by Edward Daschle

Alone on the losing side of the argument, my boyfriend was the first of us to leave for the lake. He dragged the paddle board down the pebbly beach from the cabin, out onto the water, and away until he was only a stick figure silhouette of a man, finally lost in a midday reflection of sunlight. The other four left for the lake in the canoe shortly after, unwilling to sacrifice the remainder of the day to wallowing in the wreckage of our friendship. They invited me to join them, but I felt certain after all that had been said they didn’t want my company.

Late into the evening, when twilight was only a thin line of rust on the horizon, and my friends had yet to return, I shouted their names across the water, starting with my boyfriend. With how long they had been out, I worried they might have drowned, but worried too I might be overreacting and didn’t want to make an anxious fool of myself. Instead, I paced the beach, hoping someone would return, all the while replaying the argument in my head, trying to think how I could’ve saved my boyfriend from his embarrassment and myself from being implicated in the eyes of my friends by his opinions. For just a moment, I thought I hated him. Maybe he had traveled across the lake and found someone there to take him back into town, and would call me up later to break up and ask for his things. Just as I drifted through this speculation, he returned.

What I noticed first was the clamminess of his touch when he embraced me.

“You scared me,” I whispered in his ear.

“Benjamin,” he said, his voice a leaking faucet, “I just needed time to think.”

“Okay,” I said. A cold hand slid up under my shirt.

“Benjamin, there’s no one around, we’re alone,” he said, before kissing me, his other hand squeezing my ass and pulling me to him. His tongue was a slug in my mouth. What I loved about him, though I had yet to tell him I loved him, was his provocative nature. He made me feel as though I could take the risks being alive demanded. But it was more than the chill of his skin and the strange way he was talking, it was his smell too that triggered something deep in me. He smelled not of sweat, as I might’ve expected, but of the lake, of the reeds and mud.

“Wait, stop,” I said, and pulled back from him, “I’m worried about the others, did you see them?”

He looked to the lake and then back to me. His eyes rolled in their sockets before his head turned. “Benjamin, no, I did not. But we can look. Yes, let’s go to the lake.”

The pebbles of the beach chattered beneath his feet, and he beckoned me to follow. But all I could do was stare at the hole in his back. It was like the hollow of an old tree where any creature might live, his spine and insides neatly scooped away. And then the last of the twilight orange disappeared from the sky.

“I think, hey wait, I think we need to go to the hospital,” I said, uncertain if what I’d seen had not been a trick of the light. “And then we can get the police too for my friends.”

“Benjamin,” my boyfriend said, and in the new dark, I could no longer make out the hole, only a vast shadow. “It’s my fault. I want to make it right. Come to the lake, we can find them.”

My boyfriend held the paddle board steady for me to sit, and though I hesitated, finally I joined him. I could not bear to face a return of the lonely anxiety from the afternoon again. There was no wind over the lake, and stars had begun to pierce the sky glowing queerly against the dark. Our legs trailed in the water, rippling the reflected void.

“Benjamin,” my boyfriend said, his clammy lips at my neck, “I think I ruined your friendship. I think they thought you chose me over them.”

“No, that’s not, I mean,” I said. But he was repeating back to me my own fears. He knew me so well. And in a way I had. I could’ve gently led him aside, could’ve asked him to be more courteous to my friends. But I worried, and believed the worry, if I fumbled a relationship with a man so otherwise good as he was, I would never do better and would spend the years of my life alone. “I just want to find them. We can fix this.”

A hand pallid as the underbelly of a timid fish emerged from the water. It gripped the edge of the paddle board, rocking our tenuous craft. Another hand followed, and then a third and a fourth, pulling us along, further to the center of the lake where an empty canoe waited for us, bobbing in place as though anchored.

“Help,” I whispered to the dark, certain no one was listening who might stop this.

“Benjamin,” my boyfriend said coldly against my neck, before I felt his weight leave the paddle board, and heard the gentle parting of the water as his body slipped below. A hand gripped my ankle and then another, and a third had my thigh. They tugged me off the board, and though I wanted to scream, my throat felt as though there was a fourth hand around it constricting my breath and voice. I treaded water, spluttering, and watched as hands emerged from the lake, beckoning me, and at the center my boyfriend’s head, bobbing, smiling wider than I’d ever seen him smile before.

“Benjamin,” my boyfriend said as the hands pulled me under the water of the lake, “do you forgive me?”

Edward Daschle (he/him) is a queer writer living in Maryland. He has attended Clarion Workshop and Disquiet Workshop, and earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland, where he now teaches. His stories appear in Apex Magazine’s “Robotic Ambitions” anthology, After Dinner Conversation - “Best of 2023” anthology, and Washington Writers' Publishing House among other venues.