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The car door slams behind Jay when he shuts it too forcefully, picking at the scabs along his knuckles in anticipation. His camcorder is tucked between his armpit until he decides to begin a new recording, flicking the power on and centering the shot where he wanted it. If he was going to record his meeting with Alex here at Rosswood, he was going to do it right.
His shoes scuff along the parking lot until he makes his way into the grass outside the forest. Thistles and weeds cropped up everywhere they possibly could as he ambled closer, the cuffs of his pants dragging through them when he walked.
The area was well-loved by nature until the trailhead Alex mentioned over the phone appeared in Jay’s line of sight. The transition between the overgrown mass of foliage into dead, dusty paths and shriveled plant life was impossible to miss. Jay continued onward despite his reservations at the scene, startled by Alex’s figure behind the shrunken trees ahead.
He was just as beautiful as Jay remembered.
“Where have those hands been, Jay? You miss me?” Alex goads, his feet shuffling forward over the dead leaves left in shambles underneath his soles. The gun in his back pocket is left untouched, barely rustling when he ambles forward. He wouldn’t care if it had loosened and fell between the empty space separating him and Jay.
Jay doesn’t have any words to offer him. The well of his honesty had run dry years ago when the two of them had realized lying to the world was more rewarding than treating it as a confessional, their hands interlocked behind rows of cars and bushes, pulses pounding hard enough they could both feel the static when their wrists knocked together. They didn’t know each other until the door to their shared dorm had locked behind them, until they had something to hide behind.
They hadn’t breathed this close to each other since Jay had arrived to dredge up the tapes Alex wanted to destroy, the gasoline he’d bought for the occasion still hunched over the shelves in his garage. Dust had gathered on the untouched container, streaks raked through the sides and on the handle from when Alex had turned it over and held it in his hands one last time before he’d driven to Rosswood to meet up with his old friend.
He was going to kill Jay when he came to pick up the tapes. He was going to set him on fire, yet he decided against it on a whim. He wasn’t sure why Jay made him do silly, irreverent things, like setting the canister down and deciding there wasn’t a reason to use it at all.
Alex instead conceded that it was far easier to leave Jay mangled in the wreckage of poor decisions that he’d collected over the years. A considerable portion of Jay’s adult life after college had been spent online searching up the names of everyone he’d known, frantically pouring over Something Awful forums and making phone calls to everyone he possibly could until someone got back to him. The tab labeled ‘sent’ had gathered triple the amount of emails his inbox did.
It baffled him when Alex was the first person to answer his pleas for information, yet he let himself indulge in his company one last time. He relapsed into his bad habits more often than most, and he assumed Alex was one in the same.
It was strange to think they had similarities when Alex had been dead for years at this point. The boy Jay was crazy about back then had been choked to death in their dorm with his own bare hands, yet he still thought someone was there, even when the suicide note was taped to the back of the boxes Alex carried to his new house in a better part of town.
Jay figured he was just another thing Alex had left behind — after all, he’d seen Alex’s girlfriend when he looked through his social media profiles. She was pretty, much prettier than Jay was back in college, so why did Alex feel the need to chase Jay down and drag him down by the heels into an obsession he’d forgotten about? What could he have possibly done to deserve that?
He remembered he still had to be a person when Alex whacked his camera out of his hands and let it tumble down the trail behind them. He flipped himself around and scurried after it, his legs wobbling from poor balance combined with sheer panic. Jay’s camcorder meant the world to him, and he wouldn’t be able to have it when Alex reached for the collar of his shirt and dragged him backward against his chest.
It would have reminded him of his life nearly four years ago if it weren’t for the way Alex gripped him, completely bereft of the kindhearted intentions he used to wear proudly on his sleeve. Jay forced himself to play pretend and to prop what was left of Alex up in his mind with polished memories of when there was something worth looking for behind his college sweetheart’s eyes.
All Jay sees in him is the boy he once was, even when his fingers twitch for the gun resting in his back pocket. He doesn’t touch it. The trigger finger he had when he’d brutally murdered Seth is somewhere else whenever Jay is around.
He thrashes under the force of Alex’s clenched fingers until the seams of his collar thin themselves into loose threads that slip right through Alex’s hands. The fabric returns to the back of his neck unenthusiastically, hanging uselessly low as Jay stumbles to his knees to pick up his camera.
His weight is crumpled under itself when Alex tackles him from behind. It was surreal when his breath fanned across his neck and sent shivers down his spine. Times when he was young and thought it was irrelevant to care about anything bombarded his senses when Alex pressed himself to Jay, and God, he would give everything to go back to that.
Jay recounts the simpler times they shared together, their knees touching as they laughed on someone else’s porch, just a hair away from being too drunk to drive home and fool around on their cramped couch. He remembered the way Alex looked back then, his hair swooping over the side of his face and over his ears. He wished he could feel it through his fingers again, wished he could hear how he sounded when he mumbled something about needing a haircut until they both talked themselves to sleep.
Part of him wanted to feel the stinging in his eyes from when Alex had finally realized it was time to grow up and find someone who didn’t like him in the way Jay did.
His memories were derailed unceremoniously by Alex’s coughing fit, loud and pule and much too close for comfort. Jay would have felt bad if he wasn’t leaning straight into his ears while he did it. He grits his teeth and manages to crawl forward using only the backs of his elbows to slip out from under him and run as fast as he possibly could.
That horrible thing had appeared again. Jay caught a glimpse of it and how it tortured Alex’s poor lungs in the corner of his eye before he tripped near the outskirts of the forest, the beginnings of a bruise forming along his jaw. He only then realized his camera was left abandoned under Alex before he let unconsciousness pull him along the undertow.