Chapter 11
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
CLAY
“ S o, explain it to me. Why did you take a wilderness first aid course if you never wanted to be in the actual wilderness?”
“Always be prepared,” she quipped.
A week ago, maybe I’d have let her banter me into letting it go, but not now. We were making progress—not just in the “wilderness” but in something I couldn’t yet define. Something I wanted to define. I was learning things about her, how she thought, what lay beneath the surface. And I wanted to know more. She owed me a better answer.
“Try again.”
Her eyes shot to mine with a look of surprise and maybe a bit of annoyance. “Really?”
“Alexandra, I won’t judge. Was it some guy’s poor idea for a surprise date? He got you to spend the day with him by promising a hands-on educational experience and then sprung it on you that you’d be relearning CPR? Come on, you can tell me.”
She laughed quietly, but her lips didn’t form a smile. I wondered if I’d veered too close to the truth. Well, to hell with it. I braced myself for the tales of love affairs and perfect dates.
“Not exactly that.” She stabbed the gooey end of her stick at the plate of fresh marshmallows until she’d speared one. Moving it to the firepit, her eyes followed, going glassy as she stared into the flames.
“What, then?” I asked.
I could have let it go. Normally, I’d let it go. What difference did it make? Ally and I were colleagues on a dry run for an extended field trip. Even if a part of me urged this night in my yard to mean something else, my rational side knew it didn’t. But maybe I needed her to tell me about the men in her life. Maybe it would make my feelings toward her stand down once and for all.
Maybe bears would dance on my rooftop.
Ally shrugged and continued staring into the fire.
I reached for the frying pan, which now held roasting peppers and onions. I gave them a stir while Ally warmed tortillas on the rocks surrounding the flames. “We make a good team,” she observed.
I nudged her under the chin with my knuckle. “Don’t try and divert me with niceties. Why’d you take wilderness first aid?” I asked, like a masochist, begging her to tell me about a date with some adventurer.
“It was a promise I’d made to myself.” She spat out the words on an exhale like the idea disappointed her.
“What kind of promise?”
“That I’d become self-sufficient and independent. Face my fears. As a woman or a single parent someday or whatever, I need to be prepared for any eventuality. I used to have this romantic idea of the perfect man, the knight on the horse, riding into my future.” She laughed. “I read a lot of Regency romance. I guess it rubbed off. But my point is that I get the difference between fantasy and reality. And I choose reality.”
“Why can’t you have both? You seem like the kind of person who will meet a knight and still remain fiercely independent. Ride your own horse next to his.”
She smiled. “If only.” The words lacked conviction. I couldn’t understand why Ally didn’t see herself the way I did.
Tipping back in my camp chair, I decided to fish out the beers I’d stashed at the bottom of the cooler. “Not going to be doing this on the retreat, obviously,” I noted, using the handle of the cooler to pop the tops off of two bottles of cold amber beer.
“Obviously,” she agreed, taking the open bottle I handed to her and clinking it against mine. “But I appreciate you bending the rules, Scout Master. Glad to see you’re not all work and no play.”
“Your brother and I used to carry a six-pack each on camping trips back in the day.” I shook my head. “So stupid to carry all that weight. But we didn’t care. Here, we might as well enjoy the comforts of home.”
“But no sleeping inside the house?”
“No sleeping inside the house,” I confirmed. “So backing up, you’ve given up on the knight?”
Her eyes went wide, and she choked on her beer. “I mean, not in theory. But in practice, maybe. Knights haven’t exactly shown up for me. I may be better off on my own.”
I hadn’t noticed the thundering of my heart in my chest until the beating started to subside. Now it just felt like a hyper snare drum. Or a hummingbird flitting inside my chest, trying to escape. Why did the idea of Ally not wanting a relationship amp me up so much?
Because that means she doesn’t want one with you.
She shook her head, correcting, “Anyway, I need to know what I’m doing out in the world. I can’t be googling what to do for a snake bite if that ever happens. I need to know .” Clearing her throat, she attempted another sip of her beer, eyes glued to me to ensure I wouldn’t say something else to make her choke on it.
My brain continued to swirl with questions she hadn’t answered and new ones popping up by the second. “Okay, so you’re a control freak, is that what you’re telling me? Because lots of people are proficient at adulting without knowing what to do about a snake bite.”
On a long blink, she bit her bottom lip. When she opened her eyes, they looked blank. Ally unwound the scarf from her neck, revealing the pale skin of her throat. My hands twitched with the need to feel her skin beneath my fingers. I wanted to wrap one hand around the column of her throat and tip her jaw up so our mouths were aligned.
