Any Trope But You

Chapter 10 Margot

10 MARGOT

As it turns out, Trapper wasn’t joking. Apparently, camping in subzero temperatures is the plan. When I voiced the opinion at dinner last night that I’m surrounded by lunatics, all I got were self-effacing chuckles of agreement. It wasn’t comforting. Afterward, Forrest gave me a mile-long packing list, and I spent the rest of my night aggressively stuffing my hiking pack with as much gear from the list as possible. “As possible” being the operative words.

At the time, it seemed like a petty act of defiance not to bring every item on his anal-retentive list. Like “crampons,” for example, which sound like the bastard child of cramps and tampons. Now, however, as Forrest brings the SUV to a rumbling halt in the middle of actual fucking nowhere, I’m starting to wonder if I should have made more of an effort to pack everything.

“Hey, how about this!” I say as I take in the frozen expanse of tundra ahead of us. “You take everyone out there, and I’ll just camp in here . When you all get back, I’ll have her nice and warmed up for you.” I nervously pat the dashboard.

Forrest removes the keys from the ignition and doesn’t laugh along with the rest of the group in the back seats. In fact, he’s been distracted all morning, which I suppose isn’t too surprising, considering the grant offer yesterday. For the millionth time since reading his email, I wonder what his decision will be. Based on his eyebrow furrow alone, I don’t think he’s made it yet. But what if he does decide to go back to Caltech? Will I ever look up from my laptop and see him standing in my favorite coffee shop? Would we ever intentionally meet up?

“No way, Margot,” Ollie says from the row directly behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve got this. We’ll all be here to help you.”

I only barely resist pointing out that the last time Ollie promised to stay with me, I was instantly dumped for a boulder. But general sounds of assent ripple around the group as seats are unbuckled and everyone climbs out of the vehicle. Forrest turns toward me. To my surprise, he looks almost as anxious as I feel, which does absolute wonders for my nerves. “It’s just one overnight,” he says, and it sounds like he’s reassuring himself. “Let’s go.”

“You can’t make me,” I say in a panic, covering my seat belt’s clip.

He pulls on a thick beanie and, for the first time, looks almost reluctant to lay down his ace. “No camping, no letter.”

I swallow. Trapper said Forrest wouldn’t let anything serious happen to me, and all I can do is hope he’s right.

To no one’s surprise, the hike to the campsite is grueling. So grueling, in fact, that I make a vow to never use the word “grueling” in one of my books again unless I’m describing this and only this. Even Ollie has gone silent beside me, his small exhalations clouding around his face in tiny puffs. My exhalations, meanwhile, could fill the Goodyear blimp. When Forrest finally holds up a mitten to signal the group to stop, it takes everything I’ve got not to crumple in a heap.

Miserable as I may be, I can’t deny the beauty of the location. We’re set back on a cliff that overlooks an ocean of pristine snow, dwarfed only by the immensity of the sparkling blue sky. Everywhere I turn, the air glitters with what Ollie calls “diamond dust.”

“Great job, everyone,” Forrest says, barely nodding at me and setting loose a thousand butterflies in my stomach. I wish I could install a bug zapper. “We don’t have long until sunset, so we’ll need to work fast. Pick your tent site and start stomping it out. It’s going to be blustery tonight, so we’ll need to build wind walls.”

At this, Alice and Yoon look at each other like a couple of kids who just scored full-size candy bars on Halloween. Immediately, the group disperses to pick out their camping spots like one area of snow is better than another, but I have no idea why I can’t set up right where I’m standing. It would mean less walking.

Forrest snowshoes toward me like my laziness is emitting a radar signal. “The wind is going to come whipping right off the cliff toward us,” he says. “You want to pick a spot with some coverage.”

I glance around at the nearly featureless landscape. “Great idea, but unless you’re going to stand in front of my tent all night, there’s nothing else around,” I point out.

“I’m setting up my tent between theirs and building a snow wall. You can set yours up behind mine. Come on.”

Oh . Well, I suppose that’s considerate. Then again, I suppose it’s also his job to make sure I don’t die out here. But before I can thank him, he’s stomping off again, leaving me to follow in his snowshoe prints.

As it turns out, building a snow wall is kind of fun, if hard manual labor is your thing. It’s not my thing, but at the very (very) least, it’s keeping me warm. Unpleasantly sweaty, actually, despite Forrest’s constant warnings not to overheat or get too cold. Unlike him, however, I’ve been unable to maintain perfect homeostasis and have simply embraced feeling like a ripe gym sock.

