Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-One
Clementine
Six Weeks Later
“Wait, no,” I say, glancing around. “I think it’s this way.”
I take off without waiting for Hunter to answer, mostly because I know he’s going to disagree.
“It’s not,” he says, but he follows me anyway.
I round the corner and stop. It’s just another row of ugly, half-dead cornstalks. A dead end.
“Goddamn motherfucker,” I mutter, clenching my fists in the pockets of my fleece.
“It’s back there,” Hunter says, pointing.
“We went that way already,” I say.
“We went this way too.”
“Well, we did now,” I say.
“You could try believing me,” Hunter says.
A breeze blows through the corn maze, shaking the stalks and rattling the leaves, and I realize that we’re about to get into a fight over a Halloween attraction for children.
I think Hunter realizes it too, because for a moment, we just look at each other.
“Want to be that couple who gets into a fight in the Great Maize Maze?” I ask.
“Only if we can air our dirty laundry at the top of our lungs,” he says, and pushes his hands into his pockets, relaxing a little.
“I was thinking we could argue about our sex life in detail near a group of children,” I say.
Now Hunter laughs.
“C’mere,” he says, walking toward me. He puts one arm around me and points with the other toward the wooden tower in the middle of the maze.
The wooden tower we cannot fucking seem to find, by the way.
“Didn’t that kid enter the maze with us?” he says.
I blow my bangs out of my eyes, because I need a haircut.
“Magenta jacket?” I ask. “Yeah, I think she did.”
We stand there for a moment, and I’m pretty sure we’re thinking the same thing: we both navigate the wilderness as part of our jobs. How the hell are we so bad at this?
“I bet she cheated,” he says. “It’s not like these are real walls, she’s probably small enough to just run between the cornstalks.”
“Probably,” I agree. “Kids are cheating jerks.”
Hunter kisses me on the cheek, the tip of his nose cold against my face.
“Want to go try your way?” I ask.
We find the tower without getting into a fight. Turns out neither of us was right, and the turnoff was further back than either of us thought.
From twenty feet in the air, the corn maze is embarrassingly small. We both look at it for a while, considering the best exit strategy.
“Looks like we start by going north,” I say, pulling out my compass.
“I can’t believe you brought a compass to a corn maze,” he says.
“I like being prepared,” I say.
“Then what heading do we proceed along?” he teases.
“The heading is shut up or I’m leaving you to fend for yourself,” I say. “It’s getting dark and someone told me that they release wolves into the maze at sundown, so be nice to me.”
“I could fight a wolf,” Hunter says, grinning.
“You could fight one wolf,” I say. “Not a pack of wolves.”
“I’d retreat up here,” he says, looking around the tower. “They’d be forced to come at me one at a time, like henchmen in a bad action movie.”
“Sure, no problem,” I say.
A magenta jacket catches my eye. It’s running out of the maze. Hunter sees it too, and we both sigh.
“Cheater,” I mutter.
When we finally get out of the maze, it’s nearly sunset, so we skip the pumpkin patch, get hot apple cider, and go sit by the bonfire. I sit against a haystack, Hunter leans against me, and I drape one arm over his chest.
We’re surrounded by teenagers making out. It’s pretty obvious that the Ladies Auxiliary didn’t quite think the bonfire through, because several of them are just walking the bonfire in circles, frowning at teens and reprimanding their inappropriate behavior.
“Hey,” says Hunter.
“Are you gonna ask me to make out?” I say.
“I was gonna ask if you wanted to get inappropriate,” he says.
“Maybe if you put your jacket over your lap I can give you a hand job without anyone noticing,” I say, laughing.
I’m slightly more tempted by the idea than I should be.
“Or you could sit on my dick and pretend you’re just sitting on my lap,” he suggests, grinning up at me.
“Solid plan,” I tease. “It’ll fool everyone.”
Another Lady of the Auxiliary walks by, glaring. Hunter and I wave slightly, and she nods at us. We both go quiet for a little while, watching the fire. After a few minutes he sits up and puts his arm around me and I lean against him, our positions reversed, his thumb slowly stroking my shoulder.
“I really like this,” he says quietly.
“The bonfire?”
“Everything,” he says, slowly. “I like the festival, I like living in Lodgepole. I like being with you.”
I snuggle into him a little more.
“I like it too,” I say. “We didn’t even get into that fight in the corn maze.”
He considers the fire for a moment.
“What about our sex life would we be arguing about?” he says, mostly teasing.
I laugh.
“That was a joke,” I say. “Though I was really annoyed two weeks ago when you had a cold and wouldn’t have sex with me.”
“I was afraid I’d sneeze and cover you in a layer of snot,” he says.
“Ew,” I say.
“Exactly,” Hunter says.
Another pause.
“So my plan worked,” he says. “I had sex with you until you decided this was an okay idea.”
“It sounds really terrible when you put it that way,” I say.
“I need one of those Orgasm Donor t-shirts,” he says.
“If you got that shirt this relationship would be a less okay idea,” I say, and Hunter laughs.
It took him all of a week to find a job as the Lift Operations Supervisor at a nearby ski resort. The words “veteran” and “firefighter” came out of his mouth, and he got hired because of course he did.
Once he had a job, it was another five days before he found a studio apartment above a clothing boutique on Lodgepole’s tiny Main Street. Technically, he was living with me for fifteen days, but we had another house meeting and decided not to charge him rent for that last twenty-four hours.
“You know, I thought it would be harder,” he says. “Not just the job and the apartment, but with us. And it hasn’t been hard.”
“Hunter, are you calling me easy?” I ask.
“You did offer to give me a public hand job five minutes ago,” he says into my hair.
I laugh.
“I am spectacularly bad at turning you down,” I say. “I was twenty minutes late for work the other day.”
“I misread the clock and thought it said five-thirty,” he says. “That was an accident.”
“Every time you don’t want me going somewhere, you just whip your dick out and I climb right on,” I tease.
An Auxiliary Lady walks past and glares at me. I smile innocently.
“That’s not true,” Hunter says. “I would never use my dick for nefarious purposes, only for good.”
“Well, that’s the problem,” I say. “If it weren’t good, it wouldn’t make me late for things.”
“Maybe you just need willpower,” Hunter teases.
I laugh. He pulls me a little closer, and I can feel him swallow, then take a deep breath.
“What I’m trying to say is I love you,” he says. “You probably think it’s too soon, and it’s okay if—”
I put my hand over his mouth and sit up straighter, looking right into his face, my heart beating wildly.
I suddenly feel reckless, almost like this is dangerous to say out loud. But it’s true, so fuck it.
“I love you too,” I say.
He smiles under my hand, so I take it off his mouth.
“I promise not to take it back this time,” he says, his forehead against mine.
I don’t know what to say, so I kiss him, and even though there are teenagers making weird noises all around us, it feels secret and intimate, just us and this bonfire and the chilly October air.
He sneaks his hand up under my shirt and I wind my fingers through his hair, my tongue in his mouth, and then we’re definitely making out.
Hunter pulls back a little.
“There’s a chaperone,” he says.
I’m half on top of him and not too far from suggesting that we sneak back into the corn maze, where at least it’s dark.
“It’s okay, we’re in love,” I say, and Hunter grins.
The chaperone walks on past. We don’t stop making out.