Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

“I DON’T SUPPOSEyou’ve ever read the book The Night Circus, have you?” Kyle watched as Vic retrieved coffee for them both. All the patrons had already gone. He, Vic, and a smattering of other vendors were left behind, unwinding after a long Saturday of sales.

“Oh, I love that book.” Vic exclaimed, reappearing from the seemingly-closed booth with steaming mugs. “It’s part of why I started hanging out after-hours, to be honest.”

Kyle started to realize why the market’s strange name fit the atmosphere. In the darkness, the booths seemed unusually tall—certainly taller than the average seller’s stock required, their curved tops nearly touching the pine trees that surrounded them. It seemed jarring to look around and not spot a Ferris wheel, an elephant, or maybe some kind of ringmaster Jack Frost.

He and Vic weren’t the only ones who’d stayed after-hours. Gloria was there in her cotton-candy hair, as well as a few others whose faces Kyle knew but couldn’t put names to. They nodded as they passed, some even greeting Kyle while he stood outside the hot drinks booth waiting for Vic. No one made him feel like he didn’t belong there, as if he’d run away with the actual circus.

“Let me know when you need to take off, by the way.” Vic told him, gingerly guiding the mug to Kyle’s hands.

Kyle sipped. Coffee, but with peppermint. He probably wouldn’t be able to fall asleep for a long while tonight, but at least he had nothing exciting to do the next day. “I’m good to stay as long as you are. I have a sitter for the kids, and they’re probably having a great time.”

“You have kids?” Gloria called, her voice seeming impossibly loud without the usual crowds. She might be one of those people with only one volume setting. “I knew it. I’d thought to myself, ‘That man has a bit of daddy in him.’”

Kyle choked on his drink. Vic patted him on the back as he fought to recover from the (hopefully) unintended innuendo. “Y-Yes, I have a girl and a boy. Alice is eleven, and Zach is eight.”

“Awwww!” Gloria crooned. “Those are just babies. I just have one son, but he’s grown now. He’ll be twenty-four in February.”

Kyle blinked. “You… definitely don’t look old enough to have an adult child,” he said.

Gloria raised her eyebrows at Vic as he and Kyle huddled together on the curb. “I like him. You better keep him around awhile, if you know what’s good for you.”

Now it was Vic’s turn to look embarrassed. “Well, I can’t exactly keep him trapped here for my convenience.”

Gloria grinned and nodded as she pulled plastic wrap off a tray of assorted gingerbread cookies. She handed Vic and Kyle one each, then went off to distribute them among the other off-duty vendors.

“Speaking of… ah, Alice…,” Vic began. “Did she like the scarf you bought for her?”

Kyle nodded emphatically. “She loves it. She’s always loved dragonflies, so I knew she’d enjoy the iridescence of it.”

“I’m glad….” Vic turned the gingerbread man over in his hand, an aura of anxiety spiking from him. “So… being that you have a sitter, I’m guessing you don’t have, like… a shared custody situation?”

Kyle shook his head. “Nope. Just me.”

A long moment went by, both of them seeming content to watch the pillar of steam from the hot drinks booth dance between the pine tree branches. “Did… something happen? You can feel free to just not answer, I just—”

Kyle laughed softly. “No, I don’t mind you asking. It means you definitely haven’t Googled my name or anything.”

It wouldn’t have been the first time, and it was a big part of the reason why Kyle had given up on serial rebound dates. There was no solace when someone recognized his name and reminded him of the worst year of his life like it was their favorite true crime episode.

Vic’s eyebrows shot up. “Okay, again, feel free to veto this, but now I’m really curious.”

“All right, all right. I guess I can’t just leave it at that, can I?” Better to have it out now than for Vic to get curious later and Google the whole thing. At least this way, Kyle could gauge his reaction in person rather than wondering what he’d think. “Can we go somewhere quieter?”

Vic’s eyes followed his gaze to the vendors mingling and joking around them. He nodded. “I know just the place.”

“DON’T TELLanyone I’m showing you this.”

