Into the Woods

10 The Lemon Tree

10

THE LEMON TREE

Gretchen

Teddy showed up at swimming on Monday afternoon. I would have said I was surprised, but somehow, the unexpected from him was starting to feel… expected.

I was holding on to the edge of a floating dock and chatting with Maiv, who had a kickboard, when I heard him talking to Caleb and Danny on the beach. As with the campfire the other day—which felt like a lifetime ago, maybe because it had happened before we got lost in the woods—he just appeared, as if it were normal for him to be here, inserting himself into the scene all low-key-like. I didn’t say anything, merely noted his presence—and hoped I was doing so without blushing.

Maiv noticed him, too. “Looks like your boyfriend is here.”

“What?” I sputtered. “He’s not my boyfriend!”

“OK,” she said mildly.

“Sheesh. Are you in junior high?” But inside I was panicking. Had she seen me skulking into—or out of—Teddy’s cabin yesterday? I had taken pains to make sure the coast was clear before darting across the path. “Why are you saying that?”

“No reason.”

“There is too a reason. You don’t say something like that without a reason!”

“Who’s in junior high again?”

I rolled my eyes.

“There really isn’t a reason. I just get the sense that you two are suddenly kinda cozy. You showed up together at sunrise circle this morning.”

“You weren’t even there!”

“I heard.”

“Oh my God!” The idea that people were talking about us was mortifying.

“And now he’s here, when he hasn’t shown any interest in swimming to date.”

I was tempted to tell her that he had been swimming, once. I wondered why he hadn’t been back after that one morning.

Did I want him to be back? Wasn’t the whole point of my morning swim that it was a solo activity?

“Well,” I said, returning to the defense I was mounting, “he’s not here because of me, and in no way, shape, or form is he my boyfriend. You will recall that I’m here to get over boys. To transition into—”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re here to become a crone.”

“Which you said was cool! You said you were going to paint me!” Maiv and I had tromped out on one of the hiking paths, and she had taken a bunch of photos of me in all my croney glory because, she said, she was going to make a painting for the urban/wild series she was working on. I had been honored because most of her paintings didn’t include people.

“Maybe becoming a crone is like becoming a nun,” Maiv said. “You can change your mind, up to a certain point. Like, in Sound of Music , Maria’s what? A postulant? And she decides not to renounce the material world after all.”

“Oh for God’s sake. There is nothing happening with me and Teddy. Being lost in the woods together inspired us to reach a kind of… détente.” Détente with orgasms. Which still didn’t make him my boyfriend.

“OK,” she said again, with more of that maddening mildness.

I wasn’t sure why I was being so secretive. Maiv and I had become close. We were camp friends. Of course, when Marion had introduced the concept, she’d been talking about the kids, but Maiv and I were on an accelerated track, friendshipwise.

I didn’t have any experience with camp friends. Maybe you didn’t tell your camp friends about your secret hookups.

Maybe Teddy was my camp boyfriend.

No. No. Teddy was my last hurrah. Past tense. One and done. Slam, bam, thank you, sir.

All right. I needed to get my shit together and stop thinking about Teddy. I had a video call later with my contractor. Justin couldn’t start the job until after I took possession, obviously, but I had taken Rory’s advice and set him up to do one of my walk-throughs on the property so we could start making a plan.

And speaking of Rory, she was joining Justin for the walk-through. I’d invited her because she knew me so well. I figured having her there was almost as good as being there myself. But her knowing me so well was going to cut both ways. I was half-afraid she was going to lay eyes on me and have some kind of ESP-fueled vision of what had gone on in Teddy’s cabin last night.

“Well, that’s it for me,” Maiv said. “You staying in?”

We’d been in the water a long time—my fingers were prunes—but I wasn’t ready to face Teddy in front of everyone. If they were gossiping about us, I wasn’t keen on fanning the flames. If this was even a fraction of what Teddy felt like when he was in the tabloids, did I ever sympathize with the guy. And honestly, I needed to get him out of my brain before I saw Rory.

“I’m going to stay out for a bit. But give me your kickboard if you don’t mind.”

I ducked under the floating rope that marked the boundary of the swimming area, paddled out a way, and pressed the board down under the surface so I could balance my butt on it. Sitting in the lake, watching the clouds go by. I loved this.

After a few minutes, I heard someone approaching but didn’t turn.

Please don’t let it be him.

Please let it be him.

Wow, I was all over the place.

“Hey, Miller.”

“Hi!” I squeaked. So much for getting him out of my brain.

“How is it that you’re managing to levitate in the water without any apparent effort? Is this part of your crone training? Witches don’t drown, right?”

“Ha. No.” I dismounted from my kickboard and showed him my trick.

“Ah.” He had a board, too. He pressed it down and let it pop up dramatically. When I didn’t react, he said, “Am I interrupting?”

“No, no.” I gestured to the water next to me. “Have a seat.” Once he got himself settled, I, apparently deciding to state the obvious, said, “You have a lot of tattoos.”

