Chapter 19 #3
“That’s good. Can you tell me what else you hear?”
“The fire.”
“That’s right, it’s crackling real good tonight. Can you smell it too?”
Breathing in through my nose, the acrid-sweet scent of burning wood flowed into my sinuses. “Yes, I smell wood smoke and char with something earthier beneath it.”
“Good. Now can you tell me three things you can feel? Just the first three things you notice.”
“The sleeping bag. It’s warm. The chair under me.” My eyes drifted to where he sat beside me as a lighthouse in the storm of my floundering. Summoning boldness in the face of my panic I said, “Your hand in mine.”
Luke’s eyebrows lifted in surprise, but he held out his hand allowing me to take it, giving a gentle squeeze as soon as my fingers latched on.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin everything.”
His thumb swept across my knuckles. “You didn’t. You didn’t ruin anything.”
“I thought . . . when you asked if I wanted to see your tattoo, something about your expression filtered wrong. I thought you were toying with me. Mocking me.”
“Hell, I’m so sorry. Did I do something that came across that way? I never want to trigger you or make you uncomfortable. If there’s something I should change, how I talk or joke or whatever, tell me, okay? I’ll fix it.”
The only way to make sense of my reaction would be to expose myself and I couldn’t do that.
“I can’t explain it. I know it doesn’t make any sense.
But when I looked at you, I saw the way Vincent used to look at me, the smug smile and gleam in his eyes he used to get when he realized he’d uncovered something I hadn’t meant to show and he was about to do something cruel with that discovery.
I hate that my mind made that connection.
Because you’re not like him, Luke. You’ve never been like him. And I’m so, so sorry.”
“Hey. No, you don’t need to apologize for that. Not to me. I get it. Trauma doesn’t knock first and announce its arrival. Sometimes it just shows up, latching onto whatever moment it can get its hands on, and turns the volume way up.”
“But it’s been months, this shouldn’t be happening.”
“Healing isn’t a race. Beating yourself up for not being further along doesn’t help. Sometimes things are gonna crop up that make your brain go whoa! Nope, nope. Warning! Danger! I’m sure the little run-in we had yesterday didn’t help matters.”
“I hate this. I hate that I’m still so easily broken.”
“You’ve lived through something that rewired your alarms. That kind of hurt doesn’t disappear just because time passes or because you wish it would.
Sometimes those old alarms are gonna go off even when nothing’s burning, and yeah, it’s exhausting and upsetting.
But a moment like this doesn’t undo how far you’ve come. ”
“It feels that way. I can be okay for weeks, think I’ve finally built some kind of armor, and then out of the blue, for no reason, suddenly I’m back there. Like no time has passed at all.”
“Maybe you can focus on the fact you recognized it? You realized your mind made a connection it didn’t mean to and the reaction didn’t match the reality. Progress isn’t about never spiraling, but being able to see it when you do.”
“Yeah, maybe. Still bet you didn’t anticipate that plot twist as part of stage three of my camping initiation.”
“Yeah, I didn’t exactly have that on the itinerary,” Luke said with a quiet huff of a chuckle. “But every good adventure requires a little improv. I can roll with whatever you got.”
“Even when what I got is panic and lingering trauma and a brain that can’t tell the difference between a real threat and an imposed one?”
“Yes, even then. You’re one of my closest friends. If I dipped when things got messy, I’d be a shitty person, and I’d hope for your sake you’d drop me like a hot rock. I don’t want you to be perfect. Perfect is boring anyway. I want you to be safe and yourself. Just you. My Ollie.”
Hearing him call me a friend while also calling me his was a special kind of emotional turmoil. The truth of how he saw me, colliding with my hope and skidding straight for my heart. Squeezing my eyes shut, I blew out a long breath.
“If it helps, the whole reason I mentioned the tattoo was I because I wanted to match your effort,” Luke said.
“I don’t understand.”
“You stepped into a weekend of firsts. Your first camping trip. Your first real mountain hike. Your first cold water swim. I dunno, I wanted to give you something no one else had, the same way you gave that to me. I’m sorry it landed wrong and pulled you somewhere painful.”
That made a whole lot more sense than the warped narrative I’d spun in my head. And now, after that sincere confession, I needed to see it. “If that offer still stands, would you show it to me?”
“I’d love to.”
Untying his right shoe, Luke slipped it off, then peeled off his sock and stretched his foot toward the firelight.
Along the ball of his foot, in line with the natural curve of his heel, was a stunningly realistic looking moon.
I should have known Luke’s hidden tattoo wouldn’t reveal itself as some salacious surprise tucked behind a waistband. I shook my head. “It’s on your foot? Seriously?”
“Yep. Carrie and I got matching tattoos on a trip to Vegas when I turned sixteen. Our first real trip without our parents. Since we couldn’t drink or gamble, we had to think of something else to fulfill the Vegas experience.
We knew tattoo laws in Nevada were less strict than in Washington, so we walked into a shop that had a reputation for tattooing minors and she claimed to be my legal guardian.
No one even questioned it since we shared the same last name. ”
I stared at the tiny moon, still reeling. “Why there, though?”
“It was two-fold. We needed a place our parents wouldn’t see it before I turned eighteen.
Carrie picked the foot. She also liked the idea of the moon being under us.
Though I’d long given up the childish dream of being an astronaut, she knew I was still obsessed with space.
She said that way we wouldn’t have to go to the moon, we’d carry it with us wherever we walked. ”
“That’s beautiful.”
“It’s one of my favorite tattoos. It meant something then but it means more now. Back then it was thrilling to do something we weren’t supposed to do. Now, it’s a part of her I can carry with me. It’s still our dirty little secret. I like to think whenever I take a step, she’s walking with me.”
