said that if I went with her, she’d buy me a new suit. And when I told her that new suits weren’t exactly tempting, she offered me a pony.”

“I take it this is one of your non-asshole cousins?”

“He’s only fourteen, and yes.”

“Are you going to go with her?”

Peter gave him a weird look and walked so the backs of their hands brushed. “No, I’m staying at her house and watering the plants while she’s away.”

It took fifteen minutes to get back to the car, because Peter had to stop and pet every dog they saw. Then Peter insisted on digging his camera out of his bag and taking Caleb’s picture in front of the car. Caleb never wanted to see what his face looked like in that photograph, never wanted to know whether he looked as exasperatedly fond as he felt. The best he could hope for was that he’d at least never have to encounter proof about how far gone he was.

* * *

Western Oklahoma

“Oh, Caleb,” Peter said when a new song came on the radio. “It’s your lucky day.”

Peter could tell the moment Caleb recognized the song. “Oh no,” he said, only loud enough to be heard over the wind and the roar of the engine.

“You can shake an apple off the apple tree,” Peter sang, horribly off tune and not caring. Caleb gently banged his head into the dashboard. Peter laughed and missed the next few lines. “Something something kitchen, something something hall, something something something horses couldn’t tear us apart.”

“How do you not know the lyrics by now? We’ve heard the song, what, five hundred times? Six hundred? How do you not have it memorized?”

“We’re not all child prodigies, Caleb,” Peter said, having inferred that much from Caleb’s abbreviated biography.

“Oh, fuck you,” Caleb said, but Peter could hear the laughter in his voice.

Sometimes Peter could get a glimpse of the kid Caleb must have been in Hickory Creek, Tennessee. That person came out when Caleb was talking to waitresses or service station attendants—polite, almost deferential, with a soft southern accent. Waitresses put extra scoops of ice cream next to Caleb’s pie and asked him if he was far from home. Nobody ever said that to Peter—to remark that Peter was far from home would be as obvious as commenting that water was wet, boring even as small talk. They were in a place where people had only begun to hear about Cabots, and Peter was only a stranger with expensive shoes. Caleb, meanwhile, was everybody’s well-mannered grandson. Add all that to the fact that he was brilliant, and no wonder his town had made sure he got to go to college.

But the Caleb Peter had gotten to know was the mirror image of the polite sweetheart he was with strangers—Peter’s Caleb was a surly, prickly, and bad tempered. Peter wondered if Caleb had deliberately shown Peter the side of himself that was least likely to inspire generosity: he was capable of manners that were winning and charming, but when confronted with someone offering to do him a favor, he had immediately become an enormous jerk.

Peter drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “Something something stuck on you!” he concluded, in time if still off key.

When the song finished, Caleb pointedly changed the station, but they must have been between signals, because he only got static up and down the dial. “May as well pull over and let me drive,” he said, tuning the radio so it picked up the station he had abandoned.

“The signs promise a scenic vista in half a mile,” Peter said.

“What the hell kind of scenic vista can there possibly be?” Caleb gestured at the undifferentiated expanse of dusty brown and faded green that stretched out on both sides of the highway. “I’m not seeing any vista, scenic or otherwise.”

It was true that western Oklahoma was not the most picturesque part of the country they had driven through, at least not for someone who was used to everything being softer and greener. It was still relentlessly flat, but the lush summer green of the Midwest was starting to give way to something harder and almost parched. Still, Peter pulled off the highway and followed the signs, or at least he tried to.

“The sign was a lie,” Caleb said. “It was to lure travelers into a secluded area so bandits can rob them.”

“Bandits,” Peter repeated gleefully. “That might be even better than a vista.”

“Pull over here,” Caleb said, indicating a dirt path that might have been a road or might have just been a place where grass refused to grow. “So we can switch.”

“I can’t believe the sign lied,” Peter said, shifting the car into park. “It’s a betrayal.”

Caleb snorted, and then got out of the car, stretching in a way that made his shirt ride up, exposing a scant inch of pale stomach, the hint of a sharp hipbone. Peter didn’t look away in time—wasn’t even trying to, truth be told—and Caleb raised an eyebrow before giving Peter a quick and practiced once over that made Peter’s pulse quicken.

“Come here,” Caleb said, and Peter went.

There were no cars in either direction along the little road that might not even have been a road in the first place, nobody to see when Caleb hooked a finger into Peter’s belt loop and hauled him in for a kiss, nobody to hear the sound Peter made when Caleb captured him against the side of the car.

“Been wanting to do that,” Caleb said, his chest still flush against Peter’s.

“Yeah,” Peter said, and neither of them made any move to separate.