I knew that, of course, having had three occasions now to see him shirtless. But the first had been dark—he’d been illuminated only by the light of his own phone as I spied on him. The second had been that early-morning swim, and he hadn’t been close enough to see. And of course there’d been yesterday. What can I say about yesterday? I guess I’d been too distracted for tattoo inspection.

And really, it wasn’t that I hadn’t seen them; it was that I wanted to know what they meant .

“Yeah,” he said. “The ink got a bit addictive for a while there.”

“What’s this one?” I probably shouldn’t touch him, given that our hurrah was over, but I reached a hand out and grazed a pair of letters— AK —near his collarbone.

“My sister’s initials—Auden Knight.”

That was sweet, but I suspected he wouldn’t want to hear that. “She’s named after a poet, too.”

“Yep. Our mom was… a real piece of work.”

I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t a surprise given what he’d said about his childhood, but I wasn’t sure if I should pry. So I moved my hand over his shoulder and down his upper arm, where there was another tattoo. He shivered. I wanted to flatter myself that it was my touch, but it was probably the cold of the deep lake. “This one is waves?”

“It’s meant to represent this pool my sister and I spent a lot of time in when we were kids.” He paused and tilted his face to the sky. “It was more than a pool. It was… a refuge. Also a place to shower.”

“Ah.” I understood, and when he said, “Yep,” I knew that he knew I understood.

It was an interesting sensation, having this kind of shorthand with someone about our deprived childhoods—to be so easy about something that generally made me feel vulnerable and defensive.

He twisted and showed me, unprompted, a tattoo on his other arm.

“That looks like an intersection in New York?” I asked.

“It’s the location of my bandmate Scott’s parents’ apartment. Ex-bandmate. They… they were good to me at a time in my life when I didn’t have any adults I could rely on.”

Well. The Scott plot thickened. “Are you still in touch with them?”

“That’s a good question. I guess I’m not. My interactions with them were always via Scott, so…”

“They’re your ex-in-laws, basically.”

He huffed a bitter laugh. “I guess your divorce analogy wasn’t so far off.”

“And this?” I pointed to some music notes.

“A bar from the first song we wrote that got radio airplay. But also just music generally.”

“Are these all…” The idea had just popped into my head, but I didn’t know if I should verbalize it. I was probably reading too much into a bunch of tattoos. But hell, Teddy and I had told each other a lot of personal shit, to my ongoing surprise. “Are these the things that saved you?”

He didn’t even hesitate. “Yeah.”

I experienced a rush of pleasure at my crack forensic psychoanalytic skills, but doubt crept in. Why was I being so nosy?

Time to change the subject. “What did you do today?”

What did you do today? I regretted the question the moment it was out of my mouth. What did I think? I was his girlfriend? And more importantly, did I care what he’d done today?

He didn’t say anything. Fair enough. It had been a stupid question, and he didn’t owe anyone, including me, an accounting of his day. “Look at that cloud.” I pointed. “It looks like a horse.”

He eyed the cloud in question, but he said, “Today I tried to play this song called ‘Lemon Tree’ on the keyboard in my cabin.”

Ooh. The “Lemon Tree” mystery. “Yeah?” I said, trying to pitch my tone as interested but not too interested. “I know that song.” Of course, I left out that I only knew it because I’d eavesdropped on his conversation with his student a week and a bit ago and then gone on an investigative deep dive. “Peter, Paul and Mary, right?”

“There are several versions of it, but yeah. My mom was obsessed with that Peter, Paul and Mary recording. You know them, right? We sang a bunch of their songs at the campfire the other night.”

“Right. You’re having a 1960s protest-movement-music moment.”

“Apparently I am. My mom grew a lemon tree in a pot. It was inspired by the song. I always thought it was ironic because the song warns against love and attachment, right? But she was obsessed with that tree. It was the center of our lives. It gave one lemon, once, when I was maybe ten or eleven. It never fruited again, though it never died. She bought all kinds of special plant food for it. She would decorate it for Christmas. In the summer, she’d make us carry it down five flights of stairs every day so it could get sun, and then back up every night. In the winter, when the heat got cut off, she’d put it in the prime spot next to this electric heater we ran off a generator. It used to… well, it used to enrage me.” He was still looking at the horse cloud, and he seemed truly perplexed. “I don’t even know why. It was just a tree.”

The why of it seemed pretty clear to me. “She was buying plant food, but not human food. She prioritized a tree over you, her child.”

He blew out a breath and nodded. “I don’t know why it smarted so much, though, because she did that in all kinds of ways.”

“Maybe because the tree was a physical object. A tangible manifestation of her screwed-up priorities. Possibly also because it was so absurd—a lemon tree in New York. It’s already a lost cause.”

“She was Don Quixote tilting at windmills,” he said.

“Don Quixote tilting at windmills while her children raised themselves and fucking starved.” My voice had gone all vehement there, and it must have startled him. He transferred his attention from the sky to me.

