The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,149
got, the tighter his grip. Tean bore it without saying anything.
When they stopped, Jem’s whole body locked up. Tean barely spared the park a glance—scrub and sage and thistles giving way to a perfect lawn, perfect flowerbeds, perfect families enjoying a perfect day. A sign said THIS IS THE PLACE. Then his gaze moved back to Jem.
Jem was facing forward again, as though refusing to look at the park, and chewing his lip. He was clutching Tean’s hand hard enough to hurt. Then something changed, and his eyes were full, and he had to blink rapidly to clear them before the tears spilled.
“Jem,” Tean began, “we don’t have to—”
“What if she doesn’t love me? I don’t even know why it matters. She abandoned me, and I never thought she loved me, never once thought it, and now it’s the only thing in my head. Christ, I’ll be lucky if I get up there and can remember my own name.”
Tean waited to see if it was a genuine question. “That’s her decision. You can’t make somebody love you. And it’s your decision to love her. If you want to forgive her, if you want to try to have a relationship, you own that, and nobody can take that away from you. All you can decide is what you’re going to do.”
“Yeah,” Jem said. He flipped down the mirror, wiped his eyes, and checked his hair one last time. “I guess I should do this.”
“Jem?”
“I’m feeling my feelings, Tean. If I feel them any more, I’m literally going to explode.”
“No, I just wanted to tell you—” Tean drew a breath. “Did you know that crypsis isn’t always beneficial? Like any evolutionary development, it has costs too. Sometimes it’s the cost of investing too many resources, too much energy, at the expense of other possibilities. Many forms of crypsis lock a species into an environmental niche, and then they’re stuck. And . . . and one of the most common forms of crypsis is simply remaining motionless. All sorts of animals do it; it improves their camouflage, of course, but it’s also a form of hiding on its own.”
“Oh boy,” Jem whispered. “You’re about to go megadark, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been hiding for a long time. Hiding in plain sight. Trying to be invisible. And I did it by . . . by not moving, not changing, not taking any risks or trying anything new. I ended up getting stuck. And then I met you, and—and I just want you to know that I love you. So much. I know it might not be the way either of us thought it was going to be, but I’m not going to make it sound like less than what it is by saying we’re just friends. We’ve both been trying to get to the same place, but maybe this, what we have right now, this is the place, this is where we’re supposed to be together. I love you. You’re the most important person in my life. I love your great big old purple grandma t-shirt. I love the Power Rangers DVDs you think are hidden in your duffel. I love that one time I caught you kissing your comb. I love how hard you try to make yourself better every day, when anybody else would have given up. And I love that you’re kind and caring, and that you took all the hate and brutality in your life and found a way to be gentle. I know you’ve said, in the past, that you wanted us to be more than this. But for me, this is everything. I want you to know that.”
Jem suddenly smiled, the real one, with the crooked front teeth. “Can I tell you something now?”
“Of course.”
“You know what you were talking about? About how the universe is absurd because it’s orderless, no matter how much we work to impose order on it, and how that absurdity alienates us from each other and even alienates us from ourselves, how we come into existence without really being anything, and we have to decide what we’re going to be, and then all we can do is be authentic, and that’s how we live a good life in a broken cosmos?”
“Hmm. That must have been something you and Tinajas talked about. Ow!” Tean tried to pull his hand free, and he rubbed the line of teeth marks on his wrist. “You can’t bite people, you mongrel.”
“Well, apparently I can, because I just did. Do you remember now?”
“Vaguely. I never would have said something like ‘broken cosmos,’ though.”
“I went to church a few times, you know. And I remember this phrase because it’s got a cool ring to it: ‘Stranger in a strange land.’ That’s it, right?”
“That’s it.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe the universe is meaningless, and maybe life is absurd, and maybe all we can do is try to decide who we want to be, and then be authentic about it. Maybe we really are strangers in a strange land. Maybe we’re even strangers to ourselves. But you, Teancum Leon, are not a stranger to me.” Releasing Tean’s hand, he slid out of the truck and shut the door. Through the open window he said, “Stick with me. We’ll be strangers in a strange world together.”
“I think I’d like that,” Tean said, his voice thick.
Jem glanced over his shoulder. Then back. His eyes were the eyes of a child for one brief moment. “You won’t go anywhere?”
The breeze carried the smell of Jem’s new cologne, the smell of the warming asphalt, the smell of the park’s freshly watered grass, the smell of the scrub oak and lodgepole pines on the mountains. Where the park ended, ephedra and bitterbrush and Russian thistle grew in pale, cracked earth. The sun, high overhead, made the valley huge and bright, as though the sky went on forever. When pioneers had come, they had wanted everything to be different: they had wanted the green grasses and old trees of the lands they had left. They had wanted to make this place something else. For the desert to blossom like the rose. But they had gotten one thing right. They had seen, in the desert, the burning bush. They had seen the valley and known it was home.
Tean shook his head. “I’ll be right here.”
THE SAME END
Keep reading for a sneak preview of The Same End, book three of The Lamb and the Lion.
Acknowledgments
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