100 Days (12 page)

Jake lets out a nervous chuckle and tries to square his shoulders and hold his head high. It isn’t that he’s afraid of the dark. On the contrary, he’s always found a solitary peace when enshrouded in it. Spending three pitch-black minutes in the middle of a cave, on the other hand…

“Hey. You okay?” Aiden asks, stepping closer and searching Jake’s face.

“I’m fine. Forewarned is forearmed, right?” he jokes feebly, and Aiden’s brow furrows.

“Are you sure? I can call her back and—”

Darkness falls as sharply and quickly as the blade of a guillotine, and Jake’s head snaps upward almost involuntarily; a gasp catches in the back of his throat. He turns his head from side to side, suddenly feeling as if it isn’t just the light that’s gone, but his sight as well. Never before has he experienced this kind of complete, oppressively encompassing darkness, and after a few seconds it seems to close about him.

“Jake?” Aiden asks. His voice is loud, as if he’s mere inches away, but Jake could swear that they were standing farther apart just a moment ago. “Jakey? You okay?”

“Mmhmm,” Jake manages, his own voice sounding louder than usual. It’s as if the darkness acts as an amplifier, a giant bowl in which every rustle of fab­ric and distant trickle of water winds him up tighter and tighter. He doesn’t even have the deep melodies of the organ to focus on anymore. He wraps his arms around his waist, closing in on himself as even the sound of his own breathing becomes louder and he hears Aiden shift from one foot to the other.

It’s cold down in the caves, far colder than the cloudy yet mild day outside; even so, Jake’s palms begin to sweat as he thinks about how far underground they are. His breathing becomes shallow, as if oxygen is hard to come by. He feels a pressure in his chest; his heart races. He panics and gasps for air. He presses his palm to the base of his throat to try to counter the sensation of a band squeezing him. It’s suffocating; and he can’t breathe. He can’t—

“Hey, hey,” Aiden whispers, taking Jake’s hand in the darkness. Jake’s heart races even faster. His heartbeat is deafening. Surely Aiden can hear it, hear the effect a mere touch has even when Jake is panicking more than he can process. “It’s okay, Jakey. I’m right here, just come toward me, okay?”

Jake follows Aiden’s words, shuffles closer as his breathing becomes harsh­er and harsher. Clear air in his lungs is an almost forgotten sensation; he chases after it, though that seems fruitless. A roaring whoosh tears through his head. He only dimly registers Aiden pulling him closer, flush against his body; his fingers card through Jake’s hair. Jake’s forehead presses against Aiden’s temple.

“Just focus on me, okay? Just focus on me,” Aiden whispers as he sways them there. “Breathe, sweetheart. Breathe for me.”

Jake closes his eyes and tries to focus on their movement, back and forth, tries to turn it into a dance in his mind, but there is no discernible rhythm and every time he thinks he’s found one to count along to, it evades him again and his breathing keeps on stammering, stammering. And just as he’s beginning to feel lightheaded, Aiden starts to hum: quietly at first, almost too quiet to hear even in the utter silence of the cave, but the melody forms and grows until Jake recognizes it, until Aiden finds its rhythm and sways them in time.

It’s a silly childhood song, one that they used to sing in kindergarten, but it helps. Back and forth, slowly in and slowly out, back and forth, slowly in and slowly out; degree by degree, Jake gets his breathing under control. He comes back to himself, wrapped around Aiden: an entirely different kind of containment, one of safety and care that takes him back to when he was a boy of six and the very first time they watched
The Lion King
together. Jake had had no idea what would happen when the antelope began their stampede, that Mufasa would be killed, and Aiden had held his hand and then all of him, keeping him together just as he is doing now.

Aiden’s singing stops short as light floods back into the cave, and for the first time since taking his hand, Jake feels the slightest tremor in Aiden’s body. They sway on the spot for one moment more, until Aiden clears his throat and smooths his fingers over Jake’s hair. Shakily, Jake exhales the last breath he took, feels it flow warmly between them.

He opens his eyes, still unwilling to move so much as an inch, and wonders if a kiss on the cheek to say thank you would be a step too far into no-man’s land.

“Are you okay?” Aiden whispers, and Jake nods, finally shifting his weight back onto his own two feet. The hand Aiden worked into his hair slides down the side of his neck and brushes off his shoulder, taking warmth with it. “Sure?”

