“Jamie?” Desmond asked, drawing Dakota from his thoughts.
Turning, Dakota frowned when he saw that Jamie had bowed his head, hands tightened around the steering wheel and face obscured by his arm. His first reaction was to ask what was wrong, then he looked at the houses before him and sighed when the realization hit him.
Oh, he thought. Home.
To see your past before you when the rest of your life had failed, to realize that the people you loved would never be home again, to understand that your happiest moments were only memories and there would never be any more of them—how did it feel to come home after so many years, after so much had happened and after the world had ended? Was it a stab in the heart, a punch in the gut, or was it something worse—evisceration by a rotting hand or decapitation by a wrongful step? Either way, it didn’t much matter, because when Jamie let out a startled sob, Dakota leaned forward and wrapped his arms around him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, bowing his head into the man’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Jamie.”
“It’s ok,” Jamie said. “Just…give me a moment.”
They waited.
Jamie began to cry.
Dakota and Desmond eventually left the car by Jamie’s instruction. Told to walk to the front door and take the key from under the flowerpot, they entered the house and seated themselves within the living room, atop the vanilla-white furniture in front of a stonework fireplace. The whole while they sat there, the silence more than total and the tension extremely thick, Dakota tried not to look back out the window and at the truck parked in the driveway.
He’s gonna be ok. He turned his head down and away from the window. Everything’ll be just fine.
“It’s a nice house,” Desmond said, “isn’t it?”
“Sure is,” Dakota said, looking up at the living room before them. “Really nice.”
“Have you looked at anything?”
“Not really.”
“Just wondering. I’m kinda surprised you haven’t, considering this is where your boyfriend grew up.”
“I will eventually.”
“Maybe you should go talk to him.”
“He wants to be left alone.”
“You’re his boyfriend. I really doubt he’d push you away.”
Knowing Jamie? Dakota thought. I highly doubt that.
“I don’t know,” Dakota sighed, preparing to rise, but not sure if he should. “I think I need to let him have his moment alone. He is coming home, after all.”
“I guess it’s hard,” Desmond said.
“Desmond, can I ask you something about your past?”
“I lived with my parents,” Desmond said. “Yes, they loved me. I loved them. I have pretty much given up on the idea of ever seeing them again though.”
“Are you ok with that?”
“No, but I’ve accepted it.”
The door opened. Jamie stepped in, eyes red and cheeks puffy. “I just needed a moment to myself.”
Dakota stood and crossed the short distance between them. He wrapped an arm around his boyfriend’s side and leaned into his chest. “I love you, Jamie.”
“I love you too, babe. And I love you, Desmond.”
“Thanks,” Desmond replied. “And thank you for getting us here safely.”
“We had a few bumps, but it’s ok. We’re…we’re home now. Right?”
“Yeah,” Dakota smiled. “We are.”
The rest of the morning passed in silence. Desmond lounged in the living room, Jamie sat in the kitchen poring over documents and scratching things down on paper, and Dakota wandered the house and tried to distract himself from the eerie calm, despite the fact that he knew they were safe. He examined family pictures, peeked into bedrooms, slid his fingers over the neat, colored tile in individual bathrooms and pressed his hands into the fabric of beds, all in an attempt to familiarize himself with a time and place he knew he would not be familiar with had the end of the world not occurred.
Eventually, his search led him to a portrait of Jamie that had been taken years before. Dressed in fatigues and clean shaven, he looked younger than Dakota could have ever imagined him.
He looks, he thought, then paused, reaching forward to embrace the frame with his right hand. “So young,” he said aloud.
How long ago had this been taken? It couldn’t have been less than five years, because the lines around Jamie’s mouth hadn’t deepened and his cheeks didn’t have that much fat in them, and it couldn’t have been only five because he looked younger than the twenty-one he would’ve been.
This was taken years ago, Dakota thought. When he was my age.
The sight of the young man before him forced a shiver through his body. His chin still softened and the fat around it still dense enough to hide the hard square; his cheeks fuller, plump with youth; his skin lighter beyond compare—he looked Nordic, compared to how dark his skin was now, like he’d been living in a frozen wasteland complete with narwhales and penguins.
A hand touched his shoulder. Dakota jumped.
“Hey,” Jamie said, wrapping an arm around his waist from behind. “Looks like you found my enlistment picture.”
“This was taken when you were my age, wasn’t it?”
“Yup. I’ve sure changed a lot, haven’t I?”
“No kidding,” Dakota said, pulling his hand back from the picture.
“I can hardly remember being that ignorant little boy who knew nothing about the world.”
“What were you doing in the kitchen?”
“Going through my mother’s stuff, trying to figure out what we’re going to do about the house. I’d rather not board it up if I don’t have to.”
Dakota nodded. Drawn by a second picture just slightly above Jamie’s own, he looked up when he saw another man staring up at him, face hard and jaw set. The glimpse of a smile could be seen on the corner of his mouth, despite the desert behind him.
“Jamie,” he said, “is that your dad?”
Jamie reached out to touch the picture. “That’s pop,” he said.
“You look just like him.”
Jamie tightened his hold around Dakota’s waist.
A tear dropped down onto his shoulder.
Dakota reached down and set his hand over Jamie’s.
“You want to do what?” Dakota asked.
“Build a wall,” Jamie said, setting his hand over a large piece of poster paper before him. “See the perimeter around the property? We’re gonna dig a trench, build a wall and fill it in with concrete. Call me vain, but I don’t want anything happening to the houses, especially not the one next door.”
“How come?”
“Erik grew up there.”
“Really?” Dakota said.
“I remember that now that you mention it,” Desmond said, looking down at the table of figures off to the side. “What’s this?”
“The amount of wood and concrete we’ll need.”
“Those are some pretty heavy numbers,” Dakota said. “How do you expect to get all of those supplies, much less get them back here?”
“Simple; we wait for Ian, Erik and Steve to get here, scrounge up an extra car or two, then make our way to the nearest U-Haul. I doubt they’d care if we borrowed a truck, considering the circumstances and all.”
“You didn’t answer my question though. How do you expect to get all those supplies?”