JUNE

We’d only gotten about ten minutes into the walk before Raja was already complaining.

“If you’re gonna lure me out to the middle of the woods to kill me, I wish you’d have the decency to do it already,” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Making me walk in this heat first is just sadistic.”

“You didn’t have to come with me, you know,” I replied with a shrug. “Could’ve stayed your ass home in the A/C.”

“For some reason, saying ‘Get off your skinny ass and get some sunlight before you turn into a vampire’ doesn’t really make it seem like a choice.” As he quoted me, Raja’s brow became a flat line across his forehead. “You know how many times in the past I’ve nearly died of heat stroke?”

“Keyword: nearly.” I patted him on the shoulder. “You think today’s the day it’ll finally get you? Have more faith in yourself, amigo.”

At first, Raja wasn’t amused, pursing his lips before they split into an unwilling smile. “Fuck you, too.”

I usually didn’t drag him out of the house with me, but I’d been itching to get out of my apartment for a while now. Between being cooped up at the station and cooped up at home, I was getting claustrophobic, yearning for relief from the high rises and concrete of inner Dallas. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been down a nature trail, but it’d been too long, that was for sure.

Even though I’d invited Raja to come along, I didn’t expect him to actually take me up on the offer. Comments in passing here and there made it clear that he was perfectly content to stay indoors whenever possible, which was why when he joined me, I was pretty excited.

The trail around us was peaceful and quiet, as we were the only set of footsteps crunching the gravel beneath our shoes. The trademark Texas humidity was in full swing without even a breeze to give us any sort of relief, but I didn’t mind - it was actually the first time I felt like I could comfortably get away with a muscle shirt instead of a long sleeve.

I took a deep, full breath of fresh air and smiled on the exhale. “Couldn’t you just stay out here forever?”

“Maybe if I was dead or on drugs,” Raja replied. “I had no idea you were so outdoorsy.”

“Eh, usually I’m not. But I can’t take being stuck inside anymore. Now that I’m out here, I feel better already,” I said. “Hey, what do you think it takes to be a park ranger?”

“Wow, you’re outside for five minutes, and you’re already thinking of quitting your job and moving into the wilderness?” He shook his head. “Starting your midlife crisis early, aren’t we?”

“You could stand to be more supportive of my dreams.” As a joke, I gave him a pitiful pout. “Is it so wrong to want to look at bear turds and spy on campers for a living?”

Even as he limped along, Raja had enough energy to smile. “You’re right, I’m sorry. You’d probably really like it. Hell, maybe you’d even get to see Bigfoot.”

“Wait, does Bigfoot live in Texas?” I raised an eyebrow. “I don’t really know anything about him.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right guy.” Proudly, he pointed a thumb at himself. “Shared a room at a shelter with a guy who made that kind of thing was his life’s work. He was, uh, a crypto… Cryptologist? Something like that, they’re the guys that study urban legends and stuff. Anyway, he was disgraced from his old teaching job for mismanaging funds to use on his… ‘expeditions’… but he was pretty passionate about it. It was all he ever talked about, so I learned a lot, even if it was mostly against my will.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay, so, since you know so much about those monsters… which one do you think I’d be?”

For a moment, Raja paused, as if he were actually considering it. Then, a teasing smile. “Skunk ape, for sure.”

“A skunk ape? Fuck you, you made that one up!” I glared at him, but it was impossible to keep a smile from forming. “Besides, I’m Mexican, I gotta be el chupacabra!”

“Good point. Now that you’ve said it, it just makes sense, since you’re so short and hairless… oh, and you suck off goats constantly.” He looked even more smug now. “Yeah, chupacabra fits best.”

I laughed so sharply, it came out more like a cackle. “You motherfucker!”

In the middle of our uncontrollable laughter, I shoved Raja playfully, but my timing couldn’t have been worse. Right as I pushed him, he’d been mid-step, so he lost his footing and toppled to the dirt right onto his knees. Now there was no laughter, only Raja’s wheezing hisses of pain.