“Are you drinking water?” Forrest asks for the hundredth time as I pat more snow into place. After all our efforts, we’ve created a rectangular pit into which both our tents will fit.

“Yes,” I reply, pausing to take a small sip of water from the silicone tube connected to my pack. I’ve honestly been avoiding drinking too much because peeing in arctic temperatures sounds about as fun as, well, peeing in arctic temperatures.

Forrest pulls up the sleeve of his coat to look at his watch. “We only have an hour till sunset. Let’s get building, and make sure you’re not sweating.”

I laugh. “Do you need me to stop breathing too?”

“I’m serious, Margot. I told you to remove layers if you start overheating. Sweating is dangerous in these conditions.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have made me snowshoe across the entire polar ice cap and build a snow fort,” I say defensively, holding my arms out from my waist. “This coat is basically a water balloon now.”

Forrest looks at me like I’ve announced my imminent death.

“Stop worrying. I’m fine,” I say with more confidence than I actually feel. “Let’s get building.”

We open our bags to find our tents. Naturally, Forrest’s is strategically packed at the top, while I have to dump literally everything out to find mine. I’m still rummaging by the time his small one-person tent is set up, and he comes over to crouch beside me.

“I think all the tent stuff is in bags like this,” I say, holding up a blue drawstring bag.

To my surprise, he’s fighting back a smile and keeps looking away from the haphazard diaspora of camping shit strewn about me. I whack him in the shoulder with a clatter of tent poles and try not to smile myself. “Don’t laugh at my packing skills.”

“?‘Skills’?” he repeats.

I try whacking him again, but he catches it. “Why don’t you work on getting all your other gear back in your bag, and I’ll set up your tent.”

I stare at him. “Really? You’ll build it for me?”

“If I don’t, I’m not sure you’ll finish by sunrise.”

“Rude, but probably accurate,” I say, sighing. Then, suddenly suspicious, I say, “You’re not going to withhold my letters or make me, like, whittle a walking stick instead, are you?”

He smiles in earnest, and it’s the first time I’ve seen it since that night in his cabin. The harder I try to look away, the harder it becomes.

“Don’t give me ideas,” he warns. “Come on. We’re losing daylight.”

I’ve begun stuffing gear back into my bag when Ollie’s boots appear at the edge of our pit. “Hey there! Need a hand with anything?”

He’s watching me wrestle my sleeping bag into my pack like it’s an anaconda, but Forrest answers first.

“That’d be great, Ollie. Can you set up the camp kitchen? I left everything right over there,” he says, pointing his mitten to a lonely pile of gear a solid thirty feet away from us.

“Uh, sure. No problem,” Ollie says, looking at me like I might save him.

“Great,” Forrest replies, unsheathing some tentpoles. “We need to get some water boiling as soon as possible.”

“On it,” Ollie says glumly before turning away.

“Margot, are there any other blue bags over there?” Forrest calls over to me.

“No, you’ve got everything,” I say, stuffing a lamp into my bag.

He’s silent for a moment. “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” I say, looking up at him. “Why?”

He stares at me and then looks back at the gear. Rubs the brim of his beanie with his mitten.

“What is it?” I ask.

Forrest’s eyes close like he’s struggling for patience. “There’s no tent here.”

“What are you talking about?” I say. The first hint of dread rolls through my stomach like the rumble that precedes an avalanche.

“The tent, Margot,” he says through his teeth. “It’s not here.”

“Of course it is! It’s right there!” I say, pointing my mitten at the bright blue fabric laid out in the snow.

Forrest picks it up. “This is the tent fly. Not the tent.”

“What the hell is a tent fly?”

“It doesn’t matter, because it’s not a tent ,” he snaps. “So I need you to search your pack again for that missing bag, and tell me you didn’t forget the single most essential piece of your equipment.”

My face blanches as I reckon with the possibility that my tent is currently having a cozy hang with my crampons back in my cabin. The thing is, I packed all my tent gear before anything else. I knew it was important. But Forrest is looking at me like I’m the biggest airhead to ever airhead.

“I didn’t forget it,” I declare. “If it was in the box, I packed it.”

“Then it has to be in your bag.”

“I just dumped everything out! It’s not in there.”

“Then you forgot it,” he says, shoving tentpoles back into their bags with way more aggression than they deserve.

“I didn’t forget it,” I growl.

“Everything okay?”

Our heads snap up at the same time to see Ollie at the edge of our pit again.

“My tent manufacturer apparently neglected to include the tent portion of my tent,” I say.

“Oh my God,” Ollie responds. He glances at Forrest, whose jaw muscles look like they’re skipping rope, and then back to me. “Where are you going to sleep?”