Kyle didn’t think the abandoned factory by the riverfront was used for anything these days. When he was a child, it used to process paper. He still remembered the constant stream of white billowing out of the smokestack. The rare visitor might comment on the smell of the papermill, but locals seemed born with an immunity to it. Before Kyle was in middle school, however, the paper company had gone out of business and the building sat there since, fading into the background until he’d almost forgotten its presence at the scenic waterfront.

Vic struggled with the lock on the heavy metal door for a few seconds before waving Kyle inside.

The door swung open with an echoing creak as they entered. Kyle had to wait a moment for his eyes to adjust to make sense of the shadows that lurked in different shapes all around the edges of the large, echoing room.

Boxes of vendor stock and decorations poked out of the cardboard. Kyle recognized some of the statues and trees from prior years of the Circus, including a nativity scene that was displayed before the market became less religious over the years.

In the center of the room loomed a large snow globe. Well, large was actually an understatement. The glass top of the structure was tall enough for an adult to stand in and the circumference of the average hot tub. It was wrapped in strings of periwinkle-white Christmas lights, making it look like the glass was being hugged by the stars themselves. The base was painted with a deep blue background and silvery snowflakes. It had a hatch at the top and another at the base, which momentarily confused Kyle.

“It used to be a giant gumball machine,” Vic explained, as if reading his thoughts.

The area wasn’t entirely enclosed. The ceiling above them had an expansive hole worn in it from years of neglect. Kyle stepped forward to get a better look and realized the hole opened up to the sky outside. As fast as winter night could fall, the patch of sky already shone with real stars.

“Whoa,” Kyle breathed.

“Right?” Vic smiled. “Originally we were all told to keep our stock here. But, y’know, with it being open to the elements, it’s not the greatest for that. The owner mostly uses it to store future projects. Like that—” He pointed to the snow globe. “— is going to be used so kids can catch money blowing around in it next year.” He walked to the globe, pulling up the metallic hatch at the bottom. “Step into my office.”

Kyle smiled. “And tell my story to the globe?”

“Exactly.”

Getting inside was less awkward than Kyle would have imagined, even with his tall stature. Halfway through, he had to twist his body into a limbo move to join Vic, but in less than a minute they took seats on opposite sides of the globe. It was vaguely stuffy, so Vic stood and pushed up the top hatch. It clattered to the side with a jarring bang, but fresh, cool air wafted in. “I hang out here sometimes when I’m brainstorming. I thought you might like it too.”

“I do.” Kyle scanned his surroundings, seeing in the factory windows, the night sky, and the storage boxes all distort through the globe’s curve.

Vic nodded. “I figured you’d want some privacy.”

“It helps,” Kyle agreed. He didn’t know how to start. It wasn’t something he could launch into cold, but what introduction could be appropriate? “So. Her name was Julie. We were married for eight years. High school sweethearts—we started early.” His fingers played with the end of his scarf, combing through the strands of fringe. “We had a lot of the same interests. We were both nerds, we loved to watch old movies. We both liked reading. I knew, early on in our marriage, that she was a bit truth-challenged. She’d lie about things that wouldn’t make sense.”

Vic nodded, leaning back and propping himself up with his palms behind him. “Kind of a compulsive liar type of situation?”

Kyle nodded. “Exactly. Once I caught her lying about the fact that her mom was in the hospital. Except, she wasn’t: she’d come by to take the kids to school that morning. Julie lied about being out of town. She would make up the oddest things—suddenly being allergic to coconut, eggplant, peanuts. I knew what she ate at home, so I have no idea why she’d bother to make things up. She once told a friend she was originally from Ireland. Another time, she was from the Faroe Islands. I didn’t really confront her on it, though.” He shrugged. “I’m not great with conflict.”

“You were fine with handling Ms. Go-To-College, though,” Vic pointed out.

