On Friday night, Adam decided to figure out what was in Kyle’s patent-pending burgers. The result of his experiment was gray and unappetizing, and he was contemplating where he’d gone wrong when his phone chirped on the counter. There was a text message from Kyle.
jail break! Need help!
What the hell did that mean? Had something gotten loose? Kyle didn’t have a dog.
What?
Adam carried the phone and the burger over to the couch and turned on the TV. The phone chirped again.
My kid is gone!
“Shit!” Adam thumbed through the screens and dialed Kyle’s number. He counted the rings as he waited.
“Hello?” Kyle’s voice sounded calm.
“Kyle, are you okay? Where’s Caroline?”
There was a laugh at the other end of the line. “Oh wow, I didn’t think you’d actually call.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m a free man!”
Adam ground his teeth and shifted on the couch.
“My dinner's getting cold,” he said. “Do you want to tell me what you’re talking about, or should I ignore your cryptic text messages for the rest of the evening?”
“Okay, okay,” Kyle said, “jeez, you have no sense of humor.”
“Kyle, you text to say your daughter is gone, but unless you’re killing time while you wait for the police to arrive, there needs to be a good explanation happening right now.”
“She is gone! With my dad. For the weekend!” Kyle sounded gleeful. Adam wished for technology that would allow him to reach through the phone and shake the story out of Kyle.
“Where did your dad and Caroline go?” he said.
“To see my aunt and uncle! They won’t be back until Sunday afternoon!”
“You didn’t go with them?”
“No!” Kyle said it like the idea was ridiculous. “My uncle would only bug me about when I’m going to get a real job, and my aunt’s really only interested in seeing Caroline. Cute kid factor, you know how it goes.”
Adam didn’t. His life already had enough cute kids in it. “And?”
“And what?”
“You called me?”
“Well, technically, I texted you. I was totally happy to do this all by text. You’re the one who called me.”
“Kyle!” Adam should have brought a beer from the kitchen.
Kyle laughed again. It was practically a cackle. “Are we friends?”
“Friends?”
“I mean, you kicked my ass in basketball, I fed you dinner, you drove my drunk ass home and helped me keep it a secret from my dad. If we were sixteen I think that would be grounds for us to be BFFs, but since we’re, you know, grown-ups, I figure we’ll be plain old friends.”
Plain old friends. That shouldn’t have irritated Adam as much as it did.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re friends. What do you want? My dinner really is cold now.”
“Don’t you get it? She’s gone! My kid is gone. My dad is gone! I’m free! All by myself for forty-eight hours!”
Oh no. Kyle had cabin fever.
“Do you know how long it’s been since I had an entire weekend to myself?” Kyle asked.
Probably not since your wife died.
That idea sunk into his stomach like a lead weight.
“A while?” he said.
“You got it. So what are we doing this weekend? Because I already called Ben, but Kirsten and Lily are both down with the flu, and Ben’s gotta take Haley to a dance recital tomorrow.”
Adam hissed. “Second place, ouch. Way to make a friend feel special.”
“Whatever,” Kyle said. “What are you doing?”
“When?”
“Now! This very moment! I’m down to forty-seven and a half hours of childless freedom. What are you doing at this exact instant?”
“I was going to eat dinner and watch some TV?”
“Hmmm . . . Not quite what I had in mind,” Kyle said, “but I can work with it. Have you seen the latest season of Sherlock?”
“I haven’t seen any season of Sherlock.”
On the other end of the phone, Kyle made an anguished noise. “Unacceptable! I’m coming over. We’ll start from the beginning.”
“Now?” Adam was struggling to keep up.
“Forty-seven and a half hours, Adam! Text me your address. I’ll bring snacks. Hang tight!” The phone went silent.
Adam sighed and shook his head, before he set the phone down on the coffee table next to his cold burger. An oily brown liquid had oozed through the bun and onto the plate. Adam took it to the kitchen and threw it away, then went back to the living room to wait for his guest.
Kyle arrived twenty minutes later. He had a six-pack of beer under one arm and two grocery bags of junk food.
“I hope you’re hungry,” he said, setting the bags on the counter. “There’s salt and vinegar chips, kettle corn, cheesies, lime nachos, and sour peaches.”
“Sour peaches?” Adam peeked into the bags.
