Chapter 17
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
ALLY
W e taught the kids how to do a “bear hang,” in which we loaded our food into a duffel and hoisted it into a tree, out of the reach of bears. There were bear boxes at the campsite where we could put the food, but Clay was right—the kids loved the idea of hanging it, so we decided they could put some of the rations up in the trees for the night.
“You’re sure we’re good here too? No bears this weekend?” I asked quietly while tying a rope to a bag of food. We were perched facing each other on a fallen log, retying some of the knots the students had done their best to perfect. Unfortunately, a few of them were too loose, and a few students had packed way too much into their nylon duffels, making them unwieldy to hang.
We’d taught them the basics, but now we needed to get real.
A group of kids stood a few yards away, laughing and tossing their food bags back and forth like water balloons. We’d done pretty well keeping them on track all day and making them follow instructions, so giving them time now to get their excess energy out didn’t seem to hurt.
Clay laughed. “You know I can’t guarantee where bears are going to go.”
A loud collective groan sounded when one of the food bags hit the ground with a thud. “Dude, that bag had all the fruit,” a guy from the football team scolded.
“Bruh, you shouldn’t have thrown it so hard. It’s not fourth down.”
They opened the bag and inspected a few bruised apples before tying the bag up again and resuming their game.
“I do know that,” I said. “Which is why I don’t understand why you keep telling me we’ll be fine.”
“Because you keep asking. And we will be fine. Even if a bear comes through. As long as you’re not hiding cookies in your tent, a bear isn’t going to come looking for food.”
I stopped working on a particularly stubborn knot. “I would never.”
“Good girl.” His gruff voice sent a shiver down my spine as I imagined him saying that in all sorts of different circumstances, all of them sexual. My face heated at the thought, and I sincerely hoped Clay’s wilderness skills didn’t include mind reading.
“So, I should’ve asked...how was your date?” Clay’s smile was forced. The rest of his face showed signs of painful discomfort.
I stopped working on the knot and glanced behind me, thinking he must be talking to someone else. I saw only trees and rocks, so I turned back to ask Clay what he meant. Then I realized...
“Oh, Louie? The animal-hating architect? Yeah, I decided not to go.” The fact was that I’d never intended to go. It had only been one more effort to draw a clear boundary between Clay and me, and I was wanting that boundary less and less.
Was it my imagination that Clay’s face calmed? Did he seem relieved?
“Huh. Why not?”
I shrugged. I didn’t feel like explaining my reasoning to the hot man who smelled like smoke and cedar bodywash and whose muscles flexed each time he wound up a coil of rope and tossed it over a branch. Mainly because he was the reason.
“He isn’t the one I want.”
His eyes settled on me with an intensity I hadn’t seen since the night we spent in his yard. As much as I’d spent the past week trying to avoid just that intensity, it startled me how much I wanted to see it now. How much I needed to see it.
“Okay, then.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but there was no time to investigate it because three female students came running over. “Ms. Dalbotten, Mr. Meadows!”
They talked quickly and talked over each other, but the gist of the situation was that their friend Jayne wasn’t feeling well. Jayne was an awesome drummer in the high school band, and I knew she had a lot on her plate.
I popped up from the log and hurried over to the tent where Jayne lay on top of her sleeping bag, face flushed and forehead hot with signs of a fever.
“I really want to stay. Please.”
Clay looked to me, the presumed expert on wilderness first aid, which was certainly not required here. This was simple cold and flu knowledge, but I quickly ran through some basic assessments to make sure Jayne hadn’t spiked a fever from heat exhaustion or an infection.
Walking her away from her concerned friends, I found a quiet corner of the campsite where she could sit on a tarp in the shade. The listless way she slumped to the side and her pink cheeks told me her fever was probably over a hundred, but I still sent Clay to my tent to grab the medical kit I’d brought.
“It’s in the outside pocket of my pack, the gray one right outside the light green tent.”
