Peter Cabot Gets Lost by Cat Sebastian
Day 8
Grand Canyon, Arizona
Caleb was going to lose his mind. Somehow, over the course of the night, he had given Peter a bruise on his wrist, one bite mark on his shoulder and another on his collarbone that Caleb couldn’t even remember putting there, and beard burn on the inside of his thigh. He felt like he had written his name all over Peter’s body.
Even now that Peter was fully dressed, all those marks hidden safely away, Caleb still knew they were there, and he couldn’t think straight. As they ate their scrambled eggs and toast in the lodge, Peter happily lecturing about train stations and gold prospectors and Hopi muralists, all Caleb could think about was the utter ruin he had made of Peter’s voice. (“I think I have a bruise on the back of my throat,” Peter had cheerfully observed while combing his hair in the cabin’s bathroom, and Caleb had promptly walked into the door.)
Caleb would not have said that he was sexually inexperienced by any standard, but last night had left him feeling like he was giving up the last scraps of his virginity, had left him feeling like he wished he had more of those scraps to give up. His brain felt like it was filled with wet lint, except for when he thought about Peter, and then he was torn between a demented urge to ask if he was warm enough without a sweater and the need to bend him over the nearest piece of furniture.
“Eat,” Peter said, jarring Caleb out of his reverie.
Caleb looked at the forkful of scrambled eggs he held aloft and suspected he had been holding it there for some time. He took a bite. Peter put a buttered English muffin onto his plate and stirred some sugar into his coffee.
“I can do that,” Caleb protested weakly.
“All available evidence would indicate otherwise,” Peter observed dryly, looking reprehensibly smug.
As they walked down the trail to the south rim of the canyon, Peter wore his camera slung around his neck. He ought to look like a dad on vacation but instead he looked like he was on a safari or something. It was all terrible for Caleb’s nerves, and that was before he even saw the canyon itself and went into fits.
“No,” Caleb said when it first came into view.
“No?” Peter laughed.
“Too big. Too pretty. Can’t be healthy.” It was like staring at one of those optical illusions where circles seemed to be swirling into hypnotic spirals, but in this case, it was layers of striated rock surrounding infinite emptiness. If he had thought New Mexico and southern Arizona presented an alien landscape that he couldn’t reconcile with anyplace he had ever belonged, this was even more disconcerting. It was also really, really beautiful, in a way that made him want to look away.
“I was worried it would be anti-climactic,” Peter said. “We’ve all seen dozens of pictures of it, right? I thought it might be a letdown. Notre Dame was a letdown. So was the Louvre.”
Caleb thought it was a testament to the depth of his affection that he was no less fond of Peter even when he spoke in an offhand manner about the disappointments of a trip to Paris. “Hmm,” was all he said. “I think it’s the scale. It’s just…really very large. I can’t overstate how large it is.”
“Grand, one might even say.”
“Fuck off, one might even—”
Peter elbowed him, and Caleb elbowed him back, until Peter broke away, laughing. “Let me take your picture.”
Caleb wondered if whatever he was feeling that morning—emotions as layered and dizzying as the empty space behind him—would show in the photograph. He wondered what would happen to the picture—would Peter want to keep it? Would he mail it to Caleb?
The thought left Caleb predictably mopey and he grumbled for the rest of their walk.
“Where do you want to go to dinner?” Peter asked after a while. He spoke carefully, slowly, giving the words a weight that Caleb couldn’t quite make sense of.
“We haven’t even eaten lunch yet,” Caleb pointed out.
“I know, but if we want to eat at the restaurant in the El Tovar,” Peter said, naming the very luxurious-seeming hotel they were walking past, “I probably ought to call ahead for reservations. My treat,” he added firmly, looking Caleb in the eye as if he were issuing a dare. “If this is the last time I get to take you out to dinner, then I’m not losing the chance.”
“What will you do if I say no?”
“Uh, go to a different restaurant?” Peter said, as if Caleb were crazy for asking. “I’m asking you on a date, not trying to kidnap you.”
A date? The poor man had to be deluded. Maybe it was sunstroke. Maybe it was the canyon, playing tricks on his mind.
“Caleb,” Peter laughed, “it won’t even be our first date. Get used to the idea, okay?”
