Side By Side

21.

It was still cold, I was still teary eyed, and— most startling of all— Jake was silent. It wasn't often Jake didn't have anything to say, Marcus was the same. When they were quiet something was different, something was going to happen. I had noticed Marcus being quieter after he started with Lissa; maybe it was to prevent him from saying something stupid, or telling their secret. I was pretty sure though, that he was realizing he liked Lissa's voice more than his own.

Jake had led me far into the thick woods in the middle of town.

"So is this where you tell me you're a serial killer and I'm your next victim?" I joked. It was the first thing either of us said in fifteen minutes.

"Not exactly," Jake kept walking, his back and plumes of breath leading me deeper into the woods.

I didn't question where we were going or what we were doing. The woods were getting darker and darker by the minute, Jake was silent, there was a myriad of potential problems right along the path, and still, I didn't ask. I didn't ask because something told me I was safe with Jake.

"Here we are," he told me. I looked around. It seemed like we were in amongst the same four types of tree as we had been walking through for ten minutes.

"Where are we exactly?" I asked.

"Look up," he told me. Straight in front of us, up in a lard tree, was a wooden structure. Jake looked at it with admiration. He swiftly grabbed my hand and started pulling me along.

"Is that thing safe?" I tried to slow our walking so I could procrastinate going up into that thing. Jake kept walking.

"Sure, sure, Marcus and I come here all the time,"

"What, you can't hang out on the ground?" I asked. Jake was starting to climb up the rickety ladder up into the tree house.

"Come on, it'll be fun," he urged. I sighed and mounted the ladder. The tree house was so far in the woods and so well concealed, even as the leaves were gone, it looked as if only Jake and Marcus had ever been inside.

The structure was just a simple box that I could barely stand up in, with a single cube cut out on one of the wall for a window. Jake presses a button and a string of Christmas lights lining the walls illuminated the whole structure with coloured light.

"Wow, very snazzy," I remarked. Jake laid down his jacket and sat down, I wasn't sure how much of a cushion it was actually providing on the hard, wooden floor, but he gestured for me to sit down next to him on the jacket. There wasn't a lot of room for me to sit on the jacket, so our knees and shoulders were snugly presses together.

"I built it with my dad when he came to visit one summer," he told me looking around.

"Oh. You did a good job," I told him. He smiled wistfully.

"I didn't even really do anything. Mom was mad because it's built on public property and we could get in trouble, but dad convinced her it would be fine. If you look in the corner you can see where I scratched in 'my dads an assh' after I invited him to a football game and then he didn't call for three months," he chuckled along to his own memories, "I got tired and didn't finish the 'ole' in 'asshole'," Even though he was smiling, I felt like it was the first time I ever actually saw him sad. I held my breath as I put a hand on his shoulder in order to ground Jake back to reality.

He looked startled at first— I wasn't much of a touchy person— but swiftly he put his hand on top of mine and squeezed it.

"Now, are you going to tell me what wrong with you?" Jake was silent for a second before stuttering out, "I mean, I don't mean what's wrong with you just, what's going on?"