The Road to Amazing (24 page)

But no, before long I realized I'd
come to the end of the road after all, to the little apron of land
around the cove, the former location of the town of Amazing. I
spotted the tops of the rocky ruins poking up from out of the
rustling ferns. Even so, everything looked so different in the
wind.

I looked up at the promontory to the
left of the cove, the giant crag that faced the water. Through the
wind and the needles, I saw someone standing at the top of the
rock.

Kevin. He'd come to Amazing after all.
I liked that I'd been able to predict it, like I'd been able to
predict all the things he'd say in that bachelor party game the
night before. I might have been a shitty amateur detective overall,
but at least when it came to Kevin, Veronica Mars had nothing on
me.

He was looking away, staring out over
at the water.

There was something strange about him,
something that had drawn my eyes to him even through the storm, and
it took me a second to realize what it was.

All around him, everything moved: the
ferns and plants and tree branches — even the tree trunks were
swaying against the sky, a lot more than I would have expected. But
Kevin wasn't moving at all. He stood there, legs spread, braced
against the ground. He was the one solid thing in a never-ending
wash of movement.

I climbed toward him, up the too-steep
trail, through the plants and exposed dirt. Then I stood next to
him amid those trees and ferns. I sensed that Kevin knew I was
there with him, but he didn't turn to me, and I didn't turn to him.
Instead, we both stared out at the sky and water — the clouds
churning in front of us, the white caps in the water below us,
everything a thousand shades of grey. It was somehow incredibly
loud and completely quiet at exactly the same time.

We didn't speak, just kept standing
there. Could we have spoken over the roar of the wind and the crash
of the water? I wasn't sure, but I still didn't know what I wanted
to say, and I guess Kevin didn't either. Even now, we didn't look
at each other. I only saw him out of the corner of my eye — his
handsome profile, his close-cropped hair barely blowing in the
wind.

Why did we stand like that? For one
thing, it was a pretty awesome sight, with so much to look at. The
world smelled of salt and pine, fresher and cleaner than anything
I'd ever known. From the waves crashing against the rocks below, a
mist swirled in the air before us.

But there was something
else going on. Somehow Kevin and I were a part of this incredible
sight, but also apart from it, and that felt good, like it was the
two of us against the storm. I'd told Min and Ruby that morning
that I'd felt disconnected from Kevin all weekend long, and it was
true. It had gotten worse a few minutes before, when we'd been
trying to figure out what to do about the wedding. Ironically, I'd
ended up agreeing with Kevin about canceling it, but now I saw that
it had only pushed us further apart. That's what our friends had
been reacting to with their awkward silences and lack of eye
contact (and Min's
intense
eye contact): they knew that by not pushing
harder for the wedding, it seemed like I had reservations about
doing it at all. It was so obvious in retrospect.

Finally, still without saying a word,
with the world raging all around us, we turned to each
other.

I looked into Kevin's eyes, but I
wasn't sure if I saw stillness or the storm — I think somehow it
was both.

Then we were kissing. He tasted like
the churning ocean — full of life.

As we kissed, my hands were on him,
still solid, a bulwark against the storm. But his hands were on me
too. We held each other up against the wind, as we also fumbled
with zippers and buttons. Kevin's skin felt so smooth under his
clothes, even as the skin on his hands felt wonderfully rough on
me.

At the last second, we pulled away
from each other, then started shucking our jackets and t-shirts,
kicking off our shoes and socks, and stepping out of our pants. It
wasn't like Nate's striptease — deliberately provocative. It was
bolder and more matter-of-fact, nothing sly about it at all, but it
was somehow even sexier.

Finally, we both slipped
off our underwear and stood there facing each other on that ledge,
completely naked. I expected the wind to be brisk on my skin, and
it was, but it still wasn't cold. My skin had never felt so alive.
It was like I was aware of every single cell. I know I said I could
feel every little gust, and I still could, but now it was all over
my body — even in places where I was pretty sure no wind had
ever
blown.

Kevin was beautiful, and I guess he
thought I was too, because we were both fully erect. The spray of
salt water from the crashing surf below washed over me, prickling
my senses.

We started kissing again, pressing
against each other, even as we pulled each other down. The grass
was wet and soft.

Still kissing, we wrestled, but in
sync, not fighting. It was more like dancing.

When we stopped, I was on top and
Kevin was underneath me. Our bodies were interlocked, like a
puzzle, difficult to pull apart. We were both slick with sweat and
mist. I could feel his hard dick pressing up against my
stomach.

I started licking his neck, tasting
his skin, saltier than usual. The wind had made his skin more
sensitive too, and he winced and moaned.

I worked my way down his body with my
mouth. Kevin's chest was hairy but trimmed, and his nipples had
always been sensitive, but were even more so now, and harder
too.

My mouth dipped down, exploring his
lean torso. His body was like a funnel, drawing me
downward.

Kevin opened his legs for me, and I
stared at him, fascinated. I said before that Kevin was the one
solid thing in this whole windy forest of movement, and he still
was, even more than before, but now I'm also talking about his
dick. But it was different from the rest of his body too, because
there was movement within, a seething pulse. This was a hardness
that strained for release.

For a brief moment I wondered what
would happen if someone came upon us like this, one of our friends
from the Amazing Inn, or that Walker guy out hiking in the woods
again. What would they think, seeing us fucking in the ferns? But
this was only a fleeting thought, because I wasn't over-thinking
things anymore. I didn't care if someone saw us, or maybe I even
sort of liked it — was turned on by the idea of doing something so
illicit.

I took Kevin in my mouth and started
sucking him in open defiance of the world.

