Closer To The Sun [Poly] [Bi]

6 - Rory

Hey! :) Hey you!
If you're enjoying the story, leave me a vote! 
It helps new readers find the book!
❤ Thank youuu!  ❤

Q.O.T.D – What's your favorite type of romance to read?  ❤  Fast & spicy? Slow & sweet?

===============================================

🌲 . 🏔️ . 🌲

As he always did, Rory dreamt of straight lines.

They crisscrossed the blackness of his vision, white comets against the night sky. They streaked, and then they faded. Blurs of gray and blue, the ephemera of ancient stars. Pearls of rain, falling down through the gravity of his pupils. Perfect gashes of white through charcoal.

The bus shuddered and his eyes flashed open. The raindrops disappeared. Beyond the bus window spread a field of green-golden grass. Mountains rose above the plains to touch a cornflower sky, so wide and blue that he ached.

Rory's seat partner still slept. The stranger snored quietly, inches from Rory's left shoulder. He didn't seem to mind the fact that Rory smelled like a sun-baked camel. There was dirt caked so thick on his ankles that he could barely see his leg hair, and he had run out of deodorant on Day 14.

Honestly, the ability of the man to stay fast asleep was almost flattering.

As the Greyhound took a wide curve, the landscape went from any-old-Colorado-plains familiar to hometown familiar. The streets became those crooked lines etched into his muscle memory, burned into his hands against the steering wheel of his first car. They knitted into a quilt of memory. There was the old barn where he'd first gotten drunk at fifteen with the other burnouts of his high school. There was the roundabout where his drivers ed teacher docked him points for failing to yield the right of way to a slow-moving tractor.

Home. Why was he always trying to leave this place? He couldn't remember.

Today might have been the first day he was excited to return to Soledad from one of his long escapades in the American trail system. He loved his moms and his cousin and his grandmas, and he knew they were eagerly awaiting his arrival, and he always missed them when he was gone, but today was the first day he could remember that something unexpected was awaiting him at the bus station. Today was the first day he knew he would get off the bus, but didn't know what he would find.

I'll meet you at the station, the mysterious number had texted him just days before he'd left. Just let me know when you're on your way home, and I'll be there.

As soon as Rory had gotten into cell service that morning, he'd texted the unknown number, obtained from a friend of a friend. They'd only exchanged a handful of texts, and none of them had included an introduction. It was only now that Rory realized he should probably have asked the stranger's name, but he'd been too intrigued by their initial text:

Do you know what is in the woods outside of town?

A nameless excitement thrummed through Rory's skin as the Greyhound pulled up at the downtown bus station and squealed to a stop. Rory's seat partner snorted awake and then sniffed, making a face like he'd finally realized how bad Rory had smelled this entire time. Rory tried not to look culpable.

He grabbed his backpack, foam sleeping pad strapped clumsily to the outside, and his slender hiking poles from the overhead storage, which he tried not to jab anyone with on the way out the bus. He thanked the driver – he'd ridden with her before, Marla, maybe? – and his shoes hit familiar Colorado pavement. It sent a shockwave through his exhausted body and he swayed.