“It’s shameful,” I said, and I didn’t care if I sounded overly invested. Teddy and I might have gotten off to a rocky start, but as with the Concrete Temple “divorce,” I was firmly on Team Teddy now.

I really needed to tell him about my ill-fated date with Scott. It was starting to feel like I was keeping something from him, something he had a right to know.

“Still,” he said, “I don’t want to be the kind of person whose every move is secretly motivated by the fact that his mommy hurt his feelings.”

“Well, I think that’s unfair to trauma sufferers worldwide, and I think you’re talking about a lot more than hurt feelings, but I understand.” I hesitated over whether I should say more. Who did I think I was? A shrink? His shrink?

No, I was a wannabe crone, and crones didn’t censor themselves. “I just think maybe the way to not be someone whose every move is secretly motivated by the fact that his mother hurt him is to stop resisting.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let the feeling—your mom was shitty to you; she hurt you—be. Let yourself feel it. Lean into it, even. Then maybe you can discharge it and it will have less power. Resisting something can take a lot of energy, can make it more important than it is—or than you want it to be. But if you let yourself feel it, maybe you’ll be able to let it go?”

“I don’t think I can let myself feel it without talking to my sister.”

“Then talk to your sister.”

“What if she’s not ready to feel it?”

“There’s only one way to find out.” I paused. “But also, what do I know? Don’t listen to me.”

“I think you know a lot.”

I was stupidly pleased by that statement. “So you say you tried to play ‘Lemon Tree’? What does that mean? You don’t remember it?”

“Oh, I remember it.”

“Where’s your mom now?” I asked when he didn’t elaborate about the song. “If you don’t mind my asking. Have you ever, I don’t know, tried to confront her?”

“I have no idea where she is. The last time I saw her, we had a huge fight over the tree. I’d forgotten to bring it upstairs, and she wanted me to go down and get it. I was in my pajamas and ready for bed, so I refused. Well, I refused until Auden got up to do it. So I did go down for it, but it was like something inside me had snapped. Like I could see the Matrix all of a sudden, you know? She was never going to give us any of the stuff a mother is supposed to give her kids. And I’m not just talking about food and shelter and all that.”

“So you left after that?”

“No, she did. My reckoning was more internal. I wouldn’t have left until Auden was done with high school, but at that moment, I understood that there was no point in trying to please my mom. Or trying to get her to be decent to us. Or… whatever it was I was doing; I’m not even sure. The point is, I gave up. Maybe she could sense it; maybe she somehow knew she didn’t have any hold over me anymore. Regardless, she left that night—she said she was going out, but she never came back. Looking back, it was one of those You can’t fire me; I quit scenarios.”

“What! Did you try to find her?”

“Initially we assumed she’d turn up eventually. She sometimes disappeared, but usually only for a few days at a time, max. That time, though, a couple of weeks went by with no word from her, and one day we came home from school to find the tree gone. So we knew she’d been back to get it, and that she was really gone—for good.”

“What?” This was all so egregious, I was having trouble wrapping my mind around it. “What did you do? How old were you?”

“We didn’t do anything. We stayed in the apartment. She already wasn’t paying rent. It was May, so the heat wasn’t an issue. It was spring of my senior year, so I finished school and we stayed through the summer. Without my mom rallying everyone against the landlord—I guess she was good at something—the eviction notices eventually came with police. So Auden and I got a shitty studio apartment in Brownsville. I was working full-time days to pay the rent and trying to make the band work at night. She was only a year behind me in school, so she kept going—and she got a part-time job, too. She was smarter than I was, so she got into NYU with a bunch of scholarships, and she figured out legally how to demonstrate that our mom had abandoned us, so that made her eligible for financial aid.”

“And then the band took off, and she became an actuary, and now it’s all fine.”

“Maybe.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant. Perhaps that things were fine financially—which was the sense I’d meant—but not fine in other ways.

“I literally hadn’t thought about that song for years. But then on my first night here I was standing in the dark in my cabin looking at that keyboard, and it just… rose up inside me. I think remembering it is what sparked the sixties-protest-music renaissance I seem to be experiencing. And I say ‘seem to be experiencing’ because it really does feel like something that’s happening to me rather than something that I’m consciously doing. But even though I’m a regular Arlo Guthrie these days, I can’t get through that particular song without… well, without feeling ill. I play the first few measures, and then I have to stop. So that’s a very long answer to what I meant when I said I was ‘trying’ to play it.”

“You’re playing around it, or playing your way up to it.”

“Maybe so.” He shook his head and lifted an arm out of the water. “So yeah, that’s the story of the ink.” He was signaling that we were done with this conversation.

I took the cue and said, teasingly, “You and all your deep tattoos. And here I thought rock stars had tattoos of, like, badass dragons and shit. Or Chinese characters they think mean ‘fierce’ but actually mean ‘rainbows.’”

He laughed, which was gratifying. And also my chance to take my leave. “I gotta get out.” I held up my pruney fingers. “I have a FaceTime with my contractor tonight. He’s doing a walk-through of my new building.” I made a face. “So I have to turn my phone on.”

