Chapter 21 #2
He must have misunderstood. Surely Logan intended for Nate to follow him.
“Quinnie?” An exuberant voice rings out from a distance. “It’s Quinnie!”
My head snaps up. Logan is jumping up and down, waving his arms. His eyelids are drooping under the weight of whatever substances he’s consumed, and he’s wearing a spacey smile.
With all the people between us, I only catch flashes of him—his hair flopping, his nose sunburned, a pair of reflective sunglasses askew on top of his head.
If he’s smiling, and he’s happy to see us, why is he over there instead of over here?
“Come see us!” I shout back.
He shakes his head, which knocks his sunglasses off, then dips below the horizon of people.
Nate groans. “What the fuck?”
When Logan pops back up, a few feet to the right with his now-filthy shades in hand, I yell, “What are you doing? Stay right there and we’ll come to you.”
“Can’t! The show already started and if I’m not dancing in three minutes I’ll explode. It’s my last hurrah!” With that, he tosses his beach ball in the air and bats it toward us, and by the time it lands—a few feet short—he’s slipped away.
Nate breaks the silence that follows. “His last hurrah? Is he dying ?”
“We should follow him.” I push off the fence. “At least we know where he’s going.”
“Wait.”
“He’s clearly not mad at you,” I say over my shoulder as I walk. “He seemed happy to see us. Maybe once he’s tired himself out, he’ll want to grab dinner with us. Or you. I’m happy to hype you up or leave you to it, whichever you want.”
Nate jogs to keep up. “Quinn, stop.” He sets a hand on my arm.
“Didn’t you hear him? He doesn’t want to see us.
Doesn’t want to talk to us. He probably knows why we’re here, and he knows how far off-track we came to find him, and it doesn’t matter to him.
If he doesn’t want to take over the camp, fine.
Do I wish that as my best friend he’d have a straightforward conversation with me about it?
Yeah, but that’s not happening. Maybe we’ve outgrown our friendship, and there’s nothing I can do about that. So let’s just forget it.”
Frustration pulses through me. Nate is giving up on Logan too easily. “Why am I trying harder than you are to make this happen? I don’t know if you even want it badly enough.”
He massages his eyes. “That’s a little cold, don’t you think? This isn’t easy for me.”
Cold. That word catches me like a fishhook, digging in and drawing blood. I blink hard as my eyes burn.
“Fuck,” he says. “No, no, no.” He wraps me in his arms, slipping one hand inside my jacket and cradling the back of my head with the other. “I didn’t mean that, I swear. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
He rocks me back and forth, his fingernails delicately scratching my scalp. His gentleness softens me, even though I wish it didn’t. I hug him back.
“I feel like an idiot,” I say into his shirt. “I’m busting my ass, giving all my energy to this instead of what I should be doing. I’m doing this even though it hurts.”
A cheer goes up behind him as a group of people at the bar behind us takes shots from a long red ski. I can smell the cherry rum.
He stops rocking. “What do you mean, it hurts?”
“Nothing.”
“It hurting isn’t nothing.” His voice is soft.
I tip my head back and force myself to look him in the eyes. “I’m helping you do something that means I’m going to lose you.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, drawing me back into his chest. “Quinn.” It sounds like Don’t.
In Vegas, Nate told me he used to want me. In Denver, he kissed and touched me like he still does. But there are a lot of ways to want someone. It’s a vague word, and maybe it doesn’t apply to us the same way.
“It’s okay,” I say, because someday it will be. My heart is like plastic wrap, stretched so thin it tears. “If you don’t want to look for him, what’s the plan? You tell me.”
He swallows. “Can we just make tonight about us instead of Logan and the camp and figure out the rest in the morning?”
About us? I nod, though I have no idea what the night will look like when he makes it about us. About us sounds intimate. Romantic. But I can’t read anything into it.
It turns out a night with Nate at the Sunflower Sound Country Music Festival looks like this: a cold beer and a hot bowl of ramen as the evening chill creeps into the air, our knees knocking against each other under the picnic table.
A game of Kan Jam with a couple we meet at the activity field, a guy from Dallas and a guy from Kansas City who united in person for the first time this weekend after meeting through a video game.
We all suck, but we don’t stop laughing, and I’m pretty sure we’re going to be invited to their wedding someday.
When I finally manage to toss the disc straight enough for Nate to deflect it into the can, I fall to the ground like I just won Wimbledon. Nate bows to me.
Our new friends tell us the nicest bathrooms on-site are hidden behind the sunflower field, so we make a pit stop there so I can use a relatively clean toilet in a trailer that opens up onto a sea of deep gold, the flowers like starbursts in the dark.
Nate snags us each a warm spiked apple cider before I even mention that my hands are cold, and we drink them on the walk over to one of the smaller stages, where a folksy singer-songwriter is playing.
We stand on the fringes at the back, and we don’t touch but we don’t not touch.
In fact, when I catch a flash of pink tinsel hair—the girl who recognized me earlier—I step away for a second, because I’m supposed to be celebrating my singlehood and I’m pretty sure we look like a couple.
It definitely feels like we’re a couple when the heat of his chest radiates against my back.
When an especially aching lyric gives me the shivers and we make knowing eye contact.
When he angles his head down and says into my ear, “I’m glad we’re doing this together. ”
We don’t stick around to drink or watch the late shows. On our way back to the golf carts, we pass somebody squatting to pee in the bushes, her skirt hiked up to her waist.
“Now is definitely the time to get the hell out of here,” Nate says. And that’s what we do.