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The morning after, Andrew awoke, as he often did, to the sensation of warm, smooth skin pressed his against his mouth. As he opened his eyes slowly, he moved from Cody's shoulder to nuzzle his ear. "Good morning..." he whispered gently.

"Mmm...?" came his boyfriend's drowsy response. "...morning..."

Andrew gingerly shifted in the bed, careful not to make Cody uncomfortable, before reaching to the nightstand to take his phone off the charger. As part of his morning routine, he always checked to see, first thing, if there were any messages from last night.

Not unusual for that morning, there was, from his best friend back home - the one who had remarked Cody looked like a puppy - Bligh.

The two of them had been best friends since some misty time back in elementary school - he was the one whose Andrew's rapid push to move to Florida had hurt the most. Andrew had dreaded when he had to deliver the news to Bligh he was moving - that his choice wasn't Marshall, or Bethany, or WVU, but USF, some eight or nine hundred miles away. Bligh said he was happy for him, but Andrew knew that it must have been a hideously hollow happiness. Andrew was determined to not let their relationship become strained, even over the distance - but there was always the nagging feeling that some irreparable damage had taken place. Bligh was the person next to Cody that Andrew spoke to the most, and several states away or not, he was, next to his own brother, the strongest living link with West Virginia. And because his brother, Stephen, was moving too, and because they had not spoken lately, soon Bligh would be his _only_link to the place of his roots.

Bligh's reactions to all the earthquake-changes in Andrew's life had been difficult to properly gauge - over the phone, even when it seemed like Bligh was willing to listen, there was always a degree of discomfort, subtly echoing. Perhaps Bligh had been actually unwilling or unable to come to terms with the fact his best bud was gone, let alone a homosexual...or perhaps, as Cody noted to him in a moment of rare profundity, that Bligh was most upset by the fact that Andrew had hid his sexuality - his deepest secret - to someone with whom all secrets, regardless of their nature, should have been shared.

It was certainly true that all the good news he brought to Bligh could be answered only with the same tired stories of working for the mine straight out of high school, caring for the elderly Korean War vet grandfather - "Pappy," who had been grand patriarch to Bligh and Andrew both - and hanging out with a stagnant group of equally directionless townies. There had been some excitement when their mutual friend, Dan Dorsey, had killed himself, but it was a mere ripple in the wake of the wine-dark sea that was Andrew's past - he had cut a swath across the universe, and Bligh had done nothing at all...

"Andy...?"

Cody had jerked Andrew out of his intense introspection - he turned to look at his boyfriend, who had a concerned expression. Andrew hadn't realized, deep in his thoughts, that he had moved to sit on the edge of the bed, staring down at the phone blankly.

"What is it? You look upset..."

Andrew turned back down at the phone in his hand."It's Bligh." "Really? Been a bit." "Yeah, it has...like a week. It's unlike him. But, um - he wants to visit, finally. He - uh - says this weekend starting tomorrow is completely free for him, so he can come and stay for awhile..."

Cody moved to put his arms around Andrew, digging his chin into his shoulder to read the text.

"So...whatcha gonna say?"

Andrew sighed. "I want him to come, but...I'm kinda scared. I haven't seen him in so long, and--" He shook his head, stealing a kiss on Cody's cheek. "--it's complicated."

"You two were best friends, right?"

"Are," Andrew corrected, somewhat defensively. "Uh...are."

"Sorry."

Andrew gave him a squeeze. "Don't be - maybe you're right - maybe I should use past tense."

Cody grabbed Andrew's arm in protest. "Hey now, c'mon, don't think like that! You always talked about how close you two were..."

"Well, yeah, but like, what am I even going to say to him? That I'm sorry? I mean, I am but - I'm...also kinda not." He paused. "If...if I hadn't moved, where would I be? Still in the closet, without - without you..." Andrew and Cody's eyes met briefly - Andrew shook his head sadly. "I just don't know...how do you feel about it?"

"You talk about him a lot, you've told me a lot about him. I'd like to meet him."

"Really?"

"Yeah, I would - I've said that before."

"Yeah, I guess..." Andrew thought a moment. "Well...okay then. I mean, he could finally meet you, and we could catch up in person." He nodded, in affirmation of his own idea. "Alright. What's today, Wednesday? It'll take him about a day or so to drive down...I'll tell him to come tomorrow."

Cody smiled. "We'll have fun. Don't worry."

Andrew looked over Cody's face with a smile before leaning in to give him another affectionate squeeze.

The rest of the day, which began as it nearly always did - Andrew making their favorite breakfast, pancakes with butter and maple syrup - still passed uselessly...it was August, and while school had not yet started, Andrew was graduating in December, and so one corner of the kitchen table was overrun with grad school pamphlets and printed-out applications to this university or that, which Andrew would fret over but never could fill out, but instead nervously go through about every hour, trying to make a profound decision about his future which he was never fully able to do. He wanted to study moths - there was an extremely distant dream of having a new species named for him, of letting an Attacus atlas ryukyuensis perch on his finger amidst the mangroves of Yaeyama, feeling the sweeping breeze on his hand as it flapped its enormous wings... I am a scientist - he would tell himself this, when he was down and even Cody could not help, when he was uncertain he should continue in his chosen hobby, the intellectual altar at which he had sacrificed so much. It was the fever dream of his boyhood - a scientist. When the little boy he tutored - Davey, whose parents owned the Green Room, a skateshop in a strip mall near their apartment, where Cody worked - had asked him what he did, what was his job, Andrew had answered just so - a scientist. It wasn't yet true, of course, and it wouldn't even be true after he graduated - but Davey's eyes went wide at the idea in wonder. A scientist. A grand thing - a dream of greatness.