He made a sympathetic face.

“Yeah, I’m about to spend a shockingly large sum of borrowed money on a risky new venture—I close on the purchase next month—and I haven’t figured out a way to do that without a cell phone.” I popped off my kickboard.

“Reality rears its ugly head.”

Didn’t I know it, Teddy Knight. Didn’t I know it.

I thought about what Teddy had said as I showered and dressed. I thought about what he’d said as I grabbed dinner from the dining hall, and as I ate it in my cabin. I thought about it as I unearthed the planner that held my notes on the new building—skimming them made me feel like I was an archeologist discovering records of a past civilization.

Well, no, really I thought about him . Kid Teddy hauling that lemon tree up and down five stories. But also adult Teddy floating in the lake and just… opening himself. Telling me about his tattoos as if I were a person worthy of his confidences.

Not going to lie, I was also thinking about those tattoos in a purely aesthetic sense.

Also in the I-want-to-put-my-mouth-on-them sense.

But we’d had our last hurrah.

And it was good to remember that while we’d had fun, this was what was real. The studio. Studios, plural. This was my life.

I had to plug my very dead phone in and wait for it to come back to life. I was tempted to read the 207 emails and thirty-two texts I had notifications for, but I resisted. I had autoreplies on everything. This was only a quick dip back into reality.

“She lives!” Rory exclaimed when FaceTime connected. “Are you really not using your phone at all?”

“Not at all!” I confirmed. “It was completely dead, and I’m having to talk to you with it charging.”

“Hey, Gretchen,” Justin said. “Are you having a good summer?”

“I am, but I’m on pins and needles here. How does it look?”

“Everything looks good as far as I can see. There’s just one thing we may have to worry about.” He reversed his phone camera and pointed it at a spot where it appeared he’d removed some of the drop-tile ceiling and exposed the ductwork. “You see this tape?” He moved the phone and showed me a piece of yellow-brown tape.

“Yes?”

“That’s asbestos tape.”

“Ooh, that’s bad, right?”

“It’s fine as long as it’s undisturbed, which it has been under the ceiling. But now that we’re going to expose it, we have to get rid of it. And I don’t do that.”

“Who does?”

“Remediation specialists.”

“Who are expensive, I’m assuming? Though how expensive can it be to take off some tape?”

“It’s not the tape part so much, but they have to build a barrier and create a negative pressure situation, wear protective gear—it’s a whole deal.”

“Well, shit. Do I have asbestos tape in my dance studio? Why don’t I remember this being a thing?”

“Your existing studio is in a building that’s too new to have asbestos in it.”

Justin had done the work on my studio when I’d first leased the space and needed to change it from a hair salon to a dance studio, cutting me a bit of a deal because I was so young and so clearly broke—and because he’d just been starting out himself. Look at us now, embarking on a giant-ass job complete with asbestos.

“Asbestos was more a thing mid–twentieth century,” he went on. “Clearly someone did a reno on this place around that time—hence the ugly drop ceiling.”

“So we have to deal with this.”

“We do. I mean, I guess you could ask the seller to remediate it.”

“I think that ship has sailed; that should have been part of the negotiation process. Why didn’t the inspector tell me about this?”

“He should have flagged it.” He shrugged. “But it’s not the worst problem to have. It’s probably going to be a few thousand bucks, and it’s going to delay my start a bit, but it’s not the end of the world.”

“You know how you watch those reno shows on HGTV and there’s always some catastrophic surprise, like black mold or something that’s disastrously not to code?” He rolled his eyes to express what he thought of those shows. “You’re saying this is not that.”

“This is not that. With a place like this, you never know what people have been doing to it over the years until you pop the hood. This is what you get when you buy a building that’s more than a hundred years old.”

This was what you got when you bought a building that was more than a hundred years old in an attempt to cure a midlife crisis.

“It’s got good bones, though.” Justin started walking around, but his camera was still reversed. It was wild to see the space after so long away from it. From the idea of it, even. I guess the woods had really done their work.

Last time I’d been to the new building, on one of the visits I’d made when I was thinking about buying, the space had looked more like the out-of-business clothing store it had been. But now the racks and fixtures were gone, as was the huge cash desk that used to sit along one of the sidewalls. I guess the seller was getting a jump on getting rid of all that stuff.

What had once been the bones of an old store was now a blank box.

I owned this blank box. It was mine. Or at least it would be on August 31.

“I had a peek under the carpet,” Justin said, pulling back a corner of the God-knew-how-old wall-to-wall gray carpet. “I’d been hoping for hardwood, but no dice.”

“Yeah, but old hardwood is usually too wonky and uneven for dancing.” Though maybe not for yoga. I wasn’t sure about that.

Shit. Did I know enough about yoga to be opening a yoga studio?

“The underflooring seems like it’s in good shape from what I can see,” Justin said. “It will be easy enough to lay down wood, or laminate. We can talk about options, and costs.

