The lantern light a time.., p.1
The Lantern Light: A Time Travel M/M Holiday Romance, page 1
The Lantern Light
C.L. Beaumont
Carnation Books
The Lantern Light Copyright © 2021 by C.L. Beaumont
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-948272-61-2
Published 2021 by Carnation Books
CarnationBooks.com
contact@carnationbooks.com
Seattle, WA, USA
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
About C.L. Beaumont
Also by C.L. Beaumont
About Carnation Books
1
December 1880
On the final day, before the sun rises, Amos Walker refuses to cry.
He has no reason to cry. He doesn’t think he’s shed a tear in his life since he learned how to walk—minus a night or two during the war. They’re just two men moving separate ways. Two strangers who happened to cross paths in the middle of nowhere, and now their lives won’t overlap anymore. That’s all it is.
He spent the night in the chair. Got a mighty crick in his neck from what little sleep he got. Stolen dreams between the silent hours he spent in the moonlight, looking at another body lying out on his bed; studying those almost-familiar hands, memorizing the scars that the railroad made. Wishing, with some inexplicable longing, that he could steal the forbidden knowledge of how it would feel to drag his mustache across a sleeping fingertip.
But there’s a faint light filling the cabin, and they’ve already stolen this night. A night of no consequence, he reminds himself. A surprise visitor in the snow, needing shelter. Nothing more.
Amos leans forward, hesitant to break the quiet. A sense of mourning hovers over his shoulders, confirmation that this is the last moment he’ll ever get to look.
“Just come dawn,” he whispers.
Wei shifts, instantly awake, but he doesn’t open his eyes. “I know.”
“Should go before it’s light,” Amos says. He doesn’t mean to, but it sounds like a funeral song. The prayers his momma sang over her own pa’s casket. He glances at the icy window. Feels the need to add something else, something normal. “Cold night.”
Wei swallows. He opens eyes like a starless sky. Says a word that could mean anything or nothing. “Yes.”
Wei shouldn’t be here. They’d gone and said their last goodbyes weeks ago, the horrible moonlight on Wei’s face as he looked back over his shoulder, and Amos had thought that Wei had already up and left town like he said he would. He’d avoided town himself just so he wouldn’t prove himself right. Had watched the rest of the workers pack up and move east towards Billings, knowing, like a gaping hole in the sky where the sun should be, that Wei wasn’t among them.
And then it had been last night, dark and lonely, snow flooding the cabin windows, and Wei had slipped inside without even knocking, startling Amos out of his wits. He’d looked Amos straight in the eye, breathing hard and shivering, covered in snow from his thin boots to his eyelashes.
“Can I sleep here?” he had asked, no preamble. No explanation. Amos had silently gestured to his empty bed, too stunned to speak. And now, as the last shadows of darkness fade, Amos is about to watch Lin Wei leave him again, this time for good.
“Wei,” he starts to say.
Wei shakes his head. “Do not say it.”
Amos shuts his mouth. He doesn’t even know what it is.
He turns away, breathes hard. He thinks he knows exactly what it is. Horrible and threatening and buried deep, deep down. His skin feels damp and heavy with a nervous sweat despite the cold, and he’s still filthy from working out on the ranch the day before, and he needs to feed Old Jane and build a fresh fire, check his stores of rations, he needs to—
He needs to burn the sheets after Wei leaves. Throw the quilt out into the snow.
It’s Christmas morning, he realizes, as Wei rises to his feet, gathers himself. That new-fangled holiday that had the whole town in a stir last time he ventured past the church. He has a faint memory of his momma placing an evergreen branch on the hearth around this time in the winter, before this Christmas was even a thing. Before he came back home from the war to an empty farm, his parents dead and the pigs all stolen.
Wei stands before him, ready to leave, and Amos can’t speak. Snow dances against the steamy windows, mocking everything he shouldn’t say. He thinks of the fog settling over Antietam after the long night, when the sun rose and light spilled across the blood-stained grass, gnarled blue uniforms like water in the mist.
“I’m sorry,” Wei says, eyes at his feet. “I should not have come.”
Amos blinks away a foggy Maryland field, the drums and the bugle. “Don’t be sayin’ that.”
His hand is wrapped around Wei’s wrist, some hidden force placing it there. He’s too weak to resist. He strokes the vein on Wei’s wrist, just once.
“I should not have come,” Wei repeats, dying words on his last breath.
And it’s there, in that moment, that Amos finally understands.
It cuts him at the knees, like he’s falling through the floor and into the earth. The tiny flickers of warmth whenever Wei smiled, the emptiness in Amos’s house every time he left. The ache in his chest imagining him bent over a railroad track.
Amos snatches his hand away—a reenactment of their first meeting. Impossible, horrifying, that he should want, that he should even think—
“Well, gettin’ light,” he says, gruff and hoarse like usual. The mean bugger he’s only ever known himself to be since finding Old Jane by that burned-down farm outside Maryland, terrified and dragging a broken saddle behind her in the ashes, and he had fixed her up, leapt on her willing back, and rode west.