“Shit, are you okay?” I knelt down to see what happened. “Fuck, man, I’m sorry—”

“It’s fine! I’m— I’m fine. Just landed on my bad knee in a weird way.” He tried to stifle the frown that stretched across his face, but it was obvious. “Uh, can we find a place to sit?”

“Yeah, of course,” I nodded. “Here, let me…”

With Raja’s wrist in my hand, I guided his arm across my shoulder, and as we stood up together, the side of his body pressed close to mine. For once, he wasn’t too proud to lean against me, which I took to mean that his knee probably hurt pretty bad. Immediately, I felt a pang of guilt.

Another few minutes passed until we found a solid, sturdy log, so we decided to take a break there. The second he sat down, Raja let out a breath of relief and started massaging his knee through his pants. It was a good idea to cut the hike short if his knee was busted up already, but he had a tendency to push himself farther than he should, if only to reap the consequences later. Who knows if he’d go for it?

As Raja drank eagerly from his water bottle, I gave him a once-over just to make sure he didn’t seem genuinely heat sick on top of everything else. Of course, I couldn’t resist staring for just a little bit longer than I needed to.

All the time indoors had made Raja a little paler, and the dark circles under his eyes had now all but disappeared with proper rest. He’d also put on a little weight, but it mostly brought him out of ‘scrawny’ and into ‘bony.’ A few more months, and he might even graduate to ‘slim’, but even back at his fittest, he was still the skinniest guy I knew. Overall, he was looking a lot better.

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When he finished drinking, Raja leaned over to continue massaging his knee, and I felt another pang of guilt at the sight of it. “Um… sorry about that again,” I said, gesturing to his leg.

Wiping the water away from his beard, Raja shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you gonna be good to walk back?” I asked. “Do you need me to—”

“Manny.” He closed his eyes, exasperated. “You don’t need to baby me. I’ll be fine.”

Sure, he was saying that now, but I could already envision him with a stack of pillows and a rotation of frozen foods on his knee the second we returned to my place. I wasn’t going to push him on it, though, so I let it go.

As we rested on the log, the dial had been cranked up on the humidity, so now we were both sweating. I lifted up my shirt to wipe my face dry, only to find Raja watching me when I pulled it back down. His gaze was strangely tender, and my pulse began to race once I’d noticed it.

“What?” I asked.

Immediately, Raja glanced away. “It’s nothing.”

Not this shit again… I frowned. “Look, if you think you’re being sneaky, you aren’t. You’re always looking at me like that, man, what is it?”

Somehow, Raja had the nerve to look at me like I was the unreasonable one. “Looking at you like what?”

“I don’t know, it’s like…” I was scrambling for a way to define it that didn’t sound weirdly accusatory. “It’s just… the way you look at me.”

Rubbing his temples, he sighed. “Fuck, do we have to do this right now? When I’m out here in the wilderness, fighting for my life?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “Explain what’s going on with your dying breath, or— or I’ll leave you for the panthers.”

He rolled his eyes. “This trail doesn’t even have panthers.”

“Are you ready to test that theory?” I raised my eyebrow. “Come on, just spit it out. The sooner you fess up, the sooner we can go back home.”

“Am I being held hostage now?” His tone dripped with sarcasm. “I knew you dragged me out here to kill me. What was I just saying earlier?”

“Raj, seriously, though,” I said firmly, abandoning the joke. “You can’t possibly tell me that after everything between us, you’ve still got anything to hide.”

The lighthearted energy we shared now disappeared in an instant. As Raja began the process of untying and retying his hair, there was something about his expression I couldn’t place, like his amusement died and left behind something more remorseful in its wake.

“It sounds stupid,” Raja said, turning to stare off at the trail ahead of us. “… No. Wait. Actually, it doesn’t sound stupid, it sounds batshit crazy.”

“So?” I shrugged. “Say it anyway. I guarantee it’s nothing as fucked up as the shit I see at work.”

Rather than fire another comeback at me, Raja pulled his hand down his face, grasping all the way down until resting his hand on his cheek. His expression had gotten so serious that when it took about a minute or two for him to answer, I was starting to get a little uneasy. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked, I thought nervously.

