Ink and Ice, Erin McRae [primary phonics .txt] 📗

now. His hands were so unsteady—Zack was a really good kisser—that he couldn’t get the fingerprint sensor to work and had to type in his unlock code instead.

There was a text from Huy.

Huy: Idk what you guys are doing out there, but Katie’s heading out to make the rounds on the cows or sthg. Look lively!

Aaron: Thx!

Aaron replied, with sincere gratitude, and shoved the phone back into his pocket.

“Katie’s coming. We should probably look less like we’ve been sucking on each other’s faces.”

“Which would be...how?”

Aaron grabbed Zack’s hand and dragged him away from the barn and away from the house. “Do you want to see the chickens?”

THEY ARRIVED BACK AT the house as the fireflies started to flicker along the tree line. The rest of the group was gathered out back on the screened-in porch that looked over the pastures and distant treeline. Katie wasn’t there, which meant that all Aaron had to deal with was a suggestive look from Huy and a pointed eyebrow-of-disapproval from Charlotte. But Brendan didn’t seem to think anything was amiss, and soon Zack and Aaron were settled next to each other on the wicker loveseat.

Aaron leaned into Zack occasionally and was rewarded by the warm press of Zack, shoulder to thigh, against him. The heady memory of Zack’s mouth pressed against his made Aaron deeply regret his early morning ice time and the fact that he’d driven here with Charlotte. Going home with Zack—he was pretty sure that was on the table if he wanted it to be—was both logistically unwise and more socially awkward than even his generally high tolerance for awkwardness could take. But despite the disappointment of that, Aaron’s mind felt quiet in a way he hardly ever felt anywhere that wasn’t the island. For a few hours tonight he had stopped worrying—about the season, about expectations, about letting his family down—and let himself be.

Chapter 8

AFTER THE DINNER AT the Farm

Somewhere on I-35

THERE WAS SOMETHING to be said for thinking things through while driving. Zack was glad for the rental car and the empty road when he finally pulled out of Katie and Brendan's at eleven—late, he was told, for skaters.

He flipped on the radio... and that was the thing about radio in the dark. No matter where you were, the experience of it was more or less the same: a bunch of songs you didn’t necessarily love whispered into your ear by a DJ that felt like he was speaking just for you. The only thing that changed from state to state and country to country was the language and how much God was part of the mix.

Zack wished the farm were further out and the drive longer, because Aaron—who was apparently boy crazy and made of trouble—had kissed him, and it was completely a delight. And also a giant problem.

One, he had to admit, that he'd been courting since he arrived.

Zack knew the most obvious answer was to not entertain the situation further, wrap up whatever background he could pretend to himself that he still needed here, and go home. Or go to Phoenix and try to get an interview in person when he still couldn’t get anyone on Sauer’s team to answer his calls. He only had a week left on the temporary lease for Marie’s in-law apartment anyway. Perfect timing.

If Zack hadn’t become wildly, inappropriately, emotionally entangled with Aaron—and hadn’t just spent half an hour making out with him in a field, what the fuck was his life?—he could give up on Sauer and make the story entirely about Aaron. But journalistic bias worked every which way. Focusing on Aaron because Zack liked him was as fucked up as avoiding focusing on Aaron for the same reason. Both versions of the situation were now a complete ethical nightmare, no matter the extent to which Aaron was complicit—knowingly or not.

Zack resisted the urge to bang his head on the steering wheel. He didn’t want to leave the Twin Cities. He didn’t want to go back to Miami and find a new place to live. To go back to the life he had before, writing little pieces here and there from the comfort of his apartment until he got bored enough to overcome his own better sense and fly back into the type of trouble he no longer believed his body and brain could handle.

Aaron was here, of course, but so were Katie and Brendan, and Twin Cities Ice and the few other skaters he’d already met. Marie, too. It was a warm and welcoming community, with people who loved their work and were devoted to it. All of which Zack enjoyed. But there was also the feeling of something else, lurking under the surface, that Zack couldn’t stop rolling around in his head. There was also a fuzziness here in the space that separated people from animals.

The more that people relied on their instincts, the more their ears seemed to prick up at things seen or heard. This adventure was full of that, and Zack was aggressively interested. He didn't have that experience of the world himself, no extra senses and no animal instincts, but he knew it when he saw it. In a war zone he’d learned to watch the animals to know if he was safe, to know what would happen next, to know who the monsters were.

Finding people with that magic here—Aaron and Katie mostly, but also Marie—had suddenly made life outside a warzone seem a lot more interesting than it had in ages.

Zack knew he needed to stop thinking with his dick, to consider whether he was having addictive tendencies, and call this whole non-thing out as a rebound, but he also knew that if he did so, he wouldn’t be being entirely honest with himself. The situation was ill-advised, yes. But it felt real and mutual.

The light in Marie’s front window was on when he pulled into the driveway. And Zack, having already made a series