Chapter 15
Sarah
The camp rose out of the plain ahead of us.
The water tank, propped up on its tall, welded stand, was the first visible indicator we were drawing nearer.
The cabins gathered in low behind it, the dining tent’s canvas roof among them.
After more than a year here, I knew the whole spread of it by heart, and pulling in usually felt like coming home. Not this morning.
Donovan eased off the accelerator without my asking. We hadn’t said a lot on the drive back from Nanyuki, and now that the buildings sat there in front of the windshield, I finally understood what I’d been dreading for the last two and a half hours.
This was the end of the private part.
I kept my eyes forward and waited for it.
The cooling. I knew the shape of that by heart, the way a man got some daylight and some distance and quietly revised his opinion of you once the room stopped being dark.
Whatever had felt certain at three in the morning tended to look like a mistake by noon, and I’d spent the drive braced for the exact moment he decided it had been one.
He hadn’t given me a single sign of it. He’d kept his hands relaxed on the wheel and his eyes on the road. That was worse, somehow. Silence left room to fill, and I’d filled two and a half hours of it with every version of the letdown I’d survived before.
I was good at bracing. I’d had practice.
Donovan’s hand left the gearshift and settled on my thigh, warm and heavy, and squeezed once.
“You okay?” he asked.
Two words, and they weren’t really about the road or the meds. I looked at his hand on my leg, then up at his face, and I found none of the distance I’d talked myself into expecting.
He looked at me like the night had happened and he wasn’t sorry about it, and there would be more of it when there was time.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay.”
His hand stayed a beat longer, thumb moving once against the seam of my pants. Then the first cabins came up on either side of the track and he put his hand back on the wheel, and the private part was over.
He parked beside the vet facility. The second my boots hit the packed dirt, camp life closed back over me.
The cabins sat thirty feet apart. The mess tent had its sides rolled up so you could see clean through it from either direction. In a camp this small, someone always knew who walked to whose cabin and when they left it. The rest found out by breakfast.
Whatever Donovan and I were now, there was no way to manage it here without giving the whole compound something to talk about. In a hotel room in Nanyuki, we’d had a city full of strangers.
He felt it too. I read it in the careful arm’s length he kept as we came around to the tailgate, the deliberate, ordinary way he reached past me for the first case without letting his hand find the small of my back like it had in that hotel lobby.
We stood eight inches apart and performed being strangers, and every one of those eight inches carried a current I had to work not to lean into.
“Where do you want these?” he asked.
“Supply room. Left of the door.”
I carried one case and he carried the other. We walked them into the supply room and locked them in the metal cabinet, and the errand that had detonated my whole life for thirty hours finished itself as the most boring thing on earth.
Alyson was waiting when I came back out.
She’d propped herself against the water tank with her arms crossed and her phone nowhere in sight, which for Alyson was the equivalent of cracking her knuckles. She took one look at my face, and every suspicion she’d been nursing since yesterday morning confirmed itself at once.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I haven’t said a word.”
“You’re about to.”
Donovan stepped out of the supply room behind me.
Alyson pushed off the tank and intercepted him before he’d fully cleared the doorway, all brisk cheer and zero subtlety.
“Hello. Everyone’s staging for the herd move tomorrow, and Cole’s short on hands.
You could be so useful there.” She hooked a thumb toward the far end of camp. “I need Sarah for a while.”
Donovan looked at me over the top of her head. I gave him a small nod, because whatever Alyson was about to put me through was not something he needed to witness. He went.
Alyson waited until he was well out of range, then threaded her arm through mine and towed me around the back of the facility, to the one thin strip of shade where the canvas didn’t have eyes.
“Okay.” She planted herself square in front of me, close enough that I’d have had to shove past her to leave, which we both knew I wouldn’t do. “Talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Sarah Calloway. You spent a night in a hotel with that man, and you came back glowing like a damn lighthouse. Something to talk about is the only thing there is.”
“It’s not like that.”
“It is exactly like that.” She grabbed both my hands. “Did you kiss him?”
I opened my mouth to deflect, and the memory of the second shower arrived instead, uninvited.
Steam, and the tile cold against my shoulder blades. His hands gripped under my thighs, which were wrapped around him, holding me off the floor. The water had gone lukewarm over both of us, and neither of us reached to fix it.
“We kissed,” I said. “A little.”
“A little.”
“Alyson.”
“A little like a peck, or a little like I need to sit down for this?”
“It wasn’t a whole production. Leave it.”
She did not leave it. She never left anything.
“You kissed him a little,” she repeated, tasting each word for the lie in it. “In a hotel. Hours away from anyone who’d tattle. And then you both turned in early, chaste as a pair of nuns, in your two separate rooms?”
She wasn’t buying a syllable of it. She knew me, and she could see the exact spots where my story had already sprung a leak.
I said nothing, which was its own confession, and she knew it.
“You’re doing the clipped thing,” she said. “The one where you go all short and clinical to keep me out. Which means it was absolutely a whole production.” She tightened her grip. “Did you sleep with him?”
