Chapter 10: The Call
His fingers were numb, caked with cold, gritty mud. The grass beneath the bench was a sodden mess, each blade heavy with rainwater. Aaron scrabbled, his professional, document-signing hands now claws digging into the earth. It was absurd. Pathetic. But the thought of leaving it there, of that circle of platinum being washed into a storm drain or found by some stranger, was unendurable.
His fingertips brushed something hard and smooth. He closed around it, the mud squelching between his fingers, and pulled the ring free. It was filthy, its shine completely obscured by dark earth. He slumped back onto his heels in the wet grass, breath clouding in the chilled air, and tried to wipe it clean on his ruined trousers. It only smeared.
His phone, buried in his coat pocket, vibrated against his hip.
He fumbled for it with his cleanish left hand, leaving muddy streaks on the fabric. The screen glowed in the deepening twilight: Unknown Caller. His heart, already hammering from the frantic search, stuttered. He stared at it as it buzzed, a trapped insect in his hand. It could be Dakota. It could be a client. It could be a wrong number.
He swiped to answer, bringing the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
The line was silent for a beat, filled with the hollow whisper of empty space. Then a voice, low and rough, the tone scraping against a memory he’d tried to bury.
“Aaron.”
It was Zack. Not Dakota. The relief was immediate, and so was the shame that followed it. A hot-cold wave washed through him, settling low in his gut.
“Zack.” The name felt foreign on his tongue. He hadn’t spoken it aloud in weeks. “How… where are you? Dakota said you were gone.”
A short, humorless laugh, barely more than a exhale. “He’s not my keeper. Are you alone?”
Aaron looked around the empty park. The woman with the dog was long gone. The streetlamp above the bench flickered, casting jumping shadows. “Yes.”
“Meet me.”
“Where?”
“Mile marker seventeen. Out on the old state highway, the cutoff before the bridge. You know the turnoff by the rusted tractor.”
Aaron did know. It was a desolate stretch, a viewing point overlooking the river gorge that nobody used anymore since the new highway went in. They’d gone there once, years ago, on a drive with Dakota. For stargazing, Dakota had said. The memory was a distant, fractured thing.
“Why?” Aaron heard himself ask, the social worker in him reflexively probing, seeking the rational reason. “Zack, what is this?”
“Just come.” Zack’s voice tightened, a note of strain slipping through. “I need to see you. I need to… fuck, Aaron, just come. Please.”
That ‘please’ did it. It was raw, stripped of all the swagger and challenging heat that usually wrapped around Zack’s words. It was just a need, naked and urgent.
Before he could think, before the logical part of his brain could list the thousand reasons why this was a catastrophic idea, Aaron heard his own voice reply.
“Okay.”
The line went dead.
He sat there in the mud, the phone slipping from his ear, the dirty ring clenched in his other fist. The chill from the ground seeped through his clothes, but inside he was burning. Mile marker seventeen. A secret, a clandestine meeting, a physical place on a map that now existed only for this.
He pushed himself to his feet, his joints stiff. He looked a mess—filthy knees, mud-streaked coat, face probably still blotchy from crying. He didn’t care. A frantic, desperate energy was coiling in his limbs. He stumbled out of the park toward where he’d left his car blocks away, the ring a hard, muddy knot in his pocket.
The drive was a blur of wiper blades and his own racing thoughts. The city lights receded in his rearview, replaced by the darkness of the two-lane road snaking along the river. Rain turned to a fine, persistent mist, haloed around his headlights. He almost missed the turn, the rusted skeleton of an ancient tractor just visible in the gloom. His tires crunched on gravel as he pulled off the road into a small, overgrown turnout.
He killed the engine. Silence, save for the patter of drizzle on the roof and the distant, unseen rush of the river below. No other cars. He’d expected Zack’s beat-up truck. There was nothing.
Had he gotten it wrong? Was this a cruel joke? His hands were shaking again, this time from the adrenaline crash and the cold. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the ring. He worked at the mud with his thumb, a nervous, compulsive motion. A clean band of platinum emerged from the grime.
A sharp rap on the passenger window.
Aaron jumped, a short, choked gasp escaping him. He hadn’t seen anyone approach.
