Page 10 of Beneath the Indigo Sky

The wave of guilt and loss threatens to engulf me once again. I don’t know how he’s managed to stay standing feeling like this. No wonder he’d been staring at cheese.

I sigh and hesitate for a moment. I don’t want to impose, but he clearly has no one else.

“I can’t pretend to know what it’s like for you. I don’t have any family that I remember.”

His gaze shifts back down to the liquid that still fills his cup as I continue.

“But as strange as it might sound since I’m not very social, I’m pretty good at knowing how someone feels, and I just…” I trail off for a moment as I try to figure out how to continue. “I took over Ken’s bookkeeping a few years ago. I enjoy it, and I’m good at it. Ken told me that was your brother’s department at the shop, so if you ever feel like you need some help with it…”

He hasn’t moved, so I trail off, afraid that I’ve overstepped some invisible line.

I watch him closely, wondering if he’ll offer me thanks once more and then stand and walk away. He’ll probably tell me to go, that he doesn’t need my help, that he doesn’t want it. I don’t want to go, and I tell myself that it’s simply because I’m trying to help someone in need, that it has nothing to do with strong arms and jade eyes and the bright magenta surge of love for his brother that I felt roll off him when we first met.

And then the world is blue. It’s the vibrant blue of the sky and the sea where they come together on the horizon on mid-summer days as relief washes over him. His shoulders move with his breath, slow and smooth, and his fingers reach toward his cheeks. His head is bowed, his gaze averted, but I watch as relief settles into his bones. It’s dimmed and covered by a shroud of hurt and emptiness, but it’s there as I watch his knuckles brush away the tears that have found their way down his cheeks and gotten caught in the scruff on his jaw.

“Thank you,” he whispers to the table. “I can’t…”

His breath stutters.

“Thank you.”

Chapter 4

Jayce

I never realized just how much I depended on Jordyn’s presence to ground me, and I’ve been so lost, floating on my own without him. After our parents died, we were all the other had. We both wanted more one day, of course - a wife, a husband, kids. We wanted families of our own. I’ve always known that would be harder for me than for Jordyn; after all, how many single gay men are there in a backwoods town with a population under three thousand? Not many. As far as I know, it’s just me. Still, I wanted that for each of us - to have someone to love other than each other. We’d always love one another. We’d always be a part of the other’s soul; that’s how twins are, but we both knew we needed more. Neither of us had found it, so we’d been one another’s everything.

I knew the moment I lost him that his ghost would haunt me at the shop.

The vacant desk in the office is gathering dust because I can’t bear to sit in his chair, and the absence of his bulky shoulders as he stood at the front counter plagues me every day, but it’s the small things I’ve found somehow harder to bear. It’s the thirty texts a day about football and food that never arrive. The online dogs that bark on my phone screen with no one for me to send them to or laugh at them with. The tea that no longer miraculously appears on my workbench at four every afternoon.

For the thousandth time in only a few short weeks, I’m sitting on the single high bar chair behind the reception desk holding my phone in my hand, willing it to beep or to vibrate or to ring until my knuckles whiten and the edges cut into my skin. What am I supposed to do now, alone with my thoughts and my hopes and my dreams? Alone in the shop and in my truck and at home. Alone with no one on the other end of the telephone line.

I crush my lower lip between my teeth hard enough that the metallic taste of blood floods my mouth as my thumb slides along the blackened screen. It’s not the first time. Without the sound of my tools, the silence that seems to hang in the shop like thick fog is deafening, and my world is collapsing into a black hole of nothingness.

The sound of the door chime pulls my attention from the breath that sits trapped inside my lungs and the heat of the salt water that’s found its way onto my face once again, and I manage to loosen my grip on my phone and set it on the counter in front of me.

Namid asked if he could come to the shop on a Saturday. He doesn’t spend a lot of time around people, which makes sense, I suppose, as any time I hear people talking about him in town, it’s always with a bit of uncertainty. They aren’t sure what to make of him with his refined demeanor and almost otherworldly beauty. Objectively, I understand why they think he’s out of place here. People here are kind enough, but they’re hearty and boisterous and roughened by the cold and the dark. They are eagles and falcons - strong, sturdy hunters - fending for themselves in an obvious, almost predatory way. Namid doesn’t feel out of place to me. He feels like a jay, bright and small and blue and beautiful. Happy to soar through the clear spring skies looking for seeds and berries. Yet there seems to be a quiet strength to him, like he’s thriving by foraging in the crisp snow-covered woods. He fits here, just as the jay does. He simply doesn’t conform in the way others expect him to.

He smiles at me as he walks in, and it’s effortless and happy and brilliant. It’s like he’s offering me the gift of a single ray of light to cut through the darkness surrounding me, and I can’t help but smile back, even though the movement is unfamiliar and awkward these days.

“Good morning.” He crosses the room without hesitation and sets a paper cup on the counter in front of me.

“I thought I was supposed to buy the next round.”

He looks almost playful. “You’ll just have to get the next, next round, I suppose.”

I’m not sure what to say to that, so I just mumble a, “Thank you,” as I stand and take the cup.

“You want me to show you around?”

“I’d love that, thank you.”

He keeps talking as he follows me through the glass door that leads into the work bay.

“I’ve been here before a few times, for Ken’s shitty old trucks mostly. Ken says that he used to be his own mechanic before you opened this place, but as someone who’s seen him try to fix the office’s radiator, I’m grateful that I don’t have to drive something that he’s worked on.”

We’re standing in the shop next to the lift, surrounded by tools and the smell of oil. We’re standing in a place where I stand a hundred times a day, but it feels different with him here rambling at me, filling the silence.

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