Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Skylar
So the quiet man I was crushing on was seeing me in tighty whities because I forgot my swimsuit at home like an amateur, basically.
It was enough to make me want to pick up my clothes and hug them over my stomach.
But as I snatched my towel off the chair next to the hot springs pool, I peeked, because I didn’t want to see, but I also did want to see his expression when he was looking at me.
Hoping for anything from spacey to neutral, I fumbled as I dried off.
Because he was…
Okay, I wasn’t one of those people who sailed through life seeing interest in everyone’s eyes. We all couldn’t be supermodels or have a killer smolder or be wildly sexy. Some of us had pretty eyes and bodies that didn’t want to get into shape on the outside, even if they were really healthy. And that was great, because I wasn’t out here trying to catch someone who looked perfect, I wanted to earn someone who loved me and I loved right back.
It was a great ideal, but why the hell was I justifying this in my own damn mind?
There was no reason, because Ezra was eating me up with his dark eyes.
Or he was until his eyes slid up and bumped into mine, then he shifted his eyes really slowly over my shoulder and out towards the mountains, like he thought he could fool me.
What should I do?
If this was a very gay beach back home, I would let my clothes dangle from my hand and own my body because it might not look like too much, but it worked great . But even if Ezra were the gayest man in all of creation, he wouldn’t be someplace like that. Gay or straight or anywhere else on the rainbow, he was still himself, and he wasn’t the type.
Torn exquisitely between being elated that my crush had seen me mostly naked and looked into it, and freaked out because maybe he was freaking out about it, I… caved.
Like a big dork who didn’t know what to do when his crush might maybe like him back, or at least be into seeing him mostly naked, I scurried into my clothes and then I… looked out where he was looking too. The view really was worth looking at as the sun rose up over the mountains beyond the reservoir, which was the only reason the hot springs were open this early in the morning. We were close enough to stretch out and hold hands if we wanted to, but far enough apart that he couldn’t hear my slightly faster breathing.
After what felt like a long time, I shuffled my feet and said, “Thank you again for bringing me here.” I wanted him to know that I appreciated the trip and his presence, even if he was freaking out and decided to come up with a fake excuse for why we needed to cut the weekend short and go home right now. “It’s like it’s our secret, don’t you think?”
His short beard shifted and I thought maybe there was a hidden smile under it.
A minute later, he said in a sleep-roughened voice I wanted to roll around in, “Do you… want to make some eggs and then take a hike, maybe? This area gets a lot of tourists through it in the summertime, so I’m not sure how many animals we’ll see.”
“That sounds great,” I assured him quickly. “I can see animals at your vet anytime. Wild animals—or, animals in the wild, I think I should say—would be cool to see, but I live in Colorado now, right? It’s not like the eagles and the moose are going somewhere.”
“Only if they migrate, but they’ll come back,” he said, and this time, he was definitely smiling at me, his neck twisting to keep eye contact as he turned toward the hot springs exit.
I stood breathless for a few seconds, then hurried to catch up to him.
Once we were back at our campsite, Ezra got the fire going again and then I made breakfast while he studied the map of the state park he’d gotten on the way in yesterday. Even though I knew there probably wasn’t a strong or consistent cell signal out here, it was still charming that he was studying it like it had any danger zones marked.
He folded it up when I handed him a plate with half the eggs and veggies I’d made, humming when he saw the salsa I’d added. I tried not to stare while he ate, but it was impossible to ignore how his jaw stretched and flexed, and his tiny noises of enjoyment.
I ate absently, not even tasting the food, but it didn’t matter. We were silent, not something I usually liked, but I didn’t feel awkward or antsy. Random thoughts weren’t begging me to let them free and alleviate the silence either. It wasn’t even self-sacrificing because I thought maybe he was having some feelings about having checked out another man. Well, I was conscious that my apparent contentment gave him space to have feelings.
So, a little bit of credit to me for not trying to make him talk about anything.
“Okay,” he said, scraping the last smear of salsa and a green pepper straggler off his plate and into the fire. “Let’s put on our hiking boots. I’ll carry the water and snacks and all that, since I’m used to hiking and it doesn’t bother me. Do you trust me to pick the trail?”
Gallant, too , my brain whispered.
“With how hard you studied the map, I’d be a fool not to,” I said cheerfully.
My brand-new ability to be quiet and peaceful lasted while we got ready and for a couple of hours as we hiked. Walked, really. I thought Ezra kept calling it hiking to make me feel like I was doing something exciting, but it was just a nice walk. The ground wasn’t flat or anything, but we weren’t in the mountains, either. He let me set the pace since my lungs still weren’t used to the elevation and neither of us wanted me to wheeze the whole time.
“Hey,” I finally said, “can we sit over there for a minute?”
“No problem.”
I perched delicately on a lumpy rock with a sort of butt-sized dip/crack thing in the middle, while he leaned against a tree trunk a few feet away. He tossed me an apple and a single serving sized bag of cashews, which looked like something you’d put in a kid’s lunch.
That prompted me to ask him, “So tell me about your kids.”
