Chapter 13
thirteen
. . .
As the sun streamed down on my skin and I felt Evan breathing in rhythm with the lapping lake water, there was one thing I had to admit to myself. It all felt so normal.
My head was resting atop his chest, his arm was draped over my shoulder. We were both warm and tired, both circling the edges of a nap in the sun. It was the sort of feeling I wanted to bottle up to savor forever.
There were a handful of truths I’d processed on our descent down the mountain. Evan’s aforementioned “wild attraction” to me converging messily with my own. The admission that we were both falling for one another. The ridiculousness of it all.
It had been three days. Seventy two hours.
I wouldn’t question his judgment or beg for answers, nor would I doubt my own affection towards him.
Instead, I happily accepted when Evan had asked if I wanted to lay on the dock for a little while after we cooled off in the water.
The red wooden boards had served as an anchor of sorts for this newness unfolding between us.
I had gotten suspiciously good at being in the moment for the last hour—but old Dani, real life, practical Dani, still crept in through the cracks of this idyllic snow globe we were currently in.
We were halfway through the week, and there was no actual talk of what was to become of this once it was over.
He’d implied extending this beyond the confines of camp, but I was rational. I needed a true plan.
If he wanted to keep this all here within the protected bubble of the camp—where no one existed but us—I wouldn’t fault him. Just because he told me otherwise doesn’t mean I can believe it as fact. I’m not unfamiliar with the idea of someone only liking the idea of me. Nick did.
“What’s the story with the tattoo?” my fingers gently traced the outline of the circle on his soft, sun-warmed chest.
He looked down, seemingly forgetting it was there at all.
“Not much of a story, more like I was nineteen, about to sell my soul to Hollywood, and got drunk enough to get a permanent tribute to the motherland. The details of the night are admittedly a little fuzzy. My mam was mortified. And I was terrified I’d lose the job. ”
“You obviously didn’t,” I laughed. “Do you miss it? Scotland?” My vacations growing up were of the tropical resort variety or here at camp.
My scope of the world was embarrassingly limited.
I knew Scotland was rainy, with no shortage of old beautiful buildings.
Beyond that it was a mystery. I fantasized Evan holding my hand walking through cobblestone streets, or standing on a grassy cliff surrounded by sheep.
An alternate universe where we had a simple coexistence.
He sighed, and I felt his chest rise and fall. “Every day. I love New York but it can be so loud and crowded. Up until I left, Edinburgh was the biggest city I’d been to.”
I mouthed Edinburgh to myself to feel the way the word felt. I loved the way it so casually lolled off his accented tongue, I wanted him to list off every Scottish town name he could think of so I could hear how he said it.
“Do you go back often?”
“I try to, between filming and for Christmas, but it’s never the same once you leave. I get homesick sometimes, but I don’t think I’m homesick for a place, more like the person I was before I left.”
“Like you’re a visitor in your own life,” I said quietly.
I didn’t have a homeland laced with fond nostalgia, but I still found myself missing my sterile and empty childhood home and the mall I’d wandered for hours as a teenager.
Evan’s hand had migrated to my head and he was mindlessly playing with my hair as I lay curled up beside him.
“What about your family? Sue is…”
“My mom’s sister. They’re nothing alike,” I scoffed.
“In a good way or a bad way?”
“I don’t have a typical relationship with my mom.
We’ve never really been like mother and daughter.
I was the accident child who she raised out of obligation.
It’s why Sue and I are so close. I used to cry and beg her and Randy to adopt me when I was a kid, whenever my mom picked me up I’d leave literally kicking and screaming. ”
“That explains why you love it here so much.”
“It’s the only place I get homesick for. I dread Christmas every year because it’s the most time I spend with my mom every year.”
“Is it only you two?”
I nod, chewing at my lip anxiously. “My dad died when I was in high school.”
Evan’s thumb brushed against my temple. “Oh Dani, I’m so sorry.”
The distant apologies always felt odd to me.
