Page 12 of Road Trip

But the risk of being found out could never stop me from looking. Once you knew you could fly, how could you pretend you didn’t want to reach the sun? And me and Icarus both knew it was gonna end badly, but to feel that warmth on your skin just before you fell?

Why wasn’t the point of that story whether Icarus thought it was worth it or not?

This summer already felt like flying too close to the sun, just me and Jacob and the way the light caught in his eyelashes. The way his skin glowed under that messy halo of his hair. The way my fingers twitched to reach out and trace the line of his jaw, his cheekbones, his mouth. Sometimes I wanted to touch him so much I could feel the ache of it down to my bones.

I jammed my hands in the pockets of my shorts because I wasn’t ready to crash and burn. Not ready to turn our friendship into a crumpled mess of blood and bones and broken wings if it could soar for just a little longer and I could soak up some more of the warmth that was Jacob.

We continued on our way, and I tried not to feel Jacob’s shoulder brushing mine when we moved closer together to let someone pass us coming the other way. Leaves and grit crunched under our shoes as we followed the trail.

At the end of the trail, a set of concrete steps led up over a hill. From the top of the hill, we could see down through the trees to a creek, but going down was rougher than climbing up, so I kept my attention fixed on where my feet were landing. At the bottom of the hill on the bank of the creek, we stepped onto a longwooden suspension bridge. We were the only ones on it—there was a family coming toward us from the other side of the bridge, but they were still a little way off—so I jumped to see how much I could shake the bridge, and Jacob grabbed ahold of the cable guardrail and threw me a dirty look.

“The sign says not to jump!”

“Bruh, it hardly moved!” I protested. “I won’t do it again, promise.”

The creek swept underneath the bridge, white water marking where it hit the rocks before dropping over the cascades. At the bottom of the drop, the creek ran through a shallow gorge. Rock walls topped with trees rose up out of the water. I wished I’d brought my sketchbook with me.

Beside me, Jacob unpeeled his fingers from the cable and took his phone out to take some pictures of the view. I took a couple too.

The family passed behind us, kids wrapped in towels, hair dripping.

“Mommy, I’m cooooold!”

The mom was wrangling another kid, so the dad picked the complaining kid up and they kept going.

Jacob looked at the water while I turned my head to watch the dad carrying the kid. I couldn’t see much, just a pair of small bare feet sticking out from either side of the dad’s hips, but I felt a nudge of something in the back of my mind that was too faint to be a specific recollection. Sense memory, maybe, of being small and being carried.

Jacob’s shoulder knocked against mine, pulling me from my thoughts, and he said, “Come on.”

We crossed the bridge, walked up behind some building on the other side, then followed the sign down a series of wooden steps and walkways to the cascades.

It was beautiful.

The water spilled onto the rocks below, filling a series of rock pools and a swimming hole. There were a few people sitting inthe rock pools and some kids standing right under the falls. It must have been busy in the heat of the day, but it was late afternoon and most people seemed to be packing up. The light was golden now, filtering down through the trees and landing in dappled coins on the surface of the water. Above the cascades, I could see the suspension bridge we’d crossed to get here.

Jacob was already taking his shirt off.

“Didn’t you hear that kid?” I asked him. “It’scold.”

“Don’t care.” He flashed me a broad, easy grin that could make me do anything. “You coming in or are you chicken?”

“What are you,twelve?”

He made a chicken noise, the asshole. Did the wings with his arms and everything.

“Fuck you,” I muttered and pulled my shirt off too.

We took off our shoes, shoved our phones in them, and then picked our way down over the slippery rocks and into the water.

Holy shit.

That kid hadn’t been wrong. It was freezing but neither of us was going to admit it. Hell, we went swimming in the ocean in winter sometimes. No Tennessee water hole was going to get the better of us, even if it was apparently fed straight from some polar ice cap. But it was okay once we got in deep enough to get our shoulders under the water—or maybe we’d just lost all the feeling in our limbs. It was hard to tell.

I shivered, then launched myself forward in a dog paddle in an effort to warm up. It wasn’t super deep, and while kicking around messily, I ended up splashing Jacob right in the face. It was an accident, mostly. He squawked and lunged after me, and the next thing I knew, he had me in an iron grip and was pulling me under the water.

He let go after a few seconds and I surged back to the surface, sputtering and hissing like a wet cat, and he grinned at me like he’d done something hilarious—which he kind of had, but I wasn’t going to admit it. His sunny smile made it impossible to stay mad, but it would have been a betrayal of our friendship if Ihadn’t dived forward, grabbed him around the waist, and pulled him underwater. I wasn’t going to let him beat me just because he was bigger.

My palms skated over his cool skin and down his broad back as we grappled together, both of us wet and slippery and laughing, and fuck, I was going to miss this more than I’d thought.

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