How can I possibly choose!? 11, 15, 21 - take your pick! And you know who. You always know who.
Oh, believe me, I know!!!! And I wanted to write them all for you, but here’s #11 (partners in crime). Fair warning: this contains some pretty much entirely off-screen violence, and death.
“Have you seen a dead person before?” Jared asks, calmly, too calmly, like he’s looking over an Excel spreadsheet and not at a body on the floor.
“No,” Richard yelps. “No. Fuck. Jared. No. I haven’t.” His chest heaves, once, violently, and a wretched sound escapes him. Richard clamps his hands over his mouth and races to the door.
Jared doesn’t give himself much time to think. He looks down at the man, cold and pallid as the grey marble floor beneath him, and doesn’t chastise himself for not feeling guilty. All he has to think is, this man was cruel to Richard, he was hurting him, and he feels almost entirely justified.
Jared packs those thoughts away. He knows it’s time to clean up now. To make things presentable. To pretend at normalcy. After over half a lifetime keeping secrets, those are things Jared knows exactly how to do. By the time Richard comes back from the bathroom, he’s taken care of everything. Mopped up the evidence, collected Richard’s belongings, recovered the hard drive with the past day’s security footage. He sits, hands folded, on an expensive-looking, uncomfortable couch.
Richard sniffles. His eyes are red from tears. A loud, purple handprint snakes around his throat, a terrible reminder of what almost happened here earlier.
Richard wipes his nose on his sleeve. He laughs a little, remarkably. “Jared,” he says. “That’s supposed to be for show. He never let anybody sit there.”
They climb into the car, Jared in the driver’s seat, Richard beside him.
Jared thinks of all the places he’s been. There are many. Too many. Few worth going back to.
“Where do we go?” he asks. “Anywhere but Pennsylvania.”
“Cape Canaveral,” Richard says, as if shocked at his own decisiveness. He takes down the GPS and plugs in an address. Etches the map into his brain for later. “Kennedy Space Center. Florida. Let’s – Yeah. I always wanted to see it. We’ll go south and then east.”
They pitch their cell phones out the window somewhere outside Palo Alto. Same with Jared’s GPS. At a rest stop in Avenal, they buy lukewarm coffee, donuts, bottles of water, sunglasses, baseball caps. Jared withdraws all the cash left in his meager, well-worn bank account. He tosses the hard drive and most of the remaining contents of his wallet discreetly in the trash. He drives straight through the night, until his hands ache from gripping the steering wheel. Richard barely speaks. By dawn they’re skirting the edge of Los Angeles and heading east.
“You can sleep, Richard, if you’d like to.”
The sky is pale with the bleary haze of morning. Palm trees stretch up into it as if they’re straining their necks.
“No.” Richard shakes his head, his eyes cast down at his sneakers. “I couldn’t. But, ah, how about you? Want me to drive for a while?”
“Oh, no thank you. I’m alright.”
Richard nods. He goes back to fiddling with the car radio, which picks up mostly static and the occasional top 40 song.
“They must know by now. Right? I mean, a famous billionaire. That’s something people’d notice. It’d get put on the news.”
Jared thinks Richard is probably right – that they might even have figured it out by now, that maybe they’ve been reported missing, that maybe their faces are already plastered on every corkboard in every police station in every state, that maybe there’s already nowhere left for them to run now – but Jared says nothing. The only things he can think of saying are questions he can hardly bear to ask.
“Joshua Tree,” says Richard. He reaches over Jared to point out the entrance sign.
Jared turns off without thinking. He’s heard there’s excellent bird watching in the park.
When they finally stop for a night, in some run-down motel in the Arizona desert, Jared half-expects the woman at the counter to call the cops. Instead she smiles kindly, comments on what polite young men they are, and accepts Jared’s cash and assurance that he’s left his ID in the car without further comment. She reaches into a cabinet and hands over a pale pink key.
The room itself is small but habitable. There’s a chair covered in cowhide. A single, full-sized bed. A kettle Jared will use to make tea in the morning. Richard immediately, anxiously, checks the sputtering old television for news while Jared excuses himself to the restroom.
He sets the shower running but doesn’t get in. Stares himself down in the mirror as his posture cracks, his breath catches, and the next thing he knows he’s crying, harder than he has in years. Jared clambers down onto the turquoise tile, folding his long legs up to his chest. Pull yourself together, Donald, he thinks. Come on. Distantly he remembers his mother also being like this: excellent in a crisis, then quick to privately fall apart.
When everything feels wrung out of him – all the pent-up anger, and the shame at having expressed it – Jared steps into the shower, set scaldingly, punishingly, hot.
Richard is looking out the window when Jared emerges later, having showered and shaved with a cheap kit procured from the lobby. He wears a white t-shirt and boxers, a towel around his neck. His khakis slung over one arm to iron later.
“Have you seen the stars?” says Richard.