The gray hour came back before I could stop it.
Waking in the dark to his mouth inching its way up the inside of my thigh. Hands gliding up my rib cage. Thumbs lightly brushing the undersides of my breasts. The unhurried patience of a man who was willing to draw out each moment in order to better savor it.
I turned toward the acacia. It didn’t help.
“See, now you’re doing the other thing.” Her eyes went wide and delighted. “You’ve gone the color of a stop sign, Sarah. That is not the face of a woman who kissed a man a little.”
“It’s hot back here.”
“It is not hot, it is the exact temperature it’s been all week, and you have never in your life blushed at a temperature.” She was nearly vibrating. “How many times? Give me the number. You don’t have to say anything else. Hold up fingers.”
“I’m not holding up fingers.”
“So there’s a number worth hiding?”
“I’m not confirming there’s a number.”
“You just confirmed there’s a number!”
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, and behind them, the first time came back whole.
Both of us still catching our breath. Me on top of him, his chest rising and falling under my palms. I’d thought that was it.
That the night was winding down. Then his hands found my waist, and he rolled me onto my back and settled over me.
“I’m not done with you,” he’d said, his face inches from mine, and suddenly I felt the girth of him fill me once more.
“Fine,” I said. “Yes. It happened. I’m not giving you a play-by-play, so put the interrogation lamp away.”
Alyson let out a sound that startled a go-away-bird straight out of the acacia behind us.
“I knew it.” She had both my arms now. “I knew the second you stopped answering my texts. Two rooms. You booked two rooms, you liar. You are the most adorable liar God ever made.”
“I did book two rooms.”
“And how’d that shake out?”
I didn’t answer. She read the answer off my face anyway and made a second, louder sound.
“One room.” She pressed both hands over her mouth, then dropped them. “They gave you one room. Was it one bed? Sarah. Tell me it was one bed.”
“There was a tour group. The town was full.”
“That is a yes. That is the biggest yes you have ever handed me while trying to say no.” She caught my sleeve. “Okay, last thing, then I’ll stop, I swear. Was it good?”
The question snuck under everything else and hit the honest part before I could get a wall up in front of it. She wasn’t asking how it had happened or for a number again. She was asking whether it had been good.
His hand cradling my face in the dark. Stay with me. Here and now. Making it clear to me that this was exactly what he wanted too.
“Alyson.”
“That’s a yes too.” Her voice had gone soft for exactly one second. “That’s a different kind of yes.”
I looked away, and she let me, which was how I knew she knew enough.
“Okay. Okay.” She pulled herself together, mostly. “So what happens now? Is this a thing? Are you two doing this again?”
There it was. The question I’d already been asking myself since about four that morning. Lying awake with his arm wrapped around me and his body curved around mine.
“It’s not a thing,” I said, and I made it come out easy. “It can’t be. His team’s nearly finished here. A few more weeks, a month at the most, and then Citadel leaves. Everyone goes back to their lives.”
“You sound pretty certain of this.”
“I’m just trying to be realistic.”
I said it lightly, but to me, it still felt heavy. A month, I could survive. A month, I could be grateful for.
“There’s a bright side, honestly,” I said. “This way, I don’t have to sit around wondering whether I can keep a guy like that. He leaves on a schedule. The question answers itself. I get the good part and skip the part where he works out he can do better than me.”
I meant it as a laugh line.
Alyson did not laugh.
She let go of my arms and stepped back, and the delight drained straight out of her. And what took its place was something I liked a good deal less.
“Say that again,” she said, quiet now.
“Say what?”
“The part where he works out he can do better than you.”
“It was a joke.”
“It was not a joke, and I want you to hear whose voice it was.” Nothing playful was left in her face at all. “That was Gregory. Word for word. That is Gregory Haines, years later, still living rent-free in your head and walking out of your mouth like it’s a thought you had yourself.”
“That’s not—”
“It is. He said that to you. I was there for the wreckage after. And you’ve hauled it around so long you’ve stopped realizing it isn’t true.
” She moved back in and took my hand. “It was never true, though. It was a small man saying something ugly to a woman who was miles out of his league so he could feel bigger about leaving her.”
I looked at my best friend. She’d held my hair off my face in a bathroom our second year. She’d driven four hours to sit on my apartment floor the week the Gregory thing finally died. And she was looking at me right now like she’d square up with a ghost if it would do any good.
“You’re right,” I said. “Okay? You’re right. It’s an old tape on a constant loop. I’ll knock it off.”
Her shoulders came down half an inch. She wanted to believe me, so she chose to.
“Good,” she said.
Inside, where she couldn’t reach, I didn’t believe a word of it. Not one. She could name the voice all she wanted. Naming it didn’t make it a liar. Gregory had said it, but no amount of Alyson loving me was going to make me believe it was false.
“Come on.” She tugged me toward the mess tent. “You missed breakfast, and you look like you could use some post-workout calories,” she said with a smile and a wink.