Zack stood outside, collar of his denim jacket pulled up against the damp. His face was angled down, but even through the rain-speckled glass, Aaron could see the difference. The easy, predatory grace was gone. He looked coiled, tense.
Aaron hit the unlock button. The sound was overly loud in the quiet car.
Zack opened the door and slid into the passenger seat, bringing with him a wave of cold, wet air and the smell of his cologne, dirt, and engine grease. He pulled the door shut, sealing them in the sudden, intimate capsule of the car’s interior. The only light came from the dim glow of the dashboard.
They sat in silence for a long moment, Aaron staring straight ahead at the dark outline of trees against the lighter sky, Zack looking at him, his gaze a physical weight on the side of Aaron’s face.
“You look like shit,” Zack said finally, his voice quieter than on the phone.
“I feel like shit,” Aaron replied, the words automatic. He chanced a glance over.
Zack’s face was a map of recent hardship. A fading yellow bruise shaded his left cheekbone—Dakota’s knuckles, a lifetime ago. Dark circles hung under his eyes. He hadn’t shaved in days. He looked older. Worn.
“Why here?” Aaron asked.
“It’s nowhere. Nobody comes here.” Zack shifted, the leather seat creaking. He was looking at Aaron’s hands, at the ring he was still worrying between his fingers. “Is that it?”
Aaron stopped moving. “Yeah.”
“Should have left it in the mud.” There was no malice in the statement. It was just a flat, exhausted truth.
“Probably.” Aaron swallowed. The air in the car was too thick, too shared. “You said you needed to see me.”
Zack didn’t answer right away. He looked out his window, into the dark. “I heard. About today. The papers.”
“How?”
“I still have friends in town. Cops talk.” Zack’s jaw worked. “How was he?”
The question shocked Aaron. It was the last thing he expected. “He was… fine. He signed. He told me not to touch him.” The words came out stripped bare.
Zack nodded slowly, as if he’d expected nothing less. “He hates me.”
“He hates me, too.”
“Yeah.” Zack turned back to him, his eyes searching Aaron’s face in the dim light. “But you hate yourself more.”
It was so painfully accurate that Aaron flinched. He looked down at the ring, now mostly clean in his palm. A symbol of a broken vow, polished by his guilt. “Why did you call me, Zack? Really.”
Zack leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, running a hand through his damp, unruly hair. “Because I’m in my truck about a half-mile down the road with everything I own in the back. Because I’m leaving. For good this time. The job in Colorado… it’s real. I’m gone at dawn.” He took a slow breath. “And because I couldn’t fucking leave without seeing you one more time.”
Aaron’s breath caught. This was an ending, then. Another one. A final severance. It should have felt like a mercy. It felt like a fresh wound. “So see me,” he whispered, his voice breaking. “You’re seeing me.”
Zack shook his head, a frustrated gesture. “No. Not like this.” He reached out, his movements hesitant, and his rough, calloused fingers brushed Aaron’s cheek, tracing the path a tear had taken earlier. The touch was electric, a live wire in the stagnant car. Aaron didn’t pull away. He leaned into it, a moth to a fatal flame.
“It wasn’t just nothing, was it?” Zack’s voice was low, barely audible over the drizzle. “For you. In the pantry. All of it. It wasn’t just… some fucked-up game?”
Aaron closed his eyes. He saw the shelves of dry goods, the sliver of light from the kitchen, the desperate, hungry look on Zack’s face as he’d closed the distance. He felt the terrifying, thrilling collapse of his own carefully constructed walls. He’d called it a mistake, an impulse, a ruinous error. But it had been the most alive he’d felt in years.
“No,” he breathed, the confession wrenched from somewhere deep and ruined. “It wasn’t nothing.”
Zack’s hand slid from his cheek to the back of his neck, pulling him in. There was no urgency like before, no frantic, clawing heat. This was slower, sadder, a goodbye written in the space between their breaths. When their lips met, it tasted of rain, and salt, and an immeasurable, complicated loss. It was a kiss of pure, unchecked wanting, devoid of any future.
When they broke apart, Aaron was trembling. Zack rested his forehead against Aaron’s, his eyes closed. “Come with me,” he murmured, the words a warm puff against Aaron’s skin.
Aaron’s mind short-circuited. “What?”