I mourned my dad, but I mourned the idea of a father figure more than the actual person.
I shook my head, effectively rejecting Evan’s platitude.
“It was tough then, but in retrospect he and I were basically strangers. He was kind, I remember that much, but he was always working. Sue was the first adult in my life who treated me like a person, not a problem.”
“You’re not a problem,” Evan affirmed, I felt his head shake above me.
We slid back into silence and watched the clouds pass above them, save for some birds chirping in the distance and breeze rustling through the leaves. There was complete quiet.
I had made a silent pledge that I would never put pen to paper about any of the formal details of what happened between Evan and I. I could write scribbled notes, poetry that could be separated from the factual events, but their meaning would be mine alone.
I wasn’t sure exactly when the decision was made.
It could have been after he lifted me up off the ground after I tripped, or after he tried grabbing my hand later that evening, or after I rid myself of any of the false walls I built and allowed him to kiss me.
Truthfully, I could write novels about every moment I had lived since Sunday around two p.m. and I wanted, so badly, to immortalize this in the form of my writing.
If I did, everything I ever wrote after would be tainted by the fantasy I was currently living in.
I turned my head to bury myself deeper into his chest, he smelled like the fresh water of the lake warmed by the sun above.
“By the way,” I said through a yawn, “don’t bring up the ‘selling your soul’ thing to Sue, she might actually believe you and not let you come back.”
“So I shouldn’t make a joke that I drink the blood of virgins every morning with my coffee?”
There are moments that seem to exist entirely outside of any true timeline. When one can’t remember if they’re eighteen or twenty eight or something else entirely.
It’s the kind of stretch of time that should last for years, not minutes.
The twenty six minutes Evan and I spent driving from camp to our destination were a perfect example of those sort of moments.
As trees and rocks flew past my SUV in a blur I had to glance over at the passenger seat to remind myself who was sitting beside me.
Every past version of me was on this drive, the angry sixteen year old who was still mourning the loss of a father I barely knew, the infatuated twenty two year old taking young love for a test drive, and now the twenty eight year old cautiously optimistic about slightly less young love.
After laying too long in the sun, I had gotten hot and antsy and wanted a change of scenery.
There were still hours left to kill in the day.
I had offhandedly suggested a drive to a secret location by the other end of the lake.
Evan joked about the possibility of me sacrificing him to the famed hermit, to which I playfully punched him and suggested that I just might.
We stretched and changed out of our swimsuits and as always Evan met me off my cabin doorstep.
Hands intermingled on the short walk to the car.
I kept the location a mystery, though the destination was less of a draw than the journey itself. When Evan got in the car he twisted the thick turquoise heart pendant that hung from a silver chain on the rearview mirror in between his fingers.
“Sue gave it to me, when I was little I’d always say her necklaces were so beautiful and one year for my birthday she mailed me one. I used to wear it all the time but I outgrew it.”
Evan released it and it swung back and forth as they continued deeper into the woods.
I turned up the volume on my running playlist and rolled down the windows.
As we snaked down the dirt road it slowly widened into flat logging roads and the tree cover lessened, sending beams of sunlight through the sunroof.
These roads were less treacherous, but familiar, and I could put my foot on the gas and arm out the window without a single care.
Middle school anthems were interspersed with light conversation.
Either casual observations of the landscape from Evan, a commentary on the previous song, or a random question and answer from each other.
I wanted to know everything about the pieces of him that made him whole, and he gleefully obliged and returned the favor.
Songs would make either one of us smirk and glance at the other, hoping for shared enthusiasm at the track.
Our eyes kept meeting, a silent excitement at the parallel lines of our lives beginning to converge.
Evan’s hand slowly wandered to my thigh, and he was mindlessly drawing hearts with his index finger as the rest of his hand gripped the soft tanned skin of my leg gently.
The same Fall Out Boy song that had sparked my initial curiosity regarding Evan’s interest began playing, and I felt Evan squeeze me slightly harder.