Kyle pulled out a small orange pouch of candies. “Those are for me.” He winked, then moved through the kitchen, opening and closing drawers as he went.
“Can I help you find something?” Adam asked, as Hurricane Kyle blew through his apartment.
“Bottle opener.” Kyle opened another drawer. “I could use my key ring but since— Oh here it is.” He held the opener up. He flipped the tops off two beer bottles and passed one to Adam. He clinked their bottles together.
“Cheers?” Adam said.
Kyle took a long drink, but he kept his eyes open as he did. “This is not at all what I thought your place was going to be like.”
Adam tried to imagine what Kyle was seeing. The apartment wasn’t big. The walls were a brown color that Rebecca liked to call mocha, but that had been called Havana Tan on the swatch when Adam had painted after moving in. The furniture wasn’t anything special, a brown leather couch, gray armchair, and a battered coffee table that had been rescued from Rebecca’s basement rec room. “What did you expect?”
Kyle ventured farther into the space, taking another sip of his beer. “I don’t know. Brighter? I thought maybe it would be all post-industrial architect, less Father Knows Best? If there’s a pipe and slippers over by that armchair, I’m out of here.”
“I’m not much of a slippers guy.” Adam scrunched his bare toes on the worn hardwood floor.
“No, I guess not.”
“I’d ask if you were hungry but . . .” Adam gestured to the pile of snack food on the counter.
“I’m sorry,” Kyle said. “This is too much, isn’t it? I’m used to feeding people and maybe I got a little excited and—”
“It’s okay.” Adam held up a hand. Kyle didn’t look convinced. “Okay, maybe a little much, but it’s fine. You’re here, there are snacks and beer. It’s good.”
Kyle watched him for a few seconds longer, and then seemed to break out of his funk almost as quickly as he’d fallen into it.
“Okay, awesome,” he said. “So let’s get the Sherlock education started!” He snatched the pack of candy peaches off the counter and went to the living room. He sprawled on the couch. Adam grabbed a bag of chips and settled himself in an armchair.
“Get ready!” Kyle laughed again as he picked up Adam’s remote and navigated through screens. Kyle had made himself so at ease in Adam’s apartment, and it should have annoyed him. The space wasn’t very big, and he generally preferred to keep his place to himself. Kyle had bulldozed through the usual formalities and now, as he selected the first Sherlock episode on the menu, Adam found he didn’t mind much at all.
In fact, Adam spent more time than was strictly appropriate watching Kyle’s face as the reflected light from the screen played across it. He was so caught up in his own thoughts, he missed most of the episode they were supposed to be watching.
“Well?” Kyle straightened as the first episode wound down. He turned to Adam, who was still staring. “What?”
“Nothing!” Adam’s breath stuttered as he realized he’d been caught. “How do you eat all those?” He gestured at the empty candy bag on the coffee table. It crinkled as Kyle smoothed a hand over it.
“Not part of a balanced diet, Mr. Hathaway?” Kyle laughed at his own joke. “I don’t know. I’ve always liked them. You can ask my dad. I was never big into salty things like chips, but give me a bag of candy and watch out for your fingers as you step away!”
“Is that why you call Caroline Jelly Bean?”
“No. Not exactly.” Kyle’s smile dimmed. Adam was immediately sorry he’d asked. “It’s not much of a story. When Olivia was pregnant, the first time she went to the doctor’s they did the ultrasound. She brought a copy home to show me, and she made me point out where the baby was, because at that point, it’s really small and the picture’s all smudgy and black and white.”
“Okay,” Adam said, although he wasn’t sure. When Rebecca had been pregnant the first time, she’d sent out a picture by email with It’s a Boy! in the subject line. The tiny person in the image had taken up the majority of the frame, and had been very clearly baby shaped.
“Anyway,” Kyle said, “I looked and looked and I couldn’t find it and finally Olivia had to point it out and I said ‘That’s not a baby, that’s a jelly bean,’ and the name stuck after Caroline was born.” He smiled as he stared at some point of nothing between the two of them. Adam felt the silence stretch.
“How long were you two married?” he said.
Kyle blinked, and his smile softened. “We weren’t married. I think we talked about it, for like two seconds when she told me she was pregnant, but it didn’t seem necessary.”
Adam was saved from asking another awkward question by a roar like a fighter jet careening through his living room. Kyle hopped up off the couch and fumbled to pull out his phone. “It’s my dad.”
