Western Skies Ch. 05: Snowfall

"Mom." Luke cleared his throat and then stared at his mother, seeming to gain back some of his usual confidence, but he was quickly interrupted by her.

"Not now. Neither of you answering your phones so I come back to drag the two of you over for the midnight countdown...what were you thinking, if your father walked out here instead of me..." She stopped talking and shook her head, looking away from us with evident shame. In my heart, fear and the feeling of icy-cold adrenaline mingled with my simmering anger and intense frustration.

"Luke," I muttered quietly, fixing my attention back on him and hoping against hope he'd stand up for himself. He refused to meet my gaze, instead pushing himself to the other side of the hot tub. Luke looked determinedly away from me, going so far as to turn his back and stare off towards the black night beyond.

"Kaden," said Mrs. Robinson, more softly than before. "Please go inside while I talk to Luke. Whatever is going on between the two of you...it would be better if it stopped."

Sheer terror flooded my veins, drowning out every other emotion. "Luke, say something, damn it," I said, my voice deathly quiet and heavy with emotion.

He finally turned to face me. His eyes were glistening, but his expression was stony. Luke's mouth opened as if to speak, but nothing came out. Looking crestfallen, he tilted his head forward, his eyes fixed ashamedly at the water.

His silence said it all--it spoke more clearly than any words could have. Hearing him deny me--deny us--when finally confronted with an opportunity to stand up for what I thought might actually be love, struck a deeply emotional chord within me. It was humiliating. And I couldn't stick around to deal with it. Commingled fury, pain, anxiety, and confusion spun through my mind like a flock of yammering, incoherent birds.

I pulled myself up out of the water with a splash. The frigid air hit me like a white-hot knife in the heart. Reflexively, I inhaled sharply and snatched up the towel I'd set on a chair nearby as I walked briskly towards the door.

"Kaden..." Luke began, a note of angst evident in his tone.

I turned around sharply, fixing him with a solemn stare. "Yes?"

Silence hung in the air. I snorted and turned back towards the door. "I need to go. Now. Goodbye, Luke."

Reeling, I slipped by his mom, who had the foresight to stand to the side and let me pass. Walking through the cabin as I toweled myself dry, I felt like I was in a tunnel with the walls closing in. Thought had given way to dizzy emotion. Somehow, I made it back to the bedroom and began hurling everything that belonged to me haphazardly into my duffel bag. I slipped on a pair of jeans, boots, and a heavy jacket before emerging back out into the hallway. I could hear Luke and his mom arguing through the still-open patio door. For a brief moment of hesitation at my actions, my feet stopped working, and I stood there long enough to hear Luke's mom say something that sounded like, "It's for the best."

That was it. Hot tears burned in the corners of my eyes and a mighty lump formed in my throat. A moment later, I was slamming the front door behind me. Outside, the threatening clouds had finally begun to unleash a cascading torrent of frozen flakes upon the mountains. In the few minutes I took to pack up, a faint dusting had already glazed my car. I hopped in and cranked up the defroster before throwing the pickup into four-wheel drive and heading down the meandering road towards the two-lane highway.

As I drove, my eyes rose towards the sky and I wondered how I'd gotten myself into this mess. Coming to Montana was supposed to be an incredible adventure, a chance to experience so many new things before heading off to college. A wry smile cracked across my face and a single tear ran down my cheek and into the corner of my mouth, burning a hot trail with a salty finish. I'd experienced something new, that was for sure. Something new that was wonderful and terrible at the same time; I'd defied logic and the pressure of the world I knew to do something my heart had burned for. But when you play with fire--as the saying goes--you're eventually bound to get burned. In this case, burned by the guy who'd stolen my heart and then torn it in two...by saying nothing.

I wiped a couple more tears from my eyes and feebly attempted to to force my thoughts onto a more pleasant subject. Horses. Football. My old life back home in Texas. I even tried to redirect the storm inside me to a different source of anxiety: my upcoming graduation and the web of uncertainty beyond that milestone in my life.

It was no use, however, because through everything my thoughts kept pulling back towards Luke, like his face was some sort of magnet for my firing neurons. With an audible sigh, I opened and closed my hands around the steering wheel, trying to alleviate the pressure in my fingers I'd gained through my death-grip on the wheel. It was no use. No matter what I tried, there was nothing that could settle my mind right now.

By the time I had turned onto the highway towards Bozeman, the snow was coming down at a furious pace and the road was quickly becoming snow-packed. I should've been more careful driving, but worry about what I was going to say to my dad and my rapidly churning emotions concerning Luke fueled my heart to a violently rapid beat.

If I had had a level head and more experience driving in northern winters, I would've slowed down. But I didn't, instead taking the corners as quickly as I could, trying to put as many miles between me and the source of my pain as possible. My headlights cut through the frosted gloom like searchlights, guiding me forward through the raging snowstorm a hundred feet at a time. Beyond the reach of the headlights was blackness--the cold, unknown road that lie ahead. Behind me was also blackness, and in my rearview mirror there was nothing to be seen. There was only the moment, a bubble within a void, moving through frozen time.

For minutes and minutes it was just me, cocooned in my sphere of grief and self-pity. Slowly, a sense of resigned calm descended upon my soul. For turn after turn I cruised in silence, trying to focus on nothing outside the tunnel of light before me, cutting through the snowy night.

Until I rounded a turn and a magnificent buck appeared out of nowhere, looming like a sentinel of the mountains in the middle of the road.

My breath caught and I slammed on the brakes, the truck shuddering as it tried to stop on the frosty ground. Instinctively, my hands twisted the steering wheel, attempting to swerve around the deer. But the road was too slick, and while I managed to miss the deer, there was no way to fight the bend in the road...the pickup careened sideways through the guardrail and dropped over the edge. Thought ceased, my eyes went wide, and then everything went dark.

Through the night, the howling wind roared and the snowflakes swirled, gradually frosting a lonely pickup truck that had gone off the road in a mountain blizzard.

As dawn broke over a new year in Montana, rays of golden light punched through the clouds as the roaring wind subsided into a benign breeze. Alpenglow gilded the freshly snowcapped slopes, lending an ethereal, storybook beauty to the hills. Many miles away from the lonely pickup truck, in a cabin near Big Sky, a lean boy with glistening blue-gray eyes watched the sun rise after a sleepless night.

Hot tears flowed down his cheeks.

***

This chapter may make you want to say, "Fuck you Zorse_D," but remember (before y'all shaft me on your star ratings) to just go read the next chapter.

P.S. If anyone caught the Shameless TV series reference in this chapter, we can be friends.