“To Colorado. Right now. Get in my truck. We just go.” Zack pulled back, his eyes fierce, desperate. “There’s nothing here for you but a half-empty apartment and a brother who won’t ever look at you again. There’s nothing here for me but the ghost of my own fuck-ups.” He gestured vaguely toward the city lights, invisible beyond the trees. “Let’s just be gone.”
The offer hung in the air, intoxicating and insane. To erase himself. To become someone new, with Zack, in a place where no one knew what they had done. To trade one kind of ruin for another kind of freedom.
He looked at Zack’s face, at the bruised cheekbone, at the hope warring with the exhaustion in his eyes. He thought of Dakota, alone in their—his—apartment, a ring-sized strip of pale skin on his finger. He thought of his job, his clients, the life he’d built board by careful board.
He thought of the ring in his hand.
He slowly, carefully, reached for Zack’s left hand. Zack let him take it, his brow furrowed in confusion. Aaron turned the palm upward. It was scarred, tough, so different from Dakota’s. Without a word, Aaron placed the clean, cold platinum band in the very center of it.
Zack stared at the ring lying in his calloused palm as if it were a live grenade.
“I can’t,” Aaron said, his voice finally steady. It was the truth, simple and devastating. “This… you… were the fire. But I lit the match. I have to live in the ashes. I don’t get to run from them.”
Zack’s fingers curled slowly around the ring, his fist closing into a tight, white-knuckled ball. He looked from his fist to Aaron’s face, and the hope drained from his eyes, leaving only a profound, weary understanding. He gave a single, sharp nod.
He opened the car door. The sound of the rain grew louder. He paused, one foot on the gravel, half-turned back.
“He loved you, you know,” Zack said, not looking at him. “Like, forever-love you. The kind you read about. I used to hate it.” He finally met Aaron’s gaze, his expression unreadable. “Now I just think it’s fucking sad.”
He stepped out, closed the door softly, and vanished into the mist and the darkness between the trees.
Aaron sat alone in the idling silence, staring at the empty passenger seat. The ghost of Zack’s cologne lingered, mixed with the scent of wet earth. He felt carved out, hollow, the decision leaving him weightless and utterly empty.
He started the car. The headlights cut twin swaths through the drizzle, illuminating the empty turnout, the rusted tractor, the road leading back to a ruined city. He put the car in drive. He did not look back.
The heater roared to life, blasting air that smelled of dust and damp carpet onto his icy hands. He gripped the wheel until his knuckles ached, the gravel crunching as he turned back onto the empty highway. The city’s glow reappeared ahead, a sickly halo against the clouds. His phone sat silent in the cup holder.
The ring was gone. His palm felt strangely light without its weight. He flexed his fingers on the wheel, the ghost of Zack’s rough skin against his neck still lingering. Come with me. The words echoed, a seductive, ridiculous rhythm against the windshield wipers. A clean break. A new name in a new town. He could almost see the mountains, a picture from a brochure, vague and empty.
His throat tightened. He pictured Dakota alone in their apartment, the one they’d painted together, maybe sitting at the kitchen island with a beer. Dakota would be staring at the wall, at the photo of them at the coast, laughing. He wouldn’t be crying. He’d be quiet. That was worse.
He flicked the indicator, though there was no one for miles to see it, and pulled over onto the narrow, wet shoulder. The tires sank slightly into the mud. He killed the engine, leaving only the sound of rain on metal and his own unsteady breathing. The phone glowed up at him from the console.
He picked it up. His thumb hovered over Dakota’s name in his favorites list, the heart icon now a brutal irony. He didn’t think. He just pressed it. The dial tone buzzed once, twice. Each ring was a hammer strike on his sternum. He almost hung up on the fourth.
“Yeah?” Dakota’s voice was flat, drained of all its warm, easy cadence. It was just a sound, a acknowledgment of the call.
Aaron opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He heard the faint hum of Dakota’s television in the background, some late-night sports commentary.
“Aaron?” Dakota’s tone shifted, suspicion edging in. “What is it? You have an accident?”
“No.” The word scraped out. “No accident.”
A pause. Aaron could feel Dakota’s guarded patience, paper-thin. “Okay. Then what?”
“I saw him.” The confession tumbled out, blunt and ugly. He hadn’t planned to say it. “Tonight. I saw Zack.”
