Wild About You

Chapter Ten

“Just when I’d started to think an e-reader wasn’t the most useful secret weapon on the trail, the power of pocket-sized literature proves me wrong,” I say as we lay eyes on the creek for the first time.

Harper, who had only needed to hear the word swim before joining this excursion, nods. “We’ll have to get you repeating that on camera sometime. See how many e-reader sponsorship opportunities roll in.”

It was Finn’s idea to break out the AT info books I apparently mentioned at some point in my ramblings, back when I thought he was ignoring everything out of my mouth. Since Wild Adventures doesn’t give us regular trail maps, we hit up my e-books to see about locating a water source. There are spigots at the shelters, which he did propose as an option—use one to fill a bucket or empty bear canister, and sponge-bathe out of it.

But I couldn’t shake the desire to be surrounded by cool, refreshing water, dunk my head under, rinse all the stickiness away, and Harper felt the same. So we got producers’ permission to take a little field trip in our camera-free, obligation-free downtime, and wandered until we found the nearby creek that was described in one of the books. We brought our sat phones in case we got lost, plus a few other necessities.

“Make sure you put all of that somewhere it won’t fall in,” Finn warns with a pointed look at my toiletry bag as he approaches the creek bank, waterproof hiking sandals strapped on and ready for action.

“Okay, relax, Captain Planet,” I call back, taking in the scene before us. “Even if I was a monster who didn’t care about polluting the environment with all my harmful chemicals, this is, like, three paychecks’ worth of products. I definitely don’t want any of it floating away.”

I was envisioning a creek like the one that runs through the horse farm where I grew up—a small, gentle stream that trickles through a skinny ravine and only goes up to my knees at its deepest point. As a kid, I used to kneel down at its banks or wade around ankle-deep for hours, looking for fossils or other interesting rocks and trying to catch crawdads.

But this creek is much wider and looks deeper—definitely above kid Natalie’s head, at least—and rushes over and around big boulders. The water is also super clear, which is helpful in my effort to trick myself into thinking it’s shower-level clean.

“Why even bring it, then?” It’s getting harder to hear him over the rushing water as he moves farther away and I look for a safe, dry spot to keep my change of clothes. Harper, who just wore a one-piece swimsuit, shorts, and sandals that look like a smaller version of Finn’s, hangs her camping towel from a tree before shucking the shorts and hanging them too.

“So I can moisturize right when I get out of the water. It’s most effective that way. I also might do some biodegradable shampoo and rinse action on land, if I’m feeling frisky. We’ll see.”

As I turn my back to both my companions, I’m pretty sure I catch Finn muttering the words “feeling frisky, what the hell” to himself, followed by the sounds of water splashing as he steps in.

“This feels a little like hanging out with my parents before their divorce,” Harper deadpans just as I spot a dry, sun-dappled boulder that looks like the perfect stuff holder.

My cackle probably sends some fish scattering while I walk toward my target. “He’s not divorcing me at least until we win this thing.”

Just after I say it, I second-guess myself. I think I have a decent grasp of Harper’s dry, sometimes darkly funny wit, but what if you’re not supposed to laugh at the divorced parents of the friend you’ve only known a few days?

“So do you live with one parent, or alternate, or…?” I turn my head slightly to the side so my raised voice will carry back to her, trailing off as I wonder if I’ve now taken things to way too serious of a place. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, of course.”

Harper’s short laugh sounds closer, like she’s heading toward the water too. “It’s fine, it was a long time ago and we’re all way better off since. I don’t live with either, now that I have an apartment near school.”

Duh, Natalie.I’ve reached the creek finally, slowly hobbling in my thin rubber flip-flops, but stop short of wading in. “We’re all way better off,” she said. Even though my parents are together, I can relate. I’ve always been hyperaware of the fact that they only got married once they knew they were expecting me, an antiquated sense of propriety rather than love driving the wedding that my mom and her more traditional parents pushed for. Granny Star always tried to tell me that both Mom and Dad loved and wanted me, but that was hard to reconcile with all the moments when one or the other would let something slip in their weariest moments, or in the heat of a fight, about the life they could have had. The unfinished end to the sentence being, “if we hadn’t had Natalie.”

