one year I went around to different high-end concert venues pretending to be a stage manager for bands and stealing instruments. Those we did sell.”
“It’s like you can’t trust anyone,” I said.
“You can’t,” he answered seriously. His gaze flicked to me and then back to the road. “So?”
“So?” I parroted.
“Now you know. I’m a con artist. A thief. A criminal. That’s what I’ve been doing. Why I haven’t come home. So don’t you, you know…hate me?”
“No. I don’t hate you. Don’t be ridiculous. Have you ever murdered anyone? Hurt animals or kids?”
“God no!” He looked offended.
“I didn’t think so, but I had to ask. Apparently, I’m more…morally flexible…than I suspected.”
“No questions? No judgment?” he asked sounding skeptical.
I didn’t blame him for that. If I had learned what he was up to before he’d come back to me, say from some kind of news report, I probably wouldn’t be taking it so well. There would be more shock and maybe some disgust. But now I knew he was still mostly a grown version of the boy I’d loved, and regardless of how gullible and naïve it made me seem, I couldn’t believe he was a bad person. “I do have a question. How much of what you’ve told me before right now was a lie?”
“I don’t expect you to believe me, but I haven’t lied to you directly since I got here.”
“But you’ve lied by omission.”
“And you’ve enabled it by not asking any hard questions.”
“It’s true. I was scared to.”
He nodded in understanding. He held out his hand, palm up, asking for a connection instead of taking it.
With a sigh, I reached for him and he grabbed my hand hard.
“The important things have never changed,” he said vehemently. “How I feel about you is true. My hopes and fears. That’s the important stuff.”
“I’m going to need some time to think about it,” I said. “About what it means for us. In the future.”
His fingers tightened on mine. “So.” He cleared his throat and tried again. “So, you think there might possibly be a future where there’s an us?”
I’m sure I was being an idiot and there was a great chance that all of this would come back and smack me in the face somehow. But Jake made me want to do crazy things. He made me want to take chances. “I can’t even imagine how it’s supposed to work out, but, God help me, I’m not ready to let you out of my life again yet.”
He turned to me with the kind of wide, happy smile I remembered from when we were both young, before any of this had happened. A ten-year-old on Christmas morning smile.
“Hey, eyes on the road,” I said, though I knew I was smiling just as widely.
He squeezed my hand again and then lifted it up to his mouth to gently kiss the back of it. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
After another hour or so of driving filled with conversation that was much less emotional, we took an exit and ended up in the parking lot of a Denny’s. There wasn’t much else around us. A gas station. A drive-through Starbucks. “This was our destination?” I asked.
“I had the urge for generic breakfast food,” he said, getting out of the car. The slam of the door echoed in the night.
“Okay, then.”
Inside, the Denny’s was indistinguishable from every other Denny’s, which I suppose was the point of chain restaurants. You knew what you were going to get when you stopped there. No surprises. There was something to be said for that.
It wasn’t until the waitress popped up that I realized she was why we were there. A skinny girl with a nose ring and hair dyed flat black, she reminded me of sixteen-year-old Jake, something about the intensity and the hair.
“Hey, you’re back!” She checked me out thoroughly from top to bottom. “New guy? Cute. Do you even know any ugly people?” She asked with a laugh.
“That’s my job,” he replied with a smirk.
I elbowed him. I wanted to ask if he was insane or blind but being we were in a Denny’s in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t. But the waitress had my back.
“C’mon on, you can’t judge yourself against the male models you hang out with. I bet your boyfriend here thinks you’re a real cutie, right?” She looked at me for confirmation.
“I think he’s adorable,” I said putting my arm around his shoulders.
“See?” she said. “Told you.” She handed us menus. “Now what can I