“I’m going to guess he’s more focused on other things,” Zach murmured, closing his hand over Gibson’s. “Him leaving is personal. I don’t think it has anything to do with us or you personally. He told me he had things that he needed to do.”
“Yeah, he said that to me too.” He itched to open the laptop again, to reread the words his brother left him, but Zach was right. Ellis leaving wasn’t about anything other than what he needed, no matter whether Gibson thought he was ready to go or not. “There’s someone he said he wanted to find as well. I could’ve helped him with that, he’s not exactly computer savvy. I just don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Zach leaned forward, then kissed the corner of Gibson’s mouth. “You’re going to do exactly what he told you to do… live your own life and love me.”
IT WAS a week before Ellis reached out to Gibson, a stretch of seven days Zach spent at Gibson’s side. They worked to keep themselves busy, doing chores around the cabin and taking long hikes, avoiding the elephant in the room in the shape of a missing black wolf. Zach understood Gibson wouldn’t—couldn’t—move forward without at least something from his brother to let him know he was safe and, as much as it would hurt to hear, didn’t need Gibson to help him.
Salvation came in the form of a text, a long ramble of words assuring Gibson he’d landed on his feet and everything was going fine. The attached picture showed what looked like a typical small town Main Street, gentrified storefronts interspersed with a couple of diners and an old-fashioned drugstore but nothing else.
“He could at least have given me a state,” Gibson grumbled, showing Zach the text. “It’s like he doesn’t trust me.”
“I wouldn’t trust you,” Zach replied, searching for a whisk in the collection of kitchen utensils the Keller boys shoved into a wide drawer. “He promised you he would tell you when he stopped moving. That’s as good as you’re going to get and all you can ask for.”
“Asshole could at least take a photo of himself so I could see he was doing okay,” he muttered under his breath, scrolling through the message one more time. “Would it have killed him to do that?”
“Look, he did what he said he was going to do. Now let it go and either help me find the whisk or beat those eggs for me.” Zach tapped at the cookbook lying open on the kitchen counter. “You’re the one who wanted to see if we could make quiche. So either pitch in or get out.”
IT’D BEEN a risk to go on a walk while the quiche was cooking, but Gibson needed to burn off energy and Zach longed to stretch his legs. As cold as it was outside, it felt good to return to the trails and stomp through the snow banked up on either side of the winding path. There were signs of wildlife here and there, fox prints scattered over a pristine expanse of freshly fallen powder near the small pond Gibson showed him only a week before. Three cardinals fought a mighty skirmish with a handful of sparrows over the deck’s birdfeeder Zach refilled every morning, a couple of shivering pigeons pecking at the fallen seed on the ground below. The birds scattered when they approached the cabin, scolding the couple from the relative safety of the nearby trees.
Since the house didn’t smell like burned eggs and wasn’t filled with smoke, Zach figured the quiche had survived. The look on Gibson’s face when he checked the oven wasn’t reassuring, and neither was the heavy, protracted sigh he got when he asked how it looked.
“It would help if we had turned the oven on the right temperature. I turned the oven on low-ish to preheat it while we were putting everything together, but I never turned it up. So it’s not quite cooked.” Gibson grinned when Zach repeated every swearword he’d ever learned. “Should we let it cook some more?”
“I’ve a better idea,” Zach said, peering into the stove. “Put the damn thing into the refrigerator and I’ll make something quick. We’ve got more eggs.”
“Pretty sure that’s how you get salmonella,” he replied, then looked back at what was in the oven. “Actually, I am going to guess that if we continued on any course of action with this particular quiche, we are definitely going to get salmonella. Trash? We still have lots of frozen pizza and instant noodles.”
“We are not eating frozen pizza or ramen. It was supposed to be we cooked dinner at least five times a week, something that didn’t come out of the freezer or in a takeout box.” Zach rolled up his sleeves and nudged Gibson out of the way. “Stand back. I’m going to try to do something Ruth made for me once. Pray to God it comes out right.”
DINNER WAS something Ruth called Chicken in a Basket and a bottle of red wine. The wine was from Napa, and the basket dish was basically an egg fried in a hole made in a slice of buttered bread. The edges were a little crispier than Zach intended, but for the most part the yolk was still runny enough for the cut-out piece to be dipped into, and the thick-sliced smoked bacon he’d found in the back of the freezer went a long way in forgiving the odd piece of shell they both found in their eggs.
“I like how everything tastes like the bacon,” Gibson commented. “Even the bread tastes like bacon.”
“That’s because I fried the egg thingies in the same pan after the bacon was finished.” Zach set his plate down on the coffee table, a little alarmed at the grease congealed around its rim. “Next time, I should probably drain some of the oil out. But every meal is kinda like a lesson learned.”
“Like Ellis trying to microwave an egg?”
“I caught him before he did it, didn’t I?” Zach pointed out, refilling Gibson’s wineglass, then his own. “I’d already thrown out one microwave for doing just that. I would’ve hated seeing another one die the same way. You can’t ever get the stink out.”
Gibson pulled Zach close, and he rested his head on Gibson’s shoulder, staring at the fireplace crackling a few feet away. They turned off all the lights, filling their bellies and making up wild stories about what Ellis could be up to, sipping the potent wine, and Gibson chortling hard enough he forgot to breathe when Zach wondered aloud if Ellis was stomping grapes in a barrel at a Napa winery.
“I’m glad you’re here with me,” Gibson murmured through a kiss he placed on Zach’s lips. “I know I’ve been pain in the ass this past week, so thank you.”
“I could think of a lot of ways you can thank me.” He set his glass down on the table behind the sectional. The wine was stronger than what he was used to—in fairness, he normally stuck to beer, with the occasional gin and tonic, but it had been gathering dust, and when he brought out the bacon, Gibson suggested a fine red would go well with the pork.
Neither one of them knew anything about wine, or even if the bottle could be considered a fine red, but the little bit of silliness kept their mood light.
“I could be the one that cooks for a week,” Gibson suggested. “Or if you don’t want to play Russian roulette with your stomach, I could do your laundry.”