There’s no way they’d even still speak to each other if not for me. But me telling them they should divorce, that we’d all be better off, would only make them more determined to stay married forever.

“I alternated every other week at each of their houses in high school,” Harper says, reclaiming my attention as she wades into my line of sight. “They lived close together. But I try to divide visits equally-ish. You can take the legal adult out of the custody agreement, but you can’t take the custody agreement out of the legal adult. Isn’t that the saying?”

“Something like that, yeah,” I call back with a smile, grateful to find someone else who deals with the hard stuff through humor. She’s now knee-deep in the water about ten feet ahead of me, so the temperature can’t be that bad.

I wiggle my toes. After days in hiking boots, the freedom is refreshing.

When I take my first step into the creek, it’s a few degrees past refreshing.

“Shhhhitballs, that’s cold!” I squeal, but I don’t jump back out. The only way I’ll get used to it is to keep going. Eventually, my feet will be numb and I won’t care what the temperature is.

“Welcome to the mountains,” Finn calls from upstream. He’s mostly hidden from me by a boulder but I can hear the smirk in his voice.

“I was starting to wonder if you’d make it in today,” Harper adds.

“Hey, watch it—you’re not allowed to get along with him if it means ganging up on me!” I stab a finger in her direction. They both snicker. I don’t love where that’s headed.

Reaching my chosen boulder shelf, I stand on tiptoes to place my clothes, travel towel, and toiletry bag there, then put my hands on my hips and consider my next move. I didn’t pack a swimsuit and figured my sports bra and undies would be more or less the same. But now that I’m here, and Harper’s in her practical swimwear, the assumption that I can just strip down in Finn’s presence feels…bold. Should I see what he’s doing first? If he wants to turn away or something?

I spin toward him. “Finn, what should—”

I choke on the rest of the question, whatever it was gonna be, feeling speechless. Feeling a whole bunch of other things, too. Because Finn is now visible, having waded into the middle of the creek.

And stripped down to his underwear.

Like it’s nothing.

They don’t reveal much more than swim trunks would. I just hadn’t even readied myself for the fact of Finn shirtless, let alone…everything else.

“What should what?” he asks with a brief glance my way, clueless that he’s being ogled. He goes back to his task of cupping water in one hand at a time, bringing some up to pour over the surprisingly broad, fit expanse of his bare chest, each arm that I definitely hadn’t been giving enough credit when they were T-shirt–clad, up his neck, over the top of his head. It’s ridiculous, like watching some outdoorsy GQ shoot happen in slow motion before my eyes. Dunking himself under water for two seconds would be so much more efficient.

I can’t look away.

But then he meets my eyes again, confusion in his. That makes me blink back to the present, to where I am and what’s happening. To Harper now wading past me, about halfway between where Finn and I stand. To how I was about to ask the Calvin Klein model in training if it’s okay that I take my bonnet off and loosen my corset strings in his presence, because apparently I’m some kind of Puritan now.

“Oh, nothing.” The words are comically high-pitched and a little wheezy, like my mouth is too dry. Never mind those liters of water I downed back at camp. Take me to the town square and slap a red letter T to my chest, because this girl is thirsty.

I’ve seen my fair share of hot, less-than-fully-clothed guys, in plenty more intimate circumstances. I can acknowledge that yes, my partner is one of the hottest, but he’s also only recently stopped being actively hostile to me. Let’s have some dignity and move right along. It doesn’t have to be A Whole Thing.

Squaring my shoulders, I summon all the reserves of confidence and shamelessness buried somewhere under the humbling experiences of the past year. I remove my shirt and toss it up beside my fresh clothes, then pull off my leggings, already relieved to be free from damp, clingy cotton.

Finally, I wade deeper in. Goosebumps cover me head to toe by the time the water is at my belly button.

