Twice Shy

by Sarah Hogle

  This is fine. I am fine.

  I am totally fine, never better, as I hold the flashlight for Wesley while he sets up the tent for us, clutching the hunk of metal in both hands so the stream of light doesn’t wobble and give me away. I’m freaking out and he’s focused on his task, infuriatingly calm. Unless he’s freaking out, too, but hiding it better than I am. I remember what he said about masking his panic attacks and narrow my eyes at him. He could be having one right now for all I know.

  Or maybe it’s no big deal to Wesley that we’re going to be lying next to each other all night. Or two nights, if we happen to get a freak snowstorm that strands us here in this field. I mean, it’s seventy-ish degrees and a snowstorm is unlikely, but stranger things have happened. We could be stuck here for days together—a rogue porcupine could shred my sleeping bag, forcing us against our wills to share a single sleeping bag. What a shame that would be. I can’t even entertain the thought.

  I entertain the thought in vivid detail with half of my concentration, the other half funneled into maintaining my cool and collected composure, an I don’t even care expression. I’ve known all week that this was coming, but imagining and experiencing are as far from each other as the North and South Poles. Nothing could have prepared me for this panic, this flustered, thrilling, scary spiral. Nothing is going to happen tonight, I know.

  I realize I haven’t shaved my legs in four days and respond to Wesley’s chitchat with a smile, I am sure, that makes me look like I’m in pain. Maybe I’m underestimating myself. I’m fully capable of ignoring him while lying next to him. I can pretend he’s a wall.

  “I brought one with a plastic see-through ceiling,” he says, tapping the tent’s dome. “Good for stargazing.”

  “Mm-hmm,” I say tightly. My pitch is the last key on a piano.

  Wesley shovels our bags into the tent. “Gimme a minute? Just gonna change my clothes. Then we’ll trade.”

  I bob my head. “Yep, yep, yep.”

  He quirks an eyebrow at me, then disappears into the tent. I nearly buckle. I have absolutely no business letting myself visualize what he’s doing in there, but I do. I squeeze my eyes shut, consider bolting into the trees, and command myself sternly to not hear that rustling noise that is unmistakably a pair of pants being removed. I simply do not possess the strength this situation requires of me.

  He emerges in his koehler landscaping shirt and gray sweatpants that steam up my glasses. Hair mussed. His rain-and-earth-and-bonfire scent wafting stronger, refreshed, reaching out to punch me in the stomach. A chyron of explicit language rolls across the bottom of my field of vision. “Your turn.”

  “Cool, thanks,” I squeak, sliding past him. Our gazes clash and can’t get unlocked for a moment, the function jammed. I drag mine away, the weight of oceans, limbs clumsy, and it’s fine, I think, that I know how I’m going to die now. Not everybody knows.

  The volume in this tent as I unzip my bag is obscene. Either my legs have swollen or my jeans have shrunk, because wrestling them off is an embarrassment. Wesley absolutely, 100 percent hears the racket of my shirt going up over my head. I scrub on my deodorant, smooth my hair, scrub on more deodorant for good measure, and fight my way outside to brush my teeth. I do so a good twelve feet from the tent, in the dark, so that Wesley can’t see toothpaste foam dribbling down my chin. I am losing it, perhaps.

  Then there’s nothing left to do but climb into the mouth of the beast. I crawl in first, feeling Wesley’s warmth, his size, at my back as he follows suit. With both of us in here, the space is impossibly small. Loft-of-a-cabin small. I hold my breath as he reaches over my prone body. Our eyes meet in the near-blackness, and I follow the silver arc of a shooting star in his irises as Wesley zips us up inside.

  Nowhere to run now.

  Chapter 15

  I AM BURIED ALIVE UP to my neck in a sleeping bag, every breath a thunderclap, cold puffs of fog curling in and out of my mouth.

  “Wow, I’m so tired,” I lie, unprovoked.

  Silence. And then:

  “. . . Yeah.”

  “Time to count sheep, I guess.” I roll in the opposite direction of Wesley, features twisting into Kill me now. I will never be cool.

