The Journey
Chapter 14
By Sunshine Boy
Beau froze; this was the worst-case scenario.
Frank McKinnon stood over Beau demanding an answer but after a moment he realized that Beau had frozen so he tried again.
"Alright, one question at a time. Did you delete those files?"
"Yes."
"Where's Dan?"
"Walking across BC."
"Then why did you delete the files?"
Beau took a deep breath and realized that he couldn't avoid it any longer, he had to enact the emergency plan.
"Can I get something from my car?"
"Hurry."
Beau grabbed a large envelope and ran back into the house.
"Can we sit down, maybe at the kitchen table? This is quite a stack of papers." Beau asked.
"Very well."
Beau and Mr. McKinnon sat at the table and Beau fumbled with the envelope.
"Dan made me promise I'd never tell but under the circumstances I have little choice so I'll let you read these instead of me telling you.
*
The path Dan and Sam were following led to a small no-name village where they bought some more food.
"Have you ever thought about having kids?" Sam asked.
"Not really, your not pregnant are you?" Dan joked. Sam grinned but didn't drop the subject.
"I'd like to have a kid, a boy preferably. I want to raise a child in a better place than I grew up in."
"Do you think we could do it? We'd have to adopt of course and then things get sticky, how do we explain to a little kid why he has two daddies and no mommy?"
Sam smiled and appeared almost shocked for a moment.
"What?" Dan asked.
"Nothin"
"Come on, what?"
"You said, 'do you think we could do it?"
Dan blinked and nodded slowly and said nothing for a while.
They walked on in silence for a while longer. Dan checked his map and they turned onto a long dirt road. Along the way Dan told stories of his life and just made general conversation.
"Tell me about your childhood." Dan asked.
"Not much to tell, I was a kid and then I grew up." Sam said abruptly.
"Well there must have been more to it than that."
"Nope, that's it. Are you sure we're on the right road?"
Dan glanced down at his map. "Yeah, it's fine." He said and allowed the previous conversation to fall away.
*
"So this is why he's on this trip?"
"Yes."
Mr. McKinnon sighed deeply and rubbed his temples.
"Surely he knows this is a scam, I raised him better than this."
"He believes in it."
"I guess he's finding himself, but this is such an expensive eventually disappointing way of doing it. I need to talk to him, I need to know he's safe."
"He has my cell but it's not turned on. You could call and when he turns it on next he'll see that you called and hopefully phone back. Or you could leave a text message."
"Nah, I can't figure out all that fancy text stuff, I'll just call and leave a message, but what if he doesn't call back?"
"There's not a lot we can do, he's in some very remote locations."
"Why didn't he just tell me?"
"Would you have let him go?"
Frank McKinnon stopped himself from saying no and remembered the boy he was so many years ago asking his father something similar.
"I would have let him if he wanted to but I wouldn't have approved. Well you better put away these papers. I'll leave the computer in the back of my car. We can't tell Janet, she wouldn't understand."
*
Dan sat alone on a log staring into the fire. 'Who am I? What am I? Do I want this? I want Sam, but I don't want to be gay.'
"Hey Sam, the tea is ready. Are you done with my map?"
"I still don't get it, where are we?" Sam asked as he sat down next to Dan with the map.
"Right here sweetheart." Dan pointed to a spot on the map. Sam smiled up at him then looked down at the map.
"How do you know?"
"There's the stream we walked beside, the mountain next to us and the one in front."
"Okay so this narrow path is...?"
"Here, 2 km ahead. It's 7 km long and after that we drop into the next valley but you see it follows along the side of this cliff or really steep hill. It might be rather narrow."
"You scared of heights?"
"A bit."
"Me too."
You wanna take another rout? It'll add three more days though."
"No let's do this."
"Okay."
Sam quietly folded the map and put it away then snuggled back into Dan's arm and the two sat in silence.
"Have you ever seen the northern lights?" Dan asked.
"No, only on TV."
"We'll have to drive up north perhaps this winter and see them together. You can see them from just outside of town but they're much better when you get out of the city lights of Edmonton, it's a six hour drive but it's worth it."
"Sounds nice."
Dan sipped his tea.
"Those spiral tunnels, when will we be there?" Sam asked.
"In about 5 or 6 days I expect."
"Cool."
Sam yawned, "I'm getting kinda tired."
"Yeah I was thinking about that."
"About me being tired?"
"No about us sleeping together."
"What do you mean?"
