by Naomi Niles
“We ain’t got the tents set up yet,” I said. “Where are you gonna change at?”
“I know how to change a shirt without being seen,” said Allie in a mysterious tone. “I’ve done it before. I’ll be quick as a wink.” And she disappeared into the undergrowth carrying her duffel bag in tow.
“You gonna hit that?” asked Zach when she had gone.
“Should I?” I asked. Not because I thought I shouldn’t, but because I wanted to hear his answer.
“You’d be a damned fool if you didn’t,” he said. “Shit, man, if I lived here, I’d be all over that.”
“You and Darren both. What is it about this chick that seemingly every boy in our family wants to get in her pants?”
Zach scoffed and motioned to the woods where, presumably, she was pulling off her sweat-stained shirt. “Have you seen her? One, she’s cute. Two, she’s perky as all-get-out, and three”—he raised his hands in front of his chest—“those tits are to die for!”
This was all true, though I wasn’t sure how I felt hearing it from my own brother. A second later, Allie came tripping back into the clearing, and we both became intensely focused on unpacking our bags.
We spent most of the next hour quietly pitching and loading up our tents. At one point, I came over and asked Allie if she needed a hand. But, true to form, she said she had been pitching her own tents since the age of five. “One summer, my parents drove out to Yosemite, and we spent the day there. Around nightfall, my dad offered to show me how to throw up a tent, and I wouldn’t let him. I said I could do it myself. Nobody believed me, but I did it.” She beamed, as if still savoring the triumph of proving her dad wrong.
As we sat around the campfire that night eating greasy bowls of ground beef and macaroni with smoked sausages, Zach told stories of living in the Pacific Northwest and his death-defying encounters with wolves and bears.
“Once when I was hiking in Oregon,” he said, “I came across a couple of coyotes late at night. All I had for protection was the staff I was carrying. But by that point, I had already gone through basic training, and my muscle memory must have kicked in as they were inching towards me. I honestly don’t remember what happened next. All I know is, I looked down and there was blood on my hands, and two coyotes lay dead on the ground at my feet.”
This story, which would have been eerie in any context, became positively chilling when spoken in Zach’s matter-of-fact, no-nonsense voice. An owl gave a low hoot in a tree overhead, and Allie shivered. “It’s getting awfully cold out here,” she said.
“Is Zach scaring you?” I asked, only half-kidding. “Do you want me to make him stop?”
“It’s alright; I think I’m just tired. It’s been a long day. I think I might go to bed early.” She stretched her whole back, looking bone-weary.
“Well, I’ll be right here if you need anything,” I told her as she rose from the log and headed off toward her tent. “I won’t let any bears get you.”
“I won’t let them get you,” said Allie, and she disappeared into her tent.
Zach and I sat there in silence for a few minutes, finishing our macaroni and sausages. Hot and humid summer weather always made me crave Mama’s blue lemonade, so it was unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate) that we hadn’t brought any. That stuff would cling to my teeth and get stuck there for days.
“For real, though,” Zach said quietly, “I think it’s great that you’ve found someone. You were so broken up after what happened last year, I began to worry you’d given up on dating.”
“Well, I’m still not entirely sure what we are. We’re in that weird in-between place where we’re more than friends, but not official. Pretty soon, I need to ask her about it.”
“Well, there’s no better place,” said Zach, setting down his bowl and stretching his arms. “Here in the wilderness, with all the stars of the Texas sky crowded around you like a choir of angels.”
I supposed there was something to be said for that. Maybe when we went hiking tomorrow, I would take her aside and talk to her.
Zach retired for the night while I went out into the woods to pee and brush my teeth. By the light of the full moon, I could barely make out the ferns and bushes directly ahead of me without the aid of a flashlight. A field mouse crept noiselessly past me in the half-light. There was a loud screech, and a barn owl came floating eerily down out of the darkness, its legs lowering like those of a plane on the runway. The mouse skittered away into the underbrush, unharmed, and the owl flew on its way.
I climbed into my tent and settled into my sleeping bag, feeling like a caterpillar in its cocoon. I lay there for about an hour thinking about the talk Zach and I had had earlier. I wasn’t looking forward to the talk I knew I would have to have, and soon, with Allie. But I knew it was better that we get it out of the way now, so I didn’t spend weeks thinking there was something there when there wasn’t. Perhaps it was all in my head. It didn’t seem real that a girl like her could like a guy like me. She was too intelligent, too classy for that. She could have her pick of any guy she wanted, and in what universe would she choose me over all other guys?
I was still pondering this mystery as I drifted off to sleep. It might have been a minute, or it might have been an hour later when I heard a light knock on the door of my tent.
At first, I ignored it, thinking maybe a branch had fallen. But then it happened again, louder and more insistent. And then I heard it: a voice in the darkness.
“Curtis!” she said. “It’s me!”
It felt like a fever dream I was having. My whole body was sweaty, whether from the heat or the thought of her being near me. Being with me. Slowly, I got up out of my sleeping bag and unzipped the tent.
“What’s going on?” I asked. I was fully awake now.
