by Roxie Noir
“I didn’t say you were,” she teases. “I just need a second opinion.”
I adjust the lenses and the faint white column she’s pointing at comes into view. I stare at it for a long time.
“Huh,” I finally say. I examine it harder, because while it does look like a pillar, it doesn’t seem to be growing. It doesn’t seem to be emanating from one spot, like smoke would be.
I think it’s just a weird spot of half-fog half-cloud, though it’s hard to tell. Plus, the sun is setting, and that makes it even harder to tell.
“We’ll see if it’s there in the morning,” I say. “If it is, we should call it in, but if it’s anything at all it’s just a lightning strike. Most of those go out pretty fast.”
As many wildfires as there are in the west, there are way, way more trees struck by lightning. Most of them smolder for a little while, then go out, and nothing around them even catches fire. Sometimes, some of the brush around them will catch, a few of the drier trees, but those usually put themselves out too. Even in a drought, live trees don’t catch fire very easily.
It really takes a bad combination for a lightning strike to turn into a wildfire: dry, dead trees, lots of underbrush, dense foliage that hasn’t gotten rain in too long. We’re here because conditions in Big Sky National Forest could be right. They’re probably not, but they could be.
Clementine just nods.
“Dinner?” I ask.
I pour the spaghetti onto tin plates, and we eat with sporks, sitting on one of the cots, watching the sunset. I don’t say anything, and it’s partly because I’m eating, but partly because I can’t think of anything to say as the clouds above turn from pink to orange to purple, striping the sky with colors I wouldn’t believe if I weren’t sitting here, looking at them.
Then, when the last rays of the run disappear below the horizon, it’s suddenly dark. The whole cabin is swathed in shades of purple and everything seems to go perfectly still, even the air. I hold my breath, afraid to ruin it.
I want to reach out, put my arms around Clementine, rest my chin on her head as she relaxes against me. It feels unnatural to be sitting here, her so close, and not do that. But she’s been pretty clear: this, sitting and watching the sunset together, is gonna have to be good enough.
It isn’t, but I’ve been disappointed before. I’ll survive.
“This might sound weird,” Clementine says, her voice slow in the stillness, “but this kind of feels like college.”
I look around.
“Being in a lookout cabin on top of a mountain with a busted ankle feels like college?” I ask.
She brushes her bangs off her forehead, still looking out the window at the spot on the horizon where the sun went down, smiling.
“Not that part,” she says. “But sitting on a tiny bed and eating in the dark does.”
I grab our plates and stand, walking them to the basin. There’s no real sink, but there’s a big bucket and a tank of water for dishes.
“I thought you went to class and shit,” I say.
She laughs.
“That too,” she says. “But while I was living in the dorms, the only place to sit in anyone’s room was the bed. So I ate a lot of cereal there, or if people wanted to watch a movie or something, we’d all have to sit on the bed. And now, anytime I’m on a twin bed doing something besides sleeping, it feels like college.”
I sit down next to her again, leaning against a window so now we’re facing each other. A small, mean part of me wants to ask what else she did on her bed in college, and who she did it with, but I don’t.
“Sounds like I missed out,” I say.
Clementine shrugs.
“Not really,” she says. “Unless you really like sleeping on spilled coffee because you were too lazy to change the sheets.”
I’ve done that anyway, but I don’t tell her that.
“What else did I miss by not going to college?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
She’s sitting cross-legged next to me, and she scoots a little, turning so she’s facing me instead of the window.
“I didn’t know about the bed thing,” I say. “I mean, I knew about classes and frat parties and tests and papers and all that, but what don’t I know I missed?”
That isn’t my real question, but I don’t know how to ask my real question. I want to know what she was doing while I was sleeping on a cot in a dusty tent, or in a tank for twelve hours, or busting down doors only to find frightened women and children.
“You’re thinking about this the wrong way, you know,” she says, tipping her head against the window to her right and looking at me, her hazel eyes deep in the dark.
“What’s the right way?”
“You were in the Marines,” she says. “Just because you weren’t in college doesn’t mean you weren’t doing something, you know, noble and important.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Can I get that in writing?” I ask.
Clementine kind of laughs, then looks out the window again, at the thin strip of light at the horizon.
“You’re not the only one who managed to grow up some in eight years,” she says. “I was kind of a dick about you going into the military.”
I don’t say anything. I’m too surprised for a moment, and I don’t quite know how to respond.
She’s completely right. She was a total dick about it, from the moment I casually mentioned I was meeting with a recruiter to the moment I shipped off to basic training.
It baffled me. Other guys who were joining up, and there were plenty at our high school, had girlfriends who were proud of them, who got t-shirts that said shit like “proud Army girlfriend” and bragged about it. But any time I so much as mentioned the Marines around Clementine, she’d go totally silent.
In retrospect, it was a huge, flashing neon warning sign. But at the time I was so head-over-heels that I ignored it.