Kyle considered that, then corrected himself. “I wasn’t great with conflict. I’m better at it now. Maybe because of this….” He sighed. “The weird thing was, nothing actually… led to what happened. No fight, no problems. She could be passive-aggressive, didn’t like a lot of my friends, occasionally judgmental. But it was nothing earth-shattering. We never fought in front of the kids or anything. I didn’t know she was unhappy, but I guess looking back, we were sort of distant…. Chilly.”

Vic shifted to lean against Kyle’s side. Vic had a very cat-like way of offering comfort, Kyle noticed—pressing himself against Kyle’s side, even nudging Kyle’s shoulder with his face. “Yeah?” he prompted.

Kyle took a deep breath. “It was three years ago. Alice was eight, Zach was five. And she was due home from work at a local restaurant. She sent me a text saying, ‘Hey, may be late. Someone’s tailing me and I’m going to take a few weird turns.’ The text didn’t really alarm me. I wouldn’t go as far to say she was paranoid; I don’t live in a woman’s world, I can’t pretend to know what it’s like. But she would try to convince me that people who looked at us were glaring at her, or tell me that Lloyd was staring at the house with binoculars from next door, that customers were taking pictures of her. If you believed her, you would think she was a celebrity desperately trying to lay low, or something. It wasn’t the first time she’d told me someone was following her, but I never had any indication that it was true.”

Vic nodded, his breath brushing against Kyle’s neck. It made him feel impossibly warm.

“Then she didn’t come home. That had never happened before. I called the police as soon as I’d put the kids to bed. Turns out, her car was found on the side of the road, just pulled over near a wooded area. The car door was open. Her wallet was in there, but not her phone.” He sighed. “Of course, I was out of my mind with worry. A huge search was launched…. You’ve seen how small this town is. A potential kidnapping was huge. Nothing like that had ever happened. There were groups of volunteers and dogs combing the woods around where the car was found. It got into the news.”

“They didn’t suspect you, did they? They couldn’t possibly.” Vic asked. “I mean, no offense, but I’d sooner suspect Mickey Mouse of a crime than you.”

Kyle laughed. Generally, only Wesley could make him laugh about his marriage. But with Vic, he couldn’t help it. “Some did, sure. Mostly hobbyist crime sleuths online. ‘It’s always the husband.’ But I was home the entire time. Both my phone records and the kids attested to that. It went on for months. Months. I had to handle the kids waking up crying. I had to handle the police asking my kids what our marriage was like, if we’d ever fought…. I literally had Alice ask me, one night, if her mom was dead. Her grades were suffering, Zach nearly had a nervous breakdown at daycare. It was bad.”

“Jesus.” Vic chewed his lip, his soft brown eyes were looking up at Kyle through the fringe of his bangs. “She was never kidnapped, was she?”

Kyle shook his head. “Nope. Turned out, she’d started an online relationship with another guy and figured she could just cut and run from her life. She was—bored, I guess. We found out six months later. She’d kept her phone but never turned it on, just in case it could be tracked. But then she bought a new phone and had someone transfer her old data to the new device. And the old phone being accessed sent up a flag. She was in another state, hiding out at her new boyfriend’s house.”

Vic whistled low. “And she cheated?”

“I really couldn’t care less about the cheating,” Kyle bit out. “If Julie wanted to leave me for someone else, fine. If she was unhappy, she could divorced me. I wouldn’t have fought it. But making myself, my kids, think that something terrible had happened to her—I was furious, no, horrified when I found out.”

“I bet,” Vic breathed.

Kyle took a couple of deep breaths, calming himself. He wasn’t an angry person. In fact, he was far from it. But this was the only subject that could inspire bitterness in him. “Julie ended up going to jail for a few months. As it turns out, the state doesn’t really take kindly to people who waste police time and resources. Tens of thousands were spent trying to find her or her imaginary kidnapper. I kind of wanted to reach out to her—ask her why, if she was out of her mind, if she cared that she’d scared the kids half to death. Turns out I didn’t have to. She sent three letters from jail, addressed to each of us.”

“Are you serious?” Vic sat up to look Kyle full in the face.

