Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Hunter
We lie there for a long, long time. My mind is almost perfectly blank, just a navy-blue haze of happiness and warmth that matches the darkness around us. Clementine’s hand is in mine. Our legs are intertwined. I can feel her breathe.
I just have one small latex problem, and after a while, I can’t ignore it any more. I sigh.
“So... there’s no bathroom up here,” I say.
“There’s an outhouse on the ground,” she says without opening her eyes.
I gather all my will, release her hand, and sit up on the cot. Then I stand.
I seem to be managing this okay.
“Be right back,” I say, walking for the door, still completely naked. Who’s gonna see me, raccoons?
“Don’t throw the condom in there,” she says, looking over at me.
I look down at my now-flaccid dick, the used condom drooping sadly off of it.
“Where do I put it?” I ask. My brain is still working half-speed, and I look around the lookout tower, vaguely wondering if it goes down the sink or something.
Clementine just starts laughing and rolls onto her back, still totally naked in the dark.
“I thought you spent six months a year camping in the wilderness,” she says. “What do you do with anything?”
I look down again and sigh.
“Right,” I say. “Leave no trace.”
“There should be ziploc bags in one of the cabinets,” she says, still laughing.
I find them, then take off the used condom, tie a knot in it, and deposit it in the baggie, sealing it. The moon has circled the sky and come around to the north-facing windows, and now it’s cutting bright white shapes across the room.
“You look like you’re in a movie where Humphrey Bogart plays a detective, except you’re holding a baggie with an old condom,” Clementine volunteers.
“And I need to pee.”
“Even really good private investigators have to pee sometimes,” she reassures me, her voice lazy but teasing. “They just don’t show it in the movies.”
I look over at her. The moonlight is just above her head, and she’s flopped one hand up and into it, the rest of her still dark. I drop the baggie on the floor near my backpack, then lean over and kiss Clementine.
“Take a flashlight,” she says.
I shove my feet into hiking boots and head down. The moon is bright enough that I don’t need the flashlight, but I’m glad I brought it. When I finish my business, Clementine is there, waiting fifty feet away, looking up at the stars.
Fuck, she’s beautiful. Especially like this, naked except boots and careless in the middle of nowhere, laughing and relaxed and not giving a shit.
“Did you hop down the stairs?” I ask, frowning.
“My ankle’s not that bad anymore,” she says. “It hurts a little, but honestly, I think it’s fine.”
“It’s because I fixed it with my dick,” I say, walking toward her.
“I don’t think your dick even touched my ankle,” she says.
“Close enough,” I say. “You have any other ailments, come to me. I’ll fix you right up.”
Clementine laughs. I kiss her as I walk past, heading back to the lookout tower so she can use the outhouse.
As I walk away, she smacks my ass. Then she laughs.
Back in the tower, I go ahead and get our sleeping bags out of our packs and spread them on the two cots. Then I flop on the one where we just had sex and stare out the window.
I know this is the easy part. Being alone together for a night, with nothing and no one else to complicate things? It’s a piece of fucking cake.
It’s when we get back, to Clementine’s divorcing parents and me fighting fires for weeks on end, to the real world where shit happens. That’s the hard part.
Everything she said in that bathroom was true. I was flirting with Mandy, not because I particularly like her, but because it’s habit. Two days after asking Clementine if she wanted to try again, I had another girl on my shoulders, giggling.
I’m also afraid I know how this ends. And I don’t want to be stupid, but when I’m with Clementine — when we’re hiking nine miles or, hell, when I’m talking to a group of old ladies and trying to get out of it — it feels right, like there’s no other way I could imagine being. Like puzzle pieces that fit together.
I hear Clementine coming up the stairs in her heavy hiking boots, and then the door opens.
“Bleh,” she says, and goes to the basin to wash her hands.
“Isn’t this your job?” I ask.
“Peeing in outhouses?” she says.
“Peeing outdoors.”
She shakes her hands, looks around, then finds her shirt and dries them there.
“My job is actually trail marking, trail maintenance, setting up wildlife cameras, surveying, and that sort of thing,” she says, and walks over to me, flopping next to me on the cot. “The peeing outdoors is incidental. Scoot over.”
“I can’t,” I say. “I’m already up against the glass.”
Clementine solves the problem by getting half on top of me, her right arm flopped over my chest, her head on my shoulder.
“These things are too small,” she says sleepily.
I stroke my fingers up and down her back. Her body against mine like this makes my dick twitch, but I hiked nine miles with seventy pounds on my back. I don’t think I can move anything else. Round two is gonna have to wait.
“It’s almost like they’re not made for two people,” I say.
“Smartass,” she mutters.
“You wouldn’t like me if I wasn’t.”
“You mean if you were a nice person who didn’t tease me all the time?” she asks, tilting her face up.
I grin, looking down at her.
“If I were a nice guy who didn’t challenge you sometimes you’d get bored and eat me alive,” I say.
She taps her fingers on my chest, like she’s thinking.
“I like nice guys,” she says after a while, though she doesn’t sound like she believes it.
“I’m nice,” I say. “I was real nice earlier.”
She laughs, then snuggles against me a little more. We both look out the window, at the horizon. I’m starting to doze off when she speaks.
“That’s Saturn again,” she says, pointing.
I follow her finger, remembering the directions from the other night: Mars, over to Antares, up to Saturn.
“Can you see the rings with binoculars?” I ask.
“You could barely see them with a big-ass telescope,” she says.
Right.
“You know what planet I can see right now with the naked eye?” I ask.
Clementine looks at me again.
“If you say Uranus I swear I’m leaving and hiking nine miles back to civilization right now,” she says, but there’s laughter in her voice.