A wash of salty precum flooded my
mouth, like the gush of the water against the rocks below. I sucked
it in, and Kevin writhed at the intensity of the feeling of my
mouth on his dick, but I held him in place with my hands, savoring
the taste of him. He gently thrust toward me, and I opened wider
for him.

My eyes flicked up toward his face,
and I saw his lips move, knew he was moaning loudly with pleasure,
but I didn't hear a thing over the churning storm.

After I released Kevin, I worked my
way even farther down, still probing with my tongue, licking his
balls. Above me, his granite dick still seethed.

His legs opened wider, and I didn't
hesitate. I leaned forward, my mission clear, pressing my face
against him. Above me, I sensed his dick still flexing, straining
like the nose of jet during take-off.

As I touched him with my tongue, his
whole body stretched backward, spine arched and legs planted, but
still he made no sound I could hear. I surrendered to my desires,
and he accepted my tongue, and together we tangled. But this did
nothing to quench my lust. On the contrary, it just made it
stronger, building like the wind and the storm.

We both desperately needed more, so I
sat upright. My own dick was angled up from my body, wet and
glistening, sticky like the pitch I could still smell seeping from
trees all around me.

I crawled forward over Kevin, my chest
above his torso, the two of us pressing together, touching in one
single spot, but not yet joined. Everything was slick and wet — the
ferns around us, the salty mist of the water — it coated us,
dripped down on us, mixing with our perspiration, my spit, and the
moisture still seeping from both our dicks in quick pulses. But
even so, it wasn't enough to ease the barrier between
us.

I bent down to kiss him, and he kissed
me back with an eagerness that surprised me even now. Now were
touching in two places, and for a moment, we stayed that way,
solid, both of us holding in place, the tension
building.

The kiss was deep and wet, but I felt
the moisture down below too — my cock still surging and
dripping.

The pressure finally broke, resistance
giving way to friction, and I slid into him, all in one slow glide.
His body accepted and defied me in equal measure, the perfect
balance.

The waves crashed and the wind howled,
but all that power was nothing compared to the sensation in my dick
and brain.

Now Kevin I were interlocked even more
deeply than any stupid puzzle. The connection was so tight I felt
like it would be impossible to move. But it wasn't impossible. I
pulled back from him, feeling every inch, then forward again, into
him again. He was moving too, accepting me, letting me go, but then
pulling me into him again.

Now it wasn't the two of us against
the storm — now there was only one, a single being, connected in a
way we'd never been before. But that wasn't quite right either,
because we weren't apart from the storm any more. It was raging
around us, but it was a part of us too. We were all one thing, one
building storm, and there was no way it was going to break, not
until we had churned and howled and groaned to our heart's content,
and every single drop of energy had been spent, and there was
nothing more either of us had left to give.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

I won't say that the storm
broke exactly when Kevin and I were, uh,
finishing
, because that would be a
little too perfect. But honestly, by the time we were done having
sex, it really did seem like something in the air had changed
again.

We sat in the grass amid the wet
ferns, both of us still naked, staring out at the water. The water
rose up in big waves, and it sloshed against the rocks below, but
there were no actual whitecaps out in the channel now. The wind was
calmer too, cooling the sweat on my body, but not so much that I
was cold. On the contrary, the temperature was still
perfect.

I'd thought the night before was going
to be the last opportunity for us to have premarital sex. I guess
I'd been wrong.

Boy
,
was I wrong!
Maybe it was the unexpectedness of it all, or all the angst
and emotion from the canceled wedding, or the greatness of the
storm itself, but it was pretty much the best sex I'd ever had.
More than that, I'd never felt so close to Kevin.

I looked out across the channel. The
outline of the trees against the sky on the other side of the water
was crisp and clear. The sun was just beginning to break through
the streaks of the clouds, like a light bulb shining through a
frayed lamp shade. Puget Sound was slowly turning from
black-and-white back into color (or as colorful as it ever got on a
Saturday in September).

Suddenly I sat upright.

"What is it?" Kevin asked.

"I know what happened," I
said.

"Happened to what?"

"The people of Amazing!"

"The people of what?"

I explained what Min and I had been
talking about all weekend long: how, years ago, there had been this
little town called Amazing, and then one day all the people had
disappeared. As I talked, I realized I'd never gotten around to
reading that photo album of articles that Min had talked about.
Yes, yes, I was a shitty amateur detective, but it didn't matter.
I'd figured out the answer anyway.

"They weren't abducted by aliens," I
said. "And they didn't commit mass suicide."

"So where did they go?" Kevin
asked.

I looked at him and smiled. "They just
left."

Kevin stared at me, not
understanding.

"Amazing might have been a great place
to live," I said. "There was running water, and great forests, and
fresh seafood, and hey, they were a stop on the route of the
Mosquito Fleet! And, I mean, look at this view. But something went
wrong. Maybe the groundwater ran low, or maybe there was a fish
die-off. Maybe some tragedy happened here, something they couldn't
ignore. But whatever the reason, the people weren't happy. They
wanted something different. So they left! There were only
twenty-six people in all. That's enough to fit in a couple of
boats."

"Left to go where?" Kevin
asked.

"Who knows?" I turned toward Puget
Sound, the actual sun visible at last, blazing and golden. "Out
there somewhere. Maybe they didn't even know where they were
headed. Maybe they were just taking their chances, leaving
everything behind and starting fresh. I mean, why not? They thought
this place was amazing — that's why they named it Amazing, right?
But they were wrong. It turned out not to be amazing, not in the
end. So they went out looking for it somewhere else. Because
amazing isn't a place, at least not a place you can stay in for
long. Nothing stays amazing forever. Amazing is a goal. If you want
to live in Amazing, you have to keep looking for it. So that's
where they went."