Clay jogged off toward the tents, and I focused on Jayne’s sad, flushed face. “I know there’s probably a rule that says I need to go home, but...” Her lower lip trembled, and she swallowed back her emotions. “Is there any way I can stay? I’ve been looking forward to this all year long.”
“You want to be with your friends.” I nodded, remembering that feeling in high school of not wanting to miss out.
She shook her head. “I want to be here in the mountains. I need it. School’s been so stressful this year and I just feel like...” She stopped to catch her breath, and she shook her head again. On a long blink, she swallowed hard, and I began to see that there was something else going on with her.
I reached out and put a hand on her knee. “You okay?”
She blinked a few more times, then nodded her head. Her downtrodden expression said otherwise. “Yeah, pretty much. But, you know, this year hasn’t been the best for me.”
I knew a little bit about it because her mom had called the school to let us know Jayne’s dad had moved out. I’d been keeping an extra eye out for her, but she’d seemed to be in good spirits at school, hadn’t changed friend groups, and hadn’t let her grades slip, as far as I knew.
But I also knew kids worked hard to make sure the surface impression they gave hid whatever they didn’t want seen. Just like the battle Clay had fought silently for so many years. Still waters ran deep, and I felt for Jayne, just like I felt for Clay.
“Yes, I know. Is there anything I can do to help you?”
She tilted her head back and seemed to be studying the branches overhead, but when she looked back at me, her eyes were more glassy than they had been a moment before. I felt for her, trying to hold back emotions that probably had little to do with coming down with a fever.
“I just don’t want to leave. Being up here, this is exactly the break I needed. I just want to breathe the clean air up here and clear my mind. I’ll stay far away from everyone, I promise.”
Still sitting, she leaned back on her hands and lifted her face toward the sky. Despite the tree canopy, the sunlight crept through, dappling her face.
I looked up as well, taking in the majestic trunks and leaves. She was right—there was something centering about being out here. I wanted to find a way to let her stay, but Clay and I would need to bend a few school rules, and I didn’t know how he’d feel about that.
“Sit tight a minute, okay? Let me see what we can work out.”
She nodded and I left, intercepting Clay on his way back from my tent and guiding him out of Jayne’s earshot.
He held up my red first aid kit, which was the size of a jumbo bag of chips. “This is heavy. You carried this in your pack?”
“No such thing as too heavy when it comes to safety.” It didn’t weigh that much. The bag was more awkwardly large than heavy, and I’d had to forego an extra fleece pullover in order to make it fit.
“All my sound words of advice and she learns nothing.”
“Hey, I learned a few things. Especially that if you could carry a six-pack up to a lake, I could carry a few bandages.”
I found myself not wanting Clay to see me as the anti-bug scaredy-cat who couldn’t hold her own in the woods. Maybe I’d gone slightly overboard packing some extra instant ice packs, rolls of bandages, and enough water purifying tablets to make Tennessee’s entire water supply safe for drinking. But if my wilderness first aid skills ended up being needed, I didn’t want to come up short.
Clay started to walk over to where Jayne looked slightly less distressed sitting in the shade, but I put a hand on his arm to stop him. I wasn’t expecting the zing of awareness when I felt his muscles flex beneath his shirt. His eyes shot to mine and I knew he felt it too.
Removing my hand, I stuffed it in my jacket pocket and tried to ignore the unexpected warmth spreading through my veins.
Maybe I had a fever too. These things could be contagious.
“Is there any chance we could bend the rules and let Jayne stay for the rest of the trip? We can quarantine her from the others but at least let her get something from being out here. She did hike all this way, after all.”
His quizzical look turned to distress. Clay wasn’t a rule bender. “I don’t think the school administration would approve. We’re supposed to send her home.”
“Yes, but that would mean one of us hiking down with her and the other supervising nineteen kids. Does that sound like something anyone would want?”
“It’s not a long hike,” he said. Ever logical.
“I think it’s important for her to stay. I’ll go to bat for her. I’d love the chance to get back at Pin Dick by making decisions without him.”
His eyes widened slightly as he caught my drift. “Details, Alexandra.”
