12. Sloane
SLOANE
I wake up warm for the first time in two days, which should be my first indication that things have gone horribly wrong.
The second sign is the scent curling into my nostrils underneath the loamy sweetness of the forest. An indefinable male spice that fuckboys all over the world would pay good money to bottle, as it would guarantee a never-ending line of willing partners.
Not me, of course.
I gave up fuckboys around the same time I gave up recreational drugs, and I don’t miss either. They both left me feeling sick and full of regret. At least the drugs were a known evil. The guys, not so much.
But it’s tempting.
Except… wait.
The nylon walls of the tent glow with early morning light as I open my eyes.
And, oh shit. Turns out the source of all that olfactory temptation is Jensen, who I’m wrapped around like a milk-drunk kitten.
I managed to unzip half of my sleeping bag during the night, and one arm and leg are staking their claim across the front of him.
His sleeping bag is still zipped, a puffy down barrier that my unconscious body decided was more of a suggestion than a rule.
Maybe he hasn’t noticed, and I can subtly retract my rogue limbs and…
I feel him shift beneath me and glance up to find him looking at me with a smile that holds way too much wattage for my pre-caffeinated brain.
His lips move, but the sound is muffled by my earplugs. I yank them out at the same time I peel my arm and leg off his body and roll away, pressing myself against the tent wall so that approximately six inches of barely-there space separates us.
“I said good morning.” His grin gentles as he stares at me. “In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t, and I didn’t mean—” I stuff the earplugs into the pocket of my sleeping bag and try to fix my face so it communicates dignified indifference and not the mortification burning me up from the inside out. “To molest you in my sleep.”
“You’re in luck, because I don’t have a no-no square.” He folds his long arms behind his head like a man who’s never been embarrassed a day in his life. “At least not one you need to worry about violating.”
Unlike Jensen, I’m not amused. I’m a wanton skank. Not my brain, which has done its level best to remain unaffected by him for the better part of two days. My body, in contrast, is a shameless, heat-seeking traitor who mounted a country music star in the middle of the night like a rodeo cowgirl.
“It was a mistake.” I sound more certain than I feel, which is a small gift.
Even though I’ve pulled away as much as the tent’s tiny interior will allow, I feel him tense next to me, frustratingly in tune with every micro-shift Jensen makes, whether it’s a deep inhale or involuntary flex of muscle.
“Which part?” he asks, the teasing gone from his voice. “The part where you climbed me like a jungle gym in your sleep or Nashville?”
All of it, I want to tell him. But denying the connection between us is getting harder with every mile we cover. The truth is, pretending I want him gone—acting like his showing up here was the worst thing that could have happened to me—takes more energy than I have left to give.
I made Jeremy watch my favorite rom-com, Ten Things I Hate About You, at least six times during those weeks in the hospital room at Vanderbilt Medical Center when I was too exhausted to hold a book. Literal enemies-to-lovers perfection. And oh, young Heath Ledger. Rest in peace, you beautiful man.
But right now I’m not thinking about Heath’s soulful eyes or Kat and Patrick’s banter. I’m thinking about the poem Julia Stiles read out loud in class at the end. How of the ten things she hated about him, the thing she hated most was that she didn’t hate him.
Not even a little bit. Not even at all.
So I don’t answer.
I sit up and slide into the Birks I left near the tent’s entrance. “Nature calls,” I say, then make the mistake of glancing back over my shoulder.
Jensen is now propped on both elbows, his sleeping bag tented in a very specific area that should not make my breath hitch in the chilly air.
“It’s just morning.” His voice is rough with sleep (or something else) and completely unapologetic. “You can ignore it.”
“I plan to.” My voice is two octaves higher than usual and accompanied by a tiny yelp that I will forever deny making.
Morning or not, my body wants to crawl back into the tent and unzip his sleeping bag, and do more of that jungle gym business. Except on purpose this time, and with fewer layers between us.
Nope. Not gonna happen. Not in this lifetime, which is all I’ve got.
Face flaming, I take care of business behind a stand of pines and splash icy water from a Nalgene bottle on my cheeks until I lose that plugged-into-a-light-socket feeling.
By the time I get back, Jensen is out of the tent and crouched over the camp stove, boiling water for coffee.
He’s changed into a fresh shirt under his puffer jacket, his boots loosely laced.
“How are your feet?”
“Better, actually.” He glances up, the gratitude in those gray eyes catching me off guard. “Thank you again.”
We eat instant oatmeal and guzzle coffee in companionable silence, then he cleans up the dishes while I break down the tent.
I watch him out of the corner of my eye as I roll up the rain fly.
He’s definitely not limping as much as yesterday, and he doesn’t wince every time his boots meet dirt, which means the bandages and the ointment did their job.
It’s weirdly satisfying to think my ministrations worked, and nice not being the weakest link for once. He’s not monitoring me for signs of fatigue or checking my pallor or whatever my friends track when they think I’m not looking.
Of course, the term weak has no business in the same zip code as Jensen. Hell, he hauled a forty-pound pack up a mountain on feet that looked like they’d gone through a wood chipper. Didn’t complain once. But for a little while, he needed me. And I helped.
I like it more than I should.
The clouds stay low for most of the morning, wrapping the trail in a gauzy silver light that makes everything feel more intimate. As if the whole mountain range has shrunk to the size of our two bodies moving through the mist. Every one of my senses is dialed up to eleven.
I experienced something like this during chemo, although not at all the same.
Every strange smell made me want to hurl my guts up, while any sort of clang could trigger a headache that lasted hours.
That was when I’d started using lavender-scented everything: lotion, candles, dryer sheets.
Sometimes I’d bury my nose in a sleeve just to get some relief from whatever ordinary part of life my body had decided was an enemy that day.
