Great. Now that they hadthatout of the way—“So, you and Pacey.” He propped his chin on his hand and batted his eyelashes. “He seems dreamy. Tell me everything.”
“Ugh.” Carter shoved him playfully. “You’re the worst. It was a summer thing. I would’ve been… twenty-five, I think?”
Jeff and Howl had just been hitting their stride, booking international tours, starting to get recognized. He reached past the feeling of shaken foundations for the surer ground. “Carter Rhodes,” he said, mock scandalized. “You had a relationship with asummer resident?”
“You’rea summer resident,” Carter pointed out.
That set fire to something in Jeff’s guts, but he ruthlessly stomped it out. “How dare you. I am ahometown boy returned to his roots.”
“For the summer,” Carter said, heavy on the implied eye roll. “In a rental cabin.”
Does that mean you’re going to date me next?Jeff bit down onthatbefore it could escape his dumb mouth. “So what happened? That didn’t feel like ‘oh well, summer ended, it’s been nice knowing you but see ya later.’ That felt more like ‘I left your things on the lawn and somehow they mysteriously caught fire.’”
Carter laughed and spread his ridiculously long arms over the back of the bench. If Jeff wanted to, he could lean back too, and it would be like Carter had his arm around him. “God, what kinds of breakups have you had? I promise you no one has ever set anything of mine on fire.”
No, of course not. Jeff couldn’t see how Carter could ever make anyone that angry. “You’re just not trying hard enough.”
“I didn’t realize inspiring arson was the goal.” He shook his head, sobering. “It was, uh. It was my birthday and he wanted to surprise me, so he got me tickets to a concert.”
Jeff’s stomach did something very uncomfortable.
“It was a whole thing, you know, we even drove into the city for it, got a hotel room. Looking back I think he was maybe a little more serious about the relationship than I was and I didn’t pick up on it.”
Jeff didn’t have to ask what concert. He keenly remembered being aware of the fact that he was doing a show in Toronto on Carter’s birthday. “That’s always awkward,” he said, hoping his voice didn’t sound as strangled as it felt. His palms started to sweat. Since when was it this warm this early in Willow Sound?
Carter glanced at him sideways and Jeff could hear his unvoiced commentary on how often Jeff was perfectly aware that he was the less serious person in a relationship. “He already knew I liked the band because I had their CD in the car—”
“I am three thousand years old,” Jeff said. “Remember CDs?”
Carter ignored the interruption as though determined to get this story out. “So we had really good seats. Not first row or anything, but close. And at first it was really great. We both liked the music, and it was a great show, but um….”
Jeff was going to melt right through the bench. Possibly with embarrassment. Probably with something else.
“There was some weird technical difficulty, maybe an amp blew a fuse or something. You’d know better than I would.”
Ha ha, Jeff thought hysterically, completely unable to laugh at Carter’s stupid in-joke.
“Anyway, most of the sound went out—everything but one mic and the lead guitar. So while the tech guys worked on that, the lead guitarist had one of the crew bring out a stool and he plugged in this beat-up sunburst guitar I’d seen about a million times—”
“Fuck,” Jeff said quietly, but at least they were now both acknowledging, if not the elephant in the room, at least the fact that elephants existed.
“—and played my favorite song on my birthday.”
“You always were kind of a sap,” Jeff said automatically. Teenage Carter had loved to play the Wallflowers’ “The Difference” at top volume in his beat-up truck, windows rolled down as he sang along. In retrospect maybe a song about people remaining the same despite the passage of time was a little on the nose for that concert.
“I like what I like,” Carter returned. Jeff was going to die. “I, well, I sort of had an unpredictable reaction to that, and then I had to explain to Pacey that actually I know that guy in the band, we grew up together. He… jumped to some conclusions.”
It was too much information to process. Jeff couldn’t even guess what that meant. “So instead of your romantic birthday surprise, you broke up?”
Carter winced. “It was a really long drive back to Willow Sound.”
“Fuck,” he said again. Then he recontextualized running into Pacey in the grocery store and repeated, “Ohfuck—”
“Hey.” Carter derailed his panic with a hand on his wrist. “I don’t care what he thinks, okay? And just because it didn’t work out between us doesn’t mean he’s going to go, I don’t know, attempting to sell a nonstory to a tabloid.”
Jeff took a deep breath and attempted to internalize it all. “Okay, but he definitely does think we’re boning. I could tell just from the way he was looking at me earlier. This”—he gestured between them, intending to indicate the lasting trauma Carter had just inflicted on Jeff’s psyche—“only reinforces that I am definitely right about that.”
“Maybe,” Carter allowed. “Do you care? We can go tell him the truth.”
