“Oh, that one’s ours,” Paige exclaimed, pointing to a very large RV with the name of a rental company emblazoned down the side.
Mitch, having substantially deeper pockets than Liz, had arranged for a rental company to deliver an RV to the campground and set it up. Liz would be setting up her clearance tent by herself.
After he parked in the shadow of the RV and killed the engine, Liz waited for Paige to climb out of the truck and open the access door. When she finally climbed out, Liz’s back and legs protested spending almost two hours in the small backseat of Mitch’s truck and she stretched, twisting her body to work the kinks out.
She got to do that for about thirty seconds before the family descended on them. It had been less than a year since she’d seen them all at Mitch and Paige’s wedding, but Aunt Mary cried a little, anyway. Uncle Leo hugged her so hard she could swear she heard cracking, and then she was passed through what amounted to a gauntlet. Her cousin Joe and his wife, Keri. Their daughter, Brianna, was almost two and played shy, turning her face away when Liz said hi to her. Her cousin Kevin’s three-year-old daughter, Lily, was more friendly, though she stuck close to Kevin’s wife, Beth. Joe’s twin sister, Terry, her husband, Evan, and their fifteen-year-old daughter, Stephanie, were next. Liz wanted to kiss Paige for giving her the rundown on the drive over from Maine. She’d grown up with or near her brothers and cousins, but the kids were hard to keep track of.
Her cousin Mike and his wife, Lisa’s, kids were the hardest. Four boys—Joey, Danny, Brian and Bobby—ranging in age from sixteen to nine.
“Where’s Sean?” she asked when she didn’t see her brother in the crowd.
“They’re on their way down,” Terry said. “They got the cabin up around the corner. Between the distance and the log walls, she’s hoping Johnny won’t keep everybody awake.”
Johnny was the almost two-month-old nephew she hadn’t met yet, and she could barely stop herself from grabbing him away from Emma when she and Sean finally brought him down. She barely took her eyes off his sweet, sleeping face while she hugged her brother and then her sister-in-law.
“He’s so perfect,” she breathed, wanting to touch his cheek but not daring to in case she woke him up. She didn’t know a lot about babies, but she knew sleeping ones were a lot quieter than awake ones.
Because Mitch had just one more business call to make, they’d gotten a later start than he’d intended and they were the last to arrive, so it was quite a crowd to get through. But Bobby and Brian finally showed her where her site was. Thankfully, she noted, it was close to the bathhouse, which meant she wouldn’t have to stumble around too far in the dark to go pee in the middle of the night.
Tent first, she decided. After lugging the bag from the truck to her site, she unzipped it and pulled out her accommodations for the next week. Luckily it was designed for easy setup, with the thin, bowed poles already attached to the tent, so all she had to do was unfold it, square up the corners and pop it up. A few adjustments and ground pins later, and voilà. She had a tent.
With her hands on her hips, she tilted her head and pondered her accomplishment. It was a lot smaller than it had looked on the package. She and her one duffel bag would be very, very cozy, and anytime she was moving around in it, she’d have to be on her hands and knees.
She heard a chuckle off in the distance and looked over to see Drew, standing in front of his own tent, inflating an air mattress and watching her. His tent looked like something on the cover of a camping gear catalog. It was spacious and tall, made out of a rugged-looking canvas material. It had a fly over it, to protect from rain and sun while allowing ventilation. And it had a small screen house built out from the door.
Rolling her eyes, even though she wasn’t sure if he could see it from that distance, she turned her back and made her way back to Mitch and Paige’s site. From the humming sound, she knew they’d already fired up the air-conditioning in their RV and she mopped at her forehead before grabbing the duffel containing her clothes, toiletries and miscellaneous things from the back of his truck, along with the grocery bag that held some snacks and water to squirrel away in her tent.
“How much more is yours?”
Liz jumped when Drew spoke from just behind her. She hadn’t realized he’d followed her. “The sleeping bag and ground mat, and then my pillow and a bag of books in the backseat of the truck.”
