Jack and Calder woke cold and tangled up in their improvised den. Jack felt guilt and regret settle on him like a fog almost at once. He watched Calder gradually waking beside him, the lines of his face, the curve of his shoulder, just visible in the morning light through the tarp. He hated himself all the more for the warmth that face caused in him, his desire to kiss that shoulder. He rolled away and began disentangling himself brusquely, not answering Calder’s confused, sleepy noise. He pushed his way out past the tarp, needing fresh air, not caring that he was letting out the heat.
He stood in the snow, looking out over the ice field with a scowl, contemplating his options. He could see the different texture of the patch of ice which had frozen over the hole his plane was in last night. The reminder that his livelihood and primary source of happiness in the world was currently in pieces at the bottom of an estuary further soured his mood.
After a few moments, Calder emerged to stand beside him. The other man looked tired and worn. He had numerous small cuts and bruises Jack had hardly noticed last night. He imagined he looked much the same. Calder offered him a protein bar from the pack.
“I don’t know if we should be rationing these,” he said, “but you could probably use it, right?”
Jack grunted in agreement and accepted the offered bar, unwrapping it and taking a big bite. It tasted like sawdust and peanut butter, but it was better than nothing.
“So what’s the plan?” Calder asked. “What are we doing?”
“Waiting,” Jack told him between mouthfuls of the protein bar.
“There must be something we can do,” Calder suggested. “Build a sign or—Or look for food or something.”
“Save energy, stay warm, and wait.” Jack took another bite of the protein bar. Calder stared at him for a long moment. The early sunlight cast golden bars across his face, between which the shadows were a perfect blue. There wasn't much wind right now, the air clear. Far across the ice field, more than a football field's length away, the rising sun lit a small stand of pines, their shadows like the ghost of taller, more ancient trees on the ground behind them.
“Are you all right?” Calder asked, shifting his coat higher around him.
“No,” Jack spoke through gritted teeth, not looking at Calder, feeling his guilt sour and ferment into anger. “My plane is gone, anytime I turn my head too fast I almost pass out, and I'm stranded in the God damn arctic wilderness with no guarantee anyone even knows we're here. No, I'm not all right.”
“You don't need to take it out on me,” Calder said, taking a step back, his shoulders squaring. “I'm in the same situation, remember?”
Jack scoffed, looking away, and Calder bristled, reaching for his arm to turn the other man back toward him. Jack jerked his arm away, refusing.
“Hey, do we have a problem?” Calder asked, equal parts offended and hurt. “I thought we were past this.”
“Past what?” Jack muttered, shame creeping like a blush up the back of his neck.
“This!” Calder repeated. “You acting this way!”
“I'm not acting any damn way.” Jack hunched deeper into his jacket and stomped away. “Go back inside before you freeze.”
“No, I'm tired of this!” Calder followed him, his voice irate but a dreadful fear in his eyes, like a person standing on the edge of a cliff, waiting to be pushed off. “I'm tired of you acting like one person at night, then pretending nothing happened in the morning. What is your problem?”
“You are my problem,” Jack snapped, turning back to look him in the eye, his guilt boiling into rage. “You show up here, following me around, you demand I work for you, you threaten to kill yourself if I don't- real charming behavior there- and then, what, you expect me to cuddle with you after?”
Calder turned white, then red, stepping closer to shout in Jack's face.
“I never forced you to do anything!” His face was ugly with anger, his eyes wet. “I was under the impression you were enjoying yourself as much as I was!”
“You said yourself that you were taking advantage!” Jack said, baring his teeth in a smile that was all anger and no joy. “It isn't my fault you thought there was something else going on here! You're a warm body and a paycheck, Calder!”
Calder pulled back so fast it looked like he'd been hit. He stared at Jack, mouth open, silent.
