Chapter 15
Dani seems determined to provide Nora with every experience that Riverwalk and the surrounding area has to offer before the summer ends.
She takes Nora bowling with Mila and Ryan, wearing the silliest pair of shoes the bowling alley has to offer and playing intentionally badly to make sure Nora doesn’t come dead last her first time. She takes Nora fishing, which amounts to the two of them making out in a rickety aluminum boat for most of an afternoon without making a single catch. And she shows Nora the hilarity of going to bingo night with the sole intent of watching senior citizens threaten to physically fight each other over a five-by-five piece of cardstock.
And to top off the most enjoyable July Nora has ever had, Dani takes her to the drive-in.
“I genuinely thought that these didn’t exist anymore,” Nora says incredulously as Dani pays their eight dollars each and steers her truck toward screen three. “I’ve only ever seen them in old movies.”
“This one is still pretty popular,” Dani says. She fiddles with the knob on her radio to tune it to the right channel for the movie audio. “People like the nostalgia.”
It is a deeply nostalgic kind of experience, even for Nora, who has never actually experienced one. The three screens each have their own parking lot where people arrange their cars in haphazard rows, and the gravel is scattered with people in folding lawn chairs braving the mosquitoes for a better view.
Everything here seems like a relic, a slowly aging pocket in time from the 1950s—the rusty fences between screens, the aging playground equipment, the concrete concession building that smells like decades worth of popcorn and spilled drinks. It’s all new and yet somehow familiar to Nora, like a strange sense memory absorbed through films, and Dani moves through it like she’s been here a hundred times.
They arrive long before the movies start, before the sun has gone down. After Dani has found the perfect spot and killed the engine, she leads Nora toward the playground with no sign of irony.
“Dani?” Nora asks as Dani hops the short fence that surrounds the park—completely ignoring the gate that sits open nearby, which Nora uses instead—and heads to the swings. “What exactly are we doing?”
“What does it look like?” Dani sits down on one of the rubber seats, her hand still in Nora’s, and moves her legs to get a half-hearted swing going.
Nora chuckles, but she doesn’t sit down on the adjacent swing. Something of her childhood lingers in her bones. A voice that sounds eerily like her second stepmother is telling her that this is inappropriate, that she shouldn’t be seen here. You’re wasting time playing, Eleanor. Do something productive.
“This place is for kids,” Nora finally says, tugging on Dani’s hand in a vague attempt to get her to stand up.
Dani holds firm, digging her heels into the sand. “There’s nobody here to judge you.”
In all fairness, Dani is right. The playground is empty. No kids and no judgmental parents. No father. No stepmothers. There’s nobody here to see what they’re doing. Nobody but Dani.
Dani makes another more serious attempt at swinging, moving Nora’s arm along with it. “Come on, Nora. Get silly with me.”
Nora’s hesitation stretches out. But Dani is so open and hopeful, her expression full of more straightforward affection than Nora has ever experienced. The image of childhood disapproval wavers and then evaporates entirely, obliterated by Dani’s smile.
When Nora gingerly sits on the next swing over, Dani’s shout of joyful victory echoes across the playground.
The swings, as it turns out, are just as fun as her child self always thought they would be whenever she watched her peers play through the library window. Her stomach swoops on every arc. Dani encourages her to go higher and higher until she feels a moment of genuine weightlessness at the height of each swing. Her hair whips around her face and then blows back, and when she sees Dani beside her, syncing up their rhythm, she lets out a loud, carefree laugh.
It feels like she’s flying.
“Jump, Nora!”
Nora snaps out of her reverie. Dani’s hat has blown off—her ponytail is fluttering—and she looks completely serious.
“What?” Nora shouts back, but Dani just says it again.
“Jump! Let go at the top of your swing!”
“That sounds like a bad idea,” Nora calls back, but it’s too late. Dani has already reared back for a hard swing, and when she reaches the apex of her forward momentum, she lets go of the chains and flies into the air. For a moment, she soars, her arms spread and her hair flying—but soon enough her legs start to windmill and she hits the sand with a whumph .
Nora’s heart stops. But Dani is up again almost immediately, her hands thrown in the air as she lets out a whoop.
