Danger in broad daylight

[Cristoval de Azcarate]

Damnit! The bus had stopped.

Cris uncurled from his seat all the way at the back of the bus and tucked his phone into his back pocket as he stood up to scan the road through the windshield, to see what was going on. He'd been on his way back to the lake house, on a bus out of town, when out of nowhere the driver stopped the bus and turned off the ignition.

Outside, it was a clear and sunny day. There was a small line of cars outside that had also stopped, and drivers had already begun to emerge from their vehicles, hoping to see what the obstruction was ahead.

Unable to see much from his current position, he let out a small noise of frustration. The bus driver was outside now too, peering ahead. Cris gently tapped the shoulder of the person in front and asked, in his broken English tinged heavily in a Spanish accent, "Excuse me. Why the bus has stopped?"

@open

[Edel Ziegler]

Huh. Cris wasn't exaggerating. As Edel slipped his phone into his back pocket, he could see that there was some kind of traffic jam up ahead. There was a bus, too, which he had to assume was the one Cris was currently aboard. And drinking on... like an idiot. He didn't know whether to smile or frown, so his mouth made a sort of odd twisting motion, half amused, half annoyed.

Ah, well. At least he found him. The suburbs were out of the way but Edel just took one of those rides from the apps up to town. He probably should have had the guy on standby but he was gruff and seemed irritated by Edel's presence (even though Edel literally only said hello and thank you to him).

They could always call a new one. If anybody could get through the weird jam. Not usual to see in a town of this size. As he curiously stepped closer, Edel could see that up ahead, there was some kind of commotion. Somebody was shouting in panicked tones about an attack. Edel glanced at the bus where Cris was surely waiting but he moved past it. Cris could wait a couple more minutes.

To his shock, there was... something odd definitely going on. Before the line of cars was a bunch of road workers setting up a barrier around what appeared to be a sinkhole. Edel's eyes widened at the sight of it. But more distressing was the hysterical guy standing near the edge with blood running down the side of his head.

"I'm telling you! It was a monster, it came at me and it chased me and my friend--he got sucked into that hole by the thing! It was made of shadows or or or smoke or something!"

"Come on, Emilio," said a woman in uniform, lightly reached out and touching the man's upper arm. "Let's get you over to my car..."

Monster? Edel furrowed his brow and then turned back to the bus, too far back to see what was going on up here. Jogging back, he hurried over to the bus and went to the door and slammed on it a couple of times.

"Cris? Cris, are you in there?!"

[Cristoval de Azcarate]

As it turned out, nobody didn't like a good drink and Cris had several bottles of good drinks at his disposal. Since someone disapproved of him having many bottles of good drinks, he shared some with the rest of the bus' passengers. Everyone became considerably less stressed out after that, which in turn made Cris less stressed out.

He sat in his seat with the frozen pizza wedged against the window, gazing soulfully--drunkenly--outside at the nice, warm, sunny day. The line of cars stretched out behind him, and also in front of him. All he could see were irritated people and cars with their engines turned off. A while ago some service vehicles and emergency vehicles ran past on the shoulder, but other than that, there was nothing exciting happening.

That was, until someone began to bang on the bus doors and shout his name. Cris leapt up with a start. "That's me!" he declared to the bus at large, which was foolish because no one else was named Cris. A moment later he was out onto the aisle and tottering unsteadily towards the front of the bus.

The driver opened the door for him with a mystified look and he leapt down the stairs--okay, fell down--and into Edel's arms. "Edel!"

[Edel Ziegler]

"Oh my god," Edel said as he caught Cris. "How drunk are you?"

Did he even need to ask? He could still smell it on him--the scent of alcohol and a whiff of something else. Why was Cris' side so cold and slightly damp? Weird. Attempting to right his friend so that he could stand more steadily on his own two feet, he couldn't help letting out a sigh of relief.

It wasn't as if he expected that Cris would vanish into a sinkhole or anything. And he didn't believe in monsters, even if he read a lot of stories about them in his line of work. Monsters were a huge selling point now, in every kind of story--romance, fantasy, etc. They weren't just for horror anymore.

Still, the distressed looking man bothered him and he was beyond happy to find Cris as he had last seen him. Even if he was a little drunk, he was all in one piece and nobody had absconded with him while he wasn't looking.

Keeping an arm around Cris, he smiled at him. "C'mon dummy. Let's get back to the lake house." He tried not to look back in the direction of the sinkhole, not wanting to alarm Cris. Even just the sinkhole part was creepy enough.

"By the way... what happened to whatever you went to the shop for? I thought you were going to bribe the neighbors or whatever."

[Cristoval de Azcarate]

"Mmm you're so warm," Cris sighed as he clung long and hard to Edel. One side was nearly frozen numb from the pizza but seeing Edel made everything okay. He wasn't even freaking out about the police cars and the sirens and that huge crowd gathered around something up ahead!

