Chapter Twenty-Six
Now
I paced the kitchen for a few minutes, feeling off-kilter. I hadn’t been truly alone with nothing to do in days, and it was unsettling. Logically, I knew that camp was full of people. I was not by myself in these woods.
But as I looked out onto the back porch, it felt too still. Once again, I was itching for the sounds of my apartment back in Atlanta. The shuffling of feet overhead, even in the dead of night; the sounds of music bleeding through the walls.
And now, with Margo’s words echoing around my brain, I desperately needed something to drown it all out.
I felt two inches tall as I played back just how Margo had completely dressed me down. All damn summer you were using her. She was right. I felt like a fool, and a completely delusional asshole for ever having thought anything different.
Because Steph had made me an offer, it was true. But I’d been the one to accept it. I thought about my mother—what I put her through then by not telling her the truth—and wondered how different things could have been if I’d been honest when I’d had the chance.
I wanted to disappear entirely. I was overcome with the type of shame that seeps into your bones, crushes you into dust.
A distraction. I needed a distraction, and I needed it now. I couldn’t entertain the garbage disposal that was my brain a second longer.
So I would do what I did best, when I wanted to use my hands and not my head. I dimmed the overhead lights, lit a few candles, and opened my mother’s liquor cabinet. Once I found what I was looking for, I set to work. The garbage disposal grew quieter.
At Dogwood House, I was responsible for coming up with a cocktail special every couple of months.
Back when I’d first started—and had basically no experience—Trevor would help me research at night, poring through recipe books and articles on mixology.
Now, I didn’t have to think about it as much. Some things just go together.
I reached out to the cabinet to pull out a glass and hesitated. Was I really going to sit in my mother’s kitchen and get shit-faced alone, on cocktails made from her best gin?
When the strip of light under Margo’s door flickered out, that was enough for me. I grabbed the sweaty shaker and stuffed it in my bag—hesitating only a second before grabbing the bottle of gin, too—and went back outside before I could think better of it.
Then I made my way to Trevor’s cabin.
—
He was pulling a new T-shirt over his head when he answered the door.
His hair was wet, and I could smell his shampoo.
The scent memory was jarring; I thought of so many moments just like this, so many lifetimes ago.
Showing up at his door after my shift, his crooked grins and knowing looks.
Grabbing my wrist and pulling me inside, clothes on the floor before the lights were off.
But that was not how he greeted me tonight. Instead, we stared at each other for a weird moment.
“Greer?” he said at last, as if needing to confirm my existence, while he rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm.
“Shit, were you going to bed?” I said, all traces of heady confidence evaporating. “I’m sorry, this was…Sorry. I’ll go.” I took a step backward, almost losing my footing on the step. His arm shot out, grabbing me before I ate shit on the front porch.
“No, no, don’t leave,” he said quickly. “I just wasn’t expecting—” He squinted at the bulging bag over my shoulder and figured it all out in less than a second.
My brilliant, stupid plan. “Wait, did you come over here to make me a drink?” There was a laugh in his eyes, and I was twenty-two again, and we were bold and in love.
I hitched the bag over my other shoulder, the bottle and the shaker clanking obnoxiously.
“Well, not exactly. Yes, but no. What I mean is, I already made them. Margo and I got into an—argument, or discussion, I guess—and I wanted a distraction. I kind of went on autopilot. And then I realized I’d made enough for two, and so I just thought… ” I shrugged, unsure how to finish.
Trevor was trying and failing to conceal an almost wolfish grin.
“But, um, you should go back to sleep. This was…sorry. I’m sorry. I’m being stupid. Did I say I was sorry?”
“About a hundred times, give or take.” He took a step closer, cocked his head to the side.
“You can come in.” He lowered his voice, and I sucked in a breath.
I had to crane my neck to get a good look at his face.
It was easy to forget how tall he was until I was standing this close to him. “But there are rules.”
“Rules?” My mouth felt like sandpaper. We used to kiss, standing just like this, before one of us said goodbye. Or decided not to say goodbye.
“Yes. Rules.” There was still a smile playing across his lips, but it was smaller now.
More hesitant. “If you come in, you have to swear, on every drink you’ve ever made, that you’ll be totally honest with me.
About everything. Every question I ask, you have to tell the truth.
No matter what. I don’t want any more platitudes or bullshit. Deal?”
I swallowed. The bottle of gin was pressing uncomfortably into my back. “And what do I get?”
Trevor raised his eyebrows. “The same. I won’t lie, either.”
I snorted a laugh before I could stop myself. “That’s not fair. You never lie.”
“Do we have a deal or not?” He crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe, and I had the urge to slap him across the face for still being so annoyingly perfect.
After the shortest of standoffs, I squared my shoulders, snapped “Fine, we have a deal,” and squeezed past him, hearing his low chuckle as he closed the door.
I set to work, using the small island as a makeshift workstation. He pulled out a stool and looked at me expectantly.
After I pulled two mason jars from the cabinet, I fussed with the shaker and the garnish and did everything I could to avoid looking at him. But I could feel his heavy gaze on me, warm and familiar.
Finally, I poured the drinks. If Trevor noticed my hand shaking, he didn’t say anything. He took one sip and smiled, leaning his head back and closing his eyes like he’d never had anything better. “This is fucking good.”
“Really?”
He nodded, taking another sip for good measure. “It’s perfect. What’s in it?”
I shrugged before taking my own sip. He was right; it was good.
Cold and refreshing, like a summer at the lake.
“That’s a trade secret,” I said, before I remembered the deal.
“Fine. Gin, elderflower, cucumber, and lime.” I paused, only briefly.
“I’ve been calling it the Anita. In my head, I mean. I haven’t made it for anyone else.”
Trevor’s expression shifted, and I cut my eyes away so fast that my neck cricked. I realized just how warm it was in here, how I felt claustrophobic and nostalgic at the same time. “Can we drink these on the porch?” I asked, and thankfully, he nodded.
We sat down at the small table as the fireflies chased each other, and for a while, we only listened to the soft sounds of the lake caressing the shore in the distance.
“So, you’re still working at Dogwood House, I take it?” Trevor asked. He dipped his chin at the drink, the condensation dripping from the glass onto his hand.
I took a long sip before I answered. “For the time being. It’s a good job. Pays the bills and all that. And they like me.”
“And this?” He gestured vaguely to the forest, the water, but it wasn’t hard to understand what he meant.
“I don’t know yet