Page 3 of Canned & Coated

This is the first time all three of us have been together since the weeks after graduation, when everything still felt possible and none of us knew enough to choose a direction. Before Milo and I started dating. Before things got defined. And definitely before Tanner climbed into that beat-up Jeep and drove off chasing something bigger than the rest of us.

We all met back in elementary school when we all lived on the same cul-de-sac. Fast friends by the second week of school and inseparable by Halloween.

Those were the days of bike rides that became full-day adventures, sleepovers built on junk food and video games, and entire summers where we didn’t go a single day without seeing each other.

Now it’s been five years, which in the grand span of time isn’t that long, but it’s more than enough time for a person to become someone else entirely.

When I see this man sometime in the next few hours, he’ll probably feel like a stranger, and I don’t know what to do with that because the version of him I know is still stuck somewhere back there.

Nobody ever saw him the way I did.

Tanner McCormack always occupied that confusing middle ground between lanky and muscular, like a cross-country runner who looked shredded and hungry at the same time. Someone with oversized glasses and curly hair, who spoke too fast when he got excited because the words could never keep up with his brain.

The scent of sunscreen still reminds me of him, because he always seemed one step removed from someplace warmer, easier.

He wasn’t the guy people tripped over themselves to notice. He was the kind of person people decided they understood in two seconds and never looked at again.

To me, he was the cutest, most endearing thing I’d ever seen. The kind of beauty you only notice when you actually pay attention, and once you do, you can’t unsee it.

He loved comic books and video games and Dungeons & Dragons and math… and God, did he love adventure. Even at twelve, he talked about seeing the world. His eyes would light up whenever he said he wanted to live in a van and travel cross-country one day.

I don’t know if I fell for him because he made the world feel bigger, or because I wanted to be the person he took with him when he left.

I was obsessed. Quietly. Pathetically.

For years.

All while Milo was relentlessly obsessed with me in a way I somehow failed to fully clock at the time or maybe I did and filed it somewhere I wouldn’t have to deal with until later.

Milo was always there.

Where Tanner and I were quiet, Milo was loud and funny in that relentless way that never let me stay in my own head too long.

He didn’t read comics with me or map out ridiculous adventures, but he could make me laugh until my stomach hurt, always had the right snack on hand, and could spot me spiraling from across a room before I knew it myself.

I thought of him like a brother, which feels almost insulting now. I guess it was my mind’s way of reducing him to something easier to hold onto.

I spent years fixated on this unreachable, golden version of Tanner while Milo spent that same stretch standing right next to me hoping I’d eventually look over and see him.

By the time Tanner was gone, already halfway to becoming someone else, Milo was still there. So I reached for what was in front of me. What felt safe, real, already proven.

What had been waiting the whole time.

Milo knows he was second.

I don’t think it hangs over us or turns bitter. It’s a fact. Something he made peace with long before I did.

Maybe there’s comfort in knowing the waiting meant something. That all those years of showing up weren’t wasted. Maybe that’s where his confidence comes from, because when he pokes at old feelings I try to bury, it never feels insecure.

It feels settled.

Sometimes I get the strange sense he wouldn’t even mind. That if something had happened then or happened now, he wouldn’t see it as a threat. Maybe he’d think it was something inevitable finally working itself out of my system.

The thought that he might be okay with that, might even want it in some quiet way, lands heavier in my gut than jealousy ever could.

“It’s fine if you do,” Milo says when I don’t answer. It’s almost like the man can read my mind.

I spear him with a look.