Another breath in, another breath out, and then Raja finally started to speak.

“Back when I first came home from being discharged, I was really, really depressed,” he began. “Which I know you know already, but God, I— I was beyond fucked up. I hated myself so much for what I did to you— and Feliz. And every time I thought of you, I hated myself even more. And it got to the point where…”

Raja’s pause was so measured, so tense, that my throat began to tighten, but I said nothing.

“Every picture I had of us— of you— I had to get rid of ‘em. At first, I tried to throw them away, but I’d always go back and dig them out of the trash, so one day, I…” His voice was so low, it was nearly a whisper. “I threw them all in a fire, and watched them burn.”

Raja had stopped in the middle of putting his hair back up, so it hung over his face, making his expression unreadable. I’d focused on staring at him for so long, my eyes were dry and strained.

“So, for all these years, I had only your memory to go off of, but now I get to see you whenever I want. I can look at you for as long as I’d like.” Slowly, he turned to look at me, his expression hesitant, but sweet. “I don’t ever want to take that for granted again.”

In my chest there was a twinge, a flutter, a thrumming that led down from my heart and into my fingertips. Though I hadn’t admitted it, I’d caught myself stealing glimpses of Raja whenever possible for the same reason. It was an instinct, something that came so naturally, I hadn’t stopped to think about it; I just wanted to look at him, to capture him in my mind’s eye like he’d vanish if I didn’t.

But when I tried to speak, nothing came out, which made me feel like a sputtering old junker with a bad engine. At my silence, Raja smiled, but it was hollow, like he was going through the motions instead. He heaved himself up off the log and dusted himself off, wincing a little when he stood on his bad knee.

“Sorry,” he said quietly as he returned to the trail. “I didn’t mean to make this weird.”

“No— Raj, you didn’t,” I replied quickly.

From the corner of his eye, Raja’s skepticism was obvious. “Yeah. Right.”

A swell of frustration rose in my chest and settled into my sternum. Out of instinct, I clutched Raja’s wrist to keep him from walking further, holding him in place on the trail.

“Ugh!” He grunted as he tried to resist my grasp. “You got what you wanted, Manny, let’s just go already—”

“No!” I snapped. “We’re not leaving until you apologize.”

A hostility crept into Raja’s features. “Then I guess we really are going to die here, because I’ll never be able to say sorry enough.”

“Not to me.” I breathed in until my lungs ached. Then, out. “To yourself.”

If not for the sound of the breeze brushing past the leaves in the trees, I would’ve thought time itself stood still. My heart was racing so fast, it was making me dizzy; I was so dead set on watching Raja’s face for every little movement, I wasn’t even worried about how the greens and browns of the forest were starting to blur together.

“You keep blaming yourself, and— and hating yourself, and punishing yourself all the time, and the worst part is you think I see you like you do,” I said. “And I don’t. I never saw you like that.”

Raja’s gaze felt as steady as a laser. “How do you see me?”

I swallowed thickly. How many nights had I spent tossing and turning in bed, wishing I could put it into words and hating that I couldn’t? Just the idea of trying to describe it made me tongue-tied, words paralyzed on their way out of my mouth.

Unfortunately, Raja took my silence as its own answer, and - clearly hurt - he clenched his jaw. “Right,” he said simply, and he turned to make his way down the rest of the trail.

You fucking idiot, I thought bitterly to myself as I followed after him. In spite of my guilt, I wasn’t brave enough to say anything, which made my heart sink further down in my chest.

The rest of our walk was quiet, with only the rustling of the leaves to listen to. Every once in a while, I’d dart a glance over at Raja again, but his features had become stony and still. I wanted to apologize, but I knew he’d simply brush it off. It was for the best if I left well enough alone.

Right as we returned to the parking lot, I felt a sudden impulse to do something - anything. Where words were weak, actions were strong, so I did the only thing I could think of that ever made me feel better.

I reached for Raja’s hand, which had been curled into a fist, and held it tight.

Under my touch, he softened.