When Jake doesn’t respond, Aiden ducks to look searchingly into his down­cast eyes. The space between them is dense with tension. Aiden uncon­sciously licks his full lips, and Jake scrabbles for something to say instead of watching the movie reel unfurling in his head: a swell of music, or maybe none at all, lighting at just the right dim and atmospheric level and Jake rocking forward to crush his mouth to Aiden’s, fists grasping the front of his leather jacket.

“Do you think
Parks and Rec
was right about cave sex?” he asks, simply blurting the first thing that comes into his head. Immediately, he wants to slap himself across the face.

“I don’t know. Do you wanna find out?” Aiden counters, his tone innocent and earnest, yet somehow still loaded.

“Walked right into that one,” Jake says, letting out a tremulous chuckle and stepping completely out of Aiden’s hold. When he glances up and sees Jen approaching from around the corner, he says, “Come on, let’s go find the gift shop. There’s probably an obnoxious T-shirt that I can get for you.”

“Virginia is for lovers?” Aiden asks, and Jake smiles thinly.

“Something like that.”

1,779 miles

Day Twenty-four: North Carolina

More and more, Aiden notices what he has decided to call “Jake-isms,” things that haven’t registered before. They’re little things, really: the way Jake gazes out of the passenger side window and holds the tip of his left thumb between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, pressing and rolling until the flesh turns white; how he over-stretches and rolls his shoulders when reaching for a glass on the cupboard’s top shelf and sighs at how obviously good it feels; the fact that their every conversation these days is a surprise, and never truly finished.

“We really should try and figure out what the point of our documentary is,” Jake says, half turning to Aiden as they stroll through the Downtown Market in Asheville. The statement comes out of the blue, but is spoken as if their discussion about this very topic didn’t already end over three hours ago. With a sly grin, Jake adds, “You know, other than two cute film grads touring the United States.”

“I was kind of hoping that we’d just come across the perfect idea,” Aiden replies. “And by ‘we’ I mean ‘you,’ since you’re the one who’s been doing the most filming. Setting up the shots, checking the lighting…”

“It takes time to get the perfect shot, Ade. You know that. And besides, it’s all good practice.”

“What are you doing with all the footage, anyway?”

“Well, I was thinking about setting up some kind of blog for the trip, just dumping it all there and sending the web address to people back home. What do you think?”

“I think it’s a great idea,” Aiden says and nudges Jake’s shoulder. “Let me know if you need help setting it up.”

“Nah, I can do it. You’re busy with other stuff anyway,” Jake says, nudging him right back. He rolls his eyes at Aiden’s blank expression. “I’ve seen you writing in that notebook of yours. Don’t worry! I didn’t peek.”

Aiden shoots him a grateful smile and sighs in relief. He can’t imagine what Jake’s reaction would be if he ever read what Aiden has been writing. His in­som­nia has gotten even worse since Delaware—he tries not to dwell on that par­tic­ular link too much—so his entries have been longer and more in-depth. Just this morning he sat on the couch, knees drawn up to his chest to try to hide what he was doing, because he couldn’t stop writing without finish­ing his thought. Meanwhile Jake danced around the kitchen as he made breakfast, hips swaying sensuously to the beat of whatever was playing on the radio. The flow of his movements was without discernible end, as if the song was his dance partner, leading and turning and dipping him across the kitchen with such fluid grace that, had he not known otherwise, Aiden could have sworn that Jake had been dancing for years.

Writing it down didn’t help this time,
he scrawled, his words a hurried mess bordering on the poetry he’d written in high school before discovering a way to set it all to music.
I’m still thinking about Virginia. It sparked off my old sense of adventure, only this time it isn’t a
place
that I want to explore… it’s the way this man can make one subtle shift in the darkness and have me shivering; he moved and I was gone, wanting to run cartographer’s fingers over his shoulder blades, the planes of his chest, and down, down, down. I hope and wonder.

Aiden’s face colors at the memory—it’s all very well to write words no one will see, but another to face the object of his inspiration with those words still echoing in his mind. He swallows hard and his eyes land on a stall farther up the way, where a small African woman sits surrounded by wooden tiles and wall hangings. The words still play upon his mind as they draw closer to her, and his mind circles back to the wondering—
always
the wondering; wondering whether it would be weird if things between him and Jake weren’t at all awkward; if instead they just fell into one another as if it was something they were always meant for, as if their love was bought and paid for years ago and they were only just beginning to grow into it.