“I think we’re swimming in melted polar ice caps,” I say through chattering teeth, taking slow, careful steps. My flip-flops don’t have the best traction on the rocky creek bed.

“There’s the drama I was promised from a theater kid,” Finn deadpans, arms crossed over his chest. As I get closer to him, I see they’re goosebump-y too.

I gasp. “You do listen when I monologue about my life!”

“I listen to everything you say,” he says to the water, cheeks going pink.

Harper is drifting beyond Finn now, her head visible just to the left of his shoulder as she gives me a meaningfully raised eyebrow. Which I ignore.

“Oh, sure you do,” I retort. “You especially love my nature jokes, and when I talk about skincare. Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if you’re obsessed with me-eee…”

Splash.

Before the last word gets out, my foot slips on a slick rock, and I go cartoon-character-on-a-banana-peel tumbling backward, windmilling my arms through the air before my entire backside hits the water. And a low, flat boulder beneath it.

I’m startled more than anything as I emerge from the surface, spluttering and coughing up water, rubbing it out of my eyes and face so I can see. Warm, strong hands grip my upper arms for the second time today, pulling me up. I slide again, still not able to find good footing, but fortunately this time, I have a softer landing. Smack against Finn’s bare chest.

His hiking sandals definitely have better grip, as he stays standing and holds me to him. We’re plastered together, front-to-front, chest-to-thigh, completely soaked and breathing heavily. Our gazes lock, our chests rising and falling against each other, and I don’t know if I’ve ever felt this aware of every place another person’s skin touches mine. It’s a lot of places. One of his hands releases one of my arms and glides over to my back, rubbing a slow circle there that seems almost mindless as his focus stays on my face, tracking from my eyes to lips to cheeks that feel like they’re on fire and back. I take in new details of his face up close, like the light brown fuzz on his cheeks, jawline, chin that’s starting to move past stubble into beard territory, the faint smattering of freckles across his nose with one especially dark spot under his left eye, a small scar in his lower lip like it was split at some point.

“You good?” Harper’s shout from a few yards upstream snaps both of us out of this stunned tableau. Finn blinks a few times, his head jerking back before he puts a foot or two of space between us. With the loss of contact, I return to myself. And reality hits.

“Fine!” I yell back to her, followed by a quiet, gracelessly blurted, “Motherfucker.” I wince as I bring a hand to my left side, where my hip and butt broke my fall against the big rock underwater. I rotate my body to look down at the area that now throbs in pain, finding that it’s already got an angry red patch marking the scene of the accident.

“Are you okay?” Finn asks, reaching out as if to grab me again but stopping himself mid-air. He lets his fingers slowly float the rest of the way until they just barely graze my hip, gently turning me so he can take a look.

“I’ve given you way too many reasons to ask me that in the past twenty-four hours,” I grumble. “But I’ll be fine. Just gonna have a big bruise on my ass. Good thing there’s so much padding back there, huh?”

His throat bobs on a swallow and he gives a short nod. I don’t know if he realizes he’s agreed, or that his gaze looks like it’s trained on said ass, even though he’s likely meaning to check on my injury. Totally innocent. Totally lighting up my insides anyway.

“I didn’t know you had a tattoo.”

His words aren’t what I expect, and I look down at the interlocking star and heart on my ribs as if I didn’t know it was there either. “Oh. Uh, yeah. It’s from my grandma’s signature.” A soft, self-deprecating laugh bubbles up. “God, I’ve talked about her a ridiculous amount since I’ve been here. I’m not, like, obsessed with my dead grandma. I just thought it was pretty and—”

Finn’s fingers brush over the ink for only a second, and I can’t hide my gasp in response. My eyes flick up to find his, serious and intense as they’ve ever been, but with something warmer there too. “It is pretty.”

Harper’s voice is closer this time when she says, “I take back the divorced parents thing.”

I didn’t even register the light splashing sound heralding her approach, but now she’s almost even with Finn, with a look of amused speculation on her face. I whip around to stop displaying my backside like a museum exhibit, and Finn grips my elbow to keep me steady.