  “Does that ever work for you?”

  “Sure.” I’m lying again. Being nervous is turning me into a liar. “I mean, no. Have you never tried it? What do you think about before you go to sleep?”

  He falls quiet. I think he’s trying to figure out what I’m really asking. “It’s like sheep, but Maybells. A whole bunch of you, one after the other, skipping through a field.”

  I’m too keyed up for my sarcasm sensors to work, so I have no clue if he’s joking. Before I can blurt out any questionable nonsense, he thankfully keeps talking. “What about you? Do you go to your happy place?”

  It takes me a second to remember that my happy place isn’t this tent, smelling of nylon, bug spray, and old garage. He’s referring to the coffee shop.

  “Yeah, usually.” With the exception of this past week.

  For years, shutting the door on the real world and dropping out of a hole in the clouds into my make-believe café has been an automatic transition. It requires full cooperation with abandoning the here and now, vacating my body. Here and now, I’m so aware of my body that there’s no way I’m going to be able to leave it. I’m powerfully aware of Wesley’s, too, how the back of his hand grazes my thigh through our sleeping bags. “Sorry,” he murmurs.

  “It’s fine.” Boy, is it. I wish he’d do it again.

  The reminder of my café flips a Pavlovian switch: pink shafts of light slant through the plastic skylight, then vanish as they rotate like a lighthouse beacon. I can already smell sugar and flour, hear the notes, lighter than air, twinkling out of a retro jukebox that harbors all my favorite music. I know where my invented customers with their blurred faces will be waiting in stasis, a magic wax museum where everyone comes to life when my hand turns the doorknob to enter. Inner peace is only a heartbeat away, an irresistible invitation.

  Resist I do, pink neon shrinking from Wesley’s profile, receding into the night like banished spirits. “Do you really think about a whole bunch of skipping Maybell sheep?” I ask.

  “Are you sure you want to know?” His voice is low and dangerous.

  Yes.

  No.

  This is a feast of terrible ideas. Don’t start anything you can’t finish, I tell myself. We live together, a fact that will be true no matter how many regrets I wake up with tomorrow in the glaring light of day. I will not jeopardize my peace, my dream career, for a man. No matter how surprisingly sweet he may have turned out to be under his crispy shell.

  “No,” I decide, uncertainly.

  Wesley’s silences are even more frustrating in the dark. I can’t read his face to know if he’s disappointed or relieved.

  Damn my aversion to thick silences. “Your bedroom is right above mine.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  I respond too quickly, almost sitting up. Almost pouncing on him. “How?”

  “You close your window at about three in the morning, whenever the temperature starts to drop.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was that loud.” I like fresh air, but he’s absolutely right—I get too cold in the middle of the night and have to shut my window.

  “It isn’t. I have trouble sleeping, so I’m usually awake at three anyway. That’s why I can hear it.” He adjusts his position, sleeping bag rustling. “It’s nice, in a way. I don’t feel so . . . by myself.”

  “I know what you mean. I’m not sure I’d even want to live in that house by myself, anymore.” I wet my lips. “I mean that I wouldn’t have minded, but having had company, and knowing that having company is better—” I twist the knob on that sentence until it shuts off. I’m rambling nonsensically.

  “No, I know what you mean.”
We’re repeating ourselves now, and can’t help but laugh. It breaks the tension.

  “I stayed in a tent like this when I went to camp as a kid,” he tells me. “I refused to participate in the trust fall and the counselors told my parents I was combative.”

  I giggle. “Of course you did.”

  “Are you calling me combative?” he says, mock stern.

  “You? Noooooo, never. You’ve been a prince from the jump. Trying to get me to sell my half of the estate, eating breakfast at seven because I wake up at eight—and don’t even try to tell me that’s not on purpose—”

  “All right, all right,” he cuts in before I can pick up steam. “I’m sorry. It takes me a while to get used to new people. And I didn’t see you coming, so it was even harder. Didn’t get a chance to prepare myself.”

  “I think I’m growing on you, though.” I know I sound smug. It’s because I am. I poke his ribs and he convulses. My laugh kicks up an evil notch.