The bright yellow of the woman’s clothing is in stark contrast to the muted earth and wood hues surrounding her. Her face is weathered, dark freckles litter her cheeks and crowds of lines at the corners of her wide mouth and deep-set eyes betray decades. Her gaze briefly sweeps across Jake and lands upon Aiden, boring into him with such intensity that he feels as if she can see straight into his heart and pick out the four letters he’s sure are forming there.

“What are your names?” she demands, her English heavily accented.

“I’m Aiden, and this is Jake,” he says.

“I am Nanyanika. They call me Nan,” she says, gesturing around herself and offering her hand to Jake. After he shakes it, she offers it to Aiden and holds on when he tries to let go. “You belong, yes?”

Aiden exchanges a perplexed glance with Jake and repeats, “Belong?”

“You are his,” Nan says, looking between them. “He is yours.”

“No,” Aiden says, shaking his head. “We’re not together, we’re just friends.”

“Hmm. ‘Just friends.’ I hear this a lot,” Nan says, dropping Aiden’s hand and reseat­ing herself on her stool. From beneath her simple wooden workstation, covered in a deep green cloth patterned with the same esoteric symbols that surround her, she pulls two small paintbrushes and a pot of what looks like black ink and gestures for them to sit down.

“It’s true, you know,” Jake says, crossing one long leg over the other and loos­ening his thin scarf a little. “We’ve been best friends since we were six.”

Nan shakes her head, her shoulders slumping as she says, “They come to me to see their life and never believe. They keep their eyes closed on
purpose,
don’t
let
themselves see. They think good means scary. So you have come to me to see your life, yes?”

“Um,” Aiden says articulately, and looks at Jake.

“Yes,” Jake answers her, his curiosity written on his face.

Aiden has to admit that, though he’s never been much for spirituality, he’s intrigued.

“Sleeve up, arm out,” Nan commands, and Jake quickly complies, stretch­ing his arm palm up across her workstation. She dips one of the paintbrushes into the inkpot, loosely holds Jake’s wrist with her free hand and, without ever taking her eyes from Jake’s face, begins to paint. “I paint three things; past, present and future. We see what come out after.”

Aiden watches in silent amazement; Nan can’t see what she’s doing, but three symbols quickly take shape in a shock of black against the Jake’s pale skin. He swallows; they’ve often talked about getting tattoos, musing over placement and what they would be, but they’ve never actually gone ahead and done it. Seeing the marks on Jake’s skin brings Aiden a shiver.

“I come from the Ashanti in Ghana, and these symbols are the
adinkra
. Very important to my people and tell us many things,” Nan says, finishing the third symbol with a deft flick of her wrist and looking down at her work. She points to the first symbol, closest to Jake’s hand, which looks like a ladder. “
Owuo atwedee…
you have death in your past, yes?”

Jake raises his chin and nods almost imperceptibly. Nan gives his wrist a light shake.

“This is why we paint past so close to your hand, so you can let go. You get weak if you hold on for too long,” she says, and quickly moves on to the second symbol: two swirls forming a heart. “This is good sign.
Sankofa
; mean you are learning from your past.” Of the third, a diamond with an X at its center that forms four more, smaller diamonds, she says, “
Eban
, for your future. For you, this is sign of love and security.”

Aiden watches Jake trace the tip of his index finger around the
eban
sym­bol, and blinks when Jake agrees with Nan’s earlier sentiment, murmuring, “They
are
important. I wish they were permanent.”

Nan shakes her head and points to the past and present symbols. “Very soon, you let go of this. Present become your past,” she says, sliding her fingers toward Jake’s palm. “Your future become your present, and you get new future. You move forward, don’t get stuck.”

Jake nods and, seemingly satisfied, Nan releases his arm and holds out her hand for Aiden’s. He hesitates only for a moment before settling his wrist onto her palm. She doesn’t start painting straightaway, as she did with Jake; she seems to sift through the innermost workings of his mind until she finds the things she’s looking for, whatever they are, and it takes all his willpower not to break the eye contact.