Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

Luke

There had been some inexplicable moments in my life. Some had made me wonder how random the universe was. Some had shifted the course of my life in significant ways. My mother's reluctance to believe I was gay had come as the biggest surprise of all, considering she had never been anything other than a progressive. "But this is my family we're talking about," she had said once, finishing the discussion on that topic. The steellike determination to ignore my growing attempts to convince her of my sexuality had had an unexpected consequence. Loyalties shifted, plans changed.

In the years that followed, impossible things happened. As if unconnected threads of possible lives were weaved into a pattern of a rich tapestry, my life took twists and turns and made me who I was. Not all of it was good, and I made my fair share of mistakes. Some of those mistakes led me to where I was. Some mistakes, on the other hand, were so dear to my heart that I was never able to let them go.

He would become a pattern in my life. Rafael Santos, the black-haired, dark-eyed beauty with a zest for adventure and an uncanny ability to make the most mundane things seem most interesting. And then, he would become a fixed fact of my universe.

A long time ago, when I cried myself to sleep knowing I would never see him again, I couldn't have imagined how much of Rafael had remained in me. And I couldn't dream of the impossible things that would come.

Somewhere in the Alps

Spring, 2016

The train tilted this way and that as it sped along the railway. The heating system was making me drowsy, canceling the effects of a double shot of espresso I had had half an hour earlier in Zurich. My stuffy jacket added warmth, but I couldn't be bothered to take it off. I sketched. Flipping one page after the next, my left leg crossed awkwardly over my right knee, I crouched over my work and pressed on.

When numbness set into my leg, I uncrossed it and gazed out of the window. Snow blanketed many parts of the region, even though March was well underway. As the sun lit up the snowcapped mountains, they looked like heaven was real, and the only way to find it was to climb to the peaks.

I gazed out as the mountains sped by.

The Inspire Salzburg conference for young artists was opening with an evening exhibition tomorrow, giving me today and most of tomorrow to explore the city. Since returning to Paris two months ago, I had wanted to ride a train east. It had always remained a heartache deep in my chest.

When I boarded a train from Paris to Zurich, memories overpowered me. The entire journey had gone by without me lifting my pencil. I had gazed out of the window to look at the endless meadows with fresh grass rising from a long winter and the blossoming cherry trees, I watched the villages pass us by and thought about the cities where we stopped. Despite convincing myself it was just a train ride, I couldn't stop my mind from dreaming up this same ride happening nearly two years ago.

But I'm going to Salzburg, not Budapest , I reminded myself ever so often. I'm going to the conference to learn more about my craft . The stipend that had brought me to Paris for this semester included conferences across the European Union. The entire impossible deal was the best thing that had happened to me in years. Especially with all my plans going out the window at the last minute, just as the first wave of college submissions was opening. Sometimes I wondered if I had already paid the price for my crazy luck; sometimes, I feared that bill was yet to be settled.

The train was largely empty. Zurich in Switzerland to Salzburg in Austria wasn't such a hot tour on Tuesday morning, even if the distance wasn't that great and the fare was pretty affordable. I attributed it to the fatigue of a long winter. And that was possibly the biggest reason why I rolled my eyes when a passenger neared my row and stuffed a backpack on the overhead rack.

I stared out the window furiously. Of the entire nearly empty train, this social butterfly just had to sit in the empty seat next to me. Were I not as polite as I had always been, I would have shot them an angry look. But as it were, I only argued with them inside my head.

A single heartbeat before he spoke, a deeply buried memory of sea waves crashing against the cliffs, their spray dispersing a strong scent of salt through the heated air, resurfaced at the forefront of my mind.

I gripped my sketchbook hard enough to rip it to pieces if I weren't careful.

"You're late," came the purr from my left.

I spun my head and blinked furiously to prevent any tears from daring to well in my eyes.

Light brown skin, still as smooth and glowing, and a pair of warm hazel eyes made my heart stumble. "When I said noon, I meant the noon of the next day, Luke." His lips stretched into a pearly grin.

Heat blossomed on my cheeks as I stared at the apparition. "You…"

"Me." His smile broadened, eyebrows wriggling playfully.

"How are you…? Are you really here?" I asked in a hurried whisper. I struggled to find my voice. It was tr ue that I had been reminded of Rafael more than once since returning to Paris and much more since arriving at the fated train station yesterday, but I had never entertained the idea of meeting him again. Well, that was only partly a lie. Every now and then, in the last two months, I would walk down a street in the city, and an image of him in a café would float before my eyes before I banished that silly hopefulness from my heart and my mind.

