Chapter 6
6
“ I am so unbelievably glad you managed to coordinate this scouting trip to be overnight.” Even if it did mean every step along the trail reminded Sarah of last night. Her body felt thoroughly used in the most delicious way, which made operating on single digit hours of sleep well worth it, in her opinion. “I don’t know how to be around you and not look like I know what you feel like naked and I’m wondering how soon I can get you that way again.”
Ahead of her, Beckett snorted. “Well, that wasn’t precisely the motivation behind my original plan for searching out locations for the Scout Wars session, but it definitely contributed to the packing of the two-person tent instead of one. We’ll be out here all alone. No reason to be quiet.”
Heat bloomed in Sarah’s cheeks. “Hey, it was entirely your fault that we nearly got caught. You were the one who did that thing with your mouth that made me lose my mind.” Her body clenched and shuddered at the memory, and she fervently hoped he’d offer up a repeat performance tonight.
“I’m just glad I thought to lock the cabin door and that we were able to duck into the bathroom and hide before security caught us.”
“Small mercies. Though, given the stories I’ve heard since I got here, people being caught in compromising positions is pretty common, both among the staff and the guests.”
“Totally. Charlie mentioned how there’s actually a Banging Bingo game played over the course of the summer. Each square is a location and sexy situation. Everybody on staff can play, and the first person to get a BINGO gets their choice of dinner in the 5-star restaurant or a day at the spa.”
Sarah laughed. “Oh, Taryn is going to love that. Hell, give her long enough, and she might co-opt a square if she finds someone she thinks is worth her time.”
“She wouldn’t be embarrassed by that?”
“She’d wear it as a badge of pride. I’m not sure my sister is capable of embarrassment. None of her missteps and stumbles and failures have ever seemed to bother her. This whole mess with her ex is the first time she’s ever seemed to register that there are consequences for her actions.”
He stopped at an overlook, and Sarah stepped up beside him, gasping at the gorgeous view. Rolling green hills stretched out to touch the mountains that rose and fell in waves, their rocky peaks touching distant clouds. In the valley below, a glassy blue lake reflected towering pines that lined its edges. There was a sense of timelessness here. No man-made structures were visible, and it was easy to imagine this was how the place had looked centuries ago.
Automatically, she lifted her camera to capture the shot for posterity. She’d been doing a lot of that today.
“She’s failed a lot?”
Dragging her brain back to the conversation, Sarah couldn’t quite hide the bitter edge to her laugh. “Sometimes it’s felt like that’s all she’s done. She skated through school, more interested in social stuff and sports than performing in her classes.”
Beckett kicked back against a rock outcropping and thumbed an electrolyte chew off a roll from his pack. “Let me guess—you were top of your class.”
Was she so predictable?
“Guilty. Valedictorian.”
“High school is rough for a lot of folks.”
“True. But college wasn’t any better for Taryn. She did graduate, eventually, with a degree in multi-disciplinary studies. Which is basically the the official degree of I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up . And even that was only after taking a couple of gap years. Since then, she’s bounced around from job to job. Lots of seasonal work. A little of this. Little of that. No consistency. She hasn’t stuck with anything long enough to even start something like a career.”
“A career’s important in your family?” There didn’t seem to be judgment in his tone. Only curiosity.
“Being able to support yourself. Save for retirement. All that. Yeah. My parents are high-achieving people, and they’ve always worried about Taryn and her inability to stick to anything. She’ll walk away from something she doesn’t like at the least provocation.”
“So you consider quitting failure?”
“In a sense. Failure to finish. Failure to launch. You have to finish things to be successful.”
“Do you see me as a failure? I mean, I quit Dartmouth in my last year of grad school.”
Horrified, she laid a hand on Beckett’s arm. “Of course, not. God, please don’t think I’m being critical of you.”
“I don’t. I’m just playing devil’s advocate to figure out how you think. You say I’m not a failure for quitting. How do you square that with everything you’ve just said?”
“Because you didn’t just aimlessly flit from one thing to the next. You got another job that you kept for however many years. You did the work. Did additional training and stuck with something until you got laid off. There’s no shame in that. There was no control in it for you. No choice.”
“So, the failure only comes when you make the choice?”
Sarah frowned, kicking back against a boulder and sucking on her hydration bladder as she considered. “No. That’s not it either. Traditionally, failure is a matter of trying a thing and it not working.”
Beckett folded his arms. “You know, I’ve never liked the notion of failure as a concept. That always felt wrong to me. Too much of a zero sum game. Thomas Edison technically failed in his quest to make a light bulb a thousand times before he got it right. But we don’t consider him a failure. We consider him a success because he kept trying. To my mind, failure isn’t a bad thing. It’s just a learning opportunity. It’s like… when you’re learning to walk. You probably try hundreds, maybe thousands of times before you succeed. And nobody sane is criticizing babies for not becoming toddlers faster. They’re just so excited the kid can walk, and then they’re praising her left, right, and upside down.”
“Being a grown up is not the same as learning to walk.”