“I was gonna say Mars,” I say, pretending to be offended. “I’m not thirteen.”
I was absolutely going to say Uranus. It’s always funny.
“Sure,” she says, putting her head back.
There’s another silence, and I look at the stars hovering near the horizon.
“This is different,” she says.
“It is?” I ask.
It doesn’t really feel different. It feels like we could be in the back of my pickup truck, or in her basement, or in my bedroom after my parents went to sleep and she sneaked over.
“No one’s gonna catch us,” she says. “And if they do, it doesn’t matter.”
I’ve started playing with her hair without noticing what I was doing, the slippery dark strands coiling through my fingers.
“Does that make it less exciting?” I ask. “Are you saying you miss the thrill?”
She laughs.
“The thrill of nearly getting busted by the cops that one time?” she says. “Or of Mrs. Hudgins finding us on what was technically her property and reaming us out?”
“Did she have a shotgun, or did I make that up?” I ask.
“I think it was a BB gun,” Clementine says.
“I’d rather her shoot me than tell my parents,” I say. “A couple years ago, I sort of let it slip that I wasn’t exactly saving myself anymore, and I don’t think my mom’s forgiven me yet.”
“But you live with them?”
“I stay in the guest house for half the year,” I correct her. “And I don’t... entertain guests there.”
In high school, Clementine and I were in a slightly weird situation. I heard plenty of stories about dads in Ashlake, Montana answering the door holding a shotgun, threatening boyfriends who’d dare to touch their daughters.
But Clementine’s parents were relatively cool. I mean, they weren’t nearly as permissive as we’d have liked, but they never threatened me with a shotgun. It was my parents who were the strict ones, who were vigorously opposed to us ever being alone together, lest we be tempted by sin.
It didn’t work. Not by a long shot. Sin won, hard. And fast. And deep. And as often as we could possibly manage.
“This is nice, though,” she murmurs.
“Yeah, it is,” I agree.
In a few more minutes, she’s asleep on me. I’m tired as hell, but there’s no way I can fall asleep sharing this two-foot-wide cot with her, so I stay awake for a little while. I listen to her breathing. I slide my fingers through her hair.
I think that maybe, maybe, this time will work out differently.
After a while I’m beyond sleepy and also beyond uncomfortable, so I gently get out from under Clementine, then climb gingerly over her until I’m off the cot.
She wakes up when I try to roll her onto her sleeping bag.
“You leaving?” she asks, barely awake.
“I’m leaving to there,” I say, pointing at the other cot.
She closes her eyes again, snuggling into her sleeping bag.
“Fine,” she says, and then she’s asleep again.
I have a feeling she won’t remember this conversation in the morning. I get into my own sleeping bag, in the cot perpendicular to hers.
I’m asleep in seconds.
I wake up to the sun slicing through the windows, the hard yellow rays hitting the ceiling of the lookout and illuminating everything inside.
It takes me a minute to remember where I am, but I wake up in strange places a lot.
Usually a strange tent, sometimes a strange motel, sometimes a strange bunkhouse.
I’ve never woken up in a strange fire lookout before, though given my job, it’s weird that I haven’t.
Then I think the same thing I always think.
Is something on fire?
No.
It used to be am I in a red zone, but two years of firefighting has at least changed that habit, even though I still wake up the same way: instantly, and all at once.
I stretch and look at the cot perpendicular to mine, but Clementine isn’t in it.
“There you are,” she says.
I look down. She’s sitting, cross-legged, on a big wooden trunk, binoculars in her hands. All she’s wearing is a shirt and underpants, though I’m not really sure why she’s even wearing that.
“You need those to watch me sleep?” I ask, my voice still rough.
“Yeah, I really enjoy examining your individual pores,” she teases.
I lay back, hands behind my head. I kicked my sleeping bag mostly off during the night, because they’re usually too warm, but it’s still strategically covering my junk.
“Good, because I’m on the cover of the Hot Firemen Pores 2017 calendar,” I say.
“Hunter, wake up before you try to make jokes,” Clementine says.
She checks me out anyway, and I just enjoy it. I get checked out a lot, and though I don’t usually mind that much, I like it when she’s the one doing it.
“You want me to move the bag?” I ask, still sounding blurry.
She glances down at my morning wood tenting up the sleeping bag, as if she hadn’t already noticed.
“Actually, I want you to look at that white column,” she says, and leans toward me, handing over the binoculars.
It’s less exciting than showing her my dick, but it is why we’re here, so I take the binoculars and look at the white column. It’s the same one she showed me yesterday, but this morning it looks a little bigger, and it’s definitely rising upward.
“It’s smoke,” I say, half a second later.
“I thought so,” she says.
I keep looking at it, and a knot tightens in my stomach. It’s not big. The smoke’s not billowing upward, like it would if this were a serious fire, but something about it looks like it might be worse than just a lightning strike.
But it is definitely, absolutely a column of smoke. Clouds don’t have that slightly tan tinge to them that smoke from burning wood does.
I take the binoculars down, and Clementine is still looking at me, though now she’s not checking me out. Now she looks a little worried.
“Can you tell if it’s just a lightning strike?” she asks.
“Not from here,” I say.
“I’m gonna put on pants and radio it in,” she says, hopping off the crate.
I turn and watch her walk across the lookout, blatantly checking out her ass.
“Why would you put on pants?” I ask. “They can’t see you.”
“I’ll know,” she says, laughing. “I don’t want to talk to my boss without pants on. It’s weird.”
My boss has seen me naked more than once, but when you camp with two dozen guys for half the year, privacy is one of the first things to go.
“Suit yourself,” I say, and finally get out of bed.