Now I want to bury my nose in the crook of Jensen’s neck where he’s warm and spicy. No person has the right to smell that good on a backcountry hike.
And the sound of his breathing behind me. God. The man makes an automatic bodily process feel like foreplay. Every steady exhale is timed with his footfalls, and I’m acutely aware of all of them.
“This weather makes me wonder if we’re going to find Brigadoon around the next corner,” he says from behind me. “Or maybe a band of weary hobbits.”
I snort-laugh, which is not my prettiest habit.
“Are you having some kind of hallucinogenic reaction to the ibuprofen?” I glance back at him. “I get the hobbits. The mist and trees are very Middle Earth-y. But what does Brigadoon even mean?”
His answering laugh rolls over me, and I swallow against the far too appealing pleasure left in its wake.
“Brigadoon is a classic musical. It’s a village in the Scottish Highlands that appears for one day every hundred years.” He gestures at the fog-wrapped trail like it proves his point. “Two guys stumble into it, and one of them falls in love. Gene Kelly was in the 1954 movie.”
“Okay, Grandpa. Did you pay a quarter to see it on the big screen?”
“Fifty cents,” he counters. “Way before 50 Cent.”
I grin at the joke and the fact that he doesn’t get offended when I tease him about our age gap. As if I care about the decade plus two years that separates us. And then, without so much as a clearing of his throat, he starts to sing.
It’s just a few bars about heather on a hill, but it’s so warm and rich, I feel like I’m sinking into a hot bath at the end of a long day.
His deep baritone doesn’t just vibrate in my ears.
That would be too basic. I feel the resonance in my belly and spine.
The backs of my knees. And I have no defense against such a full-body assault.
“I’m not that much older than you,” he says when the last note is carried off on the breeze.
“Twelve years,” I remind him, trying not to sound like I’m panting. He must be used to women panting over him. I won’t be one of them. “You probably remember life before the iPhone.”
“Maybe, but Pa didn’t drive the horse and buggy down to a one-room schoolhouse.”
Another embarrassing snort-laugh bubbles out of me, and I pick up the pace. Because being amused by Jensen is another crack in a dam I can’t afford to let break. “The country music legend has a secret show tunes fetish?”
“I like all music,” he says simply, letting me know, in not-so-many words, that the categories people put him in have never fit. I get that. I really do. “What do you listen to?”
“Pop, I guess. Old-school hip-hop.”
Without a doubt, this man has made it his personal mission to destroy me, because he croons a line about not chasing waterfalls and sticking to familiar rivers and lakes. The ones I’m used to. I nearly trip over my own boots.
I whirl around to face him. “How did you know I love TLC?”
What’s a word beyond smug? Because that would best describe the expression on his face.
“Lucky guess,” he offers with a one-shoulder shrug. “I told you I was lucky.”
“Like your hit song.”
“You’ve heard it?”
“Everyone has heard ‘Lucky Me’.” I scoff, then start moving again.
We’ve reached a fork in the trail, so I stop and pull out the paper map I bought at the motel’s front desk when I decided to leave my phone behind.
“I guess,” he agrees, coming up beside me. There’s a flicker of something beneath his easy tone that tells me he has bigger feelings about his ubiquitous hit song than just cashing royalty checks. “It was a long time ago.”
“Twenty years,” I supply.
“Yep.”
He points toward the trail that snakes into a thick copse of trees. “That way?”
I turn the map, trying to match the contour lines to the landscape I can barely see through the mist. The other trail heads out into an open field, and I’m mostly sure that’s our route.
But Jensen pointed toward the trees with such casual confidence, and I’m not known for my sense of direction, metaphorically or geographically.
Still, this is my adventure, so I ignore his suggestion and point toward the field. “We go this way.” I think. Probably.
“Okay,” he agrees and starts moving. Then stops when he realizes I’m still staring at the map. “What’s wrong?”
“What made you pick that trail?” I hate the uncertainty in my voice, the second-guessing that lives in me like a virus I can’t shake. Sort of like cancer. “Do you have service? Should we check your phone?”
“I doubt I have service, but I don’t need to check.” One broad shoulder lifts and lowers. “You’re the leader of our pack. I trust you.”
Huh. I take my time folding the map along its creases. I need something to do with my hands that isn’t standing here staring at him while his words slide past my defenses and rewrite the story I’ve always told about who I am.
I trust you.
When was the last time someone put that kind of faith in me?
Not my parents, who were too busy cataloging ruins in Europe to notice whether I was making good decisions or terrible ones.
Not Jeremy, who spent the first five years of my adult life pretending I didn’t exist and the last year writing checks to make sure I stayed alive.
It’s his version of love, and I appreciate him more than I can say, but it isn’t the same as trust.
Not even me, if I’m being honest. I bought Cover to Cover with my grandmother’s trust fund and built it into something good, but I still poll my employees, customers, and friends before making every decision.
What should I stock? Which authors should I book for in-person events?
What genre gets the window display this month?
I tell myself it’s good customer service, but the truth is I don’t trust my own judgment enough to move without consensus.
And here’s a man I ran from (twice, if you’re counting), standing at a fork in the trail and going along with my choice, like…duh…of course I made the right one. I’m guessing it isn’t because he doesn’t have opinions. It’s because he believes in mine.
Cue the sappy music.
“I trust me, too,” I tell him and head toward the open field. Maybe I don’t sound as sure as he did, but I mean it more than I expected to.
As he falls into step behind me, the clouds part enough to allow a thin band of sunlight through, turning the droplets of water clinging to the pine needles into sparkling diamonds.
Hard to tell if that’s a sign or just nature doing its thing, but it feels like I’m going in the right direction. And I like that I’m not doing it alone.