“Oh.” He whipped his apple core off into the trees, then wiped his hands on his shorts. “Dov is sixteen, Naomi is thirteen. She had her Bat Mitzvah a month ago. That’s a Jewish?—”
“I’m going to stop you right there,” I interrupted in a perky tone, tossing a cashew up into the air and then catching it in my mouth, crunching happily. “My aunt—my mom’s brother’s wife, I mean—is Jewish, so I have listened to plenty of Torah portions and slayed all those preteen assholes at the Cha-Cha Slide while they celebrated their Mitzvahs.”
Ezra shook his head at me, but it seemed more like he was trying to pretend like I wasn’t the funniest, cutest guy he’d ever gone camping with…
Wait.
He used to go camping with his best friend, who he’d mentioned in a bitter, ex-ish tone.
“I want to ask you a question, but I don’t know how to do it without sounding rude .”
Some of his relaxation drained out, leaving his tight little shoulders rounded as he tensed. But he answered in an even enough tone, “Can’t promise I’ll answer, but go ahead.”
“You used to go camping with your best friend?”
“Yeah, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not rude,” he said dryly, arching an eyebrow.
If I wasn’t so damn curious—and invested, personally, in the answer—I would have given him an epic eye roll and a very snappy, clever comeback. But I stayed focused and said, “I could be way off base, but the way you said that, it sounded kind of Brokeback .”
Making a confused face, he wandered a little closer. “I don’t know what that means.”
Blinking, I replied, “That actually probably answers my question.”
He put his hands on his hips like a camp counselor annoyed by his hormonal campers.
Saving that idea for later , I noted to myself.
“Are you going to explain? It feels like you’re insulting me here,” he complained.
Scratching the undercut on the back of my head, the baby porcupine feeling of the freshly buzzed hairs soothing me, I half-asked, “Not… an insult? Some people might take it as an insult, but I didn’t mean it as one. That would be self-hating or hypocritical, for one.”
“Skylar,” he said, the exasperation mounting, “what the hell are you talking about?”
“Was there something going on between you and your best friend?”
Ezra’s eyes widened and he shook his head sharply. “No.”
I stood up and tucked the cashew bag into the net pocket on the outside of his backpack. “Okay,” I said, trying not to sound skeptical. “There was just a tone like?—”
“No,” he repeated, close to a growl. “The only tone was maybe… frustration.”
No matter if I’d sensed a different vibe, it wasn’t anybody’s right to try to tell anyone else how they felt. If I was wrong, or if I was right and he’d never realized his own feelings might not be pure friendship, it wasn’t my place to try to change his mind.
“My mistake,” I settled on replying. “I guess I see the world through gay sunglasses.”
That made him laugh, just a tiny bit, as he slipped his backpack on, jiggling it to rest in a more comfortable position. “We grew up together and always hung around. Went through shit and had each other’s backs. He moved to Denver last year and things changed.”
I touched his shoulder in light, quick sympathy. “That sucks. I can tell by how you said it that you mean he changed. Or the change showed you something that sucks.”
We started walking again, my eyelashes fluttering when the light wind moved across him and to me, giving me a hit of his amazing scent.
“Maybe,” he said slowly. “Maybe I’ve been putting all the blame on him when that’s not fair either. Not that he’s perfect. I just have more responsibilities and it’s hard for me to get to Denver, and I’ve been mad that he thinks coming home to visit takes too much effort.”
“Things that seem totally normal while you’re in it look really weird once you’re outside of it,” I answered just as slowly, thinking back to the recent interactions I’d had with my own friends back in Florida and how they suddenly seemed different.
He laughed again, this time louder and without any hesitation, free. “I was with Dov and Naomi’s mom for eight years, I know what you mean,” he said. “We were friends for a long time before that and she’s just… the way she is. It never occurred to me that what’s fine between friends isn’t automatically fine between significant others. It was a big shock.”
“Wow,” I said, feeling young. I was twenty-eight, so if I were in, or had been in, an eight-year relationship, that wouldn’t be crazy or weird. But it still felt like such a long time to me, especially since I’d barely met my friends back in Florida that long ago.
“Yeah, well, my kids are the most incredible thing that ever happened to me.”
If I’d thought listening to him talk with such passion and knowledge about animals was incredible, listening to him talk about his kids was a thousand times more incredible.
It was weird, but it made my stomach quiver like he’d said the dirtiest, sexiest thing.
Was this what growing up felt like? Instead of my parents won’t be home until really late making me quiver, now it was my kids are the best ? Or was it just that the part of me crushing on him was really, really into this easy display of love and devotion? What would it feel like to know that Ezra had that same rock-solid, unabashed certainty about my place in his life?
Nope , that was too far.
He might have eaten me up with his eyes earlier, but he’d dismissed the idea that his best friendship with another man might involve any non-platonic elements.
I sighed and reined in my imagination, then started to scour the landscape around us for inspiration to change the subject. “What’s that bird?” I asked in relief, seeing a bird winging across the sky off in the middle distance that wasn’t a crow or a seagull.
“Looks like a red-tailed hawk,” he said.
“Tell me what makes them unique?”
As he did, I tried to separate our budding friendship from my blooming crush.