The song on the radio changed again, and Caleb snorted into Peter’s neck and said, “Oh, this shit again,” before Peter could even recognize the song, and then Caleb had Peter in his arms as if they were dancing. They were dancing, he supposed, even though it was more like Caleb grinding up against him in time to the music.

“What is this?” Peter asked, gamely lifting his arm so Caleb could spin under it. “Is this song about a caveman? Very romantic.”

Caleb laughed and did a little shimmy and then stole Peter’s sunglasses. “I don’t know what it’s about.” He turned around so Peter’s arm was wrapped around his chest, then ground his ass into what Peter had to concede was his rapidly hardening dick. “I’d like to know who told these people that tambourines were a good idea. Who lied to them? I demand answers.”

“Caleb Murphy, cub reporter, is on the job,” Peter said in his best old-fashioned newsreel voice.

Caleb laughed, sweet and loose, exposing a crooked incisor and a couple of fillings. Peter wanted to see him laugh like that every day, wanted to hear nothing else. The sunglasses had gone crooked on his face, so Peter leveled them. Caleb repaid him with another suggestive move of his hips.

“Lewd and indecent acts,” Peter said, grinding back. “Is this how you pick men up? Tell me it’s how you pick men up.”

Caleb laughed again, bright and loud, and Peter’s heart stuttered. “No, I usually just wear tight trousers and bat my eyelashes.”

“I’d love to see that. The trousers and the eyelashes both.”

Caleb looked over his shoulder, lifted his sunglasses, and gave Peter a heated look through his eyelashes. “Like that. But with a face like yours, you don’t need tricks. Just walk into the right kind of bar and there’ll be a riot.”

Peter hated it when Caleb alluded to a future in which they’d be with other people, even though he supposed this was just reality, and Caleb was the only one mature enough to recognize it.

“I did once, actually, about a year ago,” Peter said. “I went to a bar like that, I mean.”

“Did you?” Caleb asked, pulling back and looking at Peter over the frames of his sunglasses. “In Boston?”

“No! God no. What if I had been recognized? No, I was visiting a friend in New York.”

“Where nobody has ever heard of a Cabot,” Caleb said dryly.

“Well, it’s not as bad as Boston. And—” Peter broke off, remembering the rest of the story.

“And?” Caleb prompted.

“I just really wanted to see if maybe being with a man would make me stop thinking about it so much.” Peter’s cheeks heated. “As soon as I admitted to myself that I was into men, my dick decided that it had a decade’s worth of boners to make good on.” Caleb laughed delightedly and Peter went on. “I’d be checking out books from the library or getting soup in the dining hall and all of a sudden I’d imagine some stranger bending me over the counter and—well, you get the idea.”

Caleb licked his lips and stared at him for a moment. “Well, what happened?”

“I let this man buy me a drink and then I chickened out and took a cab back to my friend’s apartment. I didn’t find anything appealing about getting off with a stranger. It seemed awkward and embarrassing, even more awkward and embarrassing than getting hard-ons in the library, I guess.” Peter swallowed and looked Caleb in the eye. “I thought it would be better with someone I knew.” He hoped that wasn’t saying too much, or not enough. He hoped Caleb could hear those words and understand how glad Peter was to have met him, to have known him.

“We should get in the car,” Caleb said, and Peter guessed that the conversation was over.

“If we hurry, we can get through Texas tonight.”

“I don’t want to get through Texas tonight. I want to stop at the next motel.”

A shiver passed through Peter. “You’re just trying to cut short the amount of time you spend behind the wheel,” he teased. Caleb turned again in his arms and kissed the underside of his jaw. Neither of them had shaved that morning, and he could feel Caleb’s stubble catching against his own, could feel Caleb’s smile against his face.

* * *

The Oklahoma/Texas border

There were worse things than being an agreeable alternative to sex with a stranger, Caleb decided. Peter wanted to have sex with someone he knew; Caleb was someone he knew; therefore sex with Caleb was a convenient arrangement for Peter. QED or something. It wasn’t as if Caleb had anything to complain about.

It wasn’t as if Peter hated him. Peter liked him! He had said so half a dozen times already, despite Caleb’s having been a certifiable asshole to him at the beginning of the trip, and probably a few times since then if he were being honest with himself. So Caleb got to have sex with someone he liked and who liked him. This was good! If being a convenient alternative to a gay bar made Caleb want to cry or stomp off in a sulk, it was just because he was being a cranky baby about it.

They were just shy of the Texas border, Caleb fussily tuning the radio to a station that played something other than static, Peter humming along to a song that existed only in his head, when they heard an ominous noise and felt the car start to wobble. Caleb’s first thought was that thank God Peter was behind the wheel, because before Caleb even quite registered that a tire had blown, Peter had already brought them safely to the side of the road.

“I have a spare in the trunk,” Peter said, already getting out of the car.