“Why not? It feels like a solid analogy to me. Nobody walks on the first try. They have to stumble and fall. They learn from that and adapt. Success is no different. You have to try stuff and fail to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. The whole point of life is to figure out what we want to do with it. What is our reason for being? The thing that’s going to contribute to society and give us joy?”
Sarah was so taken aback, she couldn’t speak for a moment. Not once had she thought about her future through that lens. Personal fulfillment wasn’t exactly a catchphrase in her house growing up. “I… never considered that.”
He looked down at her. “What do you think the point of life is?”
“I… don’t know. My whole life, I’ve been driven by achievements. I’ve always consistently moved from one thing to the next. Always aimed for the next goalpost. I never stopped to think about what the actual point was. Shit, that just got deep.”
Beckett chuckled. “I like deep. Here’s what I see in you: You like learning. Now, if you want to continue to collect degrees, or you want to become a professor or something, because you like learning and you like the idea of teaching, that’s great. That’s a noble calling. But I haven’t gotten the remotest impression that’s what you want to do with your life. Yeah, you like to learn stuff, but I question how much of it is about learning and how much of it is about achieving? You like to win. That’s been crystal clear from the moment I met you. You’re smart, so staying in school, collecting those degrees was an easy way to keep winning. And I think because of that, you have a very narrow definition of failure. Because to an achieving person, not achieving is failure, not winning is failure, not finishing is failure. That’s not how the rest of the world works, and I think that scares the shit out of you.”
Sarah gave him the side eye as she slipped off her pack and dug out some trail mix. “Bringing the hard truths today, huh?”
“Just calling it like I see it. I can back off.”
“No. You’re not wrong. Academia is comfortable to me. I understand the rules. I know the expectations. And yeah, to a point, it’s easy for me, so I haven’t had to confront failure as much. That familiarity is more preferable than the uncertainty of the real world. When Taryn finished school, she spent months hopping from job to job, never finding the right fit. Often going through stretches where she didn’t have enough money to cover her living expenses. The idea of that instability terrified me. So I stayed in an environment where I didn’t have to face that uncertainty.”
“At some point, you have to leave the bubble.”
“I know that. Objectively. But there’s a huge difference between taking that step with a rational plan in place and just acting on impulse.” She’d had a lifetime of examples of how impulsive thinking could get someone into trouble.
Beckett tugged her around until she stood between his knees. “You didn’t have a plan for me.”
She couldn’t argue with that. “No. No I didn’t.”
“How’s that working out for you?” There was a teasing note to his voice that made her think again about all the orgasms they’d shared last night.
She looped her arms around his shoulders. “I think you know it’s working out for me very well. Even if I am walking a little funny today.”
He barked a laugh. “Tell me something. Since you came up here, have you given a single solitary thought to your thesis?”
The wince was automatic. “No. But, in my defense, Taryn kind of pulled the wool over my eyes on that one. Because the idea that I’d have time to actually write and do orientation is sort of ludicrous. I didn’t realize that when I agreed to this.”
“Yeah, but that’s two different things. Not having time to work on it is not the same as not thinking about it.”
She shot him a wry smile and toyed with the hair at his nape. “I’ve been thinking about you.”
He grinned. “For which I am eternally grateful. But seriously, if your thesis and master’s degree was a thing that really, deep down, mattered to you beyond checking off a box to say ‘I did that. I finished that,’ wouldn’t you have been thinking about it in the back of your brain, despite everything else that’s going on?”
She tried to bite back the defensiveness. This wasn’t a criticism. He was just making conversation. “I’ve been struggling with writer’s block for months. The hope was that coming up here would get me unstuck.”
“Well, in that light, maybe the not thinking about it will end up being productive for you. I don’t know. I just don’t think that you pursuing a PhD program that’s going to last for years more is going to make you happy. And I freely admit that there’s a selfish component in all that for me because I want you to be happy. I want to have the chance to make you happy.”
His words struck her as far more serious than he probably meant them. But that didn’t diminish their impact. When had anybody really concerned themselves with her happiness? The idea that this intelligent, interesting, sexy man cared enough to want to contribute to that absolutely knocked down her defenses and made her yearn.
This was all bumping up against the future and the after that they were both being very, very careful not to talk about. Because the truth was that as intimate as they’d been, and as important as they’d become to each other, they’d only known each other for a matter of days. And the idea of making a change—a significant change—in her life, for a man she knew so little, struck her as the most reckless, irresponsible thing that she could do.
And that didn’t dim the wanting one bit.
Not wanting to read more into his statement than was there, she kept her tone light as she curled a lock of his hair around her finger. “Well, you’re doing a pretty damned good job.”
“Oh, would you look at that view.” Sarah’s voice was hushed and reverent, her camera already at her eye.
Watching her, Beckett smiled to himself.
Today had been amazing. Free to be themselves, without worry of being overheard or having to maintain the deception, he’d been able to get to know her on a deeper level. She fascinated him. They were very different people, and he didn’t entirely understand her innate sense of competition. But she made him think. And, as always, she made him want.