“I do think you might consider swapping the dance and yoga areas,” he went on. “At least based on the square footage estimates you gave me.” He panned along the exposed-brick sidewall. “We can run a hallway down here.” He walked toward the back of the building. “And then we can mount those Pilates machines to this wall.” He gestured at the back wall, which was also brick.

“Yeah, but my thinking was that from the street, if people see a yoga or Pilates class going on, it will lead to walk-ins, whereas my dance clientele is going to follow me, and that side of the business is more word of mouth anyway.” I relaxed a bit. I might not know anything about yoga, but I knew marketing.

“Ah. I get it. Well, we can make it work either way. And I know you want to leave the second floor as-is for now, but I was thinking those small rooms would only need some fresh paint and you could rent them out as massage rooms, or something like that.”

He wasn’t wrong. The second floor of my building contained a kitchen, a large room I was planning to use as an office, and two little rooms I’d vaguely thought I might someday combine into a small studio I could use for private lessons.

“Anyway, that would be an easy fix,” Justin said. “You can keep it in mind. We still good to walk through together on August fifteenth?”

When I first hatched the idea to buy a new place and expand my offerings, I’d been filled with excitement. Just a month ago, when I was describing it to the loan officer at the bank, he’d remarked that my enthusiasm was palpable.

Now I was filled with… I wasn’t even sure. Trepidation, in part. But to be fair, that was probably a logical response to asbestos.

Justin had turned the phone back around and was awaiting my response.

“Yes,” I said. “The fifteenth.”

“I’ll bring some flooring samples now that I have a sense of the space,” Justin said.

“With all the store junk gone, you can really imagine the new studio here,” said Rory, who’d been with me and my Realtor on my initial viewing.

You really could. I could picture it perfectly: the new studio. My future.

I wanted to sign off. I wanted to go for another swim, though I’d only been out of the water for a couple hours. Or maybe I could round up some people for a campfire. I wanted to get out of this limbo, was the point, this spot where I was half in one world and half in another.

But Rory wouldn’t let me. “Don’t mothball your phone yet. I’m going to call you from my car. Stand by.”

I sighed and waited for the incoming call. I tried to get back into my fun BFF groove. “Yes?” I said, making a silly face when I picked up the FaceTime.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“What do you mean?”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Nothing’s wrong with me!”

“You didn’t seem very excited.”

“I guess it’s hard through a phone screen. You probably need to see it in context to really appreciate it.”

There was that word again, Teddy’s word: context .

“Well,” Rory said, “it looks amazing. Now that it’s empty, it’s so much bigger than I realized.” She shot me another weird look. “So you’re liking it there? You must be if you’ve completely abandoned your phone. I have to say, I thought you were going to be calling me constantly, fretting over the new studio—and the existing one.”

“I thought I would, too, but I don’t know, I guess I really embraced the challenge of immersing myself here.”

“‘Here’ being camp? The woods? The dance stuff you’re doing?”

Good question. “All of the above,” I said, because I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to get back to it. To “here,” whatever it was.

It did occur to me that maybe the pull I was feeling wasn’t to anything—to the woods, or to Wild Arts, or to Little Women , but away . From Miss Miller’s of Minnetonka. From my new building. From my life.

But that wasn’t a possibility.

“Anyway,” I said, “I knew you’d call the camp if you ran into any trouble, so I’ve been assuming everything is fine.”

“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine.”

“And how’s the chicken nugget?”

“Chicken nugget” is what we called her baby-to-be.

She groaned, and we talked about the unpleasantness of late pregnancy for a while.

“What do you keep looking at?”

“Sorry.” I hadn’t realized it, but I was looking out the window. “Just distracted by the trees—my cabin has a killer forest view,” I said, realizing that I’d never told her about being lost in the woods. It was weird that I hadn’t, and I wasn’t opposed to doing so, but I wasn’t going to do it now.

When we hung up, I turned off the phone, stashed it in my empty suitcase, and considered the concept of context. Teddy had remarked that we didn’t know each other in context—meaning in the real world. That was why it had been so easy for me to have sex with him—to have sex with him in a way that allowed me to really get into it. Really let go. I hadn’t cared about how I was being perceived, either physically or emotionally. And why was that? Because this place had an end date. It was outside of reality. There had been no stakes, was what it boiled down to.

As a thought experiment, I considered whether sleeping with Teddy once at Wild Arts and calling it my last hurrah would be any different from sleeping with him for the duration of my time at Wild Arts and calling it my last hurrah. What was different about today versus yesterday in this place that was already outside of time and reality?

Nothing.

I burst out of the door before I could talk myself out of it, but came to a dead stop on my porch when I realized we still had the condom problem.

The camp store had closed at five, and how likely was it that a store at a camp for kids would have condoms to begin with? I might be able to get one from one of the other artists, but who? Maiv would be my obvious first choice, but she wasn’t getting it on with anyone here. At least as far as I knew—I did entertain the idea that if I was having secret rendezvous, other people could be, too. Still, I thought Maiv was a long shot when it came to condom procurement, and I wasn’t sure it was worth outing myself for those odds.