Caleb opened his door and got out too, pausing for a moment to shudder when he saw the shredded remains of the right rear tire. The whole thing had happened too quickly for him even to be nervous about it, and Peter was acting like he changed tires every day of his life, like blowing out a tire was no more unusual than stopping for lunch or checking the map. Caleb found himself being swept along in the wake of Peter’s easy competence and wished he could keep doing this forever.

When Peter opened the trunk, they took out the luggage and stacked it neatly at the side of the road. Caleb watched as Peter flipped up the carpet that covered the floor of the trunk and removed the spare tire with one arm. With one arm.

“You should take your shirt off,” Caleb said, the words leaving his mouth before his brain had time to sign off on them. “So you don’t ruin it! Because of motor oil and stuff.” Peter, still holding the tire aloft, gave him an amused, slightly bashful look, as if he didn’t know what he looked like. As if somehow he had forgotten to use some of his money to buy a mirror. Or glasses. As if he had managed to experience the last few days without noticing how Caleb looked at him. Because all of that was completely unacceptable, Caleb went on. “And also because of the aesthetics of a shirtless man changing a tire, sure. Don’t disappoint the passersby.” He began unbuttoning his own shirt, because while his own arms would be a much less gratifying sight than Peter’s, he really couldn’t afford to ruin a shirt.

“Good idea,” Peter said, watching Caleb’s fingers move along his buttons. They flung their shirts into the back seat—rather, Peter flung his and Caleb folded his own—and Caleb slid into the driver’s seat to make sure the parking brake was set, then went in search of some large rocks to brace the tires. He had changed his share of tires, and never on a stretch of road as conveniently flat as this one, but there was no way he was going to risk either of them getting run over by a parked car just because they had been idiots.

When he came back a few minutes later carrying a couple of old bricks, he found Peter kneeling before the flat tire, a tool roll on the ground before him, staring at the jack as if it were a complicated bit of math.

And Caleb realized that Peter had very possibly never ever changed a tire. In the back of his mind, he had noticed that Peter paid to have his oil changed, but it hadn’t quite registered that Peter might not know how to do it himself. He had assumed that Peter just didn’t enjoy changing oil, which was why Caleb, on principle, didn’t offer to pay for half the cost.

He remembered what Peter had said about hating when he didn’t know what to do. At the time, Caleb hadn’t understood—aside from occasional bouts of awkwardness, Peter Cabot seemed almost too competent, sailing through life as if it could never possibly present an obstacle. Now he had a sense that this was—not an act, exactly, but a sort of shield. Peter was used to everyone expecting the world from him and being disappointed with anything less. He had learned to at least look like someone who could deliver.

Caleb quietly set about placing his bricks in front of and behind the three good tires, then crouched beside Peter.

“Let’s put the jack a few inches in front of the wheel well,” he suggested amiably, as if this weren’t literally the only way to change a tire. Then he cranked the jack a few times, just enough so that the tire wasn’t supporting the weight of the car.

“My stepdad taught me to do this,” Caleb said as he used the wrench to remove the hubcap and loosen the nuts.

“If your stepdad had a car, why did your pastor have to drive you to meet the school bus?” Peter asked.

Caleb’s hands went still on the wrench. There was no way to talk about this without making his stepfather sound like an asshole, which really wasn’t the case. “He had to work. And even if he had time to drive me around, he wasn’t going to risk his old truck falling apart on the road just because I was too lazy to walk. And it wasn’t because I’m not his son—he doesn’t do that kind of thing for Judy either, and she’s his.”

“What does he do?”

Caleb frowned and cranked the jack a couple more times, lifting the car off the ground. “My stepdad grows tobacco. And we—they—have a couple of pigs and some chickens.”

He loosened the nuts the rest of the way and pulled them off.

“Is there anything I can do?” Peter asked.

“Put these in your pocket,” Caleb said, handing Peter the lug nuts and then wiping some sweat from his forehead. “And then get the spare.” Caleb had the tire off now, the shredded rubber still hot from the road and slightly tacky from tar. He shoved the tire under the rear of the car and took the spare from Peter.

“It’s hot as hell, but this is much easier than doing it in the rain,” Caleb said, positioning the spare tire and rotating it to catch the wheel bolts. “Or the snow. Or on a hill. Truly, Oklahoma is an ideal environment or changing tires. Lug nuts, please.” He held out his hand and Peter dropped them in.

Five minutes later they had the flat tire and the jack stowed in the trunk, the luggage in the back seat, and a functional car. “All that’s left is to put the bricks back to the side of the road,” Caleb said, bending to pick one up.

“Wait.” Peter grabbed Caleb’s wrist. “Thanks.”

“It’s nothing. I had a lot of practice. We ought to get to a garage and buy a new tire, that way you still have a spare in case another one blows.”

