The Lookout Point

Felix Armstrong was forty-four years old and had just become an expert at packing a car. Twenty-one years of kids and gear and grocery runs, and now the youngest was off at college and the house was so quiet he could hear the refrigerator hum. So he'd driven three hours east, parked at the Pine Ridge trailhead, and started fussing with his pack straps as if he still didn't know how to take a vacation.

That was when he heard the voice behind him.

"No way. Felix Armstrong, carrying a pack like he means it."

Felix turned around and there was Bryce Gonzalez, grinning, camera hanging off one shoulder, looking like he'd stepped out of a magazine ad for some product that didn't exist. Same dark hair, a little gray in it now. Same stupid handsome face.

"Bryce? Get out of here."

"I live out of here, mostly." Bryce spread his arms. "Come on, give me a hug before you say something dumb."

Felix hugged him. It was weird and it wasn't. Twenty-two years since he'd seen the guy last, back when they were both twenty-two and dumb, and the hug felt like about six months had gone by.

"What are the odds," Felix said. "This trailhead is, what, a hundred miles from anywhere?"

"Two hundred, if you're going by my gas receipts. I've been shooting a story on the fire lookouts up here. Wrapping up today, figured I'd do one hike for myself before I drive home."

"Home being where, this month?"

Bryce laughed. "Okay, fair. Portland right now. Before that Tucson, before that Asheville. I've got a storage unit in three states and an opinion about which one has the best coffee."

"Let me guess. Oregon."

"Oregon. You get it." Bryce looked Felix over. "So what's your story? Last I heard you were in Seattle doing the law office thing."

"Paralegal. Still. Twenty years and counting." Felix shrugged. "Kids are grown. My youngest started college last week, so I packed up the minivan, cried like an idiot in a dorm parking lot, and drove out here to remember who I was before all that."

"How many kids you got?"

"Two. Danny's twenty-one, he's in Spokane doing something with computers. Maya just turned eighteen last month, hence the whole college thing."

"Eighteen and off to school. God." Bryce shook his head. "You're old."

"You're forty-four too, you don't get to talk."

"Forty-four and no kids, so I've still got the knees of a thirty-year-old." Bryce patted his own legs. "Okay, thirty-five. With ibuprofen. Point is, they're fine."

Felix snorted. "You always were full of it."

"And you always loved it." Bryce nodded up the trail. "I'm heading to the Lookout Point. You going that way?"

"That's the plan."

"Then walk with me. Twenty-two years of catching up doesn't happen standing in a parking lot."

* * *

They fell into it easier than Felix expected. Twenty-two years should have made two strangers out of them, but Bryce talked the way he always had, fast and all over the place, one story running into the next. A job shooting lighthouses in Maine. A bad stretch in Reno where he ate nothing but casino buffet shrimp for a week. A near-arrest in Utah for climbing a fence to get the right angle on some rock formation.

"So they detained you," Felix said.

"For four hours. The ranger felt bad about it by the end. Gave me a granola bar."

"That's the American justice system, right there."

"It works if you're a photographer and not a criminal." Bryce stepped over a creek. "What about you? Married? Divorced? Tell me the whole tragic saga."

"Married fourteen years to a woman named Corinne. Divorced eight years ago, friendly-ish. She lives in Portland now, which means you might've walked past her at a farmers market and never known."

"Small world. Kids good?"

"Kids are great. House is too quiet. Hence the hiking trip, which I planned at about eleven at night on a Tuesday, which tells you everything about my mental state."

"That's kind of the best way to plan trips, though. No committee review."

They climbed. The trail was steady through the pines, the light coming down in long golden slants, and the air had that warm pine-and-smoke smell that meant somebody at the campground was cooking dinner already. Felix had forgotten how much he liked this, just walking and talking with somebody who didn't need anything from him.

"So tell me the truth," Bryce said after a while. "Empty nest. Is it as bad as everybody says?"

"Worse. I made a casserole for one and ate it over the sink like some kind of raccoon."

Bryce laughed so hard he had to stop walking. "A raccoon. Okay. Okay, that's the image I'm keeping."

"You asked."

"I asked and you delivered." He wiped his eyes. "You should've called me, man. I'd have told you to buy frozen stuff and delete the casserole era from your life."

"Noted for the next crisis."

The trail bent left at a switchback and the trees opened up. The whole valley was down there, all gold and green, a river running through it like somebody spilled it. Bryce stopped dead.