“Well, fine then.” Caleb knew he was blushing, so he glared at Peter, who only laughed harder.
The problem with Peter was that he was too nice. Caleb was of the decided opinion that Peter could not get far enough from his family. Being a Cabot sounded like swimming in shark infested waters. Probably some people could handle it; probably some people liked the danger. But Caleb read the paper and knew perfectly well what the Cabots did to one of its own when they stepped out of line. The whole damned state had seen what happened to Peter’s uncle when he got a divorce. And Caleb didn’t want that to happen to Peter. He wanted to make sure it never did happen to Peter. Peter was good and kind, and if anyone, Cabot or otherwise, tried to make trouble for him, they’d have Caleb to deal with.
He wanted to tell Peter that, even though it was the purest nonsense—Caleb could no more protect Peter from his family than he could protect him from the man in the moon.
“Your family got you used to assholes, and now when I’m an asshole you think it’s normal,” Caleb said, kicking a pebble off the path. “It’s science. Pavlov or somebody.”
Peter paused mid-stride. Whatever Caleb wasn’t expecting, it wasn’t Peter to burst out laughing. “If you think I don’t know the difference between my family and someone who gets snippy and then apologizes two seconds later, either you have no idea what my family is like or you think you’re much worse than you actually are.”
“Still, I shouldn’t.”
Peter hummed in a way that managed to agree without being reproachful.
“Peter,” Caleb said, deciding that now was the time to broach a topic he had been wondering about since the previous day. “If you thought I didn’t like you, why did you offer to drive me across the country? I know you said it was a spur of the moment decision, but still—why would spending a week with someone who didn’t like you seem like a better idea than any other excuse you could come up with to avoid your family?”
Peter toyed with his camera strap and frowned. “Because even if you didn’t like me, that didn’t matter. I liked you. I thought you were smart, and I liked listening to you in class, and when I saw that you had a problem that I could fix, I wanted to fix it.”
There was a lot that Caleb could have said about Peter having an ingrained need to please the unpleasable, to throw his cloak across puddles for people who would never appreciate it. But the fact was that Caleb was pleased; he did appreciate what Peter had done. “Well, you did fix it. Thank you.” And that might have been the most genuine expression of gratitude that Caleb had ever managed to deliver in upwards of five years.
“Hey, Peter,” Caleb said, feeling unaccountably bashful. “What would you do if you didn’t have to think about your family, or money, or anything else?” He had asked variations on that question a few times but never like that, never putting the question entirely in the realm of what Peter wanted.
“I’d stay in school,” Peter said after a moment. “Or go back to school, I guess.”
A week ago, Caleb would have been surprised. A few days ago, even, Caleb might not have expected this answer. But now it made sense, it fit in with everything else he knew about Peter—he was thoughtful, curious, and a voracious reader. “For history?”
“Yeah. I took my GREs,” Peter said, sounding embarrassed about it for some reason. “Even though I knew it was impossible.”
“Why on earth would it be impossible? You’re talking about getting a graduate degree in history, right, not joining a dance troupe or becoming a folk musician.”
“Well, it hardly matters to them. I’m supposed to go to law school after the election,” Peter said with a grim note in his voice that sounded like finality.
And that said all there was to be said, Caleb supposed. If Peter couldn’t see his way to going to graduate school without his family’s stamp of approval, then he certainly couldn’t stay in California, nor could he stay with Caleb.
Which Caleb already knew, of course. He knew this. It shouldn’t feel like a blow to the gut every time he thought about it.
“You should do it,” Caleb said. “You’d be great at it and you’d love it.” He made it sound sincere because he was sincere, even if he wanted to go lie down in the dirt and cry.
Except. Peter had said that he was supposed to go to law school. And he had said, oh, a hundred or so times that he was finished doing what his family expected of him. He had also repeatedly said that he liked Caleb very much and that he wanted to date Caleb, God help them both. He had made it clear in word and deed that he was serious about Caleb. Caleb was being willfully obtuse.
Caleb hated when people were willfully obtuse. There were enough tragically stupid people in the world without having anyone indulge in recreational stupidity. And if Caleb were missing the point despite having been all but bludgeoned with it for several days in a row, there was a problem. The problem, Caleb very much suspected, was that he couldn’t quite imagine a universe in which he deserved a person as generous and kind as Peter in his life, let alone his heart.