Reaching out, I traced the outline of the moon. This tattoo was a piece of Carrie, a shard of memory he’d carried through her loss, and he had shared it with me. “Thank you for inviting me in on the secret,” I whispered.
“You’re the only person I want to carry that secret with me.”
The words were a soft blow, both innocent and perilous, leaving me winded. Was this truly the language of friendship, or something that reached beyond it? The damn treacherous, pitiable, hope-drunk part of me whispered it had to mean more.
Don’t do this. Don’t turn his sharing into a confession. Don’t stain the purity of what he offered because you want it to mean something more.
I reminded myself that Luke valued connection differently.
He held friendship like other people held love—openly, fiercely, wholly, without reserve.
He’d said that first night at Ezra and Micah’s that not all intimacy had to be romantic, that friendship could carry the same depth and devotion.
I saw proof of that in his relationship with Ezra, through their easy affection, unspoken shorthand.
To anyone steeped in a world that assumed closeness equated to romance, their purely platonic bond might easily be mistaken for romance.
Luke and I had gotten close enough that he extended me the same treatment, but now I translated his tenderness through a distorted lens, trying to fit it into the frameworks I’d inherited, mistaking intensity for desire and devotion for want.
What we shared was connection without category, intimacy without condition.
I knew better than to question what we were to each other.
Couldn’t it be enough that he wanted to share something so personal with me?
But it didn’t matter how I tried to intellectualize it. The words had branded themselves into me as surely as that moon into his skin, and I’d spend the rest of the night trying to breathe around what they might mean.
“It only seems fair,” I said at last. “That I give you my own round of Two Truths and a Lie.”
“Only if you want to. No pressure.”
“I know, and I want to.”
“Alright then, hit me. Whatcha got?”
“In my teens I dyed my hair blue, I took ballet classes while attending college, my two front teeth are artificial.”
“Okay, I got this. I’m a master at this game.”
“Alright, master Walker, call your lie.”
“You’re too graceful for the ballet one to be a lie, and you’ve got style so I could see you dying your hair. Which means your front teeth are real?”
“Nope, they’re crowns.” Following a particularly brutal fist, courtesy of my father, but I didn’t need to share that detail. “The blue hair’s the lie. I’ve never dyed it. I didn’t want that kind of attention.”
“I don’t think it would have mattered. It wouldn’t take blue hair for you to attract attention, you do that all on your own,” Luke said.
Statements like that didn’t help my need to read meaning into every touch, every glance, every offhand remark that sounded and looked too much like the love I’d always wanted.
“I think I’m tired,” I blurted, needing an exit before I did something irredeemably stupid. “Unlike some people, I’m not a seasoned child of the wilderness. I require my full allotment of beauty sleep.”
“Fair enough. I usually end up turning in earlier than usual when I’m camping. I’ll douse the fire and clean up if you want to get settled?”
“I can help,” I offered.
“Sure.” He nodded toward the paper towels. “Since we’re only out for one night, I’ll give the cookware a proper wash when we’re home. For now, if you’d give everything a wipe down?”
We made quick work of it. Luke smothered the coals while I wiped down the dishes and utensils with damp paper towels. With the fire extinguished and everything packed away, we entered the tent.
It was a large tent, meant to accommodate Luke’s height, but it might as well have been a shoebox for all the space it offered me emotionally. Silly me, for not thinking through the logistics of this trip. I hadn’t considered what it would be like to lie mere feet from Luke in the dark.
Every rustle of his sleeping bag and every exhale from his lungs became too intimate. He occupied every thought in my head, his proximity the only thing I could breathe.
After endless minutes of sleep evading me, a twig snapped right outside the tent, followed by shuffling.
“Did you hear that?” I whispered, my voice tight with panic.
Luke stirred beside me. “Hear what?” He sounded a little groggy. Had he already managed to fall asleep while I marinated in his besotting closeness?
“A sound. Outside.”
“What kind of sound?”
“Something moving near the tent. Maybe it’s a bear.”
“A bear?”
“I don’t know.” I clutched the edge of my sleeping bag tighter. “But it didn’t sound small.”
Reaching up, he turned on the tent lantern. He tilted his head, listening intently to the nocturnal symphony beyond the tent walls.
“I don’t think it’s a bear, Ollie, but I get it.
Sometimes the night plays tricks on the mind.
Especially out here, surrounded by sounds your mind isn’t used to.
It’s easy for the unfamiliar to be threatening.
” He paused, eyes searching mine. “I don’t want you to be scared.
Would it help if you slept closer beside me?
No pressure, but the option stands if it would make you more comfortable. ”
Well, I’d already humiliated myself in front of him with that embarrassing panic attack. I guess I had no face left to save. If the aftermath of my pathetic startling got me a sliver of time in his arms, I would wear that shame like a crown.
“Yes please,” I squeaked.
The sound of Luke’s sleeping bag unzipping filled the tent. He shifted closer, and when his arm draped over the curve of my sleeping bag, settling against my side, the contact, even filtered through layers of fabric, had electricity skating along the surface of my skin, leaping from nerve to nerve.
“I told you I’d freak out over the noises outside,” I whispered.
“And I told you I’d be more than happy and willing to protect you from the creatures in the dark,” Luke murmured near my temple. “I’ve got you. No animal is going to get to us in here.”
I inched closer, unable to help the way my body sought more of his.
The campfire’s musk clung to his skin, mingling with the tang of sweat.
The odor surrounded me, filling my nostrils, and weaving itself around my senses like a spell I never wanted broken.
I could’ve blanketed myself in the scent and never come up for air.
It was official, I really was an irredeemably terrible person. But with Luke holding me through the padded wall of nylon and insulation, I couldn’t bring myself to care.