Chapter 17 Cam
Chapter 17
Cam
Fifteen Years Ago
Dusty: Hike with me this weekend? Check yes or no (don’t check no, please).
Cam: What are you, obsessed with hiking? You’re insufferable. I don’t even know if I like hiking.
Dusty: Only one way to find out. I’ll pick you up at eight.
Cam: In the morning?!
Dusty: Yeah, sleepyhead. In the morning.
Cam: Okay, but park down the street.
Dusty: That’s getting kind of weird, Ash.
Cam: My parents aren’t like yours. I’m protecting you, I promise.
Dusty: Whatever you say. Wear good shoes.
“Y ou all right back there?” Dusty asked as we continued to trudge up the mountain. Well, I was trudging. Dusty was basically floating—the incline didn’t seem to bother him at all.
“All good,” I huffed. “So do you do this a lot?”
“Hiking?” he asked.
I nodded, but then realized he couldn’t see me, so I called up to him. “Yeah.”
“A fair amount,” he said. “There’s not always a lot to do around here, you know? And even when there are things to do, it’s normally stuff that you’ve already done at least once.”
“But if you do this a lot, isn’t this just another one of those things?”
“Yeah, but it’s different every time you do it—I could hike up this trail every day and see or notice something new.”
I took a second to look at the scene around me. I couldn’t see that much on the trail—tall trees surrounded us—but we had to be pretty high up, considering we’d been walking for at least an hour.
It was beautiful, but I wasn’t really sold on the whole hiking thing yet. I had homework to do.
“How much longer?” I asked.
Dusty laughed. “Like fifteen minutes. I thought you’d like this.” I liked being with him. “Aren’t you all about hard work and outcomes?”
“I like to see the outcomes,” I said. “All I see are trees.”
“Has anyone ever told you to enjoy the journey?”
“No,” I answered honestly. “No one’s ever said that to me.”
Dusty stopped walking and turned around. I stopped when I was only a step or two away from him.
He looked down at me. “Well,” Dusty said, as he brushed my cheek with the back of his knuckles, “enjoy the journey.”
I rolled my eyes, and Dusty grinned when they came back around. “Let’s keep walking so the journey doesn’t take two more hours,” I said.
“Fair,” Dusty said as he turned and continued to lead the way. I also didn’t know how long the person whose driveway we parked in would be okay with Dusty’s Bronco in front of their house. I hoped they wouldn’t mind if we parked there for a long time because the house mesmerized me and I wanted to explore every inch of the property when we went back to the car. When Dusty and I first pulled up, I immediately fell in love with the blue exterior, the way the house was surrounded by plants and trees. I can’t explain it, but it felt like it had its own soul, like it was a living thing.
Dusty seemed to love driving me around, showing me new things. The first time I rode in his truck this past fall, I was kind of terrified. I wasn’t used to cars that were that big or loud or bumpy.
Now, I’d count down the minutes until the next time I was in his passenger seat. I’d even made him a mix CD to listen to while he was driving because his radio was trash at picking up stations without static.
He had to drop me off down the street from my house when he would give me rides home, though. I didn’t need my parents to find out about him or his loud Bronco. They wouldn’t approve of Dusty or our friendship.
Because that’s what Dusty and I were—friends. Good friends. He was probably my best friend, but I’d never had one of those before, so I couldn’t tell for sure.
But it also felt like he was more.
I mean, we hadn’t even kissed, but when he touched me, my stomach always flipped. I thought after a while, it would stop—that I would get used to it, the way he would cup my face or brush my hair behind my ear or hug me after we’d been apart for a while, but I didn’t. My stomach somersaulted every time.
He came to almost every soccer game in the fall and we did something nearly every Saturday that he didn’t have to work—even in the dead of winter. In the colder months, Dusty bagged groceries and bussed tables at the diner. When it got warmer, he kept both of those jobs and bailed hay at Rebel Blue Ranch. Wes was one of Dusty’s friends, so I knew about Rebel Blue, but I’d never been up there. Maybe he’d take me soon.
Unlike me, Dusty had a lot of friends, so being around him was good for me, I think, because it also meant that I was around other people. I didn’t know if they were my friends, too, but I had Dusty, so I didn’t feel like I needed more than that.
“I can hear you thinking back there,” Dusty said. “What’s rattling around in your head?”
“You,” I said honestly.
“Anything good?” Dusty asked.
“Not a single thing,” I lied. “All bad. Totally and completely bad.”
“Liar,” Dusty said. I could hear the smile in his voice. We walked a little bit longer, and the trees started to clear. There was a steep incline for a few minutes, and my lungs were working overtime, but we kept trekking.
As soon as we got to the top of the incline, we started to go back down—in between two large rock faces. The space between them was barely big enough for Dusty to fit through. “Careful,” he said.
When he got through, he turned back around and stretched out his hand to help me the last few steps. I stepped out of the opening, and my jaw dropped.