"Pinch me," Rafael said and cocked his head a little. His face was perfect, just like it had been nearly two years ago when I had first committed it to my memory. His earrings were the same he'd worn that night in Paris, and his lips were just as well-defined. On his right eyebrow was a cut that seemed to be healing well. It wasn't very fresh. Above his lips and on his chin, a soft shadow hinted at something like a mustache and beard. It suited him.

I brought my fingers to his smooth, bronze cheek and let them hover a moment before jerking my hand back. "You're not surprised to see me," I said.

He pulled his lower lip between his teeth and leaned deeper into his chair. "That's because I saw you board the train in Zurich."

My breath hitched in my throat. "Two hours ago." I nodded, accepting that he had every reason to want nothing to do with me. I turned to look at the seat in front of me.

"I had to think," Rafael said in his soft voice. I could still hear him rambling about this and that, but every word felt carefully placed exactly where it belonged. " Believe me, it took me a moment to return to my senses. I didn't think it was you."

I looked at him directly then. "I understand why you had to think if you wanted to speak to me. I…owe you an explanation."

Rafael waved his left hand dismissively. His long, slender fingers had more elegance in them than I had in my entire life. "Not at all."

The words stabbed me in the chest. I couldn't believe that he would be sarcastic and passive-aggressive; then again, I didn't actually know this man. So I looked down in shame.

"I had to think if this would be possible," he said. "And I figured, what the hell, I'll just do it."

A small frown wrinkled the space between my eyebrows. "Do what?"

"Where are you going?" he asked, ignoring my question.

I told him about the conference in Salzburg.

"Tomorrow evening," Rafael murmured thoughtfully and nodded. He casually lifted one leg over the other, his right ankle resting against his left knee. He was very close to me. We were almost touching, but I didn't dare to touch him. Not intentionally, at least. "I'm supposed to get off in Innsbruck. But."

My ears perked. I wanted to hear every softly spoken word he would offer me.

"Not far after my stop, there's this place I'd visited once—a small town called Kufstein. It lies at the foot of a mountain on the bank of a river. You'll never see a more charming town or more breathtaking nature." He pulled on a devilish grin that I knew well. It was the same smile that kept me out on the streets of Paris until four in the morning once. "What do you say we have a little detour? I don't get off in Innsbruck, and you do get off in Kufstein. With me as your guide. Tomorrow, you can catch another train to Salzburg, and I'll get an Uber back to Innsbruck."

My heart hammered almost as hard and fast as when he had first held my hand. A fearful smile touched my lips. "You haven't changed a bit."

Rafael nodded. "That smile tells me that you have." He already knew I would come along.

"I would have come with you then," I corrected him. In this, I hadn't changed. The only thing that changed was the fact that I had had to gain my independence before I could do something as mad as this. "My mother…" And my words dried up.

I hadn't realized how much it still hurt, that one missed opportunity. I hadn't realized how much I still grudged my mother for standing in my way, even if her reasons seemed right to her. And I hadn't realized how painful it was that she had never acknowledged the fact that I was gay. These things tightened around my neck like a noose.

Rafael nodded understandingly. "We were kids, Luke. What did we know?" A touch of sadness existed in that sweet, disarming smile. I suspected that he didn't mean it—not like that, at least. It was one of those things people said to justify just about anything. After all, he had been nineteen at the time, and I was still nineteen now .

But times had changed, that was true. My eighteenth birthday seemed a lifetime ago.

"We still have about two hours before Kufstein," Rafael said, rubbing his hands.

I nodded.

"So…" He tilted his head playfully. "What did I miss?"

A laugh broke out of me before I could contain it. "In detail?"

"Excruciating if you'd be so kind." Something about his smile made me want to do just that. But his gaze flickered between my face and the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me. "No way, Luke." He reached over and pulled out a battered paperback of The Sandman he had given me. "Are you kidding me?" He flipped through it as heat rose to my face. "Oh, this was read. This was read more than once." He closed the book and pulled his finger down the broken spine. Again, he flipped it open, but only to the very first page, where his inscription still decorated the empty space. "You'll bring me up to speed later. Now I need to know what you think of this." The pure joy of a fan converting a nonbeliever into a fan was so obvious on his face that I decided he was right.

Straining to keep my smile from splitting my face in half, I nodded slowly. "It's a long story."

"I've got all the time in the world," Rafael said, the book closed in one hand, fingers of the other hand moving over the front cover so lovingly that I was briefly jealous of the book.

I shook that silly thought away and inhaled through my nose. "When you left, I was…" Gutted. Inconsolable. Willing to rip my heart out and toss it into fire . "Bummed," I said.

