Chapter 13 #3
He pointed back at the smoke, still steadily rising from the clearing. “If you can look at that and tell me it doesn’t creep you out a little bit I will happily accompany you on your trip to figure out what it is. But I think you’re a little more freaked out than you’re letting on.”
I assessed him. His rising and falling chest in my eyeline and his eyes focused on me. I may not be brave about visiting the hermit, but I could be brave about something else.
“Counterpoint—” I wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled him down into a kiss.
He exhaled when our lips met, tension released from his body and his limbs relaxed as they pulled me closer into him.
Heat, not only from the mid afternoon sun, built between us.
My spine was a tight coil about to unspool at any minute.
Every kiss, every sign of affection grew easier and easier.
I was lighter. Evan’s hands twirled in my hair as the kiss deepened, his fingers spooling around the curls.
Everything in this part of the woods had a muted glow about it, and I felt like I was glowing too.
This fast burn was flickering and I hoped it wouldn’t go out any time soon.
“You make an excellent point,” Evan said when we parted, one strand of my hair still wrapped around his index finger. “Should we head back to camp or chase after the hermit?”
“Your choice,” I smirked and crossed my arms defiantly. Now it was a game of who would fold first and admit they were a little scared of being out in the woods with ghosts and a maybe-murderous-hermit.
Evan didn’t care to play. “Back to camp we go then, I’m not trying to be hunted down by a strange man in the woods.”
We were nearly at the parking lot when I heard the familiar sound of tires on gravel.
In the silence of nature any man made object was a noisy disruption.
As the sound grew closer, Evan grew more apprehensive.
He lowered his head and slumped his shoulders, fighting his natural heroic stance.
A truck ambled pass, the driver waved to us.
I waved back while Evan turned and faced the woods.
Time was running out where he could be nothing more than Evan from camp and not Evan McLeod.
Time was running out where I could be nothing more than Dani from camp and not Cl0ud3dR0se.
“Scared that seventy-five year-old man is a big Thorndown fan?” I chided.
“It’s probably overkill on my part, I get it.
My life isn’t like Beatlemania where I’m getting chased through the streets.
It’s the stares, the ‘where do I know you from’ comments, the pictures people think they’re being secretive about but in reality are so fucking obvious.
Most of the time I exist in a very specific context for people, but the times when I’m seen as a spectacle and not a person are exhausting. ”
“I don’t fault you for hating it,” I said as I climbed into the car. The way he spoke about his relationship to fame made it seem as though him being a celebrity was breaking news rather than something I was aware of constantly.
Evan slid into the passenger seat. “It’s a very transactional existence.
I’m a part of something people love, and as a result they feel entitled to knowing me.
I can’t fault them and resent the people who’ve made my entire career, you know, the whole ‘don’t bite the hand that feeds you’ thing,” he lifted my hand and kissed my fingers softly.
“But I keep a very healthy distance. I have to.”
I remained quiet, distance was nonexistent between them as his hand crawled over to my thigh.
Unwinding myself from him would be impossible, but if I could make it a few more days I could return home and destroy any proof that I ever put pen to paper on my fandom.
That felt like a viable solution, it wouldn’t be hard to implode my accounts and delete every document.
I’d bash my laptop to smithereens if I had to if it meant Evan and I could keep this thing going between us.
He shook his head, shaking off the conversation and his long-standing discomfort.
“I should have said this earlier, but you’re not forgettable, Dani.
You’re anything but.” He squeezed my thigh a little tighter.
“I don’t know what will happen after this week, but I do know that I’ll always want to remember this time with you. ”
He straightened himself in the passenger seat and cleared his throat. “Anyways, you’ve listened to me drabble on for long enough. I feel like every day I’ve had some variation of the ‘I hate being famous’ conversation. You probably think I’m very one dimensional.”
“Isn’t that what you came here to escape? You can’t help but linger on the exact thing you’ve tried to leave, it’s only natural.”
“Natural, maybe but I’m sure it’s draining. Besides, we’ve hardly scraped the surface of what you came here to escape.”
What had I come to escape? ‘Myself’ was the first answer that came to mind.
“Where do I even begin?” I said with a dry chuckle.
“The ex, Nick, was a driving factor? An emergency level one, no less?” He laughed at himself.
The very Nick who had become a bite-sized, miniature version of a person. Someone I could sweep into a trash can and forget about forever.
“Sort of? The more I think about it, the more I ask myself if I wanted to escape my life entirely, like the breakup served as the catalyst for a quarter-life crisis.”
“You don’t seem mid-crisis to me.”
How could I explain that this crisis wasn’t one large explosion, but a field full of tiny fires burning that I was desperately trying to put out.
There was the breakup. The mourning of my wasted twenties.
The opportunity to publish. My loss of creativity.
The world and my relationship to it changing.
The fanfiction. It always came down to the fucking fanfiction.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“Well I have plenty of time.” Evan crossed his arms behind his head and leaned back into the car seat headrest.
I didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t know which parts of myself I could safely peel away without exposing the messy, disgusting core. I wanted to make myself known to him, but there wasn’t a clear path as to how.
After a few beats of my silence Evan leaned forward in his seat and ran his fingers through my hair.
“I want to know you, Dani. I want to approach this like a typical relationship, even if this is anything but. And,” he looked at me intently, “I want to know what chain of events made it so fate dropped you here the same week as me.”
“I panicked,” I said. “I was scared. I was alone for the first time in six years. I couldn’t be left with my thoughts, and I panicked.”
“About your relationship?”
“About everything,” I sighed. “I had to run away somewhere, and this was the only place I felt like I could do it.”
“The place you feel most yourself,” he finished the statement quietly, still holding onto my thigh and rubbing his thumb in circles.
“Yes. It was never really Nick as a person that I mourned, it was always the years of my life that I gave him without question. I’m scared I’d forgotten who I was somewhere along the way.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. The first day and a half I was here I realized I had become excellent at being a chameleon of sorts.
I’d contorted my personality to fit those around me.
I’d stifled myself with Nick for so long I was kind of a shell of myself, but hadn’t realized it.
Now I was suddenly alone, which meant I couldn’t run from the parts of myself I’d kept hidden from others. ”
“And then I showed up.”
And then Evan showed up and sent a shock through my system. I’d lost my solitude— something I’d initially been frustrated by—but now I’d gained so much more.
“Are you a chameleon with me?” he asked quietly.