“What, did you think I was going to bring you home to meet my parents?” Jack asked, sick guilt warring with burning shame into a boiling bile that made him nauseous and hot even in the cold wind. He couldn't look at Calder, couldn't see that face while he was lying. “I told you from the beginning that I wasn't like that. I thought you were smart enough to recognize what this was, but I guess I was wrong! Well here it is, Calder, plain and simple for you. I'm not your boyfriend and I never was. I'm not going to hold your hand or make you breakfast in bed or tell you I love you. You want someone to fuck around with, I'm your guy, but if you thought this was ever going to be anything else—”
“Shut up,” Calder snapped, his face rigid, stricken, mortified and furious. “Just because you're a coward. Just because you can't admit what you are—”
“You don't know a damn thing about what I am!”
“I know you aren't fucking straight!”
The words rang on the ice and Jack felt pulled in two directions, explosive anger battling humiliation, like a black hole swallowing a burning sun. He wanted to crawl into a hole, to bury himself, to scream at the sky. He wanted to be anywhere but here.
“Maybe it's true for some of those other guys,” Calder went on, gesturing wildly in the vague direction of the base. “Maybe they really do just do it for convenience or whatever. That's their business. But that's not you, Jack. I'm not stupid. I know that's not you.”
His voice trailed off quieter, leaving Jack very aware of the deafening silence of this icy place. He still couldn't look at Calder. He stared down at the snow until he felt a warm hand wrapping tentatively around his own.
“I'm not asking you to love me.” Calder's voice was soft as the snow, broken as the sky. “Just don't lie to me. Don't tell me it meant nothing.”
Jack fought the way the corners of his mouth dragged down and his eyes burned. That Calder could still be this gentle, this soft to him after what he'd said—It didn't make any sense to Jack. It made him feel like an idiot, his secrets as plain as the nose on his face. He'd never fooled anyone, had he?
“I'm not someone you should be with,” he said, hating how his voice broke. “I'm not someone anyone should be with. You can do better. You can still just...go home and forget this.”
Calder's hand tightened in his own, warm and strong.
“I'm not ever going to forget you,” he said. “Whatever else happens, I won't forget.”
He pulled Jack closer and Jack, fighting his shame, folded into the other man's arms. Calder held him tight, alone in a hundred miles of ice and snow, and Jack still felt like he could feel the eyes of the world burning on his skin.
They settled back into the cave, letting the warmth build up again. Jack sat with his back to the cold stone, still trying to shake the feeling that the world was watching and mocking him. Calder sat across from him, not looking at him.
“Is that why you came up here?” he asked, carefully watching only the flame of the sterno can as it warmed up a can of soup.
“No,” Jack replied, picking at the sleeve of his coat. “Just got lucky I guess. I always kinda knew. Couldn't face it. Wouldn't even entertain the thought. Could be...violent, when I got insecure about it. I was an angry kid, got in too many fights. Had a string of girlfriends in high school. Trying to prove something I guess. Thought I was gonna marry the last one. I took the first job in Anchorage thinking I'd get the flight hours I needed in as fast as I could, take a big job with the postal service or an airline company, and in a year, I'd buy a house, marry the girl, and do the whole white picket fence thing.”
The very words tasted sour in his mouth and he shuffled back into his coat, resisting the urge to spit.
“Instead, I came here,” he went on. “Learned fast how the guys were with each other. This thing I'd been denying and ignoring and hating all my life, suddenly there was a way I could try it without admitting anything. One of the older pilots had been eyeing me up since I arrived anyway, so I took him up on his offer. It wasn't good. It was rough, sloppy and impersonal. I never did it with him again. But I did try it again. Almost never more than once with the same person. Always telling myself it was just a way to waste time. It didn't mean anything about me. I still... I still hate it. I don't even like to think the words.”
“Gay?” Calder said, and Jack flinched. “Christ, Jack, it's 2017. It's not a death sentence anymore. Nobody cares.”
Jack shook his head.
“My parents sure as hell cared,” Jack muttered. “They cared about a lot of things. Real passionate people. Loud. Always something to yell about. Always a reason to be angry. I think they cared about me. It was hard to tell.”
“Do they know?” Calder asked, looking at him with eyes lit gold by the sterno flame. Jack scoffed.