Peter shuddered. “I didn’t even think of things like oil changes and flat tires when I decided to do this.” He passed a hand over his jaw and sighed. “I just wanted to get away and I was an idiot about it.”

Caleb wrinkled his brow. “No, not really. Nothing you did was idiotic. About a hundred cars have passed us since we stopped, and there have been service stations every few miles the entire time we’ve been on this road.”

“We’re more than halfway to California. We’re in the middle of the fucking country and I have no idea what I’m doing, and you just had to change my tire, and I ran away from home like a ten-year-old.”

Caleb looked at Peter—his face flushed, his pupils dilated—and saw that the man was a nervous wreck. He remembered how Peter had taken the blame when Caleb had lost control of the car. At the time, he had assumed that was Peter’s idea of good manners, and ignored it. Now he was pretty sure Peter actually blamed himself for everything and he had a good idea why. It was just as well that he was never going to meet any of the Cabots because just the idea of them made him feel homicidal.

Caleb remembered something else—Peter had said that his mother had nervous spells. Peter might well have the same problem. “Remember when you told me to breathe?” Caleb asked.

“Doesn’t do anything for me,” Peter said. He looked like ten miles of bad road, and Caleb wanted to keep him safe from anyone who even thought about hurting him.

“Okay, then just listen to me for a minute. First of all, if I hadn’t been here, you would have managed to change the tire yourself or flag someone down for help. Come on, you know this. Second, you didn’t run away from home like a ten-year-old. You’re a goddamn adult and you made a choice.”

“I made a choice that’s going to cut me off from my family.”

“Peter, you don’t need to be cut off from them if you don’t want to be,” Caleb said gently. “You’re just making your own choices about your own life. If they decide to disown you over this, then that’s pretty messed up.” They treat you like garbage, he wanted to say, but didn’t because Peter needed to come to that conclusion by himself. Caleb knew people who had shitty families. Hell, his own mother had shitty parents, and she had dealt with that by getting married at the first possible opportunity and starting a family of her own. That was what a lot of people did when their first families were no good, and it killed Caleb that even this option—however unwise—wasn’t open to Peter. “They’re not good to you,” he finally said.

“But they’re still mine!” Peter looked up at the sky and groaned. “Sorry,” he said, making an obvious effort to get a hold of himself. “I shouldn’t be making you listen to this. It’s too hot to stand on the side of the road and gripe.”

“You’re not making me do anything. Are you even serious right now? I’m so glad to have a chance to—reassure you, I guess. So far, it’s all been in the other direction, you making me feel better when I’m a basket case. You never seem to mind doing that for me—”

“I like it.”

“Well, fuck you, so do I! It’s nice to be the competent, put-together one for once. It’s nice to take a break from endlessly looking after myself and look after someone else for a change!” He was saying too much, far too much. When this was all over, Caleb would look back and cringe at having exposed this much of himself. But right now he couldn’t regret it, because he saw that line between Peter’s eyes smooth away and his gaze soften.

* * *

Shamrock, Texas

“So,” Peter said, kicking the door shut behind him and dropping his suitcase on the floor. “There’s a pool.” His interest in swimming might have been more convincing if he hadn’t spoken the words against Caleb’s mouth as Caleb pinned him against the closed door. But they were both hot and sweaty, despite having each downed a bottle of cold Pepsi before even checking into the motel, not to mention a little sunburned and covered in dust. A dip in the pool seemed like an excellent idea.

“Stupid sunglasses, always getting in the way,” Caleb said, shoving the sunglasses to the top of Peter’s head and kissing him thoroughly, messily, and somehow irritably. Peter smiled and Caleb nipped his lower lip. “You can smile all you please later. Right now you have other things to be doing with your mouth.”

Peter didn’t think he could ever get tired of how hungry Caleb acted for him. He didn’t think he could get tired of anything about Caleb.

Caleb undid their belts and zippers with a practiced ease that somehow made Peter both jealous and aroused, and got both their erections into one hand.

“And here I was thinking,” Peter said, “that I might want to make it last this time.”

Caleb made an outraged sound into Peter’s neck, but then pulled back and looked at him. His pupils were blown out, his eyes nearly black, and he looked delightfully frantic. “This is to take the edge off, okay? Later we can take our time.”

“Yeah,” Peter said, thumping his head back against the door as Caleb twisted his fist and did something amazing with his thumb. “Yeah.”

Caleb was far gone, and Peter loved it. He hadn’t ever imagined it like this. They hadn’t even taken their shoes off. They hadn’t even untucked their shirts, for God’s sake. Peter still had the fucking room key in his hand, the metal grown hot and slick against his palm. He dropped the key into his pocket and set about getting his hands on as much of Caleb as he could. He rucked up Caleb’s shirt and undershirt, shoving them up as high as they’d go, then running his fingers over all the skin he had exposed. He dragged his fingernails over hard nipples, smiling when Caleb moaned into his neck. Caleb didn’t seem capable of doing much more than mouthing at Peter’s throat and stroking them both off, and honestly that was plenty.