Jack, I decided. He was exactly the kind of guy who would pack condoms for his writing retreat. And he would be less likely than anyone else to interrogate me about why I wanted one.

He answered my knock with his eyebrows raised. I had probably interrupted the writing of a Pulitzer-worthy sentence.

“Do you have a condom I could borrow?” I asked, deciding to cut to the chase.

I’d expected a reaction of some sort, but he merely nodded and disappeared back into his cabin.

“I don’t think ‘borrow’ is the correct word, though,” he said when he returned with a little square packet. “I don’t think I want it back.”

There was the reaction. “Ha ha.” I glanced down at it. “‘Ribbed for her pleasure.’ Wow, I wouldn’t have thought you were the type to care about her pleasure.”

“Maybe insulting the person who’s lending—giving—you a condom isn’t the best course of action here.”

He was right. “Yeah, yeah. OK, thanks, Jack. I appreciate it.”

I went back to my cabin after that, in case he was watching me. I needed to put on a hoodie, anyway. I made myself wait five minutes before heading out again.

“Hi,” I said as Teddy swung open his door and looked me up and down. He was still wearing his swim trunks from before—they had dried—and he’d added his own hoodie on top. He was barefoot. I bit my lip. There was something about his feet, casually bare on the scuffed wood floor of the cabin, that seemed almost painfully intimate. Like I was getting a glimpse of Teddy Knight at rest, a rare thing most people never got to do. My stomach lurched with a mixture of lust and fear. “I know I said that there was only going to be one occurrence of horizontal hugging, but—eep!”

If I’d been unsure how Teddy was going to react to being propositioned again, I needn’t have been: he literally picked me up and hauled me over the threshold, kicking the door shut behind us. I emitted yet another unflattering squeak when it became clear that he wasn’t going to set me down, that he was, in fact, transporting us directly to bed. A shiver of anticipation radiated through me as I hitched my legs around his waist.

“Do you have a condom?” he asked as he walked backward toward the bed.

“I do!”

“This is better than when you brought me breakfast.” His voice was low and a little bit growly. And a lot sexy. I was excited for this solo album of his—Concrete Temple had been wasting all that vocal talent relegating it to the background.

At the bed, I thought he’d turn and set me down, but he backed himself up against it and fell back, taking me with him.

I stared at him. He stared back.

I couldn’t read his expression until he suddenly started laughing.

“What?” I told myself there was no reason to be offended. The man had literally carried me to bed.

“This.” He grabbed the tie of my hoodie. “This very alluring getup you have now worn twice in your wily attempts to seduce me. I’m beginning to think this is a covert operation.”

“Of course it’s a covert operation! I don’t want people to get the wrong idea.”

His expression grew quizzical. “Which is what?”

Was he an idiot? “That we’re together! Romantically, I mean!”

“We’re together sexually but not romantically?” He undid the tie of my hoodie. “I’m just clarifying.”

“We’re not together sexually. I mean, we’re sleeping together, but out of expediency.”

“Maybe some mutual attraction is involved, too?” He looked amused. “Just a smidge?”

“Of course it is. But you know what I mean. There’s a difference between having sex and ‘being together’ sexually.”

“I see.” His smile grew wicked. He slid his fingers under the ruched edge of my hood. “May I de-hood you now?”

“You may de-everything me now.”

He did, and holy shit, I was afraid that from this day forward, the sound of a zipper slowly being lowered was going to send me into a fit of lust. He kept eye contact the whole way as the metallic zipper teeth gradually clicked open, and I swear, that mofo slowed down even more just to torture me.

I wasn’t wearing anything under the hoodie—hope had sprung eternal back at my cabin when I was waiting my five minutes—and when he finally deigned to finish with the zipper, he drew open the two sides of the hoodie.

“Fuck,” he muttered, and he looked angry as he stared at my chest. Which was, somehow, flattering.

“That’s the idea,” I said with exaggerated cheeriness, purely because I knew the juxtaposition with his cranky intensity would annoy him.

There was a moment where we stared at each other, teetering. Then it started. I wasn’t even sure how, or who fired the starting gun, but the rest of the disrobing was as fast as the unzipping had been slow. We were jointly tearing at clothing—our own, each other’s. I was frantic with a lust that was almost menacing, feeling like if I didn’t get his skin on my skin—if I didn’t get him inside me—it was going to be bad news. He must have felt the same—he was shoving everything that was in our way to the floor.

“Hurry,” I panted as he slid out from under me and off the bed so he could struggle with his swim trunks. “The condom is in the pocket of that hoodie you yeeted across the room.”

He stumbled away, tripping over his trunks, which were still on one leg, cursing like a sailor. It would have been comical if I hadn’t been so wound up.

Then he was back, trunksless and condom-ified, and his eyes were smoldering. Like he was Fabio or something. I reclined, and he paused, hovering over me. He actually looked kind of distressed, but I glanced down at his erection and decided he couldn’t be that distressed. So I grabbed him around the waist with my legs and pulled him toward me.

