Page 4 of Canned & Coated

“Want to look good for him,” he adds quickly, one hand lifting in mock surrender, even as that stupid smile tugs at his mouth.

I turn toward the window, watching the trees smear into green streaks as we speed past.

“You haven’t seen him in forever, and back then you were like… feral for him,” he adds.

“Milo…”

“Feral.” He says it louder this time, enunciating it till he’s sure it’ll stick. “Poems on your Tumblr feral.”

I groan. “They weren’t poems.”

“They rhymed!”

“They were song lyrics.”

“Okay, Shakespeare.”

I shoot him a look, but his grin is blinding, eyes back on the road, smug and sunny.

“It’s okay to still have feelings, Nate,” he says. “Maybe you have unfinished business. Maybe we all do.”

Unfinished business.

That’s one way to say it, I guess.

It sounds clean when he says it like that, but it doesn’t feel clean. It feels messy and knotted up in all the almosts and maybes and bad timing, and now that I have to see this man again all of it is pushing up to the surface at once, as if it never really went anywhere at all.

I know what Milo’s asking of me, even if he’s not saying it outright.

To look at it.

To admit it.

To let it exist without pretending it doesn’t matter.

The thing is, I don’t think I can. At least not without admitting there’s still a piece of me that wants Tanner, and probably always will, in some small, inconvenient, impossible-to-explain way that doesn’t disappear just because time passed or because I chose someone else.

Admitting that, even to myself, doesn’t take anything away from what I feel for Milo. If anything, it makes everything more complicated, more real in a way I don’t know how to clean up or fix or simplify into something easier to hold.

I want Milo and I want Tanner and I don’t know what to do with that except sit in it as the road stretches out in front of us and the trees blur together and everything keeps moving whether I’m ready for it or not.

2

We turn into the campground, passing beneath a tall rusted metal arch that reads Welcome to Cold Creek.

The road shifts to gravel, crunching beneath the tires as we pass clusters of campers and RVs, with tiny leaning rental cabins scattered around like afterthoughts.

I watch them roll by one at a time. Families setting up folding chairs. Someone grilling something that smells aggressively of burnt onions. Dogs on leashes weaving between kids with marshmallow-sticky hands.

We keep going deeper into the campground, toward the back half of the grounds where the roads narrow, the bathrooms disappear, and only the truly rugged choose to stay.

No power or plumbing, aside from a lone bathhouse still a decent walk from the campsite, which is little more than a fire pit, a tent, and enough surrounding forest to swallow the noise.

Camping probably seems like an odd choice for a reunion, but this used to be our thing. Once we got our licenses, the three of us were up here constantly. These woods were our off-brand sanctuary, the place we believed none of our problems could follow us. In hindsight, all this feels wildly optimistic considering most of our problems probably started here.

This is where we got drunk for the first time, which sounds wholesome until you factor in that we were drinking warm beer we stole from Milo’s cousin and were all immediately humbled by it.

It’s also where I got bitten by a snake, and Milo, in a truly heroic display of confidence over competence, decided to “suck the venom out,” only to realize halfway through that it was harmless and he’d volunteered himself for a mouthful of dirt and blood.