Peter slid the tips of his fingers down the small of Caleb’s back, into the loosened waistband of his trousers. He didn’t go any further, just stroked the smooth skin at the base of Caleb’s spine. He could feel Caleb trying to squirm into his touch, and that was enough of a go ahead, so he dipped his fingers lower, into the soft heat of Caleb’s cleft. Caleb groaned, and Peter circled a finger around his entrance, pressing in only the slightest bit.

“When you said you don’t like getting fucked,” Peter murmured, “I’m assuming you only meant with, um, dicks.” That might have been the stupidest sentence anybody alive had ever uttered, and really Peter ought to have known that he’d be the person to achieve that milestone. He thumped his head back against the door a couple of times.

But Caleb didn’t seem put off. “Fingers are fine. Better than fine. Fingers and tongues.” Then he went utterly still and pulled away from Peter’s throat, a look of abject horror in his eyes.

“Tongues,” Peter said, slightly dizzy.

“I mean. Theoretically. I haven’t. Forget I said anything,” Caleb said, his voice strained and his face red, and Peter realized that Caleb was embarrassed, that he wished he hadn’t said that. Peter wanted him to stop doing that right now.

“You’d let me?” Peter asked. “You’d let me kiss you there.”

Caleb made an inarticulate sound and his whole body seemed to jerk forward against Peter’s. Peter realized Caleb was coming, and that was enough to push him over the edge.

They slumped against the motel room door, panting and disheveled. “What’s that you said about a pool?” Caleb asked, sounding loose and happy and satisfied.

Caleb didn’t have swim trunks, and so they had a cheerful little argument about whether he’d concede to borrow a pair of Peter’s. Peter won and got a strange thrill from seeing Caleb wear his trunks, the drawstring pulled snug so they at least sort of fit.

The pool was empty when they got there, the water perfectly smooth and still. All the lounge chairs that surrounded the pool were empty too, and even though the highway was just on the other side of the motel buildings, the poolside was eerily still and silent.

“I dare you to jump in first,” Peter said.

“That might work on your fraternity friends, Peter,” Caleb said with a sort of playful acidity that made Peter want to cover him in kisses. “But it’s not going to work on me.”

“I wasn’t in a fraternity,” Peter protested.

“Your football team friends, then,” Caleb said.

“Wasn’t on the football team, either.”

Caleb regarded him over the top of his sunglasses, which he had once again stolen. He swept his gaze from Peter’s shoulders, down to his chest and stomach and along his legs. “How’d you get all that, then?” he asked.

Peter felt the same thrill he always did when Caleb alluded to liking the looks of him. “Crew, mostly.” Which they both knew that Caleb already knew.

“Yes, well, put them to good use,” Caleb said, gesturing imperiously at the pool and arranging himself on one of the lounge chairs.

Peter rolled his eyes and jumped into the deep end.

Given the heat of the day and the fact that they were in a desert, he had thought the water would be at least tepid, but he was wrong. It was goddamn freezing.

When his head emerged from the water, he forced a smile onto his face.

“It’s refreshing!” he called. “Come on in.”

“Wow. You really did not sell that lie one bit.”

Peter swam a few laps, aware that Caleb’s gaze was on him. “You should come on in anyway,” he said after a few minutes, “so I’m not freezing my balls off alone.”

“This is a family establishment,” Caleb said. “Language.” But he stood anyway and dipped a delicate toe into the water. “Oh, that’s not bad.” And he jumped in, splashing Peter full in the face.

Things devolved quickly from there. “Not all of us learned to swim at the country club, Cabot!” Caleb shouted as he attempted to dunk Peter for the fifth time.

“This is swimming? I thought this was guerrilla warfare.” He grabbed one of Caleb’s ankles and pulled, causing the other man to flounder backwards. “Or maybe a reenactment of the Battle of Tripoli or something.”

Finally Peter called mercy and they rested in the shallow end, their elbows on the rough concrete that edged the pool.

“The beach, not the country club,” Peter said. “With my brother and cousins.”

“The swimming hole. With, well, pretty much everyone around.”

Neither of them said anything for a minute, and Peter was pretty sure they were both thinking the same thing—that whatever and whoever was at that beach and swimming pool, they were in the past. They had both made the choice to get into a car and leave all that behind in search of something new.