"I'm just drunk enough to be interesting!" He'd heard someone say that before, that he only drank to be interesting. Maybe they were right. Or at least, they weren't wrong... Cris spoke to one of Edel's heads. Suddenly he had three of them... and then they all merged into one. Letting himself be carted away, he threw a troubled look back onto the bus but it seemed too late to rescue that frozen pizza now...

"I gave it away." He hiccupped. "You were so mad... I didn't want to make you mad so I drank it with the people on the bus. And it's all gone now! All gone!"

[Edel Ziegler]

"Okay..."

What an odd thing to say. Drunk enough to be interesting? Like what, he wasn't normally interesting enough without a couple drinks in him? Edel sighed. He could see the way Cris was looking at him--or around him, more like. He was drunk, not tipsy. Asshole! He drank more than he let on. How did Edel not catch it? How did he even text so well when he was stumbling and slurring?

"I can see that," he said. That the alcohol was all gone, although he had his suspicions about which of the passengers aboard drank the most. He sent a glare at the driver, fully blaming him for letting his passengers get drunk on his watch. As if he didn't know! For shame!

The sirens were getting louder and there were more people surging forward to get a better look at the odd sinkhole. Even now, Edel felt his hands go sweaty at the image of it. The fact that the ground could swallow up people and cars like that so suddenly...

"Let's get out of here," Edel reiterated in an urgent tone. "I don't think we want to be here anymore. I'll call..." He trailed off. "Actually, you know what? Maybe we can just stay in a hotel or B&B here tonight, huh? That'd be nice, right?"

[Cristoval de Azcarate]

"Oh but you're mad now anyway!" Cris threw up a hand in exasperation--the other was holding on to Edel for dear life. "I can't do anything right!" Should he have thrown the bottles away? Poured the alcohol out of the window? It seemed like such a waste... And there had been a couple of people on the bus who didn't mind sharing a drink with him...

Staggering away from the line of cars and their impatient drivers, Cris nodded. Then he felt nauseous from the motion--or maybe from the alcohol in his system--and stopped abruptly. "You wanna get a room with me?" His grin was equal parts drunk and suggestive. Edel probably didn't mean that kind of room. Or did he?

Or did he?

[Edel Ziegler]

"What?" Edel looked over Cris and his indignation. "I'm not mad."

Did he seem mad? Maybe. Mostly he was just agitated by what was happening at the intersection. Some part of him was afraid that the sinkhole would keep opening up. Those things were the stuff of nightmares to him. When did they end? How did they collapse in like that? Were there explosives involved? Maybe that's what the guy back there saw when said he saw some smoke like visage.

The fright in the guy's voice, though. It sounded so real.

"I do," he said, a little distractedly, because he did want to get a room with Cris but he was also still thinking about the disaster they were leaving behind. Then he made the mistake of looking back at Cris again, focusing in on him and that grin. He let out a sigh.

"Not for that!" he added. "I just think... getting back to the lake house might be hard right now, is all."

[Cristoval de Azcarate]

"Oh." And that was that--because the memory of a drunk was on par with the memory of a goldfish. Plus, Cris had a hard time working himself up into any kind of indignation and staying there when there was so much of a commotion all around them. He was almost starting to think that something catastrophic had happened. These people were acting like a hole had opened up in the earth to swallow them whole!

Edel was right though; they weren't getting back to the lake house anytime soon. "The neighbors will be there anyway," he whispered, as if the neighbors could hear them. "They'll all be judging. Let's go to a... a nice B&B! They'll serve us eggs in bed!"

Cris teared up a little. Because he was drunk. Because he couldn't remember the last time he had eggs brought to him in bed, or anyone who cared enough about him to do that for him. Mostly, because he was drunk. Still leaning heavily on Edel, he began to move off in what he imagined was a direction leading to a bed and breakfast.

"...I wanna be able to look our neighbors in the eyes again, Edel." He leaned his head onto Edel's shoulder. "Can you get me that for... Christmas?"

[Edel Ziegler]

Personally, Edel wasn't big on seeing the neighbors, either, after what they did in front of them. Just thinking about it brought a flush of embarrassment to his face but he did his best to calmly talk himself out of it. If they were going to judge them, like Cris said, they would... they would... actually, Edel couldn't think of any reason why they wouldn't judge them after that spectacle.

Yeah... even if there was no sinkhole and weird stories of smoke monsters, Edel thought he might have chosen to stay here in town. Was it safer, though? The sinkhole was here. And whatever that guy was talking about, too.

Edel sighed. Why was he even giving that any merit, anyway? Pft... as if something like that existed. But as he took another step, he felt something cold in the wind. It was the middle of summer but it felt as if the temperature was dropping at an alarming rate.

"Yeah," he said to Cris with a worried expression. He had intended to make some snarky remark about Christmas being off by quite a few months but now?  Now he muttered mostly to himself: "Seems like Christmas is coming earlier this year..."