But perhaps this was too much - much too much. And sometimes he would ask Cody if a bachelor's was enough, if he really needed all this, all this work, all this stress? And Cody - who had not finished high school, and could not grasp the gravity of what Andrew was asking him - would say of course, that the University of South Florida was enough, because he was good enough, he was always good enough. And he loved him. Then Andrew, overwhelmed at how pure Cody's soul was to him, would embrace him, and they would kiss.

This happened twice that day, and almost in the exact same manner. They made love both times - Cody was prone to begging Andrew for sex in a playful, vaguely puppy-like manner, which made Bligh's remark about Cody looking like a "pup" unintentionally awkward. He was always the bottom - lately he had adopted a somewhat strange fetish for pretending that Andrew was impregnating him as they were having anal sex. Perhaps stranger still, they both enjoyed it, and eventually Andrew gave over to Cody's esoteric passion with relish. Cody would ask him to explain what would happen to his own body if Andrew impregnated him - Andrew, the Biology major, would grunt polysyllabic scientific jargon in between thrusts, explaining how his sperm would fertilize Cody, how Cody would eventually give birth to their young, how they would be bound together, in love and offspring. All of it - every word - would send Cody into rapture, and when he would see his love in such a state, Andrew was never too far behind him in finishing.

Cody's job at the Green Room, with low late-summer traffic, had given him two days off, so the pair could fully enjoy that Wednesday together, when Andrew was not inside his own head about what the next year would bring. As Andrew was at the kitchen table fussing with his papers, checking on emails on his phone from professors he had contacted about studying under, Cody would be on the couch, always wearing those blue and black Adidas gym shorts Andrew had bought him, playing their DS or giggling at some recorded It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia on their DVR - when they were not together on the same couch, cuddling, Andrew's whole being bubbling with delight as he ran his hands over the soft, tanned skin of his beloved.

That night, however, Andrew was troubled by a strange dream.

He and Cody had made love the third time that day with unusual but welcome ferocity, the boy yelling as loud as he dared, in danger of waking the neighbors for harder, for more, for babies - not just anyone's babies, but Andrew's babies. The action was exhilarating, but tiring; they both drifted to sleep, in each others' arms, not ten minutes after Andrew had inseminated the love of his life with the hopes of the latter - perhaps half-jokingly, perhaps half-serious - that this time, it finally took.

Not long after falling asleep, Andrew found himself in a dreamscape that was distant - yet familiar.

Out past Lewisburg - south, a wrong turn for many - the roads become dense with vegetation and rolling hills of endless meadows. Beyond them are the mountains, draped with luxuriant forest, that in the autumn of the year - and it was autumn in Andrew's visions - turn into vast fire opals, the nests of phoenix, shimmering red and yellow and gold, never looking the same way twice. Every color of the trees compliments the other perfectly, until they harmonize to create an orchestrated symphony of textured autumnal hues.

This was where Andrew was. He was back in Tempest.

He was standing in a field that rolled hilly before rising up in the distance to meet those same mountains - overhead, geese flew, and he heard his father's voice from his childhood, happy and loving and unjudging, as it had not been for what had seemed like years... Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye, geese!

Here, summer was over - the trees and their autumnal symphony rang in beautiful tones of psychedelic synæsthesia, allowing Andrew the precious hallucination of hearing their colors, and seeing their quiet contentment rustle with the occasional breeze that blew from nowhere.

Echoing off these mountains were the cries of the coal miner's children - upon these mountains were the lonesome ghosts of forgotten years - within these mountains rested the souls of generations who pressed onward, undaunted, through decades of desperation and destitution and abject poverty. Their dreams - of a better life, of making it through, of indeed simply trying to subsist - were dreams clutched so tightly no god or man could ever pry them from their dead hands. Such was Andrew's heritage - he, the last heir of an ancestry he barely understood. What was Florida, and who was he to call it home? Would he ever come back to West Virginia? And how? Would he come honorably? Would he, who had been born to rule, bow himself, to the memories and spirit of his ancestors, still leering at him through the dead decades? "Drew - Drew? Where are ya? I can't - see--" "Bligh...?" He searched about him for the source of the voice, Bligh's voice, which seemed near though invisible, but his eyes darkened, and the landscape fell from view, and the ground opened up beneath him - and he plunged...

He awoke, startled and immensely uneasy. In the span of his sleep he and Cody had separated, and Cody's face was to the wall - he rose from the bed and moved back to the kitchen, where he sat down at the table and stared, listlessly, at the papers still piled on the end he and Cody never sat at for meals. They seemed to stare back at him - and like his dream, had no answers. He put his head in his hands, elbows on the table, as he realized, in a creeping flash of insight, why the dream had bothered him, why now he sat alone in his kitchen at 2:31am.

Bligh was on Andrew's mind - and, in a way understood only by boys who have been friends since early childhood and then separated at the cusp of maturity know, in his heart.