I don't want this night to end, and I don't think that Aiden does, either.

I've been talking a lot since we got in the car, and he hasn't said much of anything, but I think he's liking that arrangement. He's driving really slow, a peaceful smile turning up the corners of his mouth. He chose a long route home.

The moonlight falls in through the windshield, kissing his face. I could swear that the white glow turns golden as soon as it touches the calm blue waters of his eyes. It shines back out in richer, warmer hues.

I’ve been chattering away about nothing and everything, like I was during our whole date, but with each time Aiden’s eyes come back to me, I’m slowing down and getting quieter. With his exceptional gift for speaking in silence, he even gives me compliments without saying a word, sometimes. Purely with the way he’s looking at me.

Right now it’s to the point where I’m starting to get shy about it, burning color slowly rising in my cheeks.

“Why’d you stop?” he says softly.

I realize all at once that I’ve trailed off into silence. That I’m fidgeting with the sleeve of my flannel, and carefully keeping my gaze on it, too.

I nervously push my hair out of my face, lift my eyes to stare out of the window. “Just - giving you a break?”

“From what?”

“I don't know. My voice?”

Aiden’s warm fingertips slide through my hair, which he gives an affectionate ruffle. I’m still not looking at him, which is good, because he can’t see the love-drunk expression on my face when his deep, slow-spoken voice melts through me.

“Don’t remember asking for one,” he rumbles. “Know I wouldn’t have, matter of fact. Why would I go and do something dumb like that?”

I bite my lip, feeling stupid for having butterflies in my chest, like this is our first date or something. I have that first-date kind of excited nervousness, and I can’t remember what I was talking about.

I clear my throat, shake out my hair where Aiden messed it up. “What - what was I saying?”

“About Ralph, and the puppy.”

“Oh! Yeah, so, he was real weird about it. He insisted on taking her, but he also looked at me like I ruined his whole life.”

Aiden’s warm, huffing laughter unfolds through the quiet car, sending my butterflies to a burst of even faster flight.

“I’m surprised he was willing to take her at all. Ralph is not into dogs. He gets all nervous around them.”

“What?” I twist to look at Aiden, dismayed. “Oh, my god - really? For some reason I had a feeling that they'd be cute together... man, I could tell he was nervous! I specifically said it was okay if he couldn't handle it, why did he take her?”

Aiden arches an eyebrow, glancing at me across the car. “Probably exactly because you said that?”

“But - I…” I fade off, then press my fingers over my eyes when I realize that he’s right. “Oh, god. I shouldn’t have tried to help.”

Aiden smiles affectionately at me, making sunlight in my heart. “It'd be against your nature, Keane. Not to try and help.”

He folds his fingers through mine, lifts them to his mouth, and presses a lingering kiss onto my knuckles. My heart stumbles at the tickle of his dark, rich stubble.

I clear my throat again, trying to pull it together. “You think I should text Ralph, see if he wants us to take Tycho back?”

“Sure, if you want him to dig his heels in even harder.”

I let out a heavy sigh, rubbing my temples. “Shit.”

“It’s alright, Linden. The two of them can cope with each other for one weekend. Ralph wouldn’t have taken her if he honestly thought he couldn’t - take care of her for that long…”

I look over at Aiden, faintly puzzled by the distracted way his words trailed off. He’s staring past me, out of the passenger’s side window of the car.

Before I can turn to see what he’s looking at, he impulsively throws on the blinker and turns my car off of the street, pulls onto an unpaved road of sand.

I let my eyes roam as Aiden guides my car through the rainswept trees on either side of us. “What are we…?”

I trail off, too. I didn't see where exactly we turned off of the street, but the dark, quiet landscape is deeply familiar. The beach trees, the thick grey-green grass growing out from the mixed sand and soil. The leaves whispering all around us in the rain.

Aiden draws my car to a stop, parks it, and kills the engine. I stare at him in confusion as he gets out, then quickly let myself out, too.

I move through the chilly, salty air and soft rain to join Aiden in front of my car. We gaze out at the beach together, both of us silent.

The night is late, and beautiful. Dark indigo storm clouds and glittering stars are scattered across a deep, plum-colored sky. The amethyst ocean waves are slow and glassy, transparent in the shallows, but dotted everywhere with raindrop splashes. The moon is a circle of solid brightness. Little scoops of dancing moonlight fall through the tree boughs. The sand is silvered with it.

The air is sweet and cold. The raindrops feel good on my cheeks, which are still all heated up with the blush Aiden put there.