He grabbed the items she pointed out and fell in beside her for the walk back. “I hope you measured this sleeping bag before you bought that tent.”
“I did. It’ll fit.” Probably. It was going to be tight, though.
“I’m surprised you’re not bunking down in one of the RVs. They’ve got plenty of room.”
“That’s not real camping,” she said, because it was easier than explaining she didn’t really want to be a third wheel to any of the other couples. “Those are like luxury hotels on wheels.”
“Ah.” He nudged her with his elbow. “So you’re hard core.”
“That’s me. Hard-core camping.”
They stopped in front of her tent and she set down her bags so she could unzip the door. He crouched to hand in her belongings once she was inside. “So hard core you don’t need a cooler?”
“My family has, like, eight refrigerators. There’s a limit on being primitive.”
She watched him take a knife from his pocket to slice the plastic wrapping on the ground mat, relaxing a little. This wouldn’t be so bad, she thought. Obviously she had the ability to hang out with Drew and chat like friends did. Friends who’d had sex and occasionally snuck little touches they didn’t want her family to see, but friends.
Once he handed her the mat, she unrolled it onto the tent floor and then spread the sleeping bag on top. After she added her pillow and tucked her duffel, book and food bags along the side, she was done. Then she crawled back to the door.
“You anchored this well, right?” Without waiting for her to answer, he went around to each corner and checked the ground pins. “It looks like it’ll blow away in a stiff wind.”
“Surrounded by trees, so I won’t go far.”
He didn’t laugh. Instead he kept scowling, looking around. “You’re kind of close to the bathhouse.”
“I see that as a plus.”
“Yeah, except for the Dumpster next to the building. If bears come looking to rifle through the trash, they might smell the peanut butter you have in that flimsy little tent.”
“I’ll yell and you can come running with your gun,” she teased.
“I’m not too far away, but yell loud.” He turned to face her and she realized he was very serious, which made her laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Andy asked, surprising them both.
“Drew’s going to guard my peanut butter from the bears.”
He slapped his son on the shoulder. “Good man.”
“Where are you and Rose set up?” Drew asked him.
“I guess Mike and Lisa’s RV is ours for the week. They usually put the two older boys in the pop-up, but Mike and Lisa are moving to the pop-up and putting the boys in a tent so we can be comfortable.” Andy shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. “I wanted to argue, just to be polite, but if I sleep on the ground, it’ll take a small crane to get me back on my feet again.”
As Andy continued on to wherever he’d been going, Drew drifted away with him. But he turned back and smiled at Liz, giving her a wave.
Warmth curled through her as she waved back, but she did her best to ignore it. Friends. That’s all they were.
Very deliberately, Liz turned back to her tent so she wouldn’t do something foolish, like stare at Drew’s ass as he walked away, but then she realized she was out of things to do.
A mosquito landed on her arm and she slapped at it. Time to douse herself in bug spray and go join in the family fe
stivities.
* * *
On the rare occasion Drew was hanging out at a pool, he liked to do just that. Hang out. Sit on the edge and dangle his feet in the water with a cold beer in his hand.
But there was chaos around the edge of the pool, with kids everywhere and half the women sitting around the edges watching the little ones splash in the shallow end. And Liz was in the mix, looking hot and curvy in a one-piece bathing suit that made his mouth water. It had a tiny skirt that moved flirtatiously as she walked the length of the pool, emphasizing her long legs. And the top of it had that bunched-up look that kept drawing his eye to her cleavage no matter how hard he tried not to look.
He fumbled with the gate latch securing the fence around the pool which, of course, drew attention. Praying his swim trunks were baggy enough to hide his reaction to Liz in a bathing suit, he waved off their ridicule and made a running dive into the deep end.
The water felt arctic, shocking his overheated body as it closed over his head. After pushing off the bottom of the pool, he surfaced gasping. Better than a straight-up cold shower any day.
