CHAPTER 37
TWENTY-FOUR SERVINGS OF SEX IN THE WOODS
A few minutes later, we turned left onto Asbury Road, a short stretch with uninspiring houses on one side and May Prairie on the other. I spouted my memorized trivia like a proper travel guide: 492 acres, mixed swamp, tall grass, short grass, three hundred plant species, et cetera, et cetera.
Grant smiled. I’d done my homework, and the professor was proud.
From there, we rode into the little town of Viola, where the light-blue face of the tiny town hall greeted us.
Grant stopped as the sun struck a waterfall rushing from the rock of one of the hills. I watched him watch it. Colors echoed back with the sound of the water as they disappeared into a white froth and then were carried away to a depth the sun hadn’t reached yet. The surrounding trees stood like a chorus ready to sing, dressed in vibrant fall garb.
This was why we’d come ... untouched nature. It was part of our relationship. Nature was always herself, never pretending to be something she wasn’t and never apologizing for the various moods she found herself in. I took a deep breath, hungry for a reset, until the ride made us all hungry for lunch.
We stopped at a place called Mountain Goat Market, a large brick and painted-cement building featuring a mural with mountain goats atop bicycles.
As we walked in and joined the line at the reception desk, Grant looped his arm around my waist and kissed my helmet hair. I smiled at him, unable to resist running my hand over his chest. We were a couple, a real couple, moving at our own pace.
My heart flipped in my rib cage.
William grabbed menus from the counter and passed them out.
I loved this place. This half-suburban, half-rural route with its sloping, tree-lined landscapes and small eateries that were famous for homemade cinnamon rolls or cycling mountain goats possessed the southern charm I was growing to love.
“And what are we stuffing our faces with today?” a young, heavily bearded man asked as we approached the front of the line.
William pointed to two items on the menu. “I’m going to kick a TreeHugger in the face with a Flying Pig.”
The beard on the other side of the counter nodded slowly. “I’m writing that down just as you said it.”
Deanna ordered next; then The Beard looked at Grant and me. He turned the menu toward me and pointed to the Kale Yeah pizza.
“Uhh, Kale No.”
“But you loved the dip at the farmers market.”
“But this is pizza.”
He rolled his eyes, then pointed to the Goat BLAT. Bingo. He knew me better than I liked. Or maybe I liked how well he knew me. Or maybe I was still confused about how I wanted him to feel about me. No, I wanted him to know me. This was ridiculous. I needed to stop and order my sandwich.
The Beard wrote down our orders, but before we left the counter, Grant pointed to the felt letter board sitting beside the cash register. “Ladies.”
The letters spelled out the message for the day: JUST IN CASE NO ONE TOLD YOU TODAY: HELLO. GOOD MORNING. I BELIEVE IN YOU. NICE BUTT.
“You should pay special attention to the last line,” Grant whispered in my ear.
I resisted the urge to grab his butt, and we each took one of the red stools around one of the large industrial spool tables that sat in the middle of the room.
Before long, a woman in a cow costume brought us our food.
“Once we get to the campsite,” Grant started, nibbling some kale, “we’ll pitch the tent and have enough time to explore the trails on foot before sundown.”
“You’ll feel like exploring on foot after this?” Concern crept into Deanna’s voice.
“Well, we may want to stick around the camp, because we’re in for a treat.”
“What kind of treat?” I asked. “Did you bury fermented vegetables there too?”
He exhaled a laugh. “I’ve told you we’re staying at the Franklin State Forest campgrounds, right? Well, when I was researching the area, I came across a mountain biking group that planned to have their semiannual gathering this weekend. I messaged them to see if we could join in, and as luck would have it”—he shimmied his shoulders—“they’re a pretty friendly folk. Locals. They know the ropes and the terrain. Tonight, they’ll be grilling steaks and telling ghost stories around a fire.”
“That sounds like fun!” Deanna said with enthusiasm. Probably because being around a fire meant sitting down.