That man. Not the man who placed the quilt over Wei in the dead of night with shaking hands.
“Better go,” Amos adds.
Wei shoots him a hard look. “I understood you the first time.”
Good, Amos thinks. Let Wei resent him. Let Wei leave of his own accord, a breath of relief. Let him sprint back to his life in San Francisco and never look back. Leave Amos behind with the toil and the dynamite and the empty hills.
And Amos can feel the time slipping out of his calloused fingers like rope, like he’s falling off the back of his horse, nothing to grab to save himself.
Wei should be draped in the finest silks, fresh flowers beside his bed. Amos should have ridden with him to Helena over the summer—damn the ranch, damn the railroad, rented a stagecoach with his meagre savings—and gotten Wei’s portrait taken with one of those photograph machines there.
And Wei will find those things in a big place like Frisco. Because he’ll never find them here in Big Timber. Not with the likes of Mad Amos. The man who ran away and left his pa on his deathbed to die alone. The man who went and fought for the Union. Who crawled up to Montana after the final blast of cannon fire, broken and shaking, limping west until he found the first sliver of land that hadn’t been stained red. And he snarls at you if you accidentally look him in the eye. And he won’t take a wife. No wife in all the West would ever have him.
And only now, in this sickening moment, does he himself understand why.
They’re at the door—Amos isn’t sure how or when they both moved—and Wei puts his elegant hand on the old wood for the last time. The hand that used to weave beautiful things—silken creations that Amos will never get to see.
He needs to leave. It’s almost light. Levi could come down that road any moment and see.
Amos should tell him to travel safe—ride steady and eyes to the west. But words fail him. And Wei isn’t even riding; he’s taking the railroad he helped build. The one that makes Amos shake out of his boots with fear when he even imagines stepping inside.
Wei isn’t afraid. A brave man like him should be back by the sea. With his wife and baby.
Wei pauses. Looks over his shoulder with wet eyes. “Mr. Walker.”
Amos lets out a small, painful sound. “Don’t go.”
There’s pity on Wei’s face, like he’s watching something die. “It is the way that it is. I must, Amos.”
His name in that voice. The voice he’ll never hear again. That he will hear again, again and again, every night in his dreams until his final breath. And he doesn’t understand why.
Goddammit, he thinks. He understands why.
There are lips on his cheek. A soft kiss that’s over before Amos can react, just a trembling breath.
And Amos loves him. He knows this in the very final seconds. The painful truth of what Wei has just quietly acknowledged, his gift that he’s ripping away. It’s the last kiss Amos will ever receive. He knows he’ll never give one.
Sunlight spills into the cabin. They spring apart, quick and desperate.
“Go,” Amos breathes. There’s no time left. The roo ster crows.
And Lin Wei gives him one last look—a mixture of fury and defiance and deep sadness, staring down the face of God—the strength that will help carry him away.
Amos leaps across the room. He grabs the little book of poems, the Godless words of loneliness. Presses it into Wei’s chest. “Take this,” he begs. “Please, take it. Keep it.”
A tear falls from Wei’s eye. He gently pushes the book away, careful to touch only the worn binding.
“Yet on my heart…” Wei says, with one last broken look. He whispers, like a vow, “Keep it for me. I will see you again.”
Then he throws open the door, adjusts his thin coat, and steps out into the snow. The door slams shut with the wind.
Amos drops the book to the floor. Stumbles to the window and tries to peer through the foggy glass. He lights the oil lamp, their old signal, after a few desperate, failed tries, trying to light Wei’s path back into town where the train awaits. And he knows, with a horrible clarity, that he’ll never light that lamp in the window again. Maybe he’ll smash the glass and live by firelight alone. Never spend another coin on oil.
“Wait,” he says to the glass. His own face stares back at him—wrinkles around his mouth from a permanent scowl, meanness in his eyes. A face that no one could ever want to kiss, or will ever kiss again.
The sun peeks over the horizon, staining the snow with a red glow. It illuminates Wei like a halo, and Amos silently begs for him to pause, to turn. But he never looks back. A startled sparrow takes off from a hidden nest, the sun sparking on its wings. It disappears to the west.
The animals are hungry. No time to stand around and mope, not for him. Amos bundles up the quilt, lights a fresh fire, and tosses it onto the flames.
He leaves his momma’s book untouched on the dusty floor for almost a month.
2
December 2015
“We’re now beginning our final descent into Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport. Please remain seated with your seatbelts fastened. To the Montanans on board, welcome home to Big Sky Country. And on behalf of your flight crew this afternoon, we wish you a very Happy Holidays.”
Peter finds himself resenting the fact that the ‘welcome home’ message applies to him. That he isn’t just some tourist who got lost in the San Francisco airport and accidentally boarded a plane to Montana instead of Chicago or New York.