Peter thought of that empty green corner of Tennessee and thought of the look of homesickness that Caleb got whenever he talked about it. And Peter thought about his mother and even his brother and sister; he thought about how after he walked away from his father’s campaign, his relationship with his mother was going to be reduced to greeting cards at best, and total estrangement at worst. It was terrifying, but any closer connection came at too high a price, and Peter was tired of paying it. He might not have been so sure a week ago, a month ago, but now, in the middle of nowhere, with no Cabots in a thousand-mile radius, he thought he was finally getting an idea of who he was and what he wanted. And the one thing was sure of was that he couldn’t do any of it if he thought of himself as the disappointing Cabot boy.

“So,” Caleb said, “your plans don’t involve a suit.”

“What?” Peter asked, confused.

“You said that your aunt tried to bribe you with a suit, but it sounded like suits don’t factor into your plans. That must mean you do have a plan, and that you’re being secretive and cagey about it, and I can’t handle the curiosity anymore.” He nudged Peter’s foot with his own.

“Ah, the journalistic instinct,” Peter said. “I wish I had a secret plan. So far all I’ve done is rule things out.”

“What have you ruled out?”

“I don’t want to go into politics for my family. That’s what I’ve ruled out. They don’t like me, and I don’t like them, and I think that’s reason enough for me to keep far away from them.” He skimmed his fingers along the surface of the water. “At least, I think it is.”

“Yeah,” Caleb said after a moment. “Yeah, I think it is too.”

“I know that they’ve done a lot for me and obviously anything I do, for the rest of my life, is going to be influenced by having the name that I have. Maybe I’m being ungrateful by acting like I don’t owe them. And maybe I’m doing something wrong by refusing to help them accomplish goals that I believe are right. But I also think that I should get a say.”

“It’s no business of mine—”

“If I didn’t care what you thought, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“You don’t need to let yourself be hurt. Ever. Not even for a good cause. Not even if you owe a debt of gratitude to the person hating you—which, for what it’s worth, I don’t think you do.”

Peter bit his lip. “I have a trust fund.”

Caleb sighed. “Of course you have a trust fund.” He sounded not disappointed so much as resigned, and maybe, just maybe, a little fondly exasperated. “I should have guessed. That doesn’t change what I said, though. So they gave you money. So what? You’re a person. You matter. You don’t need to let them hurt you.”

“It’s not a huge amount of money,” Peter said, reverting to the topic of money because he didn’t think he could let himself dwell on the soft tone Caleb had used to tell him he mattered. “But, well, honestly, it’s enough that I don’t need to figure out exactly what I want to do for a while.”

“It’s enough so you don’t need to work. Christ.”

“Is that—” Peter swallowed. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“It’s no matter to me if you never work a day in your life,” Caleb said, a hint of acidity in his voice. “I can’t see why it would matter to me. You’re driving me across the country, and I’ll start at my new job and you’ll do whatever rich people do when they don’t work and that’s that.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Peter said, but Caleb was already swimming away.

* * *

“I think I need to take the edge off again,” Peter said when they got back to their room after dinner, allowing Caleb to back him into the wall. “I feel like I’ve been half hard for hours.”

So did Caleb. He felt like he spent the past four days in a state of constant, simmering arousal, which would have been bad enough even if it hadn’t been compounded with something in the vicinity of his stomach that was either happiness or food poisoning.

They stripped and got one another off in a way that might have felt a touch too efficient if it hadn’t been the prelude to something else and if Caleb had managed to shut up for even a minute. But no, he had to run his mouth, because that was his fatal fucking flaw. He whispered an embarrassing stream of praise and encouragement, leaving him feeling raw and exposed.

Peter, meanwhile, melted against him, gasping for air, begging for more. Caleb loved having the power to do that, loved letting Peter see that not only could he let go of his veneer of confidence, but that Caleb enjoyed when he did so.

When they made their way toward the bed, Peter threw off the bedspread while Caleb flipped open the latches on his suitcase. With the curtains drawn, the room was dark except for the light coming from the fixture in the bathroom, and he had to fumble around for his shaving kit. “Vaseline,” he said, climbing onto the bed and arranging himself in Peter’s lap, the glass jar in his hand.

“Oh,” Peter breathed. “Okay. Just go slow, yeah?”

It took Caleb a minute to understand what Peter meant. “I didn’t mean—I’ve never done that to anyone.” For the sake of his sanity, he decided that he couldn’t think very hard about how very not averse to the idea of getting fucked Peter sounded just then. “I just meant that it’ll feel better if you use this when you finger me.” In the darkness of the room, he could see Peter looking up at him with wide open eyes, one arm on the pillow over his head and the other hand on Caleb’s hip. “Or when I finger you,” he added carefully.

“Yeah,” Peter said, almost like he was relieved that Caleb had suggested it. “I’d like that.”

Caleb leaned down and kissed Peter hard. “Have you ever done it to yourself?”

“A little.”