"Oh, that's it. That's the light." He already had the camera up, working fast, feet shifting, checking the frame. "Hold on, don't talk to me for a minute."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

Felix leaned against a boulder and watched him work. And that was the problem, kind of. He watched Bryce's hands move on the camera, watched the way his shoulders sat, watched him mutter to himself about shadows, and something old stirred up in Felix's chest. Something from a summer twenty-two years ago that they had both agreed, without ever saying it out loud, to never bring up again.

Bryce was twenty-two that summer too. They both were. They'd shared an apartment, then a bed, then about six weeks of the best and worst and most confusing summer of Felix's life, and then Bryce took a job in another state and it was over. Friendly goodbye. No hard feelings. No mention of any of it, ever, in twenty-two years.

Felix looked at him now, forty-four years old, sun on his face, muttering at a mountain, and felt the same pull he'd felt at twenty-two. Older, maybe. Slower to admit it. But the same.

Bryce lowered the camera and caught him looking. For a second neither of them said anything.

"What?" Bryce said.

"Nothing. You look the same when you shoot. Same face."

"That's either a compliment or an insult and I haven't decided which."

"Compliment. Probably."

Bryce looked at him a beat longer than the joke required. Then he grinned and turned back to the valley. "Come here, I want a shot of you with this behind you. Stand there, right at the edge."

"Let me fix my hat."

"You look fine. You've always looked fine, Armstrong. That was always your whole problem."

Felix stood where Bryce pointed, at the edge of the drop, hands in his pockets as a man getting a passport photo taken.

"Relax your shoulders. Stop posing. Just look at the valley like you're bored of it."

"This is my bored face."

"Bored face is good. Bored face says I own this valley." The shutter clicked a few times. "Okay. Okay, got it. Come back before you fall off something."

Felix walked back over and Bryce turned the camera around to show him the little screen. Felix in the frame, squinting, the whole burning valley behind him. It was a good picture. It made him look like someone who did interesting things.

"That's going on my Christmas card," Felix said.

"Send me one. I want to see what the caption is."

"Couple possibilities."

Bryce put the camera back on his shoulder and didn't start walking right away. He stood there looking out at the river, hands loose at his sides, and Felix got the feeling something was coming.

"You know what I keep thinking about," Bryce said. "That summer. The apartment on Fourth Street. The one with the window that didn't close all the way."

Felix's stomach did something. "What about it?"

"Six weeks in that place. Six weeks and you never once fixed that window. I brought it up at least five times."

"Wasn't broken. I wedged it."

"You wedged it so it stayed open about four inches, all summer, and we never talked about why."

"Because you liked the breeze."

"Because you liked the breeze," Bryce agreed. "Sure."

They looked at each other. Twenty-two years of nothing said about it, and now they were standing on a mountain with the whole thing laid out between them like a packed cooler.

"Felix," Bryce said. "I thought about that summer more than I should have. Over the years. Tucson, Asheville, all of it. There was always some window or some song or some dumb thing that put me right back in that apartment."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Your turn. Tell me you never thought about it."

Felix looked down at his boots, then back up. "I thought about it more than once."

"More than once."

"A lot more than once. There. Happy?"

"Extremely." Bryce's voice had gone quieter. "Why'd we never talk about it? Twenty-two years, man."

"Because it was easier. Because I was twenty-two and confused and you were leaving for a job and it seemed like the grown-up thing to just... let it be a nice summer."

"Was it nice?"

"It was the best summer I ever had. That was the problem."

Bryce nodded slowly. "Same."

A jay went off somewhere in the pines. Somewhere below them a river kept doing what rivers do.

"So what now," Felix said. "We hike to the lookout, we take pictures, we trade emails, and that's it?"

"That's the boring version."

"What's the other version?"

"The other version is I've wanted to kiss you since the parking lot," Bryce said. "And I'm asking first this time, because twenty-two years ago I was a coward about the window and I'm not making the same mistake twice."

Felix's heart picked up. "You're asking."

"I'm asking. Felix Armstrong, can I kiss you?"

"Yeah," Felix said. "Yeah, you can."

Bryce closed the distance in two steps and got a hand on the side of Felix's face, and then his mouth was warm and sure and it was like no time had passed at all. Felix grabbed a fistful of his shirt and kissed him back and made a low sound he wasn't planning on making. Bryce grinned against his mouth.

"There he is," Bryce murmured.

"Shut up and keep going."

Bryce kept going. It turned hungry fast, twenty-two years of it landing all at once, teeth and breath and Felix walking him backwards