"Well now that we're a...a couple I figure we should definitely sleep together."
"Oh definitely." Sam said grinning.
"Anyway, it's kinda tight sharing just one sleeping bag and while I do enjoy being that close to you I just don't like being strangled by a sleeping bag. So I thought we might zip our two bags together thus making one."
"You can do that?"
"Yep."
"Well come on then."
"Okay." Dan grinned as he lit the lamp and doused the fire in the pit.
As Dan zipped the sleeping bags together two thoughts flew through his mind in rapid succession. 'How will I be able to change into my pyjamas in my sleeping bag?' Then, ' wait a sec, I don't have to hide from Sam.' And so when the bags were zipped together Sam sat down on his pillow for a minute obviously considering the proper changing etiquette and deciding to allow Dan to go first.
"Well I better get changed." Dan said as he started pulling off clothes. When he had only his underwear on he noticed the look on Sam's face as he sat watching with his mouth open. Grinning broadly Dan pulled down his shorts.
"What?" He asked.
"Umm...just looking." Sam managed a funny crooked grin.
Dan started rifling through his bag for his pyjamas but Sam interrupted him, "Don't worry about them, come to bed as you are."
"You mean naked?"
Sam grinned and nodded. Dan grinned back. "Okay but only if you do too."
"Your on." Sam said pulling off his own clothes while Dan watched breathlessly.
Dan sat down at the foot of the big sleeping bag, Sam stood naked before him waiting for Dan to say something.
"Sam, your...your beautiful." Dan whispered.
*
"You seem distracted. What's wrong?" Tonya asked as she and Beau sat in the park eating ice cream.
"I'm sorry I'm just worried about Dan and surprised a little by how well his father took it." Beau was talking more to himself than to Tonya.
"Whoa, you lost me."
"Oh, sorry. Oops that must have been really confusing huh? Let me explain, Dan and I have been friends forever..." Beau told Tonya the whole story condensed as much as he could to save time.
"He did take it rather well, sounds like he either has something in mind or he's just a really cool guy."
"Oh yeah, Dan's dad is the best."
"As for Dan, well I dunno, he's your friend."
"What's that mean?"
"Well it's just that I know so little about him compared to you."
"Go on."
"It's just that he picked an interesting way to meet someone; most people talk to people they're interested in at school, work, social activities, the Internet. They don't tend to do what he did."
"I guess it is a really strange way to find someone but Dan was convinced that it was his only choice."
"I see. Has he ever had a girlfriend?"
"Not really, he's had a small handful of very short-term relationships with a few girls, most of whom, no actually all of whom I set him up with. He always found something wrong with them. But basically he just couldn't find the right one. Or so he told me."
"That's interesting too. You arranged all the girls. Was he just shy?"
"No, not really."
"Sounds like he's not very interested in girls."
"Nah, he must be, he's always talking about how lonely he feels and how frustrating it is to be always looking for someone but always coming home empty handed."
"Well that's my point, you ever thought that perhaps he's gay?"
"No." Beau said surprised.
"Well it's just that most people date someone they're interested in before they decided that they aren't right. Your friend leads me to believe that he has no real interest in girls other than an overriding conviction that he's straight."
"Wow. Where'd you learn all of this?"
"I love psychology, I told you I'm gonna take it in university next year right?"
"Ah yes, behavioural sciences. Well anyway, I think you're really smart but wrong, perhaps your partially right though, you don't know as much about him as I do and so maybe I just told the story poorly."
*
"Hey honey. How was work?"
"Fine. Did they finish the computer yet?"
"No, they're working on it but I guess they're really busy."
"Oh, did you at least find out from Beau how Dan's doing?"
"Yeah, he's good. Still trekking across BC."
"Remind you of anyone dear?"
"Yeah, I learned a lot that year."
"We both did dear."
Authors deserve your feedback. It's the only payment they get. If you go to the top of the page you will find the author's name. Click that and you can email the author easily.* Please take a few moments, if you liked the story, to say so.
[For those who use webmail, or whose regular email client opens when they want to use webmail instead: Please right click the author's name. A menu will open in which you can copy the email address (it goes directly to your clipboard without having the courtesy of mentioning that to you) to paste into your webmail system (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc). Each browser is subtly different, each Webmail system is different, or we'd give fuller instructions here. We trust you to know how to use your own system. Note: If the email address pastes or arrives with %40 in the middle, replace that weird set of characters with an @ sign.]
* Some browsers may require a right click instead
