I look around the cave, and then at him, sitting cross-legged in the warm glow.
“Yeah,” I whisper. “This is better.”
I lower myself onto the blanket beside him, our shoulders touching as we eat.
“So you found this place by accident?” I ask, spreading honey on a cracker.
“Yeah,” he repeats. “I had a fight with my dad about… I don’t even remember what. Probably my grades. Or my attitude. Or the way I breathed.” He picks up an olive, turning it between his fingers. “I hiked out into the woods to get away, and I stumbled into the opening.”
He sets the olive down without eating it.
“I’ve been coming almost every week since then.” His gaze drops. “For years. It was the only place where I could disappear. Where the noise stopped.”
I set my cracker aside. “What noise?”
“The expectations. My dad’s voice in my head. The constant feeling that I wasn’t enough, that I was never going to be enough.” He stares at the cave walls. “Down here, none of that reached me. I could breathe. I could just… exist.”
My heart goes out to him. The image of a fifteen-year-old Liam, angry and alone, crawling into a hole in the earth to find silence—is devastating.
“Have you been coming since you met me?” I ask. “I don’t remember you disappearing.”
He reaches for my hand. His fingers thread through mine, warm against my cold skin.
“I don’t need to come down here anymore.” His thumb sweeps across my knuckles. “You’re my sanctuary now. I find peace when I’m with you.”
“Yeah?” I tease. “Even in the beginning?”
Liam flares his nostrils and kisses my forehead. “In a more aggravating way… but yes, from the beginning. You’re the first person I’ve shown this place to,” he continues.
A mounting pressure gathers behind my sternum that builds and builds until my eyes burn and my vision blurs.
He brought me to the center of himself. To the hidden, vulnerable core he’s protected since he was a boy. The place he goes when the world is too loud, too demanding, or too much. And he’s given it to me.
“I love you.” It comes out thick and trembling and certain.
Liam smiles. Then he tips his head back and shouts into the darkness, “I love you!”
The words hit the stone and ricochet. They return to us from the deep places of the cave, bouncing off the limestone, rollingback in overlapping waves.I love you. Love you. You. You.The echo multiplies, filling the cavern.
A laugh tears out of me.
I cup my hands around my mouth and shout back, “I love you, too!”
My voice chases his through the dark. The cave catches it, holds it, sends it spiraling through passages and chambers we can’t see, and returns it to us in a chorus, tangled together and indistinguishable. Our voices braided into a single, resounding promise.
Liam pulls me into his lap, and I wrap my arms around his neck. We’re laughing and kissing and half-crying as the echoes fade, one by one, into a silence that’s full. That’s ours.
Down here, beneath the earth, the only expectations we have to meet are our own.
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS LATER
Liam
The hotel room stinks of the ghost of someone else’s cologne. I drop my keycard on the desk, loosen the knot of my tie, and stare out the expansive window at a flat, beige skyline that couldn’t be more different from the lake.
But the numbers are good. Great, actually.