I shrugged. “I told you. The lunches. He’s creepy. And vindictive.”
Clay waited as though I might say more but I didn’t want to tell him my whole maddening history with our school principal, so I took the opportunity to untie and retie my hiking boot.
“That’s all you’re going to give me?”
“For now, yes.”
“How about explaining why you think it’s important for a sick kid to stay on the trip.”
Glancing around to make sure no students had snuck up behind us, I confirmed we were still out of their earshot. “Jayne and I were talking a little bit and I got the sense that staying here is about more than just FOMO. It feels important for her to be here. I think she needs it. Like, really needs it. For her mental health, if nothing else.”
That got Clay’s attention. “She say that specifically?”
“Her parents just split. It’s senior year. You know how stressful that gets for these kids. She almost broke down in tears telling me how much she wants to be here. These kids need to be out here breathing this air. It’s some good shit.”
The smile began creeping across Clay’s face like the first rays of dawn that don’t want to wake the neighbors. Before I had time to duck and cover, the full force of Clay’s smug grin was assaulting me with its damned beauty.
“You’re a convert. You love it out here.”
“I do. I love it.”
“It didn’t take anywhere close to a year.”
“Needing to be right all the time is not one of your more charming attributes.”
He kept on grinning, not giving a crap. “I don’t need to be right all the time. But I’m glad I’m right about this.”
At that moment, we heard a splash in the lake, and both of us turned in the direction of the noise. “Any chance that was a belly-flopping fish?” I asked hopefully.
Clay shook his head. “Doubtful.” When we heard the second splash, we started moving in the direction of the lakeshore.
“You think they’re swimming?”
“We’d have heard a scream if they were. That water’s fifty-eight degrees.”
Before I could ask where Clay came up with his precise temperature estimate, we stepped past the last tree blocking our view of the lake. A few yards in the distance, a half dozen kids stood on the lakeshore, some bent down searching for stones, the others testing their throwing arms and rock-skipping abilities.
The next stone to skitter across the lake skipped twice before dropping into the water with a similar splash as we’d heard earlier. “I thought that was going at least four,” Miles said, bending down to hunt for more flat rocks.
“Dude, not with that throwing arm,” Cassius mocked, cocking back an arm and letting his rock fly. It skipped three times and plopped into the lake. “That’s how you do it.”
I leaned toward Clay, hoping he’d agree with me about Jayne.
“Can we say we made a judgement call that the hike down would be more dangerous to her health than staying overnight? Reassess tomorrow?”
“You’re the one with the medical expertise.”
“I need to answer to the principal for my decision.”
“I’d defend you against Pin Dick if it came to that.”
A part of me really wanted to see him do that. I was so busy imagining Clay standing up in a court of law giving testimony to Pindich that I almost didn’t hear what he said next. “Since we’re out in the fresh air, she should be fine if she stays six feet away from the other students. I don’t want to make her feel like an outcast, but of course, she shouldn’t share a tent with anyone else.”
He was looking at me meaningfully, and it took a minute to catch his drift. We hadn’t brought extra tents.
“Oh.”
“It’s fine. She can have my tent and I’ll sleep outside on the ground.”
“You can’t do that. You’ll get eaten alive by bugs, for one thing. Plus, it’s cold. You’re the one who stressed the importance of the tent shelter.”
“That was more for the kids.”
I shook my head. “No way. You can share with me. We’ll just flip around so your head is by my feet to give us a little privacy.”
“You really think I want my head next to your feet after you hiked up here in stinky boots?”
“Fine, enjoy getting bitten by mosquitoes. Too bad I didn’t bring any hydrocortisone in the first aid kit to help with the itching.”
“I apologize. I’m sure your feet smell lovely.”
“They do.”
“Fine.”
We’d share a tent like two normal adults, and I’d go home after the trip and sleep for a week. Because I sure wasn’t going to get any sleep for the next two nights, trying to maximize the distance between me and a man who made my heart pound every time he touched me.
So. Not. Fine.