  He pokes me back. “It’s like if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it’ll jump out. But if you heat the water slowly, it gets used to it and stays put. You were already boiling when I was thrown into you.”

  “My apologies. I can’t help being this hot.”

  He doesn’t laugh at my joke. “It’s getting easier to handle. I’m not minding being boiled, nowadays.”

  Our next period of silence descends naturally, but if I shone a flashlight over all the dark space that surrounds us, it would illuminate a hundred lingering words. My lips part, trying to summon the right ones. Most of the time, I feel like I live all the way down inside of myself, deep, deep down, so far away from my voice that I hardly hear it and certainly nobody else ever does. I’ve been told before that I blend in, difficult to notice, easy to talk over. But ever since I realized Wesley notices me, it’s like I’ve gone to the surface of myself and stayed there. I’m not used to feeling the world at such close range, having an effect on my environment, present in my own life. I’m run ragged by it. I don’t have the wherewithal to project a more flattering version of myself, stumbling when I aim to be charming and likable. I’m bare-bones Maybell.

  “You over there counting sheep?” he asks.

  “It’s a parade of Wesleys now, one after the other, skipping through a field. In tuxedos.”

  “I don’t mind that at all.” The smile in his voice makes me smile, too.

  “You still counting Maybells?”

  “Oh, definitely not. I’d never be able to fall asleep that way.”

  If I go digging into that I will end up taking a shovel to the face. “Look, that’s Orion’s Belt.” I raise my arm.

  “Ursa Minor.” He raises his arm, too, letting it lean ever so slightly against mine. I press a little; he presses back.

  “They didn’t have this many stars in Pigeon Forge.”

  “Restricted viewing up there,” he agrees. I think Wesley’s prejudiced against large towns.

  “This is the HBO of skies.” At once, we both say, “Starz,” and laugh at our corny joke.

  My hand tilts, fingers curling back. His fingers claim the spaces between mine, just resting like that. I wonder if he’s looking at our hands, too. Listening to the telltale thud of my pulse.

  “I see the letter W,” he tells me.

  I bend my neck, and if the movement brings me closer to him, that’s entirely accidental. “Pretty sure what you’re looking at is an M from the wrong angle.” Our arms fall, side by side between our sleeping bags. Neither of us moves to withdraw.

  His face shifts toward mine, breath stirring my hair. “I’ll let you have it.”

  My jaw hurts, refusing to unclench. My face, exposed to chilly air, is hot, while my covered body is ice cold, muscles coiled tight. Walking home tomorrow is going to be a punishment.

  Bats flap overhead, and even in my sleeping bag I can feel the cold seeping up out of the soil, through the tent’s fabric. My stiff back is beginning to think that getting closer to nature is overrated. I remind myself it would be inappropriate to ask Wesley to be my blanket.

  The silence deepens. Our long day is catching up to me, my eyelids shuttering, when he whispers, “Are you awake?”

  Here’s my chance to leave tonight at a wise stopping point. I will simply say nothing, feigning sleep. He’ll fall asleep, too. Danger averted.

  I waste no time answering, “Yes.”

  “I found out something that embarrassed you today,” he replies after a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll tell you an embarrassing thing, too. The most embarrassing thing. To make us even.”

  “You don’t have—”

  “Neither did you, when you saw my drawings in the loft. But you did. And it’s easier right now, in the dark, to be braver. So I’m going to tell you.” He exhales a soft breath, turning on his side toward me once more, closer than ever. All I’d have to do is give an inch and I’d have his lips to my forehead. I shiver, fingers curling around my shirt to restrain myself.

  “I’ve never been with anyone.”

  Time goes liquid, pooling between us. The temperature goes up like a Roman candle. “You mean . . .”

  “Yes.”

  My heartbeat thumps in my ears. My arm is positioned crookedly under my head, tingling with pins and needles as it falls asleep, but I can’t move.

  He’s so soft, unbearably, when he prompts, “Say something?”

  My throat is packed with sand. “I’m trying to come up with a response that doesn’t sound like a proposition,” I confess hoarsely. “Wesley, that isn’t embarrassing at all.”