Her eyes were like two lamps in the darkness. “I can’t sleep,” she said in a soft and quiet voice. “Do you mind if I come in?”
“Go right ahead.” Without any further prompting, she clambered inside on her hands and knees, and I zipped up the bag behind her.
Chapter Sixteen
Allie
Curtis looked surprised to see me, maybe because he was still half-asleep.
“I hope I didn’t wake you up,” I said as I edged close to him. “I think your brother’s stories might’ve gotten to me. I kept laying there jumping at every noise in the distance, wondering if it could be a bear or a murderer.”
“There’s no bears out here,” said Curtis. “Crocodiles are the most dangerous thing we have out here, and they’re mostly all down by the water.”
“I don’t know what it is.” I drew my knees close and ran a hand over my forehead, which felt achy and feverish. “I just didn’t feel like taking any chances. Maybe it was the loneliness of being out here under all those stars. I fall asleep most nights with the TV on, listening to infomercials. I don’t even really like TV, but it gives me something to listen to, which puts me to sleep.”
Without another word, I laid down and burrowed in next to him, nestling into his broad chest. He flinched in surprise, and I half-wondered if I ought to have warned him first. “Is this okay?” I asked. “You mind if I just lay here for a bit?”
“Go right ahead,” said Curtis, though the bewilderment was still plain in his voice.
I laid there for a few minutes with my head on his chest, feeling its rise and fall, listening to his heart racing. There was no way that was his normal heart rate. Perhaps he wasn’t used to having girls in his tent. Perhaps he was genuinely excited to see me, or perhaps he was just alarmed.
“Allie,” he said quietly, just when the silence was threatening to go on forever. “Allie, we’ve got to talk about something.”
I sat up slowly and turned to look at him. I could see his face in the light of the flashlight, sweaty and nervous but gently beaming. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Was it something I said earlier?”
He dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “No, it’s nothing like that. I was just
thinking. It’s been great with you these last few weeks, the sort of thing that doesn't ever seem to happen in my life.”
I nodded, not understanding.
“I just think it’s maybe time we discussed where we stand,” he said. “What we are. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I know what I feel about you; I just don’t know what you feel about me, or if you even feel anything. I keep thinkin’ about that old song, ‘Lookin’ for Love in All the Wrong Places,’ and I want to make sure I don’t make that mistake.”
“Do you mean—” I began, then broke off. “Do you mean, do I like you?”
“Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean.”
I thought about it for a long moment. “I suppose I do. I guess I’d never really stopped to ask myself what this was feeling was. I just knew I liked being around you, liked the way I felt when you smiled at me, like my whole body was melting like butter. If I could, I’d bottle that feeling up and find a way to feel it every day for the rest of my life. But since I can’t bottle it up, I guess I’ll—I’ll just have to do the next best thing, which is to get you to smile at me as much as I can, for as long as I can.”
It was one of the longest uninterrupted speeches I had ever given him, and at first, I wasn’t sure how he was going to take it. For about half the time I was talking, I hadn’t even been looking at him, I was so focused on what I was trying to say and on saying it right.
But when I glanced up at him again, nervously, after a long interval in which neither of us spoke, the look on his face erased all doubt from my heart. It wasn’t a smile, exactly, but if he had been smiling, I don’t think he could have looked happier. His eyes were misting over as he said to me, softly and quietly, “Thank you. That was all I needed to know.”
I’m still not entirely sure how it happened, or which of us approached the other first. I remember trying to bridge the silence by asking him a question. (“Hey, Curtis?” I said. “Would you do me a favor? Would you play me that song when we get home, the one about looking for love in all the wrong places?”). And then one of us was kissing the other, or we were both kissing each other, it was hard to tell, and his beard brushed up against my face, and my arms were wrapping themselves around him with a hunger that was as much animal as it was human.
If I had been thinking clearly, I suppose I would have been surprised at how quickly kissing progressed into lovemaking. It was like we were tinder waiting for a match. All those primitive impulses that I had been so carefully suppressing during the last couple weeks, every look, every word, every gesture. All the times we’d been out in public, and I just wanted to nibble his fingers and bury my face in his broad chest, but I didn’t.
I don’t think it became real to me, what we were doing, until he broke away and asked, “Did you bring protection?”
As it happened, I had brought protection. Not because I had expected anything to happen between us, but because it’s always best to be prepared. “I did,” I said, reaching into the pockets of my cargo pants.
“We’ll have to be quiet,” said Curtis. His hands were sweaty and shaking. It looked like he hadn’t done this in a long time, like maybe he had forgotten what it was like. “I don’t want to wake Zach up.”
“I’ll try not to make any loud noises,” I whispered. “Are we really doing this?”
“If you want it,” said Curtis. His eyes searched mine. “Do you?”
I nodded, apprehensive but eager. “I can’t think of anything I want more right now, not even your mother’s blue lemonade.”
With a radiant look in his eyes, he grabbed my shirt from the bottom and lifted it over my head. I wasn’t wearing a bra underneath it, and there was something odd yet bracing about sitting there in front of him with my breasts out, in my natural state. Slowly at first, as if not sure I would let him, he reached his hand out and ran his thumb along the curve of my right breast down to my nipple. I thought he would stop there, but he kept going, all the way down the side of my body to my waist.
