Page 5 of Never Landing

With a heavy sigh, I dropped into the rusty, creaky swing in the side yard where Everett and I used to play, and I swayed this way and that. It was too much work to stretch out my legs, to try and get higher and higher.

Nope, my feet were stuck on the ground.

I didn’t look up at the sound of a car driving over damp pavement. There were so many cars now, their wheels all fat and black. I liked the old kinds with thinner wheels, how they bumped and jostled over the roads, how high and funny their horns were.

“Thank you,” a man said.

Something about the voice?—

I looked up, and a man was waving off the driver, looking down at an illuminated brick phone thing in his hand.

Then he raised his head, and those eyes?—

I knew those eyes. Blue as cornflower and a clear day’s sky.

Everett.

Oh god, he was even more different now, with his hair neatly brushed back and a hard jaw and—and he was tall.

He was grown up.

My stomach dropped. I froze, staring, because?—

BecauseEverett.

He looked up at the house, and something came over his face. “Jesus,” he whispered.

I flinched. My feet scrambled through the muddy earth, but I couldn’t stop myself moving fast enough. The chains of the swing squeaked, and Everett looked my way.

For one split second, our eyes met.

Then, I disappeared, racing back to the woods on a rush of magic.

No, I was not going to throw myself into his path and greet him like an old friend. The last time Everett was here, things started changing. I started changing.

And I couldn’t imagine anything worse in the world than that.

3

Everett

Apparently, I was losing my shit.

Seeing ghosts of the past standing around the yard seemed especially healthy. When the kid turned and ran, I tried to shake it off. It hadn’t been him. It couldn’t have been him. The kid had been...well, a kid, and Peter was my age. He’d be pushing thirty by now.

It wasn’t the world’s biggest surprise that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, really. I’d put myself in a truly terrible situation. Yeah, fine, my boss had put me in a terrible situation, and I’d made it worse by not going along quietly and agreeing to work eighty-hour weeks in exchange for no extra compensation.

When I got back to the office, I was either going to be fired or told that I was required to work even more hours to make up for my vacation, and there was no longer any chance I was going places in the company.

But . . . had there ever been a chance?

I’d been there for years, and watched the revolving door of young artists and writers coming in, working their asses off, getting disillusioned, and leaving. I’d just lasted longer than most of them, convinced that if only I proved myself, my loyalty, to the company, I’d be the next Tom. I’d someday be thevenerable artist who hadmade itand was a mainstay at the company.

I’d be the one telling people they just had to work harder, and they too could earn five-figure bonuses.

Except I was starting to think that Tom was a carrot on a stick, and no one under the age of fifty was ever going to earn more than the smallest amount James Warren could get by with paying them.

So there was a good chance that in three weeks I was going to be looking for a job.

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