“I’ve got to hand it to you, Grant,” William said; “this trip hasn’t disappointed.”
Grant nodded, his mustache splaying in delight.
William was right: we all needed this.
After we’d set up camp and met the mountain biking locals, Grant grabbed my hand and pulled me away from everyone else. We walked slowly, listening to the sounds of scurrying animals in the brush and the soft call of birds overhead until we’d made it to the base of an unadorned deck overlooking rolling hills that reached into the heavens, touched the clouds, and then dipped back down to the earth and dove into the water like an eagle morphing into a mermaid.
I wondered how many had stood on this very spot—suspended over a fiery tapestry of nature—and proposed. I thought of Erin and Beau and wondered if that would ever be me, us. It seemed impossible. Then I reminded myself not to compare my relationship with Grant to anyone else’s.
A large bird caught my eye, soaring across my field of vision, a paintbrush on canvas. “Do you ever wish you could fly?”
“All the time,” he replied.
“Not just fly.” I pointed into the distance, where dark-gray wings caught the wind. “She can see everything. The big picture. If we could fly, we could see it all at once. We could know outcomes, be sure we were taking the best path because we wouldn’t be limited to only a few feet in front of us.”
I sounded like Philosophical Grant, which I wasn’t sure worked on me. “You make me this way,” I said, responding to his smile. “Somehow, I see life differently because of you. A year or two ago, I would’ve looked at this same view and appreciated it, but not in the way I do now.”
I couldn’t quite meet his eye when I said this, but I reached for his hand, squeezed, then grabbed the other one. Our joined hands were continuous, like a M?bius strip, with the inability to tell where one ended and the other began.
“You saying that makes me feel like I can do anything, like I will do anything.” His voice was low, rolling in his throat, overcome by an emotion I couldn’t quite read.
“I want to be as free as that bird.” I unlocked our hands and threw my arms into the air. “Living life like she does, like you do.”
“Then do it.”
“Then do it,” I repeated, inhaled, and then looked up at the sky and let the breath go.
“Penelope.” I rode on the way he said my name.
Slowly, I let my head drift back down from the sky.
He pulled my arms around his back, bringing us closer, and then he bent to my mouth, letting his lips move in a tantalizing caress. I pushed into his body, each curve of mine pressed into each curve of his.
Somewhere in the distance, our bird friend let out a congratulatory screech. Consent. It was okay to let go, and from all appearances, that was exactly what we were going to do. This was what we’d been waiting for.
He brought his hands down to my thighs and lifted me, pushing my back against a tree trunk. I wrapped my legs around him, feeling his outline so hard against me my body ached.
He pulled back, looked into my face, and whispered, “I love you.”
My breath came faster; my head got lighter, like it was disconnected from my body for several seconds.
And my mouth clamped shut.
I couldn’t say it. I physically couldn’t get the words out. I couldn’t tell him that I loved him back. I didn’t want to be in my head then, surrounded by uncertainty and apprehension. I wanted to keep doing what we’d been doing before he’d said the thing. He’d simultaneously ruined the moment and made it perfection.
I put my mouth back on his and slipped my tongue past his teeth, not to ignore the words, but to thank him for loving me. I didn’t hide the urgency in my tongue. I let the feeling course through us both. Maybe it wouldn’t matter that I couldn’t speak.
He shoved his hands into my loose ponytail and cradled my head. I massaged the back of his neck, wanting to pull him through me. We were caught up. Neither one of us noticed we were falling until we hit the ground in a tangle of entwined body parts, landing hard on the twigs, leaves, and dirt below us.
On our backs beside each other, staring past the kaleidoscope of hues on a web of branches and into a sky that was beginning to darken, I giggled. Before long, Grant joined in, and we laughed so hard we couldn’t get up.
He reached over to brush something out of my hair. “Are you all right?”
I let out a satisfied breath. “I’m more than all right. Life with you is always an adventure.”