“All right.” Caleb tried to sound confident, but he had never been anyone’s first at this sort of thing, and the idea was equal parts terrifying and arousing. He was more than a little disturbed that terror and arousal could coexist in his mind, actually.

“What’s the matter?” Peter asked, and Caleb realized he had been sitting there for a while, still holding the jar of Vaseline aloft. “We don’t have to do that, you know.” He was running his hands up and down Caleb’s ribs, like he was soothing a startled animal.

“It’s not that. I just don’t want to hurt you.”

Peter looked at him carefully, and Caleb knew that once again he had said too much. “We’re still talking about putting a finger in my ass, right? One finger? Which is something I’ve done to you more than once, most recently about two hours ago?”

“Yes,” Caleb said, rolling his eyes.

“Because I’ll be honest. I’m over here working up the nerve to ask you to properly fuck me and I’m worried you’re not going to react well.”

“Oh Jesus,” Caleb said, collapsing onto Peter’s chest. “Why?”

“Because I think I’d like it? Because I really want to, Caleb. I keep thinking about it.”

Caleb groaned, thinking of Peter’s fantasies of strangers bending him over the library reference desk. He was fully hard now and extremely annoyed with his dick. “But what if you don’t like it?”

“Then I don’t like it. If it’s terrible, we stop. If it’s just not great, then we don’t do it again.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Caleb said into Peter’s pectoral muscle.

“Hey,” Peter said, lifting Caleb’s face with a finger under his chin. “You don’t need to tell me anything you’d rather keep to yourself, but did someone do something that you didn’t want?”

Caleb shook his head. “It isn’t that. It’s more that I don’t want to screw up and traumatize you. A little bit of pain is a normal part of that, and I don’t want to hurt you.” And that sounded far too earnest, so Caleb gathered his dignity. “I don’t want to be the person who ruins your future sex life. You’ll meet somebody else who—”

“Can you shut up about all the people I’m going to have sex with after you’re done with me? Can’t you see that I hate it when you do that? I’m here with you now. Why can’t that be enough?”

When Caleb was done with him? When Caleb was done with him? Caleb’s mind sputtered to a stop, and when he finally got it back on track, he found Peter looking up at him, a touch of defiance in his face. “I’m sorry I made you feel like that,” Caleb managed to say, his voice awfully strangled. “I don’t want to say anything that hurts you. I don’t want anyone to hurt you.” This was an understatement: Caleb wanted to hunt down and gleefully murder anyone who even thought about hurting Peter. All this came out so much more fiercely than Caleb intended, and with a horrible prickling behind his eyes.

The truth was that he had been trying to make himself think of Peter’s future lovers because he was afraid of what would happen if he didn’t. He was afraid of what would happen if he let himself be greedy, if he let himself acknowledge how much he wanted Peter all to himself.

For a minute Peter just looked up at him, and Caleb couldn’t do anything but look back. “You’re so dumb,” Peter said fondly.

“I beg your—”

“Just so dumb,” he laughed, and pulled Caleb in for a kiss. “So are you going to fuck me or not?”

“Yes, fine, whatever. It’s your funeral.”

“Sweep me off my feet, why don’t you.” Peter was laughing hard now, and it was difficult for Caleb to maintain his scowl. “It’s really okay if you don’t want to.”

“I want to.” The idea of it—of Peter beneath him, open for him, tight and warm—was threatening to short circuit his brain. “I’ll be careful, I’ll be so careful, all right?”

Peter ran his fingers through Caleb’s hair. “I know you will be.” He shifted on the bed so Caleb was lying between his legs. Caleb was already embarrassingly hard, and it only got worse when Peter rolled his hips up into Caleb’s and pressed the now open jar of Vaseline back into Caleb’s hand.

“Okay, okay, keep your shirt on,” Caleb said, then got up to grab a towel from the bathroom and threw it on the bed. Then he sat between Peter’s legs, stroking the inside of his thighs, up to his balls, which he cupped in his hand. Then he bent his head and took the tip of Peter’s cock into his mouth and sucked as he slid a slippery finger along his cleft, bringing it to rest against Peter’s hole. He circled his finger, only exerting the tiniest bit of pressure, more petting than anything else. When he finally slipped the tip of his finger inside, he made sure he did it when he had the head of Peter’s dick at the back of his throat.

“I want you up here,” Peter said. “I want you kissing me.”

Caleb lifted his mouth. “It’s easier if you have a distraction.”

“Distract me up here,” Peter said.

“Anything,” said Caleb, the word coming out more earnest than he had meant. They wound up in a tangle of limbs, one of Peter’s legs thrown over Caleb’s hips as Caleb curled his finger inside.

“Oh,” Peter exhaled.

“You’re so tight,” Caleb said into Peter’s neck. His brain was adamant that this would never work, but his dick just wanted inside.

“I want more.”

