Chapter 3
STACIA
The sandwich was terrible.
I'd made it that morning—turkey and Swiss on wheat—and it had spent the last nine hours in a cooler that had given up on being cold around hour four.
The bread was soggy. The turkey had that iridescent sheen that meant I was either going to be fine or violently ill.
The Swiss cheese had sweated through the plastic wrap and fused with the bread in a way that suggested they were now one organism.
I ate the whole thing because Duff was sitting fifteen feet away eating what appeared to be actual food—something from a vacuum-sealed pouch that he'd mixed with creek water—and I would rather have choked on bad deli meat than admit my dinner was a failure on top of everything else.
He didn't comment on my sandwich. He didn't comment on much. He ate, cleaned his mess kit, and leaned back against the tulip poplar with the unhurried ease of a man who'd spent a thousand nights exactly like this one.
The heat hadn't broken. It was dark now—fully dark, the kind that didn't exist in Charlotte, where there was always a streetlight or a parking lot or the blue glow of a phone screen somewhere nearby—and the air was still warm and close, pressing against my skin like a damp cloth.
I'd changed into a tank top and shorts so thin they were barely more than underwear, and I was still too warm. Sweat collected in the bend of my elbows, the backs of my knees. The sleeping bag was rolled up inside the tent, useless.
But the woods at night. That was something I hadn't expected.
Fireflies were everywhere—drifting up from the ground in slow pulses, lighting the tree line in scattered gold.
The cicadas had built to a full wall of sound, layered with tree frogs and the distant rush of the creek Duff had found earlier.
Above the canopy, stars showed through in patches, more than I'd ever seen, thick and dense enough that the sky looked textured.
"I can't stay in this tent," I said, because I'd tried. I'd lain inside it for fifteen minutes and it was an oven, the nylon trapping heat like a greenhouse. "It's too hot."
"Sleep outside," Duff said from across the clearing. "Ground's dry. Lay your bag flat and sleep on top of it."
"What about bugs?"
"They're mostly after the light. Stay away from the flashlight and they'll leave you alone."
I pulled my sleeping bag out of the tent and spread it flat in the clearing, about halfway between my tent and his spot under the tulip poplar.
When I lay down on top of it, the air felt immediately better—moving, barely, a faint stir that carried the smell of warm honeysuckle and creek water.
The sky opened up above me, huge and close.
"What about bears?" I asked.
"Food's hung. You're fine."
I could hear the almost-smile in his voice even in the dark.
The quiet stretched out between us—not silence, because the woods were anything but silent, but the quiet of two people who had stopped talking without it feeling like something was missing. I lay on my back and watched the fireflies drift.
"Can I ask you something?" I asked.
"Go ahead."
"Do you do this all the time? Sleep in the woods?"
"When I can." A pause. "It's where things make sense."
"And things don't make sense anywhere else?"
He was quiet long enough that I rolled onto my side to look at him. He was lying back against his pack, one arm behind his head, watching the canopy. The fireflies caught the line of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulder.
"People don't make sense," he said. "The way they complicate things that don't need to be complicated."
"And out here?"
"Out here, everything is what it is. The creek runs or it doesn't. The trail's clear or it's washed out. Nothing out here is pretending to be something else."
I understood that more than he probably knew. My entire life in Charlotte was pretending—pretending the major was right, pretending the classes mattered, pretending I had a plan when the plan had always been someone else's and I'd just gone along with it.
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the folded syllabus. "Come here."
He turned his head. In the dark, I couldn't read his expression, but I could feel the weight of his attention. He got up, crossed the clearing, and sat beside me on the sleeping bag. So close. Close enough that the heat of his body added to the heat of the night, and I didn't mind.
I held out the list. He took it, and I turned on the flashlight and aimed it at the paper—just long enough for him to read. The light drew a cloud of tiny moths that scattered when I clicked it off.
I knew what he'd seen. Eleven items in my handwriting—some practical, some ambitious, all of them things I had never done.
Eat at a restaurant alone.
Drive somewhere new with no plan.
Go camping alone in the mountains.
Learn to change a tire.
Swim in a river.
See the sunrise from a mountain.
Tell someone the truth about how I'm doing.
And near the bottom, in smaller handwriting, the one I hadn't been able to write at full size.
Have sex.
He refolded the paper and handed it back. No comment on the list. No comment on the last item. He just returned it like it was exactly what it was—something that belonged to me.
"College isn't working," I said. "I'm heading into my senior year, and I still don't know what I'm doing there.
I waited two years after high school to even start because I didn't know what I wanted, and I still don't. I picked my major because my mom's friend said it was practical.
I picked my classes because my advisor said they'd look good.
I picked my dorm because it was the cheapest option.
I'm twenty-three years old, and nothing I've ever done has been because I wanted it. "
I tucked the syllabus back in my pocket. The paper was warm from his hands.
"The list was the first thing I chose. Every item on it. Nobody told me to write it. Nobody approved it. I just—" I stopped. "I needed to know if I could want things. On my own. Without someone telling me what to want."
The cicadas pulsed. A firefly drifted between us, close enough that for a second his face was lit in gold—eyes steady, jaw set, the expression of a man who was listening like it was the most important thing happening in the world.
"You drove four hours to camp alone in mountains you've never been to," he said. "In a car you didn't know would make it. With gear you'd never used." He looked at me. "You can want things."
My throat tightened. It wasn't what he said. It was the way he said it—like it was obvious. Like the evidence was already in and the verdict wasn't even close.
"I'm terrible at all of it, though," I said.
"You're new at all of it. That's different."
The heat was everywhere—the air, the ground beneath the sleeping bag, the narrow space between his body and mine. I was looking at him and he was looking back, and the fireflies kept drifting up around us like the woods were putting on a show neither of us had asked for.
My body had been tracking him since the moment he walked into the clearing.
The width of his hands when he set up the tent.
The way his forearms moved when he strung the bear hang.
The low register of his voice when he said my name.
Every piece of information filed away somewhere below conscious thought but felt constantly, a low hum beneath my skin that had been building for hours, layered over the heat until I couldn't separate one from the other.
"I've never been with anyone," I said.
The words came out direct and unvarnished, dropped between us like a stone in still water. I hadn't planned to say it. I hadn't planned not to. The dark and the heat and the way he listened like nothing I said could possibly be wrong—it just came out.
He didn't flinch. Didn't look away. His expression didn't change at all except for something behind his eyes that shifted, deepened, like a door opening into a room he'd been waiting to enter.
"Okay," he said.
Not a question. Not a reassurance. Just acknowledgment—the kind that didn't need anything added to it.
The cicadas swelled. The fireflies kept rising. And I sat up beside him on the sleeping bag, heart slamming against my ribs, the summer night pressing in from every direction, knowing that whatever happened next was going to be the truest thing on my list.