Of course it’s tempting, looking back now, to think maybe the flight attendant knew something he didn’t. That the little speech she’d given a hundred times before somehow altered a link in the universe, and everything that came after (and that came before) was some freak chain reaction that not even an act of God could stop. One that wouldn’t have happened if only she hadn’t uttered the words welcome home.
But Peter is ignorant of what’s to come that bright afternoon as they descend into Bozeman. Ignorant and pressing his forehead to the freezing glass, willing an Olympic-sized hangover to fade, watching as the world grows whiter and emptier the farther north they fly. Lonely plains where nobody in their right mind would ever want to settle and live.
Except his own goddamn family. The Johnson’s—like their ancestors willed them to stay predictably boring for generations. And the most adventurous thing any Johnson in history had ever done was eldest daughter Marnie getting on a plane to China to pick him up as a baby. And that was only because Jesus politely asked her to do it.
If he ever meets Jesus in a bar, he probably owes him a drink. Maybe a nice Cosmo with a paper umbrella. He had, in fact, met a Jesus just after a performance only the week before. Only, he’d been a much better dancer than Jesus Christ, and much gayer, and in far fewer clothes.
The plane lands—no going back now—and Peter checks his phone in a wash of self-pity. There aren’t any new texts, which is no surprise. His mom is most definitely still relying on her avocado-green landline for communication. And Sasha is probably already getting dressed for the annual Christmas Eve Drag-stravaganza at Coco’s Lounge, texting the rest of their friends to see who’s showing up when. And David . . .
Well, Peter knows he’s never going to receive a text from him again. Might as well delete the number. A year’s worth of messages and photos. Gain some phone storage back.
Bleary-eyed and alone, Peter follows the measly group of passengers off the plane, frantically scratching off a spare bit of red-apple polish still clinging to his nail as he steps into the place he only ever enters once a year on Christmas Eve for the obligatory 48-hour visit.
“Petey! Petey, over here! Yoo-hoo!”
Peter hides a grimace as he hefts his bag over his shoulder, plastering on a smile that feels worthy of the Coco’s stage. His mother brought along her foghorn of a sister, as is tradition, which is spectacular. Because the odd glances he gets whenever he sets foot in Montana aren’t enough already without Aunt Fran to announce his arrival.
He checks his shirt collar—that it’s buttoned up to the appropriate level. Wishes he’d had time to duck into the bathroom to ensure his makeup from last night is completely washed off. The same complicated flood of emotions he gets whenever he sees his mom wash through him: nostalgia, and regret, the camaraderie of two people against the rest of the world, and a baffling distance, like the walls of a barn are closing in around him just like a church. And not a church he’d enter just to admire the architecture.
He should have called her more. Should’ve sent more than a Mother’s Day and Birthday card. Should have done something with his life so his falsified answers to the usual questions aren’t the same level of unchanged-disappointment he gives every year.
But it’s too late for regrets. He should have had his existential guilt-crisis back on the plane instead of guzzling tomato juice, moaning over his headache, and hating himself for being the sole reason there wasn’t a man in the seat next to him. He walks towards his family to ‘Let it Snow’ drifting through the airport speakers. Ignores the taxidermy deer bust above the baggage claim with a Santa hat perched on top.
“Petey.” His mom hugs him close, the usual smell of hay and 1980’s drugstore perfume and a scent he can only fondly describe as White Christian Lady—a Live Laugh Love wooden sign in a farmhouse kitchen. “You’re too thin.”
It’s the usual complaint. He hugs her back, surprisingly emotional, very aware of the fact that he hasn’t said this word to her face since last Christmas. “Hi, mom.”
“You need to come up more than once a year, you know,” says Aunt Fran, pinching his cheek like he’s ten instead of nearly thirty. “You only let your poor momma feed you on Christmas. Haven’t watched any of her girls win a barrel race in years.”
“Aunt Fran,” he says, bending so she can reach him for a wet kiss. She smells like cigarettes and saddle polish—a scent that nobody he’s ever met in San Francisco could recognize, but that brings him right back to sitting on the hay bales, watching mom and Aunt Fran teach their rodeo students in the corral, playing with the Ken doll his mom innocently thought was something related to GI Joe when she found it at the church rummage sale.
They leave the tiny airport, dodging similar family reunions with relatives who’ve managed to escape this place, and shuffle out the doors to a blast of freezing snow. Peter forgets himself and immediately curses, followed by a chiding from Aunt Fran. His mom merely takes his elbow and tuts under her breath that he always forgets to bring home a warm enough coat.
Home.
As if Peter’s ever had that thought on the flight to Montana instead of the one to San Francisco over the last ten years. She’s holding him closer than normal, one eye on him like he’ll bolt. And he can’t blame her. That’s exactly what he wants to do as they slip and slide across the frozen parking lot. And he realizes, with a wash of shame that he hadn’t thought of it before, that this marks thirty years exactly since the love of his mom’s life died—the man Peter knows from photographs, and who would’ve been his dad if only he’d lived a year longer. Her thirtieth Christmas without Gary.