“We need to go slow. It’s important,” Caleb forced himself to say, even though all he could think of was the clenching heat of Peter’s body and how good it would feel around him. He could feel Peter beginning to stretch, beginning to open for him. Caleb didn’t like those sensations in his own body and felt wrong about being so turned on making them happen to Peter. But Peter liked this—he was already pushing back against Caleb’s hand, and he was still hard.

Caleb held his breath and pushed in another finger, just up to the first knuckle. “That’s it,” he said. “Just like that.”

“More,” Peter said, and Caleb eased in a bit further. Peter pushed back. “Come on,” Peter said, sounding more impatient than anything else. Caleb bent his finger and twisted his wrist, searching. “Oh God,” Peter groaned, and Caleb felt a surge of triumph.

On the third finger, Peter’s eyes flew open and his body went still. “Fuck,” Caleb said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t stop.”

“I’m hurting you.”

“It’s not—”

“Don’t lie to me,” Caleb snapped.

“It does hurt but I don’t mind. It’s, um, working for me.” He rolled his hips into Caleb’s hand as if to prove the point. “I like the idea.”

“You like the idea,” Caleb repeated flatly.

“Of it hurting a little in order for it to feel good for you. I want to be good for you.”

Caleb’s brain whited out a little at that, Peter’s words unlocking something Caleb had never quite let himself admit. He wanted to say that Peter was always good for him, that he didn’t need to do anything special. But Caleb wasn’t an idiot, and he wasn’t born yesterday—he knew what Peter meant. He pulled his fingers halfway out and then pushed them back in as far as they could go, adding a savage little twist. “You want to be good for me?”

“Yeah,” Peter gasped, and Caleb kissed him.

“You are.” They kissed for a long while as Caleb kept stroking and stretching Peter, forcing gasps and moans from him, kissing the sounds as soon as they left Peter’s lips.

Caleb pulled his fingers out. “Roll over.”

“Can’t we do it this way?”

“Not the first time,” Caleb said.

“Okay,” Peter said, rolling over. “Next time.”

“Yeah,” Caleb said. “Next time.” Caleb tugged Peter’s hips up until Peter was propped on his forearms. “And this way I can see you.” He used his thumbs to open Peter up, looking at where he was slick and open and ready. Peter whimpered at the contact.

“Come on,” Peter urged.

Caleb’s hand shook as he slicked himself up with what he was pretty sure the maximum amount of Vaseline a human penis could carry. He lined himself up and just the feeling of the head of his cock touching the edge of Peter’s hole made his vision cloud. He was not going to last, this was going to be an utterly humiliating disaster, and really the only thing he could hope for was a giant cartoon anvil hitting him on the head right about now.

“I’m dying over here,” Peter said.

“Jesus Christ, hold on.” Caleb eased in, just the first inch, and felt Peter spasm around him. Peter’s head was buried in the pillow, his hands clutching the sheets. Caleb rubbed circles onto Peter’s lower back. “You’re being so good,” he said, when what he really wanted to do was either bury himself to the hilt or pull all the way out and never talk about this again. “So good for me. Push back against me when you’re ready, okay?”

He felt Peter’s body give way, felt himself sink deep into that impossible tightness and heat. Now Peter’s breaths were coming fast, and Caleb could see wetness gathering at the corner of his eye. “Want to stop?” Caleb asked.

“No, no. Just give me a moment.”

“You’re so good. You feel so good, Peter. I’ve never felt anything like this, sweetheart. You’re lovely.”

“You can move,” Peter said. Caleb pulled out and thrust back in so slowly he thought he might black out even without the cartoon anvil. They found a rhythm, and when he managed to hit Peter’s prostate, he was rewarded with a moan that sounded like a sob.

Things devolved from there, with Caleb shoving a pillow under Peter’s hips when he collapsed onto the bed, then sloppily kissing Peter’s shoulder as his thrusts became erratic. Peter said nothing but Caleb’s name and pleas for more; Caleb said a lot of things he’d rather not think about. Caleb came deep inside Peter’s body, and then Peter came a moment later, rolling his hips into the pillow and back into Caleb, a word very much like love on his lips, ringing in Caleb’s ears.

They lay there for God knew how long, Caleb half collapsed on top of Peter, his heart hammering in his chest.

“Caleb,” Peter finally said, squirming beneath him. “How the hell much Vaseline did you use?”

“I might have gone overboard,” Caleb conceded. “By a factor of about five hundred percent.”

Peter reached behind him, between their bodies, and started laughing. “You’re nuts. You’ve made a mess of me.”

“You like it,” Caleb said wonderingly.

“I do. But get me a washcloth.”

Caleb brought him two warm washcloths and a glass of water, because apparently he had given up all pretense of being reasonable where Peter Cabot was concerned.