Page 38 of A Sea of Unspoken Things

What the fuck are we even here for?

It was one of the only times I remember really feeling like Johnny and I weren’t on the same side. It was the fight that would change the trajectory of our entire lives, we just didn’t know it yet. And I did understand what Micah meant. Standing in the belly of the gorge felt almost spiritual. There was a transcendence to the moment that couldn’t be explained, and it was impossible to be in a place like this and not feel it. More than that, Iwantedto believe. I wanted to believe that we didn’t just stop with our pulse or our brain waves, and that there was more to all of this than the carbon and water that made up our skin and bones.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

I pressed my lips together, staring into the flames again until my eyes burned. “I just don’t feel like he’s gone.” I heard the words leave my mouth, but I hadn’t planned to say them. When my eyes focused past the fire, to Micah’s face again, he didn’t react. “There’s this unbearable pain in knowing that heisgone, but it also seems like it should feel different somehow, like there should be this absence. But there isn’t. He’s still here, Micah.”

Micah watched me, unblinking.

“Sometimes I think he’s trying to tell me something,” I whispered.

His gaze grew subtly more focused, as if the words concerned him. It only made me more afraid of what he was thinking.

“Like what?”

I inhaled past the splintering sting reigniting in my chest, waiting for the words to find my lips. But they didn’t. I wasn’t ready to say out loud what I could feel in every bone of my body—that it wasn’t an accident. That I’d begun to believe that he wanted me to know that something happened out here that day.

“It went both ways. You know that, right?” Micah said. “He always knew when something was going on with you or when you were lying about something. He knew about us. Long before you told him.”

I sat up, looking at him. The day I finally admitted to Johnny that Micah and I were together was the same day we’d had that fight. I’d kept it from him for months because I knew my brother. I knew that Johnny would ruin it. Burn it all down. And the day he found the acceptance letter from Byron, that’s exactly what he did.

Finding out that I’d lied about the letter was one thing. Leaving Six Rivers was everything Johnny had ever wanted for me, and that was mostly because he knew it’s what I wanted for myself. But it wasn’t just Johnny I was afraid to leave behind. It was Micah, too. He was the one who’d been the most hurt about Byron, because he knew I wouldn’t have hidden it if I hadn’t already decided I was going.

“I get it now. I understand why you lied,” Micah said.

His words fractured in my mind as the weed bled deeper into my veins. “You do?”

He passed the joint back to me. “That’s how you and Johnny worked. You made your own reality. Sometimes that meant distorting what was real so that the other one wouldn’t have to know the whole truth. You protected each other. That’s why you left, right?”

I met his eyes, catching his meaning. “I don’t want to talk about Griffin,” I said, in a tone that was more pleading than angry. If we pulled at those stitches, I would come undone.

Micah nodded. “I know you don’t.”

Mercifully, he let it drop, and I realized that while I’d come to Six Rivers armed with my yearslong anger, I was now mostly just bracing myself for his. But whatever tension that had materialized in the darkness slowly waned with the passing silence, and that white-knuckle feeling began to fade.

That was like him, I thought. Micah was never one to hide things, like the rest of us. He didn’t pretend.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?” I asked.

“Come on, James.”

“What?”

A long, exhausted breath escaped his lips. “We could fill the fucking ocean with the things we never said to each other.”

That pinch behind my ribs twisted tighter. There was more behind that statement than I wanted to absorb, because it was unbearably true. Now that ocean was so deep and wide that I couldn’t even begin to make sense of it.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said, finally.

The shadow of a warped smile changed the shape of his mouth. “Me too.”

I waited for him to look at me, and when he finally did, the Micah I knew best was there in his eyes. The high from the joint had given me a reprieve, but that one look was enough to push the simmering pain over the edge of that numbness.

I opened the blanket wrapped around me, letting one hand extend toward him, and after a moment his hand found mine. I pulled him into me, and the ache was there before he even got his arms around me. Like every ounce of pain and fear and sadness we’d known had been a mere harbinger of this. And on the other side of it, I didn’t know if there would be anything left. I was so tired of all the remembering.

Micah’s warmth enveloped me and I let myself press into it, inhaling the smell of him. His face turned into my hair, and that one, simple touch held so much tenderness that all the tears I’d cried across the ravine were there again, tucked just beneath the surface. But I didn’t feel like crying now. A different, more desperate feeling knotted in my stomach. It was a heavy weight that I could feel all the way into my legs.

I tipped my face up to look at him, and the firelight moved over his cheek, reflecting in his eyes. They didn’t leave mine, and I could feel him searching for an assurance that I knew what I was doing. That I had some kind of awareness of how close I was to tipping over this cliff between us.