“We should kiss this time,” he said through a groan. “On the mouth.”

“We should kiss next time,” I said, pulling harder, causing him to groan harder.

“But dude,” he said, sounding rather strangled. “Foreplay.”

“But dude,” I echoed, shaking my head. “No thanks.”

He slid in, and I swear to God, his eyes started to roll back into his head, which made me positively giddy with the sense of my own power—or it would have if I hadn’t been so flattened by lust. It made my brain heavy, my thoughts slow.

There was something about Teddy—well, let’s be honest, there was something about Teddy’s dick—that was just right. It was the angle between us, maybe. Or it was the way that instead of hovering over me and doing the classic jackhammer, he lay on top of me and rocked with relatively shallow thrusts. Whatever it was, it created a continuous pressure on my clit that had me so agitated I almost—almost—wanted to get away. But there was no getting away; there was just more of that relentless heaviness. The only thing to do was surrender to it… and come.

Oh! And come again!

“Fuck.”

He was back to swearing, but I couldn’t concern myself with him, beyond making sure that he didn’t stop, that he didn’t change anything about the angle or the pressure or the magic or whatever the hell it was that he was doing. “Keep going!” I ordered. “Don’t change anything.”

“Uhn,” he grunted—in a way that seemed to signal acknowledgment.

Oh holy God, I was having a third orgasm. “Three!” I exclaimed in disbelief as my hips shook. Except they didn’t shake. They were still pinned by Teddy’s hips, which I suspected was part of what was making this all happen. They were shaking and still at the same time. Like there was a shaking inside me that he was… in charge of, somehow.

When the shuddering stopped, I was able to be less ruthlessly inwardly focused. I eyed him.

I hadn’t realized he was watching me like a hawk. I grinned, and though I was pretty sure it was a goofy grin and not a sexy one, it seemed to summon something inside him. He shouted, “God damn it, fuck.” With a great big groan to end all groans, he froze, and his body quaked with… I wasn’t sure what. An orgasm, obviously, but it seemed like more than that. The effort of holding himself up on his arms over me all this time. Or maybe of holding back while I came—three!—times. I actually had no idea how long that had taken. Time had ceased to be real for me while it was happening.

With a final, soft “Fuck,” he heaved himself to his side, but he left one leg and one arm slung over me. He was sweating—we both were. We were breathing heavily, too.

“That was fast,” he panted.

I guess it hadn’t taken very long. Wait. I started to worry that my three—three!—orgasms had looked too good to be true. They’d felt that way. “What are you implying?”

“Nothing!”

“I don’t fake orgasms.”

“I didn’t say you had!”

“I know I told you about that time I faked enthusiasm over miso soup on that terrible date, but I never faked orgasms.”

“Nor should you have.” He lifted the arm that was slung over me and showed me his palm, a gesture of peace. “I absolutely was not complaining. I was merely making an observation.”

“All right. But also, that wasn’t normal. On a number of fronts.”

He laughed. “What do you mean? Tell me about these fronts.”

“Well, first, the only other times I’ve had more than one orgasm have been by myself.” And even then, it hadn’t been a frequent occurrence. It had always seemed like a lot of work to chase subsequent ones. They didn’t usually just happen . But I didn’t need to tell him that. He had a big enough ego as it was.

Well, no, that wasn’t right. That was my reflexive thought based on my initial impression of him. I needed to stop doing that. It wasn’t that he had a big ego so much as he was… a bit prickly. Hmm. People said that about me, sometimes, too. I filed that away to think about later. “Second, normally, the answer to the foreplay question is going to be yes.”

“Noted.”

“I mean, if we’re going to be doing this again,” I said hurriedly. I didn’t want to assume. I had, after all, given him my crone speech. More than once.

“Oh, we are going to be doing this again.”

I feared my grin was as dopey as they came—way worse than the previous one. “Yeah?”

“Are you kidding me?” He grabbed one of my thighs and slung it over his legs, reversing our positions so he was lying on his back and I was on my side draped over him.

From this angle, I noticed that one of his shoulders was covered in mosquito bites, a dozen or so of them. “Wow.” I ran my hand over them.

“Oooh, ohh, do that again but with your nails.”

I switched to scratching, and he made comically exaggerated noises of relief. “That batch is from swimming earlier.”

“It wasn’t dark yet.”

“What can I say? I guess you were right: I’m too sweet to resist.”

I snorted and stopped scratching. “Back to the concept of doing this again.”

“Damn, woman, give me five minutes, maybe?” he teased.

“Not now . Just… theoretically. I feel like some clarification is in order.”

“By all means, clarify.”

“This is still my last hurrah. I’m just being a bit more expansive in how I’m defining that. A camp affair, if you will. I want to put that on record.”

“You’re saying you don’t want me to follow you back to your regular life in Minneapolis and hold a boom box over my head outside your bedroom window?”

