Page 82 of Rent: Paid in Full

I stay where I am until, eventually, I topple onto my side on the floor. Despite the fact it’s a warm night, I shiver whenever I open my eyes and see where I am. I physically ache. I feel like I’ve been run through by a freight train. My chest is a big gaping hole. The fist has been victorious. It’s reached into me at last and ripped out the beating, bleeding organ it’s sought out for years.

Far from relishing its victory or even celebrating, it takes me by the jugular now and clenches hard. Shooting pain sparkswhere my jaw and neck meet. It’s vicious and sharp. A long probe. A steel blade that makes my eyes sting.

The entire time, the whole night, I repeat the same thing. The one thing I know. The thing I told Miller. The thing that’s obvious and has always, always been true.

Nothing good starts like this.

Nothing good starts like this for me.

Nothing like this happens to me.

I wake, still shivering, to the deep rumble of a car engine. It’s shocking on many levels. In one way, it’s shocking that there are other people nearby, people who know about this place and know how to find it. It’s shocking that while we’ve been here, life has gone on. People still exist. Reality is still a thing too. But most of all, it’s shocking because, at some point in my stay here, I completely and utterly forgot what I came for.

A car.

That seems insane now.

Everything seems insane.

I wait in the bathroom until I hear the sound of another vehicle leaving, and then I take a long shower before getting dressed and packing my things. Miller is in the kitchen in blue jeans and a black T-shirt, complete with sneakers and a whiff of cologne. That’s a shock too. People still wear clothes. Miller still wears clothes. And shoes. And cologne. It’s not just the clothes that are a shock. It’s the look on his face. He looks like he’s aged. He’s gone hard around the mouth. Haunted under the eyes. His hair is back where it belongs, swept off his face, not a strand out of place. Pompous perfection with fine platinum highlights.

“Your car’s here,” he says after an uncomfortable silence. When I don’t answer, he holds out the keys. I take the threeleaden steps required to get to him and open my palm. He drops the keys into it and covers my hand with his, curling my fingers tightly around the key. “Wanna see it?”

“Yeah,” I say quickly. “I mean, sure. That’s…what I came for.”

I blink, stepping onto the porch, allowing my eyes the time they need to adjust to the harsh glare of the outside world. Of a new day. Of reality.

There, parked in the clearing Miller and I worshipped each other in, is my new car. It’s overly shiny, look-at-me red, with long swoopy lines and sporty tires. A Dodge Challenger SXT. It’s ridiculous. It’s impractical.

It’s my boyhood dream come to fruition.

A laugh as big as the sky rips out of me without any warning. It doubles me over, weakening me until I can hardly stand.

“You, you got me an asshole car?” I say when I can.

He has both hands in his pockets. A single shoulder rises, dragging one side of his mouth up with it. “I mean, if the shoe fits.”

That threatens to double me over too, but the look in his eyes knocks the wind out of me. It feels like it did in the beginning when we first met. When we were two people who knew nothing about each other, two people sizing each other up. It’s like that, except now we’re two people who know everything about each other.

I put my bag in the trunk and walk around the car a couple of times, looking at it while Miller talks at length about things like fuel consumption, torque, and zero to sixty. Things I usually care deeply about but find hard to take in right now.

“Ryan,” he says when there’s nothing else left to say. “I regret it. I regret everything.” He breathes in slowly, holds it, and lets it out slowly. “And I regret nothing.”

“Sounds about right,” I reply because, as usual, I have to have the last word. I don’t sayI know. I don’t sayI understand. And I certainly don’t sayI feel the same way.

He shows me his palms like he always does, open and threateningly unthreatening, and I go to him. I stop inches from him and drop my head down, resting my forehead against his shoulder like I’ve done once before. He circles me in his arms, and I gulp big, desperate lungfuls of him. I move my lips against the soft skin on his neck. I make them mouthThank youwithout letting any sound out. When I try to step back, he cages my head in his hands, long fingers carding my hair as he leans down and kisses my cheek. I close my eyes as he speaks directly into my ear.

“I love you, Ryan,” he says, kissing me again. This time, his lips press against my temple. “It’s the truth. It’s my truth, whether you believe it or not.”

He releases me before I’m ready to let go, slicing through a thick cord between us, and doesn’t say a word as I open the driver’s door and get in. The door shuts and my safety belt clicks. The engine roars to life, awakening a trapped metal beast. I put my foot on the gas cautiously, trying to rein the beast in or at least let it out slowly. I feel like a man playing myself in a movie. An actor. Someone I’m outside of. Someone empty inside. I watch myself as if from above, as I hold the wheel at ten and two and the landscape starts passing me by.

I’m nervous, obviously. The fist is pounding against my sternum, obviously. It’s beating like a drum. It’s exhilarating driving a brand-new car, but it’s terrifying too. Kind of like driving a newborn baby home for the first time. Everything is exaggerated around me. Trees, rocks, and even the gate post at the end of the drive. All of them are fraught with danger and the possibility of causing carnage.

Don’t do it.I tell myself not to. I tell myself over and over,don’t do it, don’t do it, but a deep voice inside me insists. It commands it. As I stop at the gate at the end of the drive, instead of looking left or right for oncoming traffic, I adjust the rearview mirror and look back.

The sky is blue, the grass is green, and the cabin still looks about to fall down. Miller is still outside. His tiny figure is sitting on the bottom step of the porch, knees bent, one hand lying limp at his side, the other sweeping semi-circles under his eyes. The fist in my chest releases, carefully extricating itself from my chest, opening its palm at its leisure, and slaps me so hard in the face my ears ring.

It takes me less than a second to recover. I gasp, sucking a massive breath. A big breath, a huge breath, the life-affirming breath of a man who’s been underwater for most of his life.