Where am I going to sleep ? Good fucking question. “I don’t know!” I say as panic begins to set in.

“It might be a squeeze, but you could totally share me and Topher’s tent,” Ollie offers.

I don’t want to even contemplate the smell of that scenario, much less actually experience it, but before I can come up with a polite way to refuse, Forrest interrupts. “She’ll stay with me. I’ll have more room in my tent than you and Topher, or Alice and Yoon.”

“How about we let Margot decide, man?” Ollie’s tone is deceptively light as a look colder than the windchill factor passes between them.

Eventually, they turn their attention to me, waiting for my decision. I glance at Forrest’s tent, then at Forrest. “More room,” my frostbitten ass. His tent looks hardly big enough for him, let alone another person. Not to mention I’ve already been through enough tropes with this man to fill my favorite Nora Roberts trilogy, and that was before One Bed got downgraded to One Tent . Internally, I groan. But it’s either camp with Forrest, get hotboxed in Ollie and Topher’s tent, or crash Alice and Yoon’s romantic getaway. I chew my bottom lip. “I’ll stay with Forrest. Thanks for offering, Ollie, but three’s a crowd.”

Forrest nods like I’ve chosen wisely, and I resist the urge to throw snow in his face.

After I’ve made my decision about where to sleep, it’s like the sun decides to fall out of the sky. It’s nearly pitch black by the time everyone has eaten, filled their extra Nalgene bottles with hot water, and retreated to their tents. Getting inside is an ordeal in and of itself. The ceiling is barely a foot above my head while I’m sitting, and our sleeping bags overlap because the tent isn’t wide enough to accommodate both.

“There isn’t enough room,” I hiss as Forrest crawls in, trying and failing not to brush against me about thirty times.

“There’d be plenty of room if you hadn’t forgotten your tent,” he hisses back, unzipping his coat. He shrugs it off his shoulders, and as he moves, I’m hit by the smell of him: warm, fresh-cut cedar and a pheromone-spiked muskiness that makes me think of leather work gloves and denim (but not sweat, of course). Honestly, what is it about men who smell like trees? At what point did biology decide wood was the go-to scent for making men smell attractive? It’s intoxicating, but I will not let my eyelids flutter.

“I told you, I didn’t forget it, and if we ever make it back alive, I can’t wait to prove it to you,” I grumble, taking off my own coat and shoving it down by my feet. Damn, it’s cold in here . Unfazed, Forrest begins unbuttoning his ski pants. I try not to stare as he works them down over his hips, revealing a skintight merino base layer that leaves little to the imagination.

“Just like you didn’t forget your extra Nalgene?” he says dryly, pulling my attention away from his crotch.

“It seemed redundant. I didn’t know what it was for,” I say, shoving my own ski pants down despite the aching cold. If he can handle it, so can I.

“So since you didn’t know what it was for, you decided it must be pointless?” he asks, handing me his own extra water bottle, which, he explained earlier, will act like a heater in my sleeping bag. I set it aside while he pulls off the fleece he’s wearing. It drags his base layer up with a static crackle, and something lurches low in my stomach as I catch a glimpse of olive skin and dark hair. He yanks off the fleece and pulls his shirt down, but not before he catches me staring.

I look away quickly as blood warms my cheeks and set about unclipping my sweaty sports bra beneath my shirt. All awkwardness aside, there’s no way I’m sleeping in boob prison.

“You’ll find that I think pretty much everything about camping is pointless,” I say cheerfully, pulling my arms through my damp shirtsleeves and bra straps.

As we maneuver ourselves into our overlapping sleeping bags, I’m shocked by how cold the silky fabric is. I expected it to be warmer than the frigid air inside the tent, but somehow it’s even colder. I snake an arm out and grab the hot-water bottle, but despite curling around its radiating heat, I can’t stop shivering. My damp base layers and even my socks seem to be freezing and stiffening all around me. Forrest reaches up and shuts off the lamp hanging from the top of our tent, plunging us into absolute darkness, and I will my body to warm up.

“Good night,” Forrest says grumpily as he turns on his side and puts his Denali-sized back toward me.

“?’Night,” I say, trying not to let him hear my teeth chatter. Outside, the wind howls, and despite the pit we’re in, the walls of our tent shake.

Long, miserable minutes pass, but the hot-water bottle I’m relying on to warm me up is losing heat quickly. I begin moving around in the sleeping bag, trying to generate some kind of body heat, but a deep chill from the snow-packed ground rises through the floor of the tent directly into my sleeping bag. My teeth begin to chatter harder, and I can just make out my breath swirling in clouds above my face. Forrest turns over in his sleeping bag to look at me. In the dark, his faint outline looks as big as a polar bear’s.