“Come on! I’ll catch you!” Dani calls out, getting bigger and then smaller again as Nora swings back and forth, still clinging to the chains.
“That seems like an even worse idea!” Nora shouts. But Dani’s arms stay open. In the split second between downswing and upswing, Nora makes the decision.
In the split second between release and landing, she regrets it immediately.
It does feel freeing at first. She’s in the air, weightless, and for a few moments, all she feels is pure exhilaration. But once gravity starts to do its work and Nora is pulled back toward the earth, hurtling toward Dani, the exhilaration is tinged with terror.
Nora grunts as the impact takes them both down and Dani, for all her strength, crumples like a pop can. They both hit the ground in a shower of sand, and Nora rolls off Dani as soon as she’s able. When she looks over, Dani is on the ground, laughing just like the night they danced by the river.
“I was right,” Nora grumbles, struggling to her feet and dusting the sand from her legs. “This was a terrible idea.”
“But you had fun.” Dani is lying on the flat of her back with a lopsided grin, but she hauls herself to her feet to lead Nora around to the rest of the playground equipment: a see-saw that Nora outright refuses to get on, a tetherball stand, a tire swing—and while Dani is attempting to make her way across the monkeybars, her legs curled up underneath her so as not to touch the ground, Nora climbs up the stairs to the top of the rickety steel slide.
It seems like the most harmless of all the equipment, the one the requires the least skill, but that might make Dani smile. She plants herself down at the top, her hips almost not fitting the narrow width, and pushes herself down the chute.
She should have remembered that she’s wearing shorts. Nora doesn’t even remember when she started wearing shorts regularly—she hasn’t worn them since the gym classes she always got permission to skip—but here she is, in denim cut-offs, making a huge mistake.
Before she can get more than a few inches down the slide, the skin of her exposed thighs catches on the searing hot metal. The friction makes a horrible screech, and Nora shouts, catching herself before she slides any further and rolling off the edge of the chute onto the sand.
Dani is at her side in an instant, looking sympathetic but unable to keep the laugh out of her voice as Nora sits on the ground, nursing her sore skin.
“Are you okay?”
Nora lightly smacks Dani’s shin with the hand that isn’t checking for skin damage. “No!” she whines. Dani’s smile looking down at her is so, so warm. “Why the hell didn’t you warn me that would happen?”
Dani throws her hands up helplessly. “I figured you’d know! It’s a metal slide; everyone knows they run at the temperature of the sun.”
Nora sighs. After a cursory examination, she determines that she hasn’t actually injured herself, but she’s going to be sore for at least a few minutes.
“I didn’t exactly get to spend time at places like this when I was a child,” Nora mumbles, standing up with Dani’s help and starting on the seemingly impossible task of getting the sand out of her shorts.
“You mean playgrounds?” Dani says, helping to brush sand from Nora’s butt in a way that isn’t entirely helpful. Her hands trace down to the areas that Nora just dragged over hot coals, and it’s entirely distracting. “What did you do instead?”
“I did extra tutoring. Read books. Played chess.”
Nora spent most of her childhood years watching other kids her age have fun from a distance, and after a while, it had just seemed normal. She’s hardly thought about it in years. Now she’s starting to realize exactly what she missed.
“That sounds really lonely.” Dani pulls Nora toward her and rests her chin on Nora’s shoulder, nuzzling gently into Nora’s neck. Despite the gloom of the subject matter, the contact makes her happy.
“It was,” Nora admits. A lump is forming in her throat. Her chest is tight, a strange sort of grief for the child in her that never got to flourish.
Dani doesn’t push for more, maybe understanding that Nora needs to figure it out by herself, but she leaves her place at Nora’s shoulder and instead grabs her hand, leading her over to a contraption Nora has never seen before. It’s a round platform bisected with two long bars, meeting in the middle like an X . Dani motions for Nora to stand on it and then takes a firm grasp of one of the bars. “You should probably sit down.”
“Why?” Nora asks. Dani just grins and starts to push. Her feet dig into the sand as she gets the platform rotating faster and faster until the whole thing is spinning like a top with Dani running alongside.