He clears his throat. “We probably shouldn’t stay in here too long. You have goosebumps everywhere.”

Harper snorts before ducking her head underwater, so I can’t even give her an innocent look. Never mind the fact that I’m pretty sure these goosebumps Finn is concerned with aren’t an indicator of the onset of hypothermia.

I take a bracing breath and nod, avoiding eye contact with either companion. “I’d better start enjoying it, then!”

With that, I plunge down into the creek, dunking my head under for a second before reemerging above my shoulders. The first thing I see when I open my eyes is Finn’s rueful smile, and it’s devastating. The three of us float there for a while with teeth chattering, making fun of ourselves for choosing this little ice bath. Finn stays closest to me, probably thinking I’m a fall risk.

I wonder if he feels as much of this…something as I do. Something that surely has to do with the real conversations we’ve finally been having, the moments of connection and understanding. But it’s also this instinctive, unstoppable pull of everything in me toward everything in him, a recognition of attraction clicking into place. It clicked for me, at least. And I don’t know if it can be unclicked. Like a seat belt of sexual awareness that I can’t take off.

Okay, yeah, I must have hit my head in that fall.

I am just…not going there with Finn. There’s no way! Yes, there’s been a sneakily hot bod lurking under all that khaki. I mean, are those the kind of fit, solid-muscle thighs that hiking gives you? Because if that’s the case, maybe I should go ahead and plan on doing the rest of the AT. His biceps aren’t overly bulky but definitely indicate he’s lifting something other than books and tent poles on the regular, too.

Oh my God, I must be stopped.I splash some cold water on my face, now grateful for the abundance of it at my fingertips. Through the drops coming off my eyelashes, I see Finn stand and take a few steps away, water coursing down his torso in rivulets as he looks out across the creek. Ugh.

This changes nothing about how I see my partner, nor how I’ll treat him. If anything, the hotter a guy is, the more skeptical I am of him. My dating history might make that look like a lie, but all the dating High School Natalie did is what bred the skepticism. College Natalie knows better, at least about this one thing.

As I turn my head away from the view, I find Harper’s eyes on me, too much knowing behind them. I narrow my eyes at her then lean back to dip my hair once more. The chill makes my scalp tingle. Much to my surprise, I feel pretty clean and refreshed as I stand up, shivering in the air that felt scorching not so long ago. Finn looks back to me, and the way his eyes stay trained on my face seems deliberate.

“Ready?”

“Yep!” I chirp, turning quickly so I can make a beeline for my towel and dry clothes. But his hand grasps my elbow, pulling me to a stop.

“Let’s take it slow. Your water shoes suck,” he says by way of mildly rude explanation.

“Well, excuse me for going the five-dollar-bargain-bin route on this one item. I didn’t expect to be doing much creek bathing—or any at all,” I huff, but I don’t try to shake off his grip. In fact, I want to trap his hand there, keep it tucked against my side for the foreseeable future. He guides me all the way to the rock where my stuff is waiting. The way it evokes helping a little old lady across the street should really kill off any lingering sexiness around the experience, but somehow it doesn’t. We both just need to put our clothes back on, I tell myself. That’s all.

But it might not be all, unfortunately. On shore, I commence working a palm full of shampoo into my creek-wet hair, then flip my head over to rinse with a cup Harper fills for me with more creek water. When I straighten up and wring out the brown and purple mop, Finn is leaning against a tree watching, a bemused little grin pulling at his features.

“Not a word,” I warn.

He holds his hands up, palms out. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to, Dad,” Harper snarks.

From there, it’s a hilariously acrobatic process of drying off and changing into dry clothes behind my towel, which Harper holds up for me, involving a lot of flailing limbs and elastic snapping into place by way of a new sports bra, underwear, and shorts. Finn turns his back to us for most of it, thankfully. It’s another ordeal for me to comb the tangles out of my confused tresses, then don a tank top. I half expect Finn to have gone back to camp by the time I’m done, but he waits. Idly perusing his surroundings like he could do it all day, because he’s just the kind of freak who would watch the trees and sky to entertain himself even if he had other options.