“Yeah, kind of,” I say, trying to keep my voice neutral.
She looks at me and starts laughing, the corners of her eyes crinkling. I can’t help but smile.
“No, I was awful,” she says. “I...”
She trails off, pushing her hair behind her ear, and looks out the window again.
“I was really jealous because I felt like you loved the Marines more than me, and I know that sounds dumb, but back then I felt like you wanted to be halfway across the world instead of where I was and I couldn’t understand how you could say you loved me but want that,” she says, the words tumbling out of her in a rush.
“That wasn’t it at all,” I say.
“I know that now,” she says. “Now I understand that you can love a person and still want to do something else important, and it doesn’t diminish anything. But I didn’t then, and I couldn’t stand the idea of you liking anything better than you liked me.”
She laughs a little, shaking her head.
“God, that sounds dumb when I say it out loud,” she says.
“Is it my turn to confess?” I ask.
“Go for it,” Clementine says.
I pull one knee closer to my chest and drape my wrist onto it, staring at the dark windows across the cabin.
“I picked all those fights with you because I was jealous,” I say.
My heart tightens in my chest, just admitting this to her. It took me ages to admit it to myself, even, and here I am, saying it out loud.
“You were jealous?” she asks, frowning.
I just look at her.
“I was insanely jealous,” I say. “You were off at college, meeting all these new people and learning new things and moving on with your life, and meanwhile someone was still shouting at me to get up in the morning, telling me when I could eat, when I could shit, where to go, what to do.”
I swallow. Clementine just blinks, like this has never occurred to her before.
“And I felt dumb,” I say. “I was totally sure that you were meeting all these smart, interesting people and any minut
e you’d realize you were still dating some small-town moron from high school and you’d dump me. So I picked fights with you.”
“Because that’s a great way to keep a girlfriend around,” she murmurs, teasing me.
“I didn’t say it was smart,” I say. “I said it was what I did.”
“Well, thank God now we’re mature, grown adults who can discuss their feelings calmly and rationally,” she says.
I can tell there’s more, so I stay quiet.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Clementine finally says. “I should have... I don’t know. Not freaked out.”
“I shouldn’t have put Mandy on my shoulders to reach that shelf,” I say. “I wasn’t trying to hit on her, but she sort of suggested it, and then was teasing me that I couldn’t, and...”
Clementine just looks at me.
“And you had to prove yourself to a cute girl, even if you weren’t interested?” she says.
“You called her that, not me,” I say.
Clementine laughs.
“Mandy is totally cute,” she says. “And I fucked up, too, because I don’t think she’d have gone after you if I’d told her about us.”
She shifts again, stretching her leg out onto the cot. I watch as she flexes her toes backward, then rotates her ankle and makes a face.
“Still hurt?” I ask.
“Not too much,” she says. “A lot less than before.”
I grab her calf and put her foot on my lap, then feel gently along the bones and tendons in her ankle.
“It’s still a little swollen, but the ice definitely helped,” I say.
“I’m sorry I didn’t text you while I was gone,” she says. “I almost did a couple times, but I didn’t want to seem clingy or something.”
“I promise that you’re the opposite of clingy,” I say.
I press my fingers into a soft part of her ankle and she makes a face.
“That hurt?” I ask.
“A little.”
“I was afraid you’d disappear again,” I say. “Like you did when you dumped me.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said I dumped you,” Clementine said.
Now I’m just rubbing her ankle in small circles with the pad of my thumb.
“You stopped answering my calls,” I say.
“You told me you’d never loved me in the first place,” Clementine says.
My breath catches in my throat, and for a moment, I feel nauseous. I wish I’d never said it, and I wish she didn’t remember it.
“I figured we were over once you said that,” she says. “I didn’t really want to get my heart stomped on more, so I didn’t answer.”
I take a deep breath.
“I didn’t mean it.”
“I know.”
It seems so simple, now, so long after the fact. I don’t know what to say, and I don’t know that there’s anything I can say, so I move my hands up to her knee and run my thumb over her kneecap.
“This still hurt?” I ask.
She leans over and pulls her leggings up, revealing a deep purple bruise that covers half the side of her knee.
“Yikes,” she says. “That got nasty.”
“Can you move it okay?” I ask.
She straightens her leg, then bends it, depositing her foot back in my lap.
“It’s a little tweaky but fine,” she says. “I just banged it pretty hard.”
I run my thumb over the bruise again, and for a moment, we’re quiet again as the darkness deepens in the cabin.
“You broke my heart back then,” she finally says. “And yesterday, I’d just spent two days watching my parents call each other names, so when I saw you and Mandy, all I could think was that you were going to do it again.”
She sighs, leans her head back against the glass, and closes her eyes.
“I mean, what kind of dumbass goes back for a second helping of that?” she says.
“And this whole time, I thought you broke mine,” I say, running my thumb gently over the ridge of her kneecap.
“God, we fucked up,” she says. “It’s almost impressive how much we fucked that up.”