Nora clutches at the railing and takes Dani’s advice, anchoring herself near the middle of the cross-section. Once it’s going sufficiently fast, Dani jumps on, clutching the bar with white knuckles as she pulls herself up to sit near Nora.
“I’m getting dizzy!” Nora yells. The world is rushing by in a blur. The only solid thing in in her entire field of vision is Dani.
“That’s the point!” Dani yells back, joy in every inch of her face. Riding something the point of which is to get you dizzy seems like an exercise in futility, but Nora can’t deny the adrenaline that courses through her as they zoom in a circle. Even if it’s futile, it’s fun. It’s fun .
By the time they stumble off the platform together, dizzy and giggling, Nora has found a part of herself that she locked up twenty years ago, some kind of childlike happiness pulled out of her by Dani, who’s stumbling over her own feet and cackling.
Her happiness feels a lot less childlike when dusk falls, when she and Dani are making out in the truck cab halfway through the newest superhero movie.
If she were more cognizant of anything much beyond Dani’s mouth and hands, Nora would probably be a little embarrassed at how obvious they’re being—the windows are fogged, and the truck rocks a little every time Dani shifts her weight to press into Nora’s hips. But right now, with her leg hooked around Dani’s body and warm lips making their way down Nora’s neck toward her heaving chest, she couldn’t care less.
The wait until the end of the movie is excruciating. Nora outright refuses to stay for the second film, and thankfully by that point, Dani seems just as eager. By the time Dani is pulling out onto the road to drive them to a better location, Nora is about ready to take care of the problem herself on the spot, distracted driving be damned.
Dani eases the truck onto a dirt path just off a side road, stopping when a metal barrier with a sign reading NO TRESPASSING appears in the headlights.
“I thought you said you’d been here before?” Nora says.
Dani opens the door and jumps out of the cab. Flagrantly disregarding the warning sign, she makes her way up to the barrier, fiddling with the chain that keeps it closed and then swinging the gate open.
When Dani jumps back in, shifting the truck back into gear, Nora stares at her for a few seconds.
“What?” Dani says.
Nora shakes her head. “Do you always ignore trespassing signage, or just when you’re trying to get laid?”
Dani snorts as the truck lumbers over the grass. “I only ignore them when they’re stupid. This is another way to get out to the tree house. The land was sold to some big contractor who wanted to build a hotel up here years ago, but it stalled out. Whoever owns it now, they’re not using it.”
That catches Nora’s attention. She sits up straighter, glancing out the window as they roll past the gate over a bumpy path. “A contractor? Is the tree house part of that land?”
“Yep. Good thing it didn’t work out, right?”
Nora’s interest fades into something a little more antsy. Dani has inadvertently taken her to the very patch of land that Nora failed to locate at the beginning of the summer. She had meant to get back to this part of her survey after her second failure, but she’d let herself get distracted. She should be elated that she’s finally found it, but instead an uneasiness settles over her as they roll through the underbrush.
The piece of land she’s been interested in bulldozing is where the tree house is.
“Is that something people here would appreciate?” Nora tries to make out their surroundings. All she can see in the darkness are the vague shapes of trees and the dirt tracks in the truck’s headlights. The nervousness that grips her is almost enough to derail the desire. “A hotel or resort?”
Dani’s mouth twitches. It’s not quite a frown, but some of the lightness leaves her face. “No. Not really.”
Nora’s stomach sinks.
“Wouldn’t it bring tourism money? Up property values?” Nora asks, increasingly aware that she’s parroting her own report. She’s dancing a little too close to the truth yet again, but she feels a sudden need to explain herself to Dani. “It could help to revitalize—”
“Revitalize for who?” Dani says simply.
“What do you mean?”
Dani drums her fingers on the wheel.
“Some big, fancy company opening a hotel here, bringing tourists—it wouldn’t help the community. It’d make money for some company somewhere far away that buys up the land,” Dani says, unintentionally busting Nora’s proposal wide open. The uneasy feeling in Nora’s gut increases tenfold. “And maybe it would raise property values and bring tourism, but people can barely afford to buy and maintain properties as it is, with the cost of utilities and taxes and all. You could sell your house for more, sure, but that doesn’t help people who want to stay. Who have lived here their whole lives. People who grew up here and want to buy a place, only to be priced out.”