The silence on the other end was absolute. The TV sound cut off abruptly. When Dakota spoke again, his voice was lower, a controlled vibration. “Where.”
“He called me. He was leaving. For Colorado.” Aaron stared at the rain streaking the windshield, his reflection a pale, fragmented ghost. “I met him. Out on the old highway.”
Dakota’s breath hissed through the phone, a sharp, pained intake. “You met him. You drove out there, after everything, and you met him.”
“He asked me to go with him.” Aaron closed his eyes. “He asked me to leave right then and get in his truck and go.”
The silence this time was different. It was charged, a live wire strung taut between them. Aaron waited for the explosion, for the snarled fury from the lawyer’s office to return. He wished for it.
Dakota’s laugh was a short, dry, brittle thing. It held no humor. “Of course he did. And did you? Are you calling me from the road?”
“No.”
“Why not?” The question was swift, a knife thrust. “Seems like your style. Clean break. Run off with the problem. Make it someone else’s mess.”
“It is my mess,” Aaron said, his voice rising. “It’s my mess, Dakota. I made it. I’m sitting in it.” He pressed his forehead against the cool steering wheel. “I gave him back the ring.”
“What?”
“Your ring. My ring. The one you left.” Aaron swallowed. “I found it. In the mud. I dug it out. And I gave it to him.”
Dakota made a sound, choked and inarticulate. “You gave him… my wedding ring.”
“It wasn’t yours anymore. You left it. It was just a… a thing.” Aaron knew how weak it sounded. “He was leaving. I had it in my hand. I didn’t know what else to do with it.”
“You could have thrown it in the goddamn river,” Dakota said, each word measured and cold. “You could have sold it. You could have kept it in a drawer and felt shitty every time you saw it for the rest of your life. Those were all options. You gave it to my brother.”
“It felt like an ending,” Aaron whispered.
“It is an ending!” Dakota’s control shattered, his voice raw. “That’s what you don’t get! It ended in that lawyer’s office! This? This is just you both dancing on the grave!”
Aaron had no answer. The rain pattered softly. A truck thundered past in the opposite direction, spraying a wave of dirty water across his windshield, momentarily drowning out everything.
“Are you still with him?” Dakota asked, his voice quiet again, dangerously so.
“No. He’s gone. I’m alone.”
“Good.” The line went quiet for a long moment. Aaron could hear him breathing, could almost see him pinching the bridge of his nose, a familiar gesture of exhausted frustration. “Why are you calling me, Aaron? Really. To clear your conscience? To let me know my brother’s finally fucked off? What do you want?”
Aaron watched a single drop of water trace a path down the inside of his windshield. He didn’t know what he wanted. He just knew the silence in the car was splitting him open. “You said not to touch you. You were right. I lost that.” He took a shaky breath. “I just… didn’t want to lose the sound of your voice, too.”
For ten full seconds, there was only the rain. Then a soft, weary exhalation.
“I’m sitting here looking at the REMINGTON & ROOKE box,” Dakota said, his tone shifting into something almost mundane, unbearably sad. “The one we got for the filing. It’s still on the table. I haven’t moved it.”
Aaron’s heart squeezed. “The stupid, fancy cardboard box.”
“Yeah. It’s got a gold foil logo. Very professional.” A rustle, like Dakota was shifting the phone. “I keep thinking I should put it away. But I just leave it there.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” There was no malice in it now. Just a profound, simple exhaustion. “I have to go. I have an early shift. A burglary. Somebody’s shattered porcelain collection.”
“Okay.”
“Drive safe,” Dakota said. It was an automatic phrase, a fossil of their old life.
The call ended.
Aaron held the phone to his ear for another minute, listening to the empty hum of the disconnected line. Then he dropped it back into the cup holder. He looked out at the dark road, the red taillights of the long-gone truck fading into the distance. The REMINGTON & ROOKE box sat on a table in the home he didn’t live in anymore. Zack was on a highway heading west, a piece of platinum in his pocket. And he was here, on a muddy shoulder, in a car that smelled of rain and regret, utterly alone at the center of it all. He started the engine, clicked on his headlights, and pulled slowly back onto the road, driving toward the faint, guilty glow of the city.