“Hey, you’re blocking our water ball of doom game!” a young voice shouted.
An inflatable beach ball smacked him in the side of the head and, just like that, he was sucked into a cutthroat game that seemed to be a mash-up of water polo, soccer and volleyball. And, since they were limited to the deep end of the pool due to the little ones at the other end, it was one hell of a workout. After about fifteen minutes, he worked his way toward the edge and hooked his elbows up on the rim.
“You’re weak, Miller,” Josh taunted, right before one of Mike’s sons climbed up Josh’s back to smack at the ball and shoved him underwater.
It was a rough crowd. Drew watched for a few minutes, until he was breathing like a normal person again, and then dove back into the action. He wasn’t sure how the game would end, since he had yet to figure out the actual rules, but he wasn’t going to be the first guy out of the pool.
“Liz! Liz!” It was hard to miss Steph shouting right next to him, so he gave himself permission to look in the same direction the teenager was. “Come on! I’m the only girl.”
For a few seconds Drew thought Liz was going to refuse and he was relieved. Water ball of doom, as the boys called it, was a very physical game and there was a lot of bumping and grabbing.
Then she grinned and threw herself into the deep end with a splash. There didn’t seem to be any time-outs in water ball of doom, so she surfaced in the middle of a melee. Just when Drew was going to yell at her to be careful, she dove under again and he lost track of her.
He felt her before he saw her—the glide of her naked leg across his thigh—and then her head broke through the water near his shoulder. She slicked her hair back and laughed. “Are there rules to this game?”
“Don’t drown. Other than that, I think it’s just an excuse to spike the beach ball in each other’s faces and water wrestle.”
“Are there points?”
The ball was heading toward them and Drew slapped it hard, bouncing it off the back of Sean’s head. “The score, last I heard it yelled out, was two hundred thirty to two hundred nineteen, but I’m not sure how you score. It’s a very complicated system that’s pretty fluid, from what I’ve gathered.”
“In other words, Mike and Lisa’s kids invented this game.”
“I’ve only been here less than a day and I’ve already figured out if the word doom is involved, so are Joey, Danny, Brian and Bobby. And Steph, too, though she tries to pretend she’s an innocent bystander.”
“Ooh!” She was watching the ball come toward them in a high arc. “Throw me!”
He clasped his fingers together and, before he could think about whether or not it was a good idea, she had her foot in the cradle of his hands and he tossed her high into the air. She slammed the ball back toward the buoy line marking the deep end and Ryan missed the return by a fraction of an inch.
“Point!” Brian yelled, and Liz gave a triumphant yell when she surfaced.
“Dude, she’s not on our team,” Ryan yelled at Drew.
“There are teams?” Drew threw his arms up in the air. “How can you tell?”
“You’re not very good at water ball of doom,” Bobby said in a very serious voice.
The penalty for helping the other team score appeared to be drowning since, after that incident, Drew spent more time under the water shoving people off him than he did treading water. His muscles were burning but he knew the Kowalski family well enough to know if he crawled out of the pool in defeat, he’d never live it down.
It was a relief when Mary whistled and called everybody out of the pool. His muscles were getting shaky and it was only the trash talking from Mitch and the other guys that had kept him in so long. He swam to the opposite side of the pool from Liz, just so he wouldn’t be tempted to watch for her swimsuit’s skirt riding up while she climbed the ladder.
Brian scampered up in front of him, then ran down the side of the pool with his fists in the air. “S’mores time!”
Wishing he had a quarter of the kid’s energy, Drew hauled himself up the ladder and winced at the soreness already setting into his leg muscles. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been swimming, but it was obviously too long ago.
“Rematch tomorrow,” Mitch said, slapping Drew’s shoulder so hard he almost fell back into the water.
“Can’t wait.” He’d come up with a good excuse before then. Maybe run himself over with a four-wheeler somehow.