“No,” he replied. “Maybe they suspected, but I don't think so. I never told them though. Haven't even spoken to them in years. Not since I told that girl I wasn't going south again. It's a good thing. Things are a lot more peaceful without them.”
“You don't seem happy, admitting it.” Calder put his chin on his arms, watching Jack curiously.
“I'm not,” Jack said as though it were obvious. “I don't want to be this. I don't want to change and uproot my life for some identity I didn't want in the first place. Listen to people making comments about it, judgments, like what I do in my own damn bed is any of their business—”
“Jack,” Calder said, sharp enough to cut through Jack's rising ire and make him focus. “What are you even talking about? You don't have to change or uproot anything. You're not just becoming this now because you admitted it. You're gay. Or bi, or whatever. You always were. It doesn't change because you're ignoring it or not. What, do you think all gay men have to move to San Francisco and wear sequins?”
Jack started to answer, then stopped himself. It wasn't that simple. He hadn't really thought it consciously, but yes. He'd assumed admitting he was like that would mean he'd have to start acting like it. But what did it mean to “act” gay, except to sleep with men? And he was already doing that. He put his head in his hands.
Calder reached across the little sterno flame.
“Listen,” he said. “I've been through it too. Maybe not as much or for as long as you. But there were plenty of times I hated myself. When I would have given anything to just be normal. I know what it feels like.”
He caught Jack's hand, stripped away their gloves to hold it skin to skin.
“My parents threw me out when I was sixteen,” he said. “Avery and I were homeless for a while. Sleeping on benches or in shelters. At that age, after years of shame, pretending to be something we weren’t was the last thing either of us wanted, but being honest about ourselves could have got us killed in a situation like that. Nearly did a couple of times. Some men who’d seen us holding hands beat the shit out of me once, and might have killed me if Avery hadn’t stopped them. Do you think lying there bleeding on the pavement, thinking I was going to die, that I didn’t wish to God and Buddha and anyone else who would listen that I was straight? Or at least strong enough to fake it?”
Jack felt his shame deepen, retroactively hating himself for the way he’d judged Calder when he first saw him. He’d assumed he was soft, weak and inexperienced. But he’d seen more than Jack ever had. Jack had never been homeless. He couldn’t even imagine it.
“I would have given anything to be normal,” Calder said, “because I didn’t understand that normal isn’t real. There’s no such thing. Normal is a ridiculous, unobtainable state of complete compliance to a system that wouldn’t recognize it if it saw it, and keeps moving the goal posts regardless. I could have found a girl and done the white picket thing, I could have chosen to never touch another man. I could have performed normalcy to a tee, but it still would have been a performance. A lie. And I would have been miserable forever. I would rather take the beatings, rather face the prejudices and the cruelty, all the million little things every day that remind me that the world thinks I’m wrong. I would rather have all of that, and one day living as myself with someone I love. We don’t have to be miserable.”
He squeezed Jack’s hand, his skin warm, calluses on his palms that Jack hadn’t noticed before.
“It doesn't have to be like that,” Calder said. “We're not wrong for existing. It takes time, but you won't hate yourself forever.”
“Wish that were easier to believe,” Jack muttered, but he didn't pull his hand from Calder's, despite the cold stinging at his skin. He wanted it to be true, almost more than he’d ever wished for anything else in his life.
They ate their soup in relative silence, but it was a more comfortable silence now, less burdened by the tension between them. Jack still felt ashamed, both of his desire and of what he'd said to Calder for the sake of denying it. He wasn't sure he'd ever be completely comfortable with it. He was still afraid of changing, of becoming someone he didn't recognize. He didn't know how to be Jack Whittaker, openly gay bush pilot. Hell, he barely knew how to be Jack Whittaker, closeted bush pilot.
Neither of them said anything more about the relationship that did or didn't exist between them, and Jack appreciated Calder's patience. He knew Calder was right. It was a stupid lie to pretend what they'd done together didn't mean anything. Jack was still afraid to admit it was more than that. Calder wasn't going to stay in Alaska when all this was over and Jack wasn't going to leave. It was stupid to get attached, reckless to get invested, when it would all be over soon one way or another.