“Not all adventures are fun.” He brought my hand up to his lips. He’d gone pensive again, like he was falling inside himself. It was a shift, anyway, and it changed the mood. I wondered if he was upset that I hadn’t told him I loved him.
I let out a groan as I crunched up to a sitting position. “They don’t all have to be, as long as they teach you something.”
His forehead rippled. “And what did you learn from this fall?”
I stood, dusted my hands off, and looked down at Grant, who was still sitting on the ground. “To stop kissing you in the woods.”
He threw his head back. “It’s one data point! You need more than two to draw any sort of conclusion!”
“Well, I have at least two.” I held up my pointer and middle fingers. “Two months ago, the first time you kissed me in the woods, we both were drenched to the bone and nearly caught our death of pneumonia.”
He stood, inched closer, as if prepared to defend his ability to kiss me anywhere and everywhere.
“If I recall correctly, you kissed me. How was that my fault?”
“Because you insisted on being a wackadoodle in a torrential downpour, while every other sane individual had run for cover.” My voice elevated until the last word was punctuated with a tone he could never hope to reach.
“Are you calling me absurd ... again?”
“If the shoe fits.”
“You’re not going to let me kiss you in the woods?” he asked. “There’s doggone romance coming out of these flowers and setting with that sun, but you’re not going to let me kiss you in the woods?”
I crossed my arms in front of me and shook my head. I wasn’t sure why I was doing this.
He looked away and then back at me. “Ever?”
“Never.”
Don’t believe me, Grant. Come and kiss me again.
He took a large stride toward me. When his hand started toward my face, I reached out to push him away. “What are you doing?”
He stopped, opened his mouth to let the exasperated sigh escape. “There’s something in your hair. I was trying to get it out for you.”
“Oh.”
His face was inches from mine as he reached up and then, in a seductive whisper, said, “And I also wanted to tell you that you can’t catch pneumonia from the rain.”
“What?”
I was totally caught off guard as he dropped his arm to the back of my shoulders, the other encircling my waist as he expertly tilted me toward the ground and kissed me like a ballroom dancer dipping his partner in a sultry Latin tango.
I pretended to resist, but I wanted this, him and the “doggone romance,” whatever that was.
Just when we’d recovered what we’d lost in the fall, just when I was about to shove him to the ground and mount him, we heard William’s voice call out.
“Pen? Grant? Where are you guys?”
I hated William.
Grant growled as he set me upright. “Shameless! I thought you said you weren’t going to kiss me in the woods anymore.”
He left me gawking at his back.
William came into view as we passed a large maple. “Did you guys hear me calling? Why didn’t you—” He stopped talking when he saw us, my disheveled hair and red face, Grant’s dirt-streaked clothes.
“Oh,” he said. “Didn’t mean to—”
Grant stepped forward. “We were about to head your way but couldn’t tear ourselves away from that.” He directed William’s attention to the deep orange of the nearly set sun, amplified by the golden trees.
William’s mouth formed an O as he stared into the distance. “No wonder you guys didn’t come back.”
“That and we fell in the brush.” I needed to explain our appearances.
Grant leaned down. “Fell ... or tumbled in a hot—”
I squeezed his arm. “Shhh!”
“The mountain crew is all set up,” William said, “and they’re taking dinner orders. You can choose from steak, chicken, shrimp, or be totally insane and go vegetarian. I seriously think these people are somehow related to D because they didn’t say ‘steak’; they asked if we wanted ‘rib eye with shishito pepper salsa.’”
“Ooo. What’s shishito pepper salsa?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but it made D squeal. I’m getting that.” William started walking again.
“Maybe later we can finish what you started,” Grant whispered.
“What I started?”
The curl to his lips was devious. “I was innocently trying to get that flower out of your hair.”
“I bet there wasn’t even a flower.”
“Oh, there was a flower.”
His half smile made me want to shove William into a bush and have my way with Grant. Instead, we walked hand in hand as I wondered what the locals had in store for us.