“Jesus, Margot, are your teeth making that racket?”

“I’m f-fine.” My voice shudders.

“Goddammit,” he says quietly. I hear the scratchy sound his beard always makes when he scrubs a hand over it. It stops, and suddenly, his warm hand is on the side of my face instead. I practically whimper when he slides it into my sweat-dampened hair and curses under his breath again. “You took your hat off,” he scolds. To my dismay, he lets go of me and turns the overhead lamp on.

Whatever he sees in my face draws his eyebrows together with worry. He quickly grabs my hat and pulls it over my head before I can insist on doing it myself. Then, without warning, he presses two fingers to the pulse in my neck and closes his eyes, counting. When he opens them again, his expression is grim.

“Okay, here’s what’s going to happen,” he says, removing his hand and meeting my gaze. “You’ve got all the early signs of hypothermia, so you’re getting into my sleeping bag, and I’m going to warm you up.”

I want to ask him if this line works on all the ladies he takes ice camping, but I’m shivering too hard to form any words. I manage a nod, and he unzips his bag. I try to unzip mine, but my numb fingers aren’t working properly, so he does it for me. Immediately, every wisp of warmth vanishes, and a deep shudder racks my body. Forrest quickly reaches up to turn the light off, and a second later, he’s pulling me against him, his big arms wrapped tight around my body. My eyes drift shut, and I’m no longer in Alaska but stepping out of my overly air-conditioned house and onto my sun-drenched patio during the height of an L.A. summer. I half-moan into his chest, shivering uncontrollably, and his hands move over my back, trying to rub warmth into me.

“God, you’re freezing,” he says into my hat. “You should’ve told me you were so cold.”

“Why? So you c-could point out another reason I don’t belong here?” I stammer, snuggling deeper into his warmth. I can’t seem to get close enough.

He exhales and holds me tighter, welding our bodies together. “Your base layers are damp. I told you not to sweat.” He pauses, trying to regain his patience. “Margot, listen. I swear I’m not trying to make a move, but you’re at risk of hypothermia. The best way to warm up is skin to skin.”

“Like, n-naked ?” I squeak. The part of my brain that’s dedicated to raising red flags hoists about eleven in quick succession. I thought this trope train was stopping at One Tent, but apparently, it’s headed all the way to Strip for Body Warmth. “No way,” I say nervously.

“I know it’s not ideal,” he says in a strained voice. “But I can’t see anything, and we’d only need to take our shirts off until you warm up.”

“J-just our shirts?”

“Yes. We need to warm your core.”

A small, hysterical laugh escapes me. Warm my core? He’s clearly unfamiliar with romance vernacular, because I’m positive that’s the last thing he wants to help me warm up. I’m about to tell him my “core” is already toasty enough, but then the biological need not to freeze to death joins forces with the hollow ache I’ve been fighting ever since I first laid eyes on him. It’s a fight that’s only gotten harder with every new piece of evidence that he isn’t the imitation romance hero I’ve imagined him to be, but the genuine source material. He tucks my head closer to his chest, and my resistance finally crumbles.

“Okay,” I whisper.

“Okay,” he repeats, and I can hear his heartbeat thump like a kick drum in his chest. “Lift your arms above your head,” he rasps, and as I obey, he slides my shirt up and over my head in one swift movement.

I inhale sharply as my clammy skin is exposed, and my nipples tighten painfully without even my bra to protect against the cold. He makes quick work of his own shirt, and a moment later, both of our layers are abandoned and his arm is sliding beneath my bare waist to pull me in close. He pulls up the sleeping bag’s zipper behind me, and every inch of space between us vanishes.

I’d thought lying against him with clothes on felt incredible, but it’s nothing— nothing —to this. His skin is so deliciously hot that I feel almost scalded by him. He’s preternaturally still as he holds me, but as my temperature rises, I can’t stop moving against him. My face burrows into the heavy curves of his pectorals, huffing his spicy evergreen scent, while my hands greedily search for every pocket of his warmth. Unknowable minutes pass, and when I finally, finally stop shivering, I realize what my hips are doing when his hand slides down to roughly grip them into stillness.

“Please,” he says, his voice a ragged whisper above my head.

Embarrassment engulfs me. How long have I been dry-humping him without realizing it? Just like after our hike, he’s offering me standard-issue medical care, but my body has drawn other conclusions. He told me plain and simple that he’s not interested, and if I knew what was good for me, I wouldn’t be either.