“We were teenagers,” I say. “If dealing with new Marine recruits taught me one thing, it was that eighteen-year-olds are kind of dumb.”
“Yeah, but I was twenty-six yesterday,” she says. “Apparently I haven’t changed all that much.”
She opens her eyes and looks at me sideways, the corners just barely crinkling.
“Didn’t you just shout that at me in the bathroom?” I ask, half-teasing, even though it feels dangerous.
“Look, I already said I was sorry about that,” she says, but she’s laughing. “Don’t make me say it again, once was bad enough.”
“So you’re also still bad at apologizing.”
“And you still needle me until I’m about ready to kill you,” she teases.
We look at each other in the dark, her eyes deep pools, her face dark blue and white. The sliver of the moon is somewhere overhead, and it’s casting white light on the forests around us.
You’re still so beautiful it aches, I think. I still want to kiss you more than I’ve ever wanted anything.
15
Clementine
We both go quiet again for a moment. Hunter’s thumb runs along my knee, barely a whisper against my skin. I don’t think he even knows he’s doing it, because it has that familiar, habitual, time-worn rhythm to it.
It still feels the same, I’m thinking. Like it did when we were good, before all this shit went down.
I want to kiss him again. Well, I want more than that, way more, but I feel like an asshole. First, I tell him I need a couple days of time, then I decide to go for it, then I change my mind, cry in a bathroom, and yell at him.
I realize that heading to Hunter’s as soon as I got back from two days of dealing with my parents’ divorce probably wasn’t a great call. Learning that someone you’ve known your whole life, who you’ve trusted your whole life, cheated on your other parent and has been doing her best to act like everything is his fault? It doesn’t really put one in a very good place for dealing rationally with relationships.
It’s still an excuse, though. A pretty good one, but an excuse.
And, for fuck’s sake, he followed me up a mountain. I can do better.
I take a deep breath, because I’m about to act like a grown-ass woman.
“I actually came over yesterday, you know, before I freaked out, to say I think we should...”
I swallow.
Have sex, and see what happens then, but definitely have sex, I think.
“...give this a shot,” I finish lamely, my face bright red.
I’m so nervous it feels like there’s ropes tied around my stomach, because I hate saying stuff like this out loud. Admitting I have feelings? And especially that I have squishy, mushy ones? Ew.
Hunter’s running one finger under my leggings where I pushed them over my knee, and that alone is making my body do things.
“What about now?” he asks. His voice has gone a little low and raspy, and I glance down at his lap.
Even though it’s dark, his pants aren’t hiding a goddamn thing. Hunter’s pitching a massive tent, and a sudden thrill runs through me. For the first time in a long time, I let myself remember just how great some aspects of our relationship were.
We were both virgins at first, but let’s just say that Hunter was a very quick study.
“I think I was right the first time,” I say, my stomach in knots. “If you can kind of ignore the part where I yelled at you in—”
I don’t get to finish the sentence because Hunter leans over and kisses me, his lips hard against mine, my head pinned against the window. I make a surprised mmph noise into his mouth.
He makes an mmm noise back, almost like he’s teasing me, but he opens his lips against mine and his tongue winds into my mouth. I curl mine against it as I put one hand on his shoulder, gripping the hard muscles there.
He does. Hunter pulls back a little. I bite his bottom lip and he chuckles, sliding his hand up the inside of my thigh. His hand just barely brushes over my lips and clit, touching me through my leggings, but my toes curl with anticipation and I gasp.
He grins.
“You used to do this all the time,” he says.
I swallow.
“Make out with you? Yeah, I know,” I say.
He shifts on the cot, pulling my right leg around him so he’s on his knees between my legs. I’m still leaning back against the window, and he flicks both thumbnails over my nipples, through my t-shirt.
I make a noise and tighten my legs around him, my feet just under his ass.
“No, you used to go braless when you knew it would drive me fucking crazy,” he says. “Remember the time we went to the county fair?”
He squeezes my nipples between his first and second fingers and flicks his thumbnail over them again. I gasp and squirm, digging my hands into his knees.
“I wore a bra and acted like a lady?” I ask.
He pinches a little harder, still through my shirt, then leans over and bites my ear.
“Not quite,” he says. “I don’t remember a goddamn thing about the fair besides the way your tits bounced and I stared at your nipples all day.”
I half laugh and half moan.
“I might have a dim recollection of that,” I say, breathless.
“I walked around with a hard on for hours and had to keep myself from punching anyone else who looked at you,” he goes on. “Which was a whole lot of people, Clem.”
I’m blushing at the memory, because I can’t believe I wore a t-shirt with nothing underneath to a crowded county fair, just to titillate Hunter.
“I had the idea that I’d give you a blowjob in the Hall of Mirrors, but when we got there it was full of kids,” I murmur. “It’s almost like I was eighteen and a hopeless bundle of hormones who didn’t think things through.”