He’d watched through the window when the Christmas lights, which were hooked up to a timer, went on at dusk. He’d run away—from his family, from his friends, from Christmas—yet there he was, smack in the middle of another Adam’s Family Holiday anyway. Life was such an unpredictable damned thing. If he’d left five minutes earlier, had one or two fewer cups of coffee, driven past that rest stop, ignored the open hood of Chandler’s car, none of this would have happened. It had to mean something that it had happened, right? It had to mean something that when he’d seen Chandler, he’d stopped to help him rather than ignore his plight and drive off, assuming he had an auto-club card. He thumbed the lid of his Zippo so it clicked open and shut in his hand. Apparently Poppy came from a family of deep sleepers, because Chandler didn’t stir. Steve had been thinking—when he wasn’t simply lost in stroking his hand over Chandler’s sleeping body—about what it would take to make it work between them.