“Somehow you’re even more beautiful like this,” he said quietly. “I didn’t think it was possible.”
“Don’t tell anyone my secret.”
He leaned forward and kissed me once, on the mouth. “Not a soul.” He kissed me again, then leaned back as if wanting to take me all in at once. “I wonder what the rest of you looks like.”
“I guess we’ll have to find out,” I said as I ran my fingers through his hair. He smiled and ran his hand along the line of my belt. At first, I wondered why he seemed hesitant, but then I realized he was savoring the moment, not wanting it to end too quickly.
“I wish I could freeze time right here,” he said. “Just the two of us.”
It seemed an odd thing to say right as we were about to have sex. “Don’t you want to find out what happens?” I asked.
He frowned, as if not liking the question. “Have you ever had a moment of being so happy you were afraid to get up, or move, or walk around, because you knew the minute you did the spell would break and the world would go back to being its horrible old self?”
“I remember reading a story once,” I said, “about a man who was cursed to die at the moment when he was most happy. To prevent it from happening, he told his wife they must never have sex again. But then one night when they were out in the wilderness alone, they were overcome by animal passion. There was no fighting an urge that powerful; all they could do was give in to it. Right as they climaxed, he had a moment of pure happiness, and he died with a smile on his face. His wife grieved his loss, but she was happy in the knowledge that he had died happy.”
There was a quiet pause. Curtis gave me a deadly serious look, but the effect was undercut by the twinkle in his eye. “Are you trying to kill me?” he asked.
I laughed, and then he laughed, and we spent the next hour experiencing the bliss that man and his wife must have felt.
It was only much later, after it was all over, as I curled up beside him and listened to the steady rhythm of his snoring, that I thought about the wife he had lost. Christine, he had said her name was. I wondered if they had been happy together, if there had been nights like this. And I wondered, with a pang of guilt in my heart that I couldn’t entirely quench, whether I was somehow being unfaithful to her memory. Whether she still existed in some form and was looking down on us now, shaking her head in disapproval at her former husband and the woman who had just stolen him away.
Chapter Seventeen
Curtis
I awoke some hours later to find silvery-golden light seeping into my tent. I sensed at once that something wasn’t quite right; there was an absence. Then I realized: Allie was gone. She had been lying next to me when I fell asleep. And then I remembered last night, and the whole chain of events that had led her into my tent, and to the two of us sleeping together.
So we were dating now, it seemed like. And we were sexual partners. If I hadn’t given up Lizzie before, I would have had to do it now. Not that I had any desire ever to sleep with her again, not after last night. There’s all the difference in the world in banging someone when you’re lonely, or horny, and banging someone who is sincerely, fiercely interested in you, and who you can’t stand to be away from even for a minute.
Speaking of which.
I threw on a plaid button-down and a pair of hiking pants and crawled out of my tent. Allie was probably still sleeping, but I knew she’d be up in an hour or two. I needed to walk around for a bit, to clear my head and think over what had just happened.
It was always a risky business, going camping with girls. There was something oddly romantic about it, just being out in the wilderness, sunlight and moonlight and fresh air on your face. If you weren’t careful, you’d fall in love with whoever you happened to be sitting next to at breakfast. I’d gone on a couple of camping trips in high school and always came back besotted with one girl or another.
This was different, though, and that was what made it confusing. I’d been addicted to Allie since the moment she sho
wed up in our driveway. One way or another, we’d’ve found our way into each other’s arms before too long. I was sure our surroundings had played no role in my decision. (Had there even been a decision? Or had we simply been drawn together by combustible, unstoppable chemistry?) And yet here in the light of morning, everything seemed heightened, like a television in high-definition. In the branches of a tall oak, a cardinal was singing as if in celebration.
I walked until I came to the edge of the clearing. There was a figure sitting at the crest of a hill at a distance of about thirty paces. It was Allie. She was watching the sun rise over the limestone cliffs that ran along the river, her shoulders slumped as if weary from carrying the weight of the world. Still not aware that I was coming up behind her, she pulled out a tiny reed flute, sounded a single note, then hastily stuffed it back into her shirt pocket.
“Hey,” I said quietly and cautiously when I was close enough to speak without shouting.
Allie flinched in surprise. She looked from me to the flute. “Did you hear me playing?”
“Yeah,” I said, as I stooped down beside her. “But I was already on my way over.”
“Darn.” Allie snapped her fingers. “I was hoping maybe I had summoned you.”
We sat there in silence for a couple minutes, watching the ducks floating along the river. It felt oddly peaceful, more like a Sunday than a Tuesday morning. There was so much I wanted to say, but I couldn’t put words to it. It seemed like she was thinking the same thing because her shoulders tensed, and she puffed out her cheeks looking nervous.
I should have known, I guess. Mornings after are always awkward. The reality that comes after the magic.
Last night had felt like something out of a dream. But now we were being drawn back into the real world of packing and post-trip exhaustion and uncomfortable silences.