Leo, who’d been smart enough to claim a chair on the sidelines, tossed towels at them. “You think that was bad, you just wait. After everybody’s changed, it’s time for s’mores.”
Drew Miller was no fool. Not being a fan of the overly sweet traditional camping dessert, he took his sweet time showering, shaving and throwing on a pair of flannel sleep pants and T-shirt. Then he threw on a lightweight zip hoodie because, not only did it get a little chilly at night, but the mosquitoes started getting aggressive as the sun dropped.
He didn’t take long enough, though, and when the crowd around the group campfire spotted him, they didn’t accept him waving off their invitation. After stowing his toiletries back in his tent and draping his swim trunks and towel over one of his tent’s ropes, he grabbed a bottle of water from his cooler and went to join the insanity.
“Want a s’more?” Bobby asked him, swinging an almost-liquid marshmallow on a stick in his direction.
Drew flinched away. “No, thanks. You should get that onto a cracker before—”
The melted marshmallow slid off the stick and hit the ground in a white, sticky lump Drew knew would end up on the bottom of somebody’s shoe before the night was over.
“Oops.” Brian wandered away. “Mom, I need another marshmallow.”
From his vantage point just outside the perimeter of the circle of camp chairs, it looked to Drew as if there were at least a half dozen marshmallows being waved over the fire, so he stayed where he was. Liz was sitting across the fire from him, laughing with her aunt and Rose, and he watched her for a while.
She looked relaxed. Happy. Drew enjoyed seeing her surrounded by her family, and the bond she’d managed to keep with them despite being all the way across the country for so many years impressed him. Family was obviously important to her.
“You know they’ll keep offering you s’mores until you eat one,” Mitch said, stepping up beside him. “The sooner you give in, the sooner they stop waving flaming marshmallows at you.”
As if she’d heard him, Steph moved toward them, holding a s’more in her hand. “Drew, do you want a s’more?”
This one was premade, not offered up in the form of molten marshmallow dangling from a stick, so he figured Mitch was right. It was probably easier to give in. “Thanks.”
H
e had a mouthful of very sticky sweetness when Brian looked over and saw him. “Hey! How come you didn’t want my s’more?”
He shrugged, unable to talk even if he’d wanted to, and Mitch came to his rescue. “Because Steph had put it together already. You know, I don’t think Ryan’s had a s’more yet. He loves s’mores.”
Since Ryan was over near Liz, they’d have a few minutes of peace. “Brilliant move.”
“Being with these kids makes me wonder how Rose kept her sanity. I think we were almost as bad.”
“There were some moments for sure.” He saw Ryan trying to get marshmallow out of his hair, glaring in their direction over the top of Bobby’s head, and nudged Mitch. “There’s going to be payback.”
“Remind me not to ride behind him.”
Drew laughed, and his gaze shifted from Ryan to Liz. She was watching him and, when his eyes met hers, she gave him a warm smile. She had a smudge of chocolate at the corner of her mouth and he wanted to cross the distance between them and wipe it away.
Maybe it showed, because her cheeks got a little pink and her gaze flicked to Mitch before she turned back to Mary and Rose.
“We’re going to get sucked into going on a big group ride tomorrow,” Mitch was saying, “but once they’re all in the pool or hiding in the air-conditioning, we’ll head back out on the trails and blow off some steam.”
Sounded like a good plan to Drew. He definitely had some steam to blow off, though he wasn’t sure if one tank of gas in the ATV would be enough. He might have to do laps around the trail system before he found any relief.
* * *
It took about two minutes for Liz to come to the realization she was maybe a little too old to sleep on the ground in a cheap, nylon tent.
Privacy had been first on her priority list and, since both cabins were rented and she couldn’t afford an RV, her own tent had seemed like a brilliant idea. Now she realized comfort should have ranked up there, too. And judging by the damp chill setting in, she should have sprung for the nicer tent.
Love a Little Sideways Page 9