Kyle nodded jerkily. “Of course, I read mine. I was tempted to throw it away, but I was hoping for some reasonable explanation, if any. Not the case. Just this long, drawn-out rant about how she had never wanted to be a housewife and that I should have ‘read between the lines’ to realize it. That she’d been dropping hints for years and that I was ‘too oblivious’ to understand her unhappiness. She blamed me, saying I drove her to it, saying she’d been bored and I just ‘chose to ignore it.’” He gave a shuddering sigh.

He wondered if Vic could feel his quickened pulse beneath his coat. “What’d she say to your kids?”

“I never found out,” Kyle said quickly. “I was honest with the kids about what happened. Well, as honest as I could be without putting too much on them. It was a fine line. But I did tell them that she faked her kidnapping, that it was wrong, it was illegal, that I was angry with her. They understood pretty well, for their ages. I told them both, ‘Hey, your mother sent a letter to each of us. The one she sent to me was very mean. I didn’t read what she sent to you. I don’t want to. I think you’re too young for them now, but if you’d like me to save them so you can read them one day, I will. Otherwise, I’ll throw them away.’”

“What’d they decide?” Vic whispered.

Kyle shifted to free his arm out from between them to run through his hair. Vic didn’t protest. “They were done with her. They were old enough to understand that what she had done was cruel. Neither of them were interested in what she had to say. They don’t call her mom anymore.”

Vic shifted his body to press more so against Kyle’s. “I take it that it was pretty easy to get custody of them after that?”

“She didn’t even show up to the hearing. We’ve never heard from her again, and we prefer it that way.” Somehow, it was soothing to have Vic in his arms for this. “Occasionally, they’ll still ask me questions about it. They’re always welcome to. They’ll even joke about it—we’ll watch a news story about someone who faked cancer or something, and Alice will say, ‘That sounds like a Julie move.’ But… everyone knew what happened. I could barely leave the house without someone recognizing me and asking me questions about it. I stopped trusting people. After a while, I just stopped going out.”

“I’m sorry…,” Vic whispered, as if the fragile normality Kyle had constructed might break if he spoke too loudly. “For what it’s worth, you’re not… boring. You’re one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever known. You didn’t deserve that.”

“And you didn’t deserve to come home with all your things out on the lawn. Or to keep starting a new life again and again just to be screwed over by people you put your faith in.” Kyle saw Vic worrying on his bottom lip, his gaze shifted to the side as if he wanted to argue. “You didn’t. You know that, don’t you?” Somehow, it was of the utmost importance that Vic recognized it—that he didn’t blame himself the way Kyle had, three years ago. He could picture it, the crushed look on Vic’s face as person after person kicked him to the curb. It made him want to shake the world by the shoulders.

“I….” Vic was still looking everywhere but him.

It started snowing again, the fat, slow flakes falling through the hole in the roof and the hatch of the snow globe. It seemed too perfect—the snow globe filled with actual snow.

Kyle reached for Vic, cradling his face in his hands. He tried to imagine himself in Vic’s situations, finding out someone had chosen his mother’s bribery over him, finding out time and again that what he’d uprooted himself for had been a lie. “You didn’t,” Kyle murmured. He didn’t want Vic to sidestep, to laugh this off, to hide any blame he felt. “You deserve anything you want.”

Their faces were so close together. Snowflakes clung to Vic’s eyelashes, the look in his eyes like an open wound Kyle desperately wanted to heal.

Before he knew it, Kyle was kissing him—desperately, fervently, leaning over him. Vic made a noise, a soft groan. Kyle thought for one terrifying moment that maybe he had misread this, that Vic hadn’t been flirting with him all night. Kyle hadn’t even asked.

But then he felt Vic’s fingers in his hair, those strong artist hands petting his scalp. Vic’s lips moved against his, meeting him at every turn, deftly moving his body to fit more perfectly underneath Kyle’s own.

Kyle broke the kiss and stared down. Vic’s eyes fluttered open, feverish and dazed. “You know that, right? You didn’t deserve it.”

“I didn’t deserve it,” Vic whispered breathlessly.