Rafael gave a significant nod and sarcastically arched one eyebrow.

"I wasn't in the mood to go around Paris, and I had a—not a fight, that's too strong—more disagreements with my mother than ever before. I came out to her that morning, you see. And she didn't…" Fuck . It was hard to talk about any of this. Two years after the fact, and I still struggled to call myself gay aloud. "Let's just say she wasn't as happy as you were when I said it. Anyway, I stayed in the room for the rest of that horrible trip, and I burned through Madame Bovary in a day and a half. And then I picked this thing up." I pointed at the book in his hands.

"And you liked it enough to carry it around two years later," Rafael concluded.

I nodded a little reluctantly. "It's more than that. See, I told you I have a conference tomorrow, but it's a conference for artists. I…" And when words weren't enough, I lifted my sketchbook from my lap and thrust it at Rafael. It was my entire life now. The Sandman was such an imaginative thing that it opened my eyes not just to a genre but to a whole new way of storytelling.

Rafael's face glimmered with surprise as he flipped through my sketchbook. "Luke, you're an artist," he said in disbelief.

"I'm trying to be," I admitted. "After we returned to New York, I buried myself in graphic novels for the rest of that summer. Then, knowing it was more than just an obsession, I spent my senior year learning to sketch. It was intense. I didn't leave our house except to attend courses. And Mom was happy to let me do whatever so long as we didn't have to have any serious conversations. Well, she wasn't so happy when I went ahead and applied to art schools all over the States."

Rafael smiled and then chuckled with something not too unlike pride. "And you got accepted?"

"Not right away," I said. "The entire summer, my inbox was flooded with rejections. But I kept studying, practicing, and submitting my work to schools. In late August, the Metropolitan Academy of Fine Arts accepted me." Mom had gone through it all that summer; she had gloated in no discreet ways when I'd gotten my rejections, but it only motivated my stubbornness. In those days, Mom and I were engaged in a cold war of sorts.

Rafael examined my sketches, nodding with a purely pleased expression on his face and a glint in his eyes. "I always knew you'd do something amazing," he said softly. I found that hard to believe, considering he had known me for ten hours and I had unintentionally ghosted him. "That snobbish boy with his Goriot and Bovary becoming a sketch artist because of a comic book? That's incredible."

"Oi," I warned him, but we both laughed.

"Give me your phone," he said.

I didn't hesitate—oddly, I would have if it were anyone other than Rafael. "What are you doing?"

He tapped at my screen, but my gaze was on his eyes. "Last time, I wanted to hit myself in the head for thinking we would just go on a trip and have time to get to know each other better. It never crossed my mind that we might not get a chance."

I had also been so swept up in the moment that nothing outside our bubble mattered.

"Here." He thrust the phone back to me. "That's my number. I don't have any social media accounts, but I'm not a caveman."

I dialed him right away, and his phone vibrated in his pocket. "There. Now you have mine, too."

Rafael was silent for a few moments. He was looking at the sketchbook and the graphic novel in his lap, thinking. "I'm not sure I believe in fate, but I believe in the randomness of the universe. Meeting you again—and in a train, of all things—feels like the most random accident ever. When we part tomorrow, I don't want to hope to run into you again because even the universe has its limits."

"We'll stay in touch this time," I said, my thumb caressing my phone now that it had his number saved. The fact that he mentioned parting ways tomorrow made my heart sink a little. Though I had seen him twice in my life, being around him both times made the rest of the world into something beautiful and distant and less important than watching the way his lips moved when he spoke.

"But first, I'll take you up to the castle in Kufstein," Rafael said with a cheeky smile.

"There's a castle?" I asked, already in awe.

"Of course," he said in the same tone someone might use to confirm that, yes, the sky is really blue . "We never went to the Fishermen's Bastion, but I've got a few castles up my sleeves."

Nobody made me laugh at such corny things. Until now.

And as the train rocked, we settled in for a ride to Kufstein. And a night in Kufstein, apparently. I wondered if he would take my hand again. I wondered if he would have the same confidence and courage as before. I wondered if there was a chance for us to act as if we were just two boys on an adventure the way we had meant to back then.

"What are you doing in Innsbruck?" I asked.

Rafael didn't hesitate. I would spend years pondering whether it would have hurt more if he had tiptoed around it or if the way he said it was worse. I never decided on the right answer. "I'm meeting my boyfriend for a skiing break." Flat, emotionless, purely factual. And yet, he was looking at the cover of The Sandman rather than my eyes.

That was the gift he gave me. I could let my heart shatter in silence and solitude, unseen and unwitnessed by him.