“No,” Jared answers, toweling at his hair. “Well, not really.” All his life he’s spent in or near cities. Never anywhere as remote as this.
Richard says he has, on a trip to the Grand Canyon. His father drove the whole Hendricks clan. Richard says for a while he wanted to be an astronomer, or an astronaut. He mentions the telescope in his childhood bedroom. How badly he longed to go to Space Camp, but was too nervous and frightened to apply.
“Can you see many more?” asks Jared, genuinely not knowing, but feeling like that’s okay to admit. “Hundreds?”
“Thousands, Jared,” Richard says, emphatically. “Thousands. So many you can’t even – let’s just go see.”
They dress as warmly as they can manage with what little they have with them, for the cold of the desert night. They walk away from the motel, until the light of its buzzy neon sign fades out and the stars appear above them. So many there’s barely any sky. It’s almost impossible to believe, thinks Jared. It’s even better than I ever imagined.
“I never, I, um,” Richard says later, in fits and starts, as they lay together in their shared bed. “I wanted to say, I guess, thanks. If you – I mean, fuck, if you hadn’t been there I don’t know what would’ve happened. If he would’ve – Shit.” Richard drags a hand through his hair. He sighs long and deeply, his eyes pressed softly shut. “Why, ah, Jared, why were you? There, I mean.”
Jared is unsure how to answer, so he answers the only way he knows how. Truthfully.
“I noticed,” he says, reaching out to gently touch the mark under Richard’s eye by way of explanation. “I noticed all the bruises. You seemed so miserable. Always coming home so late. Oh, Richard, I – I’ve lived with enough secrets to know what it looks like when somebody has one.”
“So you followed me?” Richard asks, in a tone that conveys no judgement.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I was worried about you.”
“It’s alright. I mean, I guess I’m glad you did.”
It seems to hit Richard violently the next morning: that being on the run means not going back to Pied Piper. Not seeing any of the other guys. Maybe not ever again. Jared sits with him, wipes the sweat from his forehead, offers gentle, well-meaning assurances that things are going to be alright. He brings back fruit and plain, dry eggs for breakfast from the lobby, but has to coax Richard up off the floor to eat.
Richard flips on the television. Hears a name mentioned that sets them both on edge. “Better get going,” he says.
Outside of town, a cop car lingers behind them. They both tense, eyes locked on the rearview. Jared grips the wheel until his knuckles go bone-white, like the skin could almost split open.
“Oh fuck,” Richard exhales.
“Yeah… frick,” Jared repeats.
“It was self defense,” says Richard. “Right? That counts, doesn’t it?” His voice cracks. They’re both painfully conscious that self defense are words neither of them have said yet. That they haven’t discussed what it really is they’re doing here.
The cruiser speeds up, and passes, and they are alone again.
There’s one else around for miles. Not another car, not even a bird in the sky. Nothing but the deep, dust-red of the rocks against a vast, unbelievable, blue expanse. Clouds that stretch so far across it, they rip apart and unravel like spools of sugar spun like thread. A strange but amiable silence Richard and Jared talk into, in turns, until they’re tired.
They pass the first of several road signs for Tulsa, Oklahoma. Jared says nothing, but tries somehow to convey that Richard is welcome to speak.
“My parents,” he says, a bit stricken, sinking into the passenger seat. “Shit.”
Jared reaches across the console and takes Richard’s hand. It doesn’t feel at all unusual.
They kiss for the first time in Amarillo, Texas. Which, if Jared really thinks about it, is a statement that barely makes sense. All the seemingly infinite times he fantasized about kissing Richard Hendricks, he never once considered it happening like this. On an uncomfortable bed in a seedy roadside motel room. Richard’s hair cut brutally short in hopes of rendering him unrecognizable. A neon sign outside their window, panting and gasping for breath.
Jared makes the most of it, the way he always has. Makes memories for them both that are so good, it feels almost unfair they get to have them.
“You said not Pennsylvania,” Richard says. “Why?”
“Oh,” Jared sighs. “Richard. Someday I’ll tell you, alright?”
He senses this is not an adequate answer. Not for Richard, whose mind craves logical, reasonable explanations for things. But Jared has understood for a long time that the past can defy logic. Just like this moment does.
They get breakfast at Denny’s in the morning. Hold hands under the table, beneath their plates of pancakes and eggs. They return later to find the door to their motel room kicked in. Most of their things and the rest of the cash, stolen, right out of Jared’s pillowcase.
“We can’t go back,” says Richard, frantically, though Jared has suggested no such thing.
“We’ll figure it out,” Jared assures, his arms around Richard, already thinking about all the things he knows, the methods of survival that he hasn’t resorted to using in a very long while. “We’ll be together. We’ll be alright,” he says, and Richard nods along with him.
Jared starts up the car. The radio awakens. A local news station left tuned in. They hear their own names mentioned, and shut it off again.
They hold hands, in silence, gratefully, and drive east into whatever awaits.
