Gabe opened his eyes when Trist started turning more frequently and squinted out at vaguely familiar streets. “Are you just taking me back to your place? Is that the secret destination?”

“No,” Trist said as he turned off the expected route. He only took a couple more turns before he pulled to a stop in front of another park. “Here we are.”

“You’ve taken me to… a different park?”

“Yup.” Trist grabbed a bag off the back seat and opened his door. “Come on.”

Gabe followed.

This was a much larger and greener park that gave way into a trail that led off into the bush. On the far side, there were some children playing on older style wooden play equipment designed to look vaguely like a pirate ship, but otherwise the park was empty.

Gabe stopped to get a drink and then followed Trist towards the mouth of the trail. “On the one hand, you grabbing a mysterious bag and then leading me off into the bush seems like the kind of scenario where I get murdered. On the other hand, getting murdered would solve literally every problem I have right now, so I’m all for it.”

Trist looked unimpressed. “You seem to think I’m way cooler than I actually am.”

“You seem to think I think murder is way cooler than I actually do.”

“I just meant—” He shook his head. “Nevermind. Come on. This isn’t going to be anything like whatever you’re expecting.”

“Honestly at this point I’m not sure what this could lead to that would make me go, oh, yeah, that’s exactly what I was expecting. I predicted this outcome and I am not surprised at all.”

“I can tell you to go fuck yourself for no apparent reason if that’ll help introduce a kind of comforting consistency to my behaviour.”

“Man. The weird part is that it kind of would.” Gabe kicked a stick off the path and startled a water dragon he hadn’t noticed into skittering off into the undergrowth. “You have to understand that like… I do get the sense that you’re a genuinely good person. That’s my instinct. But guys my age aren’t generally nice to me, and we’re not exactly friends, and I don’t even really know you all that well.” It wasn’t until Trist turned back to look at him that Gabe realised he’d been idly poking at the bruise on his arm. He stopped. “I’m just saying. I’m not really in the mood for surprises or trusting people.”

For a long moment, Trist just watched him, silent, his brow slightly furrowed. “You’re allowed to say no, you know.”

“Huh?”

“If I tell you to follow me, you’re allowed to say, no, fuck you, you’re scaring me and I don’t want to do that. You don’t have to just go along with whatever shit I tell you to do.”

“Okay, fair, I could have just said no if I didn’t want to. But I didn’t want to say no. You’ve hardly even talked to me before, and I didn’t want to say no to this. Just… please?”

Gabe didn’t even know what he was asking, but apparently Trist did because he fell back to walk beside Gabe instead of walking off ahead of him like he had been. 

“We’re almost there,” Trist said. “This bit of bush isn’t really all that big. It feels isolated, but you can walk the full loop of the track in like fifteen minutes if you keep a good pace.”

“Where are we going?”

Trist pointed up ahead. “Here.”

It was so buried in bush that Gabe didn’t see anything at first, but then he noticed the sound of running water and a bridge up ahead. There was a creek that cut through the track.

“This is it,” Trist said as he set his bag down at the edge of the bridge. “This is where I’ve been coming. I haven’t been out getting into trouble. I’ve just been…” A duck flapped out of the water and quacked as it waddled over to him. “Making friends with this duck.”

“Of all the things I wasn’t expecting, which as we’ve established was all of the things that there are, this ranks pretty high.”

“His name is Peter.”

“I love Peter.”

“Would you like to feed him some peas?”

“Yes.”

So it turned out that was what was in his bag. A defrosted bag of frozen peas to feed to the duck. Of course. They sat down on a log, two feet apart because one of them wasn’t gay, and they scattered peas for the duck to excitedly peck up off the ground.

“So, anyway, yeah,” Trist said after a few minutes of silent duck feeding. “Basically I brought you here so you could see you don’t have to be worried about me or what I’m up to. I’m fine.”

“Yeah, because I was concerned when I thought you might be hanging out with friends late into the night, but now that I know you’re actually just sitting alone in the wilderness I feel so much better.”

“This is hardly the wilderness.”

“That’s hardly the point.”

“Fair.”

They’d paused in their pea scattering and Peter stretched up to peck at the bottom of the bag. Trist tossed out another small handful for him.

“Do you really need to keep avoiding me? I mean I don’t know why you were doing it in the first place, but I feel like we’ve talked now and things are cool between us.”

Trist turned to look at Gabe properly. He looked annoyed, as he so often did, but Gabe was no longer convinced that was anything but a mask. “This is actually important to you, isn’t it?”

“Yeah? You don’t have a monopoly on caring about other people, you know.”

“Clearly,” he said. “Okay, fine. But don’t expect me to actually be all that social because I’m just… not. And still don’t touch my stuff. If you can accept those two things, then yeah… we’re cool.”

“Deal.”

“Great. Shall we head back, then?” Trist asked, already starting to stand.

“Mm,” Gabe said reluctantly, but he didn’t get up.

Trist sat back down. “Okay.”

“It’s just… kind of nice here.” And Trist was actually talking to him and hanging out with him, and Gabe wasn’t sure that would continue after they left.

“Yeah, well, it’s my secret hangout, so obviously I agree.”

“When I was little, the house I lived in with my mum backed onto bushland and there was a creek at the end of the garden,” Gabe said. “In retrospect, it was probably incredibly dangerous that I played around that thing unsupervised. Especially after heavy rain, when I would have drowned in seconds even if I had known how to swim. But hey, it was fun. I used to try to make my own fishing rods with sticks and string and paper clips. They never worked.”

“Where’s your mum now?”

“Dead.”

“Oh,” Trist said, and then a few too many awkward seconds later added, “Sorry.”

“It’s fine. It was a long time ago.” Which hadn’t really made the whole thing fine, but he didn’t feel like digging into that particular trauma right now. Or maybe ever.

“My mum’s presumably alive, but I haven’t seen her since before I was old enough to form memories,” Trist said. “I’m not even sure I’d find out about it if she did die. Is there someone whose job it is to track down people’s estranged families and tell them these things?”

“Huh… I don’t actually know.”

“I guess it doesn’t matter. If she was dead, I’m not sure what I’d do with that information. I don’t know her.”

“Still. I think I’d want to know. There’s a difference between not knowing someone and knowing you’ll never have the chance to get to know them. Or to just… ask them some things.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s it,” Trist said, watching Peter as he pecked at his shoelaces. “Anyway, this got weirdly personal. We should probably head back before it gets dark.”

Gabe sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But hey, thanks for getting weirdly personal with me. It was nice.”

Trist gave him a look, but there was no real anger in it. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“You know what.”

“I really don’t.”

Trist scattered the rest of the peas for Peter. “Yeah, I know. Let’s go home.”