It’s not unattractive. Nor is the fact that when we return to camp and pack our things away, and I’ve found an open seat by the campfire, he approaches me with an ice pack in hand.

“For your, uh, side,” he says, his ears looking a little red, but it could just be the firelight. When I stare, gaping, at the plastic bag with ice cubes, he explains further. “I filled it up from the cooler. I thought it could help with the bruising.”

I shake my head and find my words. “Right. Wow, thanks, Finn.”

Taking the bag from his hands, I shift in my camp chair so I can wedge it partly under myself, covering the area of my hip and butt that’s aching. I look back up at him and his eyes flit from my hip to my face…and he smiles. A real one, small, but with a rare flash of straight teeth and accompanying crinkles forming around his eyes. My heart skips a damn beat.

As the sun sets, some of us munch on s’mores while others set up yet-unassembled tents and begin to turn in. One of the producers staying here for the night breaks out a guitar and starts to play, and, well, one thing leads to another until Evan and I are leading everyone in show tune sing-alongs. Even when this earns an eye roll from Finn across the fire, it feels like a good-natured one—confirmed when he ends it with a wink at me that I feel all the way to my toes.

“My teeth are chattering again,” Harper murmurs from her seat beside me when there’s a break in the music.

“From the cold?” I eye her shorts and T-shirt. It’s cooled off a little from earlier in the day, but I feel pretty toasty from the fire.

“No.” She does a dramatic, full-body shiver in her chair. “From all the vibes between you and Finn.”

My jaw drops, but I quickly compose myself and look at her like she’s lost it. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Uh-huh.” Her tone is desert dry. A log burning in the fire slips off the log it was resting on, sending up a wave of sparks. Harper points to it. “See? Even the firewood feels the vibes.”

“You sound ridiculous,” I mutter back, forcing an exaggerated frown onto my face even as the temptation to smile is strong. It has been all evening, as the whole group has hung out around the campfire and this time, Finn has been a part of everything. And he’s smiled some, or at least hasn’t looked miserable.

Luis and Daniel spent a while telling bad knock-knock jokes, trying to see who could get Finn to laugh first. He didn’t let either win, but clearly enjoyed their attempts. Over dinner, Zeke peppered him with questions about the health benefits of vegetarianism, which probably got more words out of my partner in one go than I’ve ever heard, and may or may not have made me burn with jealousy.

Okay, so it’s possible I’ve been a bit hyperfocused. But Harper’s wrong about whatever teeth-chattering “vibe” she thinks she’s picking up. This is a temporary condition I’m dealing with, courtesy of pseudo-skinny-dipping together and homemade ice pack gifts. And anyway, Finn is giving off no obvious indications that he’s experiencing similar, crush-adjacent feelings.

Is he?

I feel less sure by the time the group is winding down for sleep. I saw Finn go to set up the tent earlier, but we haven’t talked about sleeping arrangements tonight. I figure I’ll address it after my nightly routine, since I’m not even certain what I want yet. He probably doesn’t need to be in the tent with me, now that we’re camping with the others again. Still, I feel the preemptive anxiety rolling in—the jittery feeling of “I don’t know if I’m going to freak out this time, but since I freaked out last time, it’s a definite possibility, and I really don’t want to deal with those feelings.” It makes my hands shake as I take my makeup off, brush my teeth. I know they’re not shaking from vibes.

When I return to the clearing, though, I don’t see Finn anywhere, nor is his hammock set up. Cautiously, I approach the tent, unzip the flap on my side, and…find him stretched out there in his sleeping bag beside mine, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, the glow of his e-reader shining on his face as he reads. A wave of relief nearly bowls me over.

He looks up at me as I crawl into the tent, the light of the tablet making all his handsome features clear. And when he gives me that smile again, it hits me just how much trouble I could be in.