Chapter 5 #3
My face was flushed, from the heat of the shower and the ensuing interaction. Evan and I would soon resemble two pieces of chewed up bubblegum from all this awkward blushing.
He walked in front of me to his stall. I tightened the towel, there wasn’t a chance Evan McLeod was seeing me naked tonight or any other night for that matter.
I stepped into his bathroom, a mirror to mine.
“Sue definitely over complicated it, all you have to do is need to turn this knob to release the water from the tank first and then turn your hot and cold knobs as you wish.” I proceeded to demonstrate—my arms in a T-Rex pose from pressing my armpits down to hold the towel up.
At least I had a chance to prove that I served some sort of purpose beyond being the brooding and weird niece of the camp owners.
A callused palm landed on my bicep. I nearly exploded.
My heart dropped deep into my stomach. A handshake was one thing but this? This was something else. Something horrifying.
His hand lingered there for a moment. Both our eyes darted towards the offending touch, both met the other’s gaze with a similar panicked expression.
Evan rescinded it after realizing what he’d done. “Thank you, so much.” He wrung his hands in front of himself. “Was that Fall Out Boy you were singing in there?” he asked with a smile.
How long was he lurking out there?
“Oh, yeah, sorry I thought you were—uh, everyone was—still up at the house.”
“No need to apologize,” he smiled, earnestly, in a way that made me feel worse about this entire interaction. “Thank you for the help, I’ll see you tomorrow. 8:30.”
Evan slid off his sandals and began unpacking his small Dopp kit of toiletries.
I backed out of the stall and shut the door behind me. A single piece of wood stood between Evan McLeod and myself. The same Evan McLeod that touched me without thinking. I could still feel the ghost of his hand and fingertips.
He was supposed to be two dimensional on a screen, not someone tangible.
I waited for cameras and reporters to pop out of the woods for a “gotcha” moment, clearly someone was setting me up. I could picture the investigative article now— “From Fan Fiction Author to Real Life Stalker: How Cl0ud3dR0se Took Her Writing Too Far.”
There would be endless internet discourse that would follow. I’d be made into an example of the kind of freak that lurked on those fanfiction sites. No camera or reporters jumped out as I walked away from the bathrooms, so I determined I was safe. For now.
When I went back into the cabin I closed all the curtains.
I turned the cabin into a cave and lit all the gas lamps, each churning out warmth with their accompanying light.
I didn’t need any more heat than what my skin was radiating, but I refused to open the windows and curtains until Evan went to bed.
My notebooks stared at me, almost tauntingly so. The idea of rereading the words I wrote caused a sour nausea to creep up my throat.
I laid on the bed, my gaze trained upward as I looked for shapes in the wood.
Moments later I heard the door next door open and swiftly swing shut.
It was barely past nine p.m. Any other evening I would have built myself a fire on the beach and stared at the sparks and embers dancing around for a few hours.
Instead I was hiding out in my cabin from Evan.
What an absolute whirlwind the afternoon had been.
The notebooks were stacked on the table, and in the hidden tranquility of the cabin I could maybe, just maybe, take a peek. I crossed the room and flipped open a random one at the bottom of the stack.
“If love is something that is meant to be forged in fire then I will burn the entire kingdom down for you.”
It was a good line. I knew it was because it was one of the ones most often copy-and-pasted into the comments of the fic with a slew of compliments attached.
It was a line that felt like something slotting into its place in my mind when I first wrote it.
It was a line that made me think that I could actually pursue this writing thing in a broader capacity.
Writing was everything to me. The thought of turning it from a hobby into something more sent goosebumps across my skin in spite of the hot cabin.
What if I could share these words I loved with my name and face attached?
What if I could attend signings and be on panels and have my books be in real life bookstores?
There was a dream life waiting for me somewhere in the distance, clouded with a fog of “what ifs.”
If I could get my shit together, this future that Andrea was pushing me towards could actually be possible, and I could strip myself of anything connected to Thorndown.
Thorndown was becoming a larger and larger problem.
Even thinking about that fictional world with Evan a dozen yards away sent a deep pit into my stomach.
I slammed the notebook shut and tossed it back onto the pile.
I could use the quiet to write, I probably should. But every ounce of creativity had been completely drained out of me.
I blew out the lanterns and went to sleep.