Something makes me reach for Aiden and take his hand. We stare out together at the sand and the sea, the endless night sky.

I glance at Aiden and find him looking at a cluster of beach trees further down the sand dunes, but not too far off from where he parked my car. Something complicated is swimming around in his blue eyes.

I turn my eyes to the beach again, slowly realizing why it looks familiar.

This is the place where I always used to go when I was at my loneliest. I spent a lot of nights here before Aiden came back to town. But I never told anyone about that. Even Kasey only sort of knew, and I know I didn’t tell her that I kept coming back here to cry on my own, to desperately try to understand what was going on in my heart, I didn’t say a word about that to anyone…

I look nervously over at Aiden. He's staring out at the horizon, his chestnut hair darkened with rain.

He turns suddenly and swiftly, gets his big warm hands around my waist, and lifts me up to sit on one side of the hood of my car. I watch him with surprised, curious eyes as he pushes me further back, then gently presses a hand to my chest to lean me back against the windshield.

“Aiden, what are you d-?”

“Chill, chill, just stay there for a sec.”

He comes around the other side of my car, hops up onto the hood. He lays back beside me, then weaves his fingers through mine.

“There we go,” he sighs softly, almost in relief.

I look at him, then look up at the stars. The gentle rush of the waves is in our ears, the rain falling softly onto us. I can feel the heat emanating from his body, the warmth of his presence beside me.

I squeeze his fingers, close my eyes.

Something impossible to understand or explain happens to me as I lay on the hood of my car with Aiden, in this place. It's like gentle fingers are soothingly stroking an integral, glowing connective thread in my heart. The sense of a deep itch finally being scratched.

Out of nowhere, a tight knot rises up in my throat, making my eyes well up. I swallow it back, then squeeze Aiden’s fingers again.

I startle myself by not letting up the pressure. I’m holding onto him so tightly, without meaning to. And I’m aware that I’m doing it, but I can’t seem to stop myself.

Aiden suddenly rolls over and buries his face into my neck, flattening me onto my car. The warm, solid weight of him pins me in place. Promising not to go anywhere.

A rush of vetiver meets my nose, sending my heartbeat fluttering like fast-beating wings.

I close my arms around him in the rain, staring straight up at the stars. Half in a daze, my thoughts submerged in golden dimness. My entire body is focused on feeling, my transfixed heart on fire. I stroke my fingertips slowly and tenderly over the nape of Aiden’s neck, feeling with lightning intensity his breaths as they break against me.

We’re both silent for a long time. The rain dusts down onto us so softly.

Slowly, my thoughts reform. Enough for me to understand that I have a rough idea of what Aiden saw in the past.

We still haven’t talked about it. Managed to dance around it during our date. He hasn’t said anything about what he saw. But how else could he possibly know to take me here? To some hidden, specific place on the beach where I used to go alone?

We should talk about this. It's time.

I hesitate nervously for a long moment. Aiden feels my heartbeat picking up. He lifts his head to look down at me, one questioning eyebrow arched. 

“I thought you said that if you could go back in time, you’d go back to the 1970s,” I tell him, reaching up to twist my fingers around a strand of glossy chestnut softness. “To throw Jesse Helms off of a cliff?”

“No, I said I wished that a big, built queer could go back in time and do that.”

“Oh, and you weren’t talking about yourself?”

“Me?” Aiden presses a hand to his chest, all innocent. “Break the law? First of all, I’m on the straight and narrow these days, Keane-”

“Nothing about you is straight or narrow, Callahan,” I laugh. "We've also committed several felonies together-"

“-and second of all, turns out all I could think of was you, when I got myself lost in time.”

I fall silent, quickly growing serious again. Gazing up at Aiden with a lot of emotion held in my eyes.

He gazes down at me, then slowly sits up on the hood of my car. A protective impulse makes me want to pull him right back to me. I fight it down and sit up beside him, resting my elbows on my knees.

The rain spills softly into the ocean before us, the calm waters rippling beautifully in the moonlight. But Aiden and I look right at each other, see only each other.

“Did you realize?” Aiden asks abruptly, his deep voice rumbling through the soft, continuous patter of the rain. “Where you kept coming back to? Where we are right now?”

I look out at the beach, then back at Aiden, my eyebrows knit with confusion. Hesitating, because Aiden is looking at me like I should know what he’s talking about, and honestly -

“You don’t,” he breathes, staring at me with wide, disbelieving eyes. “You don’t, do you? You didn’t even know, and still you - you kept coming back here whenever you started to feel like you couldn’t go on waiting any longer, whenever you needed…”

He turns away and lets out a quiet, wondering laugh, but beneath it, there’s a shiver of tears. He quickly falls silent, staring out at the water.