“I told you that you’d like it,” Dusty said, eyes on me.
“It’s…wow.” The view spread out before me was stunning. Unlike most of the other viewpoints I’d seen in Meadowlark, this one didn’t face toward the town. We were on the back side of the mountain face, so there weren’t any houses or buildings in the view, just an expanse of evergreens and aspens and grasses and jagged and beautiful rocks—a river split the scene in half as it flowed below.
Dusty kept hold of my hand and pulled me toward the edge of the rock face we were on. I looked to where he was leading me and blinked a few times to make sure I was seeing things right. The way the rocks had eroded and broken had created something that kind of looked like a couch that sat looking over…everything.
“Watch your step,” Dusty said. It was a good thing he had ahold on me because I was so distracted by what was in front of me that I think I could have very easily fallen off the cliff. When we sat down on the rocks, Dusty took off his backpack. He handed me a water bottle, which I took eagerly. He also had apples, peanut butter sandwiches, goldfish crackers, and blue raspberry sour straws.
I sat cross-legged and situated myself diagonally, so I could see both of the views—the mountains and Dusty. “I think I get it now,” I said and then bit into an apple. I’d learned from Dusty’s dad that he thought Pink Lady apples were the best, and now that I’d had them a few times, I agreed.
“What?” Dusty asked.
“Hiking,” I said. “You didn’t tell me we got views and snacks.”
Dusty laughed. “So you like it?”
“I love it,” I said.
“Good,” he responded. “So really…what were you thinking about me back there?” He looked at me sideways as he ran his fingers through his mop of blond hair.
I took a deep breath. Dusty had gotten me out of the habit of censoring myself—at least around him. Maybe it was the notes or the fact that I felt closer to him than anyone else, but I didn’t think there was anything he would judge me for.
“Why you haven’t kissed me yet.”
Dusty froze, but his gray eyes gleamed. “Do you want me to kiss you, Ash?” There it was—the nickname. I had recently folded one of my English papers in a way that cut off the latter half of my last name so it would fit inside my notebook. Dusty saw it on my desk and started calling me Ash. He’d finally found his nickname for me, the one that made him feel special.
I didn’t tell him that he already was.
“Yeah,” I said in a tone that I hoped communicated that was a stupid question. When he was quiet for a second, I quickly said, “But, like, only if you want to.” Smooth.
“I want to,” he said immediately. “I’ve always wanted to.” There it was—the stomach flip.
“Then why haven’t you?” My voice came out quieter than I expected.
I watched Dusty swallow. “Waiting for the right moment, I guess.”
I gestured to the scene around us. “This feels like it could be the right moment,” I said and moved a little closer to him. He moved closer to me, too. The air grew thin, and I knew it wasn’t just the altitude.
“Yeah?” he asked. His voice was lower than I’d heard it.
I nodded. When he leaned forward, I paused. “I’ve never done this before,” I blurted out. Oh god. That was embarrassing. “I don’t know…do I move?”
Dusty smiled—the lopsided one that made my heart squeeze and my breath catch. “No, angel,” he said quietly as he brought his hands up to each side of my face. “I’ll come to you.”
I tried to control my breath and my heartbeat, but there was no use—not with him. I watched his eyes scan my face before they landed on my mouth. He leaned in further, and I closed my eyes—half a second later, his lips were on mine.
It was pretty much the best first kiss ever. I didn’t want to stop kissing him. I just did it over and over again—continuing long after we had left the rock couch, on our way back down the mountain, and in the front seat of Dusty’s truck.
I barely noticed when he parked outside of my house because when the car was stopped, that meant I could start kissing him again.
So I did.
I pushed myself across the bench seat, so I was as close to him as I could get. His hands roamed—from my shoulders, to my back, to my waist. When he used his mouth to open mine a little, I felt a little bolt of electricity from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.
Why didn’t we do this sooner? I wanted to spend every spare second I had with my mouth attached to his to make up for lost time.
A bang on Dusty’s passenger - side window startled both of us, and when I looked back at it—oh, shit—I saw my mother.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Camille Ashwood, get out of this car. Right now.” She was yelling. My mother didn’t yell—it was normally just cold disappointment.
Dusty’s arm was still wrapped around me, and when my mother spoke, it got tighter. “Is that your mom?” His voice sounded shocked, maybe even kind of scared.
I nodded and looked back at him. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“Take me somewhere. Today has been so…amazing, and I can’t deal with her right now,” I said. “Please.” My mom hit Dusty’s window again. She tried to open the passenger-side door, but it was locked.
“Ash, I…I can’t. She’s your mother. I think it’ll just make things worse. I’ll come get you tonight, okay? Maybe after everything has…died down?”
I felt my eyes well with tears, but I nodded.
Dusty kissed me again—he didn’t care that my mom was watching. “I’ll get you out of here someday, I promise.”