Peter regarded Caleb with a look that had become one of his more frequent expressions over the past day or two. It was a look of exasperated, indulgent fondness, and this was how Peter looked when Caleb was in the middle of a crisis.
It was unfair and terrible that Peter thought Caleb’s crises were cute. “You are unfair and terrible,” Caleb said, pointing at Peter in a gesture so rude his mother would cry.
“You know, you’ve totally lost the ability to insult me and sound like you mean it,” Peter observed cheerfully. “It all comes out like sweet nothings.”
Caleb felt his entire face heat, but he knew Peter was right.
* * *They spent another night at the Grand Canyon, lingering over dinner, lingering on a bench as they watched the sunset, lingering over a coin-operated washing machine while Caleb laughed at how dazzled Peter was by the spin cycle, then lingering in bed as if falling asleep would make the morning come too fast.
It was at most nine or ten hours to Los Angeles, so if they set out in the morning, they’d be at the end of their trip before nightfall. They had no excuse to make it last another day, no reason to make it last another night. Deciding that he couldn’t put it off any longer, Peter had called his aunt and let her know that he got delayed, but that he’d be there the following night.
Peter caught himself staring at Caleb even more than usual, as if memorizing the precise upward tilt of his nose or the degree to which his freckles had multiplied would keep him close. He suspected that Caleb was doing something similar, because he kept staring at Peter with something like confused indignation.
There were a million things Peter wanted to say, but it was too soon, and the past week had been so divorced from reality that Peter worried Caleb wouldn’t think anything Peter said counted for much. But Peter knew how he felt—he might not have been any good at processing emotions that weren’t in the neighborhood of guilt, shame, and anxiety, but he knew what it felt like to be overwhelmingly fond of someone. He knew he wanted to keep Caleb near him, not only in his life, but within arm’s reach.
He thought that maybe Caleb felt the same way but was much less certain about whether Caleb would let it happen. There were any number of good reasons why Caleb might choose to shake hands with Peter, wish him well, and never see him again. To start with, there was a real possibility that Peter’s father was going to become the next president of the United States, in which case all of Peter’s friends were going to come under some degree of scrutiny. Caleb might not want to be saddled with that. Hell, Peter didn’t want Caleb to be saddled with that. Second, Peter knew that he wasn’t always a picnic to be around: he got gloomy and moody, sometimes for days at a time, and Caleb might think that was exhausting. Peter certainly did. Third, Caleb was ambitious and driven, and Peter didn’t have any idea of what he was going to do next week, let alone with the rest of his life.
“What’s going through your mind right now?” Caleb asked, his head pillowed on Peter’s chest. It was past midnight, but they were still awake, clutching at the last scraps of the day. “I can almost hear the gears creaking in there.”
“I’m coming up with an itemized list of reasons why you might not want to see me again in California.”
Caleb turned his head and looked searchingly at him. “What number did you get up to?”
“Three, but I’m only getting started. I want you to know that if you decide you don’t want to keep doing this, I’m going to be very understanding. Just a real class act.”
Caleb’s mouth twitched and something complicated happened on his face, and Peter could almost see conflicting emotions fighting it out. When he finally spoke, he looked Peter straight in the eye. “In the spirit of equal time and fair-minded debate, here’s a list of reasons why I very much want to keep doing this. You’re good and kind, you make me laugh, it sure doesn’t hurt to look at you, you tip waitresses a ludicrous percentage. That’s over three, just off the top of my head.” He made a dinging noise like he had gotten the correct answer on a quiz show, then yawned. “You lose.”
It wasn’t exactly a romantic declaration, but it was enough to go on. Caleb was probably never going to offer him glib assurances, and those weren’t what Peter wanted anyway. Peter wasn’t sure whether there was anything Caleb could say at this point to put his worries to rest. Only time would do that. And from the sound of things, Caleb would give him time. They could give one another time. That was all Peter wanted.
“You’re so tired, you’ve gotten goofy,” Peter said. “Go to sleep.” Caleb rolled over and let himself be tugged against Peter’s chest, and it couldn’t have been five minutes before his breaths evened out and his muscles went limp. Peter stayed awake longer, telling himself that this wouldn’t be the last time.