I open my mouth to apologize, but then his hips tilt ever so slightly—almost like he can’t help himself—and I register what’s between us. My breathing stops. The world stops, too, because… he wants this . He wanted this in his cabin, too, but we weren’t zipped skin to skin in a sleeping bag. Here, it’s easier than breathing to draw my thigh over his. To pretend we don’t hear each other’s muffled groans at the closer contact. His hand presses against my low back, and my mind flickers. His body is so warm. Enormous. Surrounding me, overwhelming me, but somehow still not close enough. Thick heat pools low in my belly like molten gold from a crucible, and I’m almost panting, fists tugging at his chest hair.

He arches into me again, on purpose this time, and the size and heat of him untether all my thoughts like helium balloons. What’s left behind is every feeling I’ve been repressing and denying. How badly I’ve wanted this. How much I secretly like him. How safe I feel in his arms. My mouth opens against his skin as his hips roll against mine again, a small cry breaking from my throat when he hits me right where I need him through our thin base layers. I tell myself it’s okay. That in the howling dark, it could just be the wind.

Then his hands slide lower, and there’s no pretending about the way he grips my ass. I’m jerked upward, gasping between unsteady breaths as he brings my face on a level with his. In the dark, I can’t read his expression, but his thoughts are crystal clear, because they’re the same as my own. We shouldn’t be doing this .

“I know. I’m sorry,” I breathe, staving off the pain of another rejection from him with half-formed excuses. “I didn’t mean to—I was just so col—”

I never finish my sentence. His mouth finds mine in the dark, and every feeble excuse for my bad behavior is incinerated. I expect him to be careful—he’s so meticulous with everything else—but his kiss feels like a fever. His lips are hot, swollen, lusher than I’d even imagined, and I’m delirious. Lost in the slide of his beautiful mouth and the small, breathless gasps between every new way we fit together, until there’s simply no room left in this sleeping bag for all the reasons why we shouldn’t do this. Not when his hand is sliding up my naked back, and not when he grips my hair around his fist, angling my head back for easier access. On the contrary, my mouth is falling open for him like a fucking guest book, and I feel the responding growl he makes in my toes. I feel it rumble against my naked breasts, too, and at the first hot stroke of his tongue, every last trace of cold is burned from my body. When he sinks his teeth into my bottom lip, the moan I make is embarrassing, and I can only hope the other guests think it’s the wind.

But then I’m on my back, and Forrest’s heavy body is pinning mine to the cold ground, engulfing me, and I forget to be embarrassed. I forget all about my red flags and caution tape, too, because he’s licking my neck, his beard rasping my sensitive skin between hungry sucks, and my hands are finally buried in his thick hair. His burning palm scrapes up from my waist, higher and higher, until he finds the curve of my breast. He squeezes roughly and I arch, gasping cold air against his mouth when he brushes a soothing thumb across my nipple.

“Margot,” he groans, pressing his erection into me through our base layers, and suddenly, my body is a welder’s arc beneath him, too bright to look at. I have the frightening thought that no one has ever made me want like this. Need like this. No one has ever been this rough or desperate with me. Not even Adam.

And with the worst timing in the world’s history of bad timing, my ex-fiancé’s face appears in my mind. I try to banish it like a bad omen, but he lingers. Reminding me that while it was definitely never this intense, this is exactly how it started between us too. A classic Just One Time, heat-of-the-moment trope. One single night that led to a casual, then not so casual, relationship, which turned into “Let’s move in together” and eventually “Will you marry me?”

At the memory, my heart decides to stop beating. Forrest must sense something’s wrong because his head rises from the center of my chest, where his bee-stung lips have been lighting a fiery trail south. He meets my gaze in the dark, and the situation feels all too familiar. I’m making the same goddamn mistake I made five years ago, only worse. Because, unlike Adam, Forrest isn’t a douchey journalist, one thousand percent convinced his next story will bag the Pulitzer. Forrest is humble and legitimately brilliant, if half of what Trapper and Jo have told me about his career is true. Even if they didn’t brag about him constantly, I’ve seen with my own eyes that he’s self-sacrificing to a fault and cares for his father the same way I care for Savannah. He’s beautiful and, very alarmingly, the best kisser I’ve ever had the pleasure of locking lips with.

Point being, if falling for Adam felt like tripping and landing flat on my face, falling for Forrest would be like skydiving without a parachute. After hitting the pavement, I’m not sure I’d get back up again.

Forrest’s own calculations of how badly we’ve fucked up seem to catch up with mine, and his eyes go wide in the dark.

“Shit,” he huffs, and for once, we’re in perfect agreement.