All my years of dashing around campus had served me well. I’d never been in one place with her long enough to give these physical urges any room to take root. But now...shit. Now, there was no reining them in.
I ground my teeth and clenched my fists in an effort to stop myself from reaching for her. This camping practice run had been a terrible idea.
“True,” she said. She’d been silent for so long, I’d almost forgotten where we’d left off. “Maybe I am a control freak. I have an earthquake kit in my kitchen cupboard, and we don’t even get earthquakes here.”
“Are you preparing for the zombie apocalypse too?”
Turning her eyes down, she took the last bite of her s’more and chewed it slowly. I watched her throat move as she swallowed and ached to touch her skin there. I wondered if it would feel as smooth and soft as it looked under my carpentry-roughened hands.
“Not yet. But one never can be too prepared, I suppose,” she said gravely, leveling me with her blue-eyed stare. Then her lips quirked to the side and she laughed. That quiet sound that reminded me of tiny glass wind chimes.
I wanted to know more, but I sensed that if I pushed too hard, she might retreat. So I’d tread carefully.
The faint burning smell of seared peppers redirected my thoughts. I stirred the red and green slivers in the pan, noting the blackened backsides and trying to mix them in with the grilled onions so the burned edges seemed less evident.
“Mmm, smells amazing,” Ally said, setting up our plates on top of the cooler, which was tall enough to be a perfect table between the camp chairs and the firepit.
As I watched her now, so comfortable out here in the woods just a couple hours after saying she was deathly afraid, it stirred something in me.
“Hey,” I said, tucking a finger under her jaw and turning her face to look at me.
“Yeah?”
“I love that you want to be self-sufficient. It’s awesome.” I met her eyes because this part was important. “But don’t forget to let someone in.”
I felt her jaw go slack in my hand. Then she swallowed hard. “What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “I think...it’s amazing to be so independent. To not lose yourself. But there’s something magical about being vulnerable enough to trust another person to find you if you get lost. The point is to be vulnerable around the right person. To need that person enough to feel something.”
Her sharp intake of breath was the only sound I heard. But I saw the shift in her eyes. They filled with tears that she quickly blinked away until they were gone.
She nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
Yeah. And so not okay.
I was already falling hard for her. Too late to stop it. Too late to even try.
A half hour later, we’d eaten every morsel of the chicken fajitas I’d cooked up in my sauté pan, rolling it all up in tortillas and adding salsa. Ally’s appreciative sighs as she ate were downright addictive. “Everything tastes better when it’s cooked over an open fire, doesn’t it?” she asked, licking her lips. I sat hypnotized, eyes glued to her mouth as her tongue dabbed at a last dribble of salsa in the corner. “Clay?”
“Um, yeah.” It took ten seconds before I realized she was staring at me. “Hey. Let’s take a walk.”
Springing to my feet, I nearly knocked over my chair as I ambled away from her before she could see the growing bulge in my pants that came from something so simple as watching her lick salsa from her lips.
“Shouldn’t we clean up? Won’t this attract animals if we leave it?”
“Naw, it’ll be fine. Come this way,” I called back to her. She was right. It was a terrible idea to leave food out, but I needed to move. As soon as I reached the dozen or so yards of trees that separated the grassy part of my yard from the lakefront, I calmed down. It was darker here and slightly cooler.
“You sure you’re okay?” Ally’s feet crunched on the fallen pine needles behind me. I waited until she caught up, her face laced with concern.
“I’m good. Just realized I should show you the lake. We missed blue hour, but the darkness is even better.”
She walked beside me, weaving around trees and shrubs, until a rogue branch caught on her shirt and tugged her back. “Oops.”
I freed her shirt and shuttled her along, having her walk in front of me, guiding her with my hand on the small of her back.
A few paces in, the leaves and branches overhead blotted out the sky temporarily, and it suddenly grew much darker. I led her to a clearing so we could look up at the sky, almost black except for pinpricks of stars freckling the expanse.
“Whoa. I’ve lived here my whole life, but I’ve never seen the sky this dark.”
“Because we’re nowhere near town. Pretty spectacular, right?” I pointed out a few constellations, nothing an amateur with a star map wouldn’t know, but Ally seemed suitably impressed.
“Can we just...sit here for a while?” she asked, looking on the ground for a good spot. We were standing in a small meadow with soft mounds of green moss that made a perfect carpet beneath us. Ally dropped down without even checking to see if there were bugs or bears in the vicinity.
That’s when I knew I’d won her over...at least as far as camping went. I’d take that victory. For now.