“Say it again,” Kyle’s hands braced on either side of Vic’s head, their legs tangled together.

Vic’s eyes seemed to clear, then. Challenging, meeting Kyle halfway. “We didn’t deserve it.”

Kyle kissed him again, parting his lips and sweeping his tongue over Vic’s. He tasted of peppermint. Vic arched his back, giving Kyle the opportunity to hook an arm under him, holding him. As Vic’s hips shifted, Kyle could feel the heat, the telltale stiffness, against his thigh. He raised his knee higher, satisfied when Vic squirmed against him in response.

The kiss turned slow, teasing. Vic broke away momentarily to murmur a curse, then returned, as if Kyle’s lips were his only means of taking in air. When they broke for breath, Kyle pressed his face to Vic’s, whispering in his ear. “You make me feel alive,”

“You make me feel real,” Vic gasped.

They went back to kissing, meeting in a dance they hadn’t realized they’d choreographed. Kyle ran the hand under Vic over the length of his back, slipping his hand under his sweater. He had the wild, irresistible need to make Vic understand just how much he deserved to be loved, even if they both grew damp from melted snow. He wanted to kiss every inch of him, feel every shiver, savor every breath. He wanted to breathe Vic in, his heat and his hope, and fill him with all the passion and devotion he’d always deserved and never received.

The factory door banged loudly.

Kyle tore himself, mentally growling, from the blissful world he and Vic shared and back to reality. He and Vic broke apart. The glass had fogged since they’d first climbed in, so they both had to squint to see the girl from the handmade jewelry booth, Emily, covering her mouth in exaggerated embarrassment. “Oh my gosh. Oh, I am so sorry. I was just here to grab my bag—”

Stiffly, Kyle nodded. He felt dizzy and Vic’s ears were red, a stark contrast to his blond hair, as the other vender hooked her hand around the strap of her bag and whipped away, through the factory door and out of sight.

Their eyes met, acknowledging the close call. If she’d been only five minutes later…. “We probably shouldn’t, ah…,” Vic said hoarsely, motioning to the setting around them.

“Not in the snowglobe?”

Vic laughed lightly. “Yeah… I’m down, otherwise, but—I mean, my sister’s home by now, so—”

Kyle racked his brain for somewhere else they could go. The town’s only hotel would be astronomically expensive on a Saturday night. And Wesley was in his house with Alice and Zach. If he had known this would escalate so quickly, he could have planned ahead. But as it was….

Vic refastened the upper hatch, waiting for Kyle to slip out of the bottom hatch before following to close it behind them. “Look,” Kyle began. “We don’t have to rush. I want to do this the right way…. Dinner, drinks, all that.”

Vic smiled, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Well, I’d rather not go all the way in the storage area of your workplace. Inside a snowglobe.” He chuckled.

Vic continued smoothing down his hair. “So, what you’re asking for is a date. Not just hanging out.”

“Yeah. A date.”

Vic led him out of the factory. They walked along the outskirts of the market, as Kyle was sure they’d both rather be attacked by sentient icicles than run into poor Emily so soon. “My sister won’t be home on Wednesday…. Know any good places for dinner?”

Vic didn’t want anywhere too fancy, but Kyle was intent on spoiling him. They finally decided on a new restaurant in the town’s center called Poe’s Tavern, themed after Edgar himself. “I’ve been meaning to go there,” Vic admitted.

“Just had no one to go with?” Kyle guessed.

“I hate eating alone.” They were still holding hands. The fire from before had been doused with awkwardness, but there were still embers kindling. He’d been impulsive, yes, but none of it felt like a misstep to Kyle. He wished he could translate the morse code in the way Vic’s fingers squeezed his, to know without asking that Vic felt the same way. The uncertainty was maddening.

“Well, then… seven o’clock? We can meet there?”

Vic nodded tentatively. He looked, for a moment, as if he’d been defeated by something—as if his willpower had crumbled beneath a greater power.

Kyle hoped he wouldn’t regret it.