Nora hadn’t been expecting Dani to have such a polished, thoughtful answer ready that so effectively scrambles her confidence. The truck emerges from the treeline, and even from this new angle, Nora recognizes the dark shape of the tree house in the distance, lit by moonlight.
She wishes, suddenly, that Dani had never brought her here.
“What about if their bills were lower?” Nora asks, new possibilities flashing through her mind. “There’s a lot of resources out here that nobody is using. If someone invested in green energy, it could—”
“Who’s gonna do that?” Dani says, chuckling a little. “Nobody cares enough to invest in some dinky little town up north. We’re not important enough.”
Nora frowns, but Dani seems to be done with the conversation.
“I’m not saying that a little revitalization would be bad,” Dani says, finally putting the truck into park under the shadowy form of the tree house, “but not in a way that makes things inaccessible to us locals. Or destroys what we love about this place.”
Eleanor bites hard on the inside of her cheek.
The Eleanor Cromwell of two months ago might have disregarded Dani’s opinion or, at the very least, not cared so deeply about the impact of her project on the people she’s come to be so fond of. She wouldn’t have been fussed about the idea of demolishing the tree house where so many good memories are now anchored. She’d have cared above all about getting the funding she needs.
But Dani is right. Developing Riverwalk is meant to create a fund for her environmental initiatives, to drive a common good. But how good is it if it means she has to destroy something wonderful? How good is it if it torpedoes the town? Is the sacrifice worth it? Maybe Nora has been avoiding finishing the proposal in part because she’s been coming to that conclusion herself. Her old friends think she’s already practically finished, and her new friends have no idea she’s doing it at all.
Sarah said that Nora is different from most of the tourists they see in Riverwalk. In reality, Nora is far worse. She’s living a double life.
Nora should be pressing Dani for details and memorizing the location to return to later so she can finally add actual on-the-ground information to the report she hasn’t so much as glanced at since June, which she’s already starting to reassess in her head.
Caught in a sudden limbo, Nora opens her mouth.
“Dani, I—” she says, her hand clenching the truck seat’s padding. There’s no hole this time to twist her finger into, and she’s caught up in an impulse to spill every one of her secrets across the dashboard. A tidal wave of sudden guilt. “There’s something that I—I don’t think…”
“Don’t worry. I know it seems small in here, but I promise we can make it work,” Dani interrupts, wiggling her eyebrows suggestively as she pulls Nora into her lap. The steering wheel digs into her back a little, but Dani inches the seat back enough to give her some space. “See? Plenty of room.”
The impulse to confess everything is strong, but not strong enough to overtake the comfort of avoidance for just a little longer. Instead she reaches for Dani’s hand, putting business out of her mind in favour of pleasure. Dani intertwines their fingers easily, and Nora does what she’s become so adept at doing over the course of the summer. She does the only thing that makes the unease go away: She gets lost in Dani to the detriment of everything else.
The summer isn’t over yet.
* * *
Nora’s experience of sex has historically been fairly transactional. It’s always been a physical need, easily put off and easily sated without the need for pesky emotional attachments. It’s never been a reason for Nora to lose her head. Before this summer, she’d never understood the wild, all-encompassing kind of desire that could cause people to do something so silly as to have sex in a public place.
Dani has changed all of that.
Dani seems to want Nora always, everywhere, and Nora sees no reason to contain her own desire here. She indulges herself when the whim hits her, and the whim hits her often. She distracts Dani while she’s working on her truck or after she changes the oil in Nora’s car in the empty shop after hours. She interrupts Dani’s workouts, encouraging her to abandon her free weights and exert herself in a more fun way. Dani leans into it just as much, pulling Nora into the women’s washroom at the River Run or laying her out in the truck bed under the tree house. It’s all fair game.
She’s not doing anything completely unheard of. She’s not even doing anything as outlandish as some of the sex stories Ash and Kayla used to share with her in university. She’s just experiencing it all a little later than everyone else.
She reminds herself of that when Dani very reasonably asks if she can tell Sarah what’s been going on, and as word slowly spreads throughout town, the reminder helps to curb her usual discomfort with people knowing her business. Though she and Dani were never hiding their situation, there was always a furtive energy to it. Once it becomes public and there’s no need to dance around the truth, it feels like the physical aspect of their relationship kicks into an even higher gear—if that’s even possible.