“What the hell is that noise?”
“TIE fighter. This will only take a sec. You’ve reached the Batcave,” he said in an exaggerated baritone. “This is Batman speaking. Have you seen Robin?” There was a pause, and Kyle relaxed. “Hey, Bean, how’s it going? Yeah? How are Aunt Linda and Uncle Harry?”
Adam collected the empty beer bottles from the coffee table as well as the sour peach bag. The phone call continued in the same vein for several minutes. Kyle asked questions and sounded astonished at everything Caroline said. He announced that they could not get a dog just because Aunt Linda and Uncle Harry had one, and repeated himself on that point over Caroline’s howl of disappointment that Adam could hear from the kitchen.
“Okay, Bean, I gotta go,” Kyle said eventually. “No, I’m watching a movie, and it’s way past your bedtime. Tell Grandpa to call me again tomorrow so you can tell me what you do? I love you, Bean. I’ll see you soon. Bye!”
“She’s good?” Adam handed Kyle another beer.
“Fine. She said my aunt had special ‘princess sheets’ on the guest bed for her.”
“Princess sheets?”
“They’re probably purple. My aunt’s one of those old-school ladies who has soaps shaped like seashells in every bathroom, and keeps plastic on the couch unless there’s company coming. I bet she has spare sheets in every color so she’s prepared for every possible guest situation. But hey, if Bean says they’re princess sheets, then that’s what they are! Speaking of which . . .” His lips moved like he was calculating complex figures. “We have forty-five hours left to my kidless weekend. Let’s get a move on! You ready for the next one?”
The second episode went better for Adam. He was less distracted by Kyle than he had been the first time. As the credits rolled, it was his turn to reach for the remote. “Another?”
Kyle was stretched out on the couch, two cushions propping his head up while his feet dangled over the far arm. A lazy smile spread across his face. “I knew I’d wear you down, Mr. Hathaway.”
Adam’s stomach tightened.
Parent, Adam reminded himself. Widowed parent.
“Are we friends?” Kyle’s question from earlier tumbled through Adam’s brain. Friends. Friends watching TV on a Friday night.
As the opening credits rolled again, Kyle stood and flicked off the overhead light in the living room.
“Better.” He flopped back down on the couch.
Two more episodes and Adam was hooked.
“Okay, you were right. This is excellent,” he said. “There’s a few seasons online, right?” The room was silent as the TV screen flashed back to the main menu. When Adam glanced at Kyle, he discovered Kyle was asleep on the couch. Very asleep. One hand dangled toward the floor. His head was cocked at an awkward angle.
“Kyle?” Adam said.
No response.
Adam turned the TV off. He walked to Kyle and shook his shoulder. Still nothing. In the soft light from the kitchen, Kyle looked young, his artfully messy hair mashed down against his head. For the hundredth time, Adam wondered how he could have covered so much life already.
“We weren’t married.”
“Some asshole in a BMW couldn’t be bothered to check the intersection before he turned and I lost my best friend.”
Adam clenched his fist and fought off the urge to run his fingers through Kyle’s hair.
“Kyle?” he said one last time.
Kyle rolled over to face the back of the couch. “Go back to bed, Bean. It’s too early to get up.”
Adam walked across the room to the small closet outside the bathroom and took out an old quilt. He laid it over Kyle, who didn’t move again.
Lying in his own bed a few minutes later, Adam stared up at the ceiling in the dark. His apartment was silent. With the lights out and the bedroom door closed, there was no way to know that there was anyone else in his apartment. And yet he was intensely aware that someone—Kyle—was asleep in the next room, and that somehow, Adam wanted Kyle to be asleep next to him.
He sighed in the dark. This was a problem on so many levels. The reasons why anything other than a platonic relationship with Kyle were not in the cards for him were numerous, rational, and valid.
The slow end to Adam’s time at Newcastle had taught him important lessons about why getting involved with someone close to his work was a bad idea. He had promised himself to be careful when he was ready to meet someone new, and especially to look further afield when that happened. And yet, in the two years since he’d come to Red Creek, Adam hadn’t met a man who he’d felt anything other than a passing attraction to. But now Kyle had blown into his life, and suddenly all of Adam’s promises and rules seemed unreasonably restrictive.
“Are we friends?”
Adam wanted the answer to that question to be both yes and no.