  He shifts onto his back again, arm across his stomach. “It bothers me. There’s a stigma, especially for guys. Especially for guys who are about to hit thirty. It’s not that I want to be a . . . you know . . .” He can’t bring himself to verbalize it. “But it’s hard to meet people when you have social anxiety as bad as I do. I panic. Or I want to say one thing, be a certain way, but it gets all tangled up on its way out of my mouth. A pumpkin trying to be flowers and coming off like a cactus. It’s frustrating.”

  “You’re much more flowers than you are cactus,” I tell him, meaning every word. I hope he believes it. “But for what it’s worth, pumpkins are the best.”

  “Anyway.” I think he’s rubbing his eyes. “Maybe I’ve overshared. I’m sorry. It’s late, and I’m tired.”

  Of course. He’s tired—he’s not hinting anything. Not suggesting. He definitely does not want me to roll on top of him and have my wicked way. The only Wesley who will let me thread my fingers through his hair and crush my mouth to his is the imaginary one. Which I feel guilty thinking about, but I can’t help it.

  “I’m honored you trust me enough to tell me something like that.” I bite down hard on my tongue, reaching for his hand. He acknowledges it with a mellow squeeze, rubbing his thumb across the back of my hand.

  “The only reason I was able to admit it is because you’re so easy to talk to. It feels like you . . .” He inhales sharply. “Like you pay attention.”

  My body is rigid with tension, collecting in my temples. I could be imagining it but I think his muscles have tightened, as well. I am burning alive.

  “I don’t know what I’m saying,” he mumbles.

  Before he’s finished with his sentence, I jump in: “You’re right. I see you.”

  “Oh.” His voice is light as a feather. Winded. “Good.”

  This is the part where he adds, I’m paying attention to you, too, and descends on me with a fiery passion, but that never happens. He only says, “Anyway.”

  “Anyway,” I echo.

  “Good night, Maybell.”

  Disappointment crushes every bone in my body. “Good night, Wesley.”

  I don’t close my eyes. We lie there with our arms still touching, his golden curls brushing my ear, a million microscopic points of contact. Maybe
he falls asleep immediately, maybe he lies awake for as long as I do, staring unseeingly at the stars.

  * * *

  • • • • • • •

  I’VE SPENT THE BETTER part of the night debating whether I’m in heaven or hell, but this morning has clinched it. I am for sure in hell.

  Deservedly so. There’s a pair of warm arms around me, a sleeping man’s chest rising and falling against my back, and the sinful thoughts won’t stop coming. Morning breath is the only factor keeping me from rolling over onto my other side to stare at him. Also, manners. But mostly morning breath.

  “You awake?” he asks.

  I stretch and yawn, pretending I’ve been out of it. “What? Oh! Mm-hmm.” I could lie here forever. Maybe he’ll bury his mouth in my neck and tell me how badly he’s wanted me, and we’ll roll around in this field all day—

  “Good. I want to get an early start.” He unzips his sleeping bag and climbs over me, grabbing his bag on his way out of the tent. His hand pats my head like I’m a golden retriever. I fall back onto my elbows, shooting a cross expression at his back.

  Apparently I’ve misread last night’s signals.

  By the time I’ve changed my clothes and joined him, he’s wearing a fresh change of jeans and plain white T-shirt (Did he change behind a tree? Or out in the open? None of my business!), munching on granola.

  When he glances at me, I automatically flush and stumble. “Uneven . . . this grass is all uneven,” I mutter. “Gopher holes or something.”

  He raises his eyebrows at the ground, still munching. Nods. “Mm.”

  I should have packed a mirror. I could have dried patches of drool on my cheek for all I know. I’m sure my hair’s on its worst behavior. My hair always has such an attitude problem whenever I especially need it to look good. But on days I’m not going anywhere, with no human witnesses? That’s when I could be a Pantene Pro-V model.

  After I zip off into the trees for a few minutes (nature calls), I help Wesley roll up our sleeping bags, tent, and supplies. The metal detector is still nowhere to be found.