I stare at him, at a complete loss. How does he even know that’s what I was feeling, when I came here? And what did the rest of that mean?

Aiden’s eyes dart to me, then away again very fast. All of his emotions are showing in them, too powerful to keep hidden. I think he knows that, and he’s sharply aware of his defenselessness. He's shy and nervous all of a sudden, his face turned aside so that I can’t get a good look at him.

I know it takes time for him to find words for what he wants to say, but he’s quiet for so long that eventually I nudge his shoulder with my nose. He finally looks at me, meets my searching eyes.

A bright, shy blush has come over his cheeks, giving his bronze skin a subtle glow. He pushes a hand through his rain-wet hair, clearly struggling for the right words.

“That day when we talked, in high school,” he murmurs, his slow, rich voice barely louder than the rain, “I - I knew that you cut the fucking brakes on my heart, but I never knew that - that you felt any of what I… but you did. You felt it, Jamie. And you saw what I saw. What was - possible, between us. You had powerful sight way before I ever gave you ghost vision.”

I just stare at Aiden, stare and stare at him in wide-eyed, speechless silence.

“But I got you all confused about it,” Aiden forges on, all in a rush. “I told you to fuck off, and then I was always so mean to you, there was no way you could’ve gotten your head around what really happened. But even if you couldn’t understand it, even if you didn’t connect it with me, deep down, you still - you knew.”

He presses a meaningful hand over my heart, looking right into my eyes.

I stare back at him, then turn slowly to look at the beach. It’s dawning on me where we are. What this place is. What I instinctively kept coming back to.

“And you waited,” Aiden says, in a strangled, rough voice that draws my eyes back to him. “All that time, you waited, until I…”

He bites his lip, then drops his eyes from mine. He shakes his head slowly, presses his forehead to mine, and huffs out a nervous little laugh.

“Doing a god awful job trying to explain this, right now. All that rehearsing for nothing. I forgot everything I planned out to say.”

“Rehearsing-?” I finally snap out of the stunned daze I’d sunk into, then choke back a sharp, watery laugh. “Did you really-?”

The answer comes heavy with exasperation. “Yes, goddamnit, for all the good it did me.”

Aiden blinks in surprise as I take his face in my trembling hands, the frustrated look in his eyes falling away as soon as he sees my expression.

“But I know what you mean,” I whisper, my eyes blurred with sudden tears. “I know what you mean.”

Aiden holds very still, then nuzzles his nose into mine.

“That’s funny,” he says, around a shaky huff of laughter. “I was just gonna say, I don’t know how to explain what I mean, but I bet you could tell me.”

I laugh softly, stroking my thumbs over his stubble, my eyes full of love.

“I don’t think I have to.” I put my hand over his heart, like he did to me. “We both know, Sugar Maple.”

He closes his eyes, then wraps his arms around me, the toasty heat of him perfect in the cold rain.

There's a little silence, and then -

“Singing,” he sighs happily, his warm bass voice like a sunbeam.

“Are we?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“How is it?”

Aiden opens his radiant, serene eyes. “Pretty good.”

I let out a laugh, because the look on his face suggests that was an understatement of astounding proportions. The corners of his eyes are all crinkled up with his smile as he draws me closer to him.

"God, listen to that." He drops his head, brushes a kiss onto my temple. “Teach me to keep thinking I know how pretty we can sound together.”

I can’t even answer him. I’m still reeling, staggered by what he just made clear for me.

All that time I spent staring longingly out at the horizon, I was waiting for him. I was waiting for Aiden.

How many nights did I sit here, not once realizing that this place had any deeper significance to me at all? Only my heart knew, and it always led me back.

My eyes rove over the sand and pebbles where Aiden and I sat together exactly one time, when I was fourteen and he was fifteen. I remember his wide blue eyes on my face, his small, shy smile, his fingertips fidgeting with the pebbles beneath them.

I let out a soft, dazed laugh.

I always wondered why the faith in me was so unshakeable. Why I was so sure that there was someone out there with love to answer mine.

And here he is, the answer. Finally by my side on the blue hood of my car.

"I'm sorry I kept you waiting so long," he murmurs.

I lean up to kiss him, a kiss that I hope silently communicates my answer to that.

It's okay, Sugar Maple. You were worth the wait.