It’s like nothing Nora has ever known before, an addictive, thrilling spiral.
It also becomes clearer than ever that while Dani seems to take absolute joy and pride in fucking Nora until she’s almost comatose, she has trouble articulating exactly what she needs for herself.
“Can I ask you something?” Nora finally asks over lunch.
Dani takes a big bite of her sandwich, waving to Naomi walking past their picnic bench on the way to her office. “Yeah, sure,” Dani says around a mouthful of meatballs and bread.
“I’ve noticed that you don’t like penetration very much,” Nora says evenly.
Dani chokes on her food. “Jeez, Nora,” she rasps once she’s cleared her lungs, taking a few gulps of water. A fiery blush is shooting up Dani’s neck, and she glances around as if she’s afraid someone is listening to them from the bushes. “That came outta left field.”
“I think open, frank conversations about sex are necessary in adult relationships,” Nora says, taking a measured sip of iced coffee. She expected Dani to be a bit uncomfortable about the discussion, but she’s always found that facing things head- on and getting them over with is the best tactic—ripping the bandage off.
Nora wants—no, needs —to make sure that Dani’s desires are being met to the same level that her own are. Dani deserves that, especially considering everything Nora has been hiding.
Nora swallows down the reliable spike of anxiety.
“I just didn’t expect to do it here,” Dani clarifies, gesturing at the picnic bench. “Now. In the middle of my meatball sub?”
Nora hadn’t really considered that. A bench in the middle of town on a Wednesday afternoon is maybe not the best place to have this conversation, but Nora has been working her way toward bringing this up for days.
“Right. Sorry,” Nora says, wincing. “I just said it the moment it came into my head. We can talk about it later, obviously.”
“No, it’s okay,” Dani says, putting her sandwich down and wiping the marinara from her fingers with a napkin. “You just surprised me. You do that a lot.”
Nora might have taken that last statement as a bad thing, but Dani is smiling. Nora can’t quite decipher her expression.
“To answer your question…it just doesn’t do much for me. It doesn’t feel bad, but it doesn’t get me anywhere?” Dani shrugs, fiddling with the foil wrapping around her sub. “I just…work differently, I think.”
Nora nods, her suspicion confirmed. “But you do you like it when I touch you in other ways? Hard pressure, friction?”
Dani blushes a little at the blunt wording, but she nods. “I’ve always just waited until after, and then…did it myself, you know?” The blush rises to tinge the tips of her ears. “Easier than explaining exactly what I need. People sometimes get upset.”
“Why would anyone get upset?”
“Because I didn’t like what they were doing. Or what I wanted was too much for them. Or because they were disappointed they couldn’t get me off,” Dani says, shrugging again. She looks terribly self-conscious. “Lots of reasons. Eventually I stopped asking.”
Nora can’t imagine not being absolutely, mind-meltingly enthusiastic about what Dani wants. Her occasional desire for roughness is never too much, never without check-ins and large accompanying doses of gentleness, and it makes Nora’s chest ache to think of Dani putting herself aside for so long.
Resting her hand lightly on top of Dani’s, Nora frowns. “If I’ve ever made you feel that way, I’m very sorry.”
“No! You haven’t at all,” Dani says quickly, grabbing for the hand Nora offered and squeezing it tight. “Honestly, you’re sort of the only person who hasn’t. It’s been amazing.”
While that makes Nora feel somewhat accomplished, she wants more for Dani. She wants to make up for the years Dani spent unsatisfied. She wants to make up for everything, her own mistakes included.
“Would you be willing to experiment a little? Find other things that work for you, too?” Nora asks.
Dani’s brow furrows, and she squeezes Nora’s hand again. “Yeah, I think so? But the way we do it is really good. I promise.”
Nora does believe her. In comparison to Dani’s past partners, who apparently either got upset that their efforts didn’t work or ignored Dani’s needs completely, any attention would seem fantastic. But Nora can do better.
Later that night, when Dani has passed out in Nora’s bed, gently snoring, Nora takes a deep dive into research. After about two hours of careful consideration, she places an order.