He truly liked her on every possible level.
The official purpose of this overnight camping trip, at least insofar as work was concerned, was to choose appropriate locations for the Scout Wars events later in the summer. But his greater purpose had been to show Sarah all the beautiful places in the area to feed her inner photo bug. She’d told him that she’d wanted to be a photographer in a way that said she hadn’t ever really considered it a viable career option because of her parents. Yet she’d loved it enough to keep taking classes, keep learning about it. And certainly she’d kept shooting. He hoped that by bringing her to a lot of his favorite places out here, she’d have a chance to indulge that love. And maybe he’d find a way to help her consider it as an actual profession. Because he saw the light in her when she had a camera in her hands that he hadn’t seen when she’d discussed any of the degrees she’d earned.
The quiet click of the shutter was background noise as he slid off his pack and began to make preparations for camp, digging out the tent.
When she saw what he was doing, she started to put the camera down. “What can I do?”
Beckett waved her off. “I’ve got this. You keep taking photos. You’re having such fun with it.”
Sarah flashed him a giddy sort of smile and turned back to her work. That smile was worth every mile they’d hiked today.
He unfurled the tent and stretched it out on the grass. “What is it you love about taking pictures?” He was legitimately curious. Photography was such an artistic thing, and every other degree she’d sought had been so painfully rigid and scientific. He was still trying to square the two sides of her.
She seemed to consider the question. “There are beautiful things in the world everywhere you look. I love being able to capture that. To show people there’s a different way to look at things. I love the challenge of getting the shot that I envision in my brain, making people see things that I see. And I love the ability to capture a moment in time—a memory—and pull it out later to relive. There’s magic in that.” So saying, she lifted the camera again and aimed it toward him.
Click.
“ There’s an element of comfort to it, too, I guess. It’s soothing. The camera is an extension of my hands. I mean, there’s still thought involved in settings and angles, in the consideration of all the technical aspects, but it’s not the same as being actual work.”
“Do you feel like something that isn’t hard somehow matters less? That because you find it easy, and you’re not having to work at it, that makes it something that you don’t actually want to pursue?” He legitimately wanted to know. Was her deeply ingrained sense of competition really that much of a driver for her?
She crouched to take a shot of a cluster of purple coneflowers at the edge of the clearing. “No. It’s just not a practical job.”
“You talk a lot about that. About the practical. Why the obsession?”
Her brows drew together, and Beckett hoped he hadn’t crossed some line. He didn’t want to offend her, he just wanted to know the answer.
“One of us had to be practical growing up. By default, that ended up being me.”
Beckett chose his words more carefully. “That doesn’t sound like a choice.”
Her shoulders twitched in a shrug. “My sister made the choice for me. Because she never stopped to think and consider before making any sort of decision. She just leaps feet first, and damn the consequences. She’s always been able to do that because I was there to help manage them. And there were always consequences.”
There was both love and exhaustion here, and Beckett was starting to understand how much being a twin had impacted her. He didn’t think her obsession with perfection was necessarily actual temperament so much as reaction to a lifetime of being the more cautious one. As they worked together to set up camp, she told him more stories. The picture she painted was of a twin who was not at all afraid of action or of failure. Yeah, Taryn had made some bad decisions and had some crappy things happen to her as a result of that. But the end result was that Sarah had never been given the freedom to feel as if she could make a mistake because Taryn had the market cornered. It made Beckett realize that it was an even bigger deal that she had decided to take a chance on him.
He hurled the weighted end of a rope through the fork in a tree above and tugged to set up a line where they could hang their food overnight, out of reach of any bears in the area. “I’m starting to see how this thing with me, with us, is really out of character for you. And I am so incredibly grateful you were willing to take that leap with me. But I’m compelled to ask… Why did you?”
He knew he was pushing, hoping to nudge her into admitting that she also couldn’t bear for this to be over after this week. That she was willing to pursue this thing between them further.
She was silent for a while as she gathered wood for a fire. When she finally spoke, her voice was low. “Because the idea of not pursuing it felt like a bigger risk than being with you. Not knowing would’ve haunted me a whole lot longer than whatever the fallout is after.”
It was something. Maybe not as much as he wanted, but he realized that what he wanted was an awful lot in a very short span of time. Twin impersonation aside, she was a demonstrably cautious woman. So he would take what she offered and be grateful. And hopefully, somewhere in the time they had left, he’d find the key to unlocking her reluctance and grabbing onto this with both hands the way he wanted to.
He crossed over to where she knelt by the ring of stones for their fire pit and reached for her hand. When she laid it in his, warmth and electricity shot up his arm and into his chest. He drew her to her feet, pulling her flush with his body. She flowed into him without hesitation. Beckett loved that. Loved the instant surrender. The sensation of a click, as if they fit together like two puzzle pieces. Seeing the same wanting he felt reflected in her big Bambi eyes.
Linking his hands behind her back, he dropped his brow to hers. “Then let’s make the most of it.”