He tried not to shiver.

[Cristoval de Azcarate]

"I love Christmas!" Cris continued whispering. "It starts with Chris! That's my name! And--remember when we made out at Jaime's Christmas party that one year?" He was almost sure it was last year... Or was it the year before? At some point, they'd made out at a party. That happened a lot, in their defense.

The chilly gust of wind didn't go unnoticed by Cris, who shivered and held on to Edel even more tightly. It sobered him up a little. His gaze shifted to the other side of the road which was lined by a ditch and some woods beyond it. A few more police cars ran past on the shoulder, followed by an ambulance.

"Hey... is that guy checking us out?" Cris gently pushed off from Edel so that he could stagger closer, waving to the figure hovering just by the treeline. "He's been staring at us since I got off the bus. Maybe he wants to go to the B&B with us!"

[Edel Ziegler]

"Ehh...." He looked away in embarrassment. Did he remember making out at Jaime's party? Yes, but he hadn't acknowledged it before and he sort of didn't want to now, either. In the back of his mind, he kept having to remind himself that there was still a boyfriend in his life. And he... loved Rey, he thought. But maybe just... maybe not the same way as he loved Cris. How could Rey even compete with somebody that had been in Edel's life for so much longer?

No wonder Rey was so insecure.

Sighing, Edel continued to edge Cris down the street, although his heartbeat kicked up a notch at the sound of the ambulance siren. Somebody really did get hurt badly back there. He wondered how many had fallen into the sinkhole. Again, he thought of the weird, frantic guy talking about smokey monsters. Biting his lower lip, he held Edel a little tighter--only to have Cris suddenly, push away, occupied with some guy allegedly checking them out.

"Huh?" Edel asked, turning to see the guy that Cris was waving at in the nearby trees. "What? No! We don't know him. Stop waving at him."

[Cristoval de Azcarate]

"Technically we don't know anybody here!" Cris protested, though he did stop waving. "Fine," he mumbled, starting to turn away, "I wasn't going to invite him into our room or anything." For a moment he looked over his shoulder to see if the guy was waving back but there was nothing by the treeline. Huh. How'd that guy disappear so fast? Maybe he was a camper and came out to see what the commotion was...

Still walking a touch unsteadily, he leaned closer to Edel. "Anywayyyy..." Cris smiled that particular drunk smile at him. "I seem to remember... somebody having something... important... to say..."

Was it Edel that had to say it first, or Cris? What were the rules? Cris didn't know the rules with men--this was his first man. Not his first man-crush, obviously, but his first... man. The first man he had serious feelings for. And with another man, it wasn't apparent who did what in the normal sequence of things. With Jen, it was easy to take the lead but here Cris was lost.

Throwing caution to the winds, he whispered, "Iloveyou," smiled that same particular drunk smile again, and veered off.

[Edel Ziegler]

"Oh, did I?"

Something important to say? Like Edel didn't know what Cris was talking about. It was Edel himself that said he wasn't comfortable saying it over the phone. Even if it was incriminating enough to text it, saying those kinds of things when they weren't face to face just felt... wrong. More wrong, he supposed, then cheating on his own boyfriend.

Inwardly, he sighed at the reminder. Sliding his gaze aside, he could feel the guilt eating at his chest. Edel never thought he'd end up like this, the type of person who apparently wasn't as happy with his partner as he thought. He never thought about cheating on Rey before; this was new. Or it wasn't...

It was complicated, all right? He was in love with his best friend and his best friend knew it and--and so did Rey. He knew all this time and that was where his insecurity came from. Edel acted stupid or something. How did he not see it? Another inward sigh. Fuck.

"I know," Edel said softly, even though he felt a strange little melancholic clutch in his heart when he said it. And he wanted to say it back. He really did. Except Cris was veering off and teetering away from him so Edel had to pull him back.

"Where are you going now?"

[Cristoval de Azcarate]

"I'm looking..." Cris shaded a hand over his eyes as though seriously searching for something in the bushes. "For where you hid your words."

I know.

Edel's heart wasn't the only one that squeezed tight at the words. Sometimes it wasn't enough to know. Sometimes the words needed to be said, to be made concrete. Cris knew Edel felt the same way about him too but knowing it and hearing it were worlds apart. And Edel couldn't say it.

This was where alcohol came in, though. This was what made it easier to lurch down the road, grinning foolishly as he turned the topic away from his confession. Cris had been saying it to people for years and he'd been hearing silence back for years, too. His dad--too busy to hear it. His mom--too distant to hear it.

Jen said it back, though. She meant it, too, which explained Cris' devotion to her but as much as he wanted Jen to be enough, she wasn't. And maybe... as much as Edel wanted his words to be enough, they weren't either.

"Hey there's a B&B close by!" They weren't short on these things around this town, Cris noticed. It seemed like the only way the locals could make any money aside from farming or ranching. "C'mon! I need a shower!"