“That is exactly what I’m saying.”

“No danger of that.” He grinned. “But if we’re putting things on the record here, allow me to register that I do believe in kissing.”

“What?” I laughed. “I’m not sure kissing is something you can believe in or not. It’s not like God. Or, I don’t know, the COVID vaccine.”

“Sure it is. And I believe in it. Therefore, I’m starting to be a little too aware of the fact that we’ve had two episodes of horizontal hugging now and there hasn’t been any kissing—mouth kissing, I’m talking about—involved in either of them.”

“OK, so there’s a work order for next time.”

“Yes,” he said urgently. “I think next time you should keep your pants on until there’s been a certain amount of kissing.”

“What?”

He patted my hip. “You have very… distracting thighs.”

“And here I thought I had very large thighs.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Nah. I used to hate them when I was younger. I thought they were huge. Well, I got told—usually by men—that they were huge. But I got over it. I’m pretty neutral on my thighs these days.” I guess one thing that being of midlife crisis age was good for was body neutrality.

“But you didn’t get over it with regard to your breasts.”

“Huh?”

“You told me yesterday that normally you’re insecure about having small breasts.”

That was true. I shrugged. “I contain multitudes.” That was my standard line for when I was contradicting myself.

He smiled. “You sure do.”

“Well”—he ramped up his thigh-patting—“there’s something insanely hot about muscles that exist for a purpose. And when you layer on that the purpose of these muscles is dancing?” He blew out a breath.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you could have muscular thighs if you were, say, a powerlifter. They would still be hot. But dancing is so… delicate. No. That’s not right. Precise. Like, the thighs power these intricate, specific moves.”

“Weirdo.”

“I do kind of sound like John Cusack with a boom box now, don’t I?” I made a laughing noise of agreement, and he gently slapped my outer hip and added, “I can’t help it. You have superhot thighs.”

“Well, you have superhot hands.” It was out before I could think better of it.

“Really?” He sounded mystified as he held his hands up.

I grabbed one and examined it. “Yeah, the nail polish remnants, the cool rings, and I think these calluses are like my thighs—sexy because they’re in service of something delicate. Not that Concrete Temple is delicate. But you know, guitar playing also seems like an exercise in precision.”

“Mm.”

As before, I wanted to stay. But even with my relaxed rules, staying was a no-go. There wasn’t any amount of mental gymnastics that would make sleeping in Teddy Knight’s bed, draped over his body, a good idea. I started to heave myself out of bed to go back to my place, but he grabbed me and pulled me back. “What are you doing?” I shrieked. I was laughing, and trying to get away from him, but not very hard. He grunted and maneuvered us so we were arranged in reverse order from when we’d first landed on the bed. I was on my back and he was on top. “I have to go!” I mock protested.

“I know. I know. I’m just getting a jump on the work order for next time.”

“What?”

Oh. The light, bantery air around us evaporated, and I knew he was going to kiss me. He tilted his head as if he were contemplating the right way to go about it. He floated a hand down and brushed a strand of hair off my cheek, which, to my embarrassment, made goose bumps rise. He lowered his head slowly—this was the opposite of our mad, frantic coming together earlier—and when his mouth met mine, it was such a strange, profound relief that I sighed into it. His lips were gentle, and chapped. It was a relatively chaste kiss, given what had just gone down, but it felt… important.

Important? What was I on about? I shook my head, breaking the contact between us. But I flashed him a small smile to show that the kiss hadn’t been unwelcome. He rolled off me, and I got out of bed.

He didn’t speak, just watched me lazily as I got dressed, his long hair fanned out over the pillow. When I had my hand on the doorknob, he said, “‘Lemon Tree’ is kind of delicate.”

I understood that he was talking about the sorts of songs that would give him calluses, but also about something bigger. Something he was reckoning with. I was measured in my response. “On the one hand, yes, ‘Lemon Tree’ is delicate.” I paused, thinking of the lyrics. “But it’s also kind of savage.”

I’m not going to lie, I pretty much walked around camp the rest of the week on cloud nine. I used my apparently superhot thighs during the day to dance, working on recital stuff for my studio and working with the girls on Little Women .

At night I wrapped my apparently superhot thighs around Teddy, who had procured a box of condoms from Target. I was in a sex haze. As last hurrahs went, it was pretty great. And happily, my sex haze did not seem to be interfering with my actual work. The dance girls continued to be a source of inspiration and creative energy. Everything felt like it was feeding everything else.

Out of all this creative cross-pollination, something was happening. I didn’t know how to put it into words. Maybe words were not the point, because it—whatever “it” was—was coming to me in images. Fragments that would rise up through my mind when I was swimming, or sitting on the porch, or lying next to Teddy in the aforementioned sex haze. Eventually they started assembling themselves into… not a story, but little vignettes.

I didn’t know what these vignettes meant. I didn’t know what to do with them except to let them keep coming, to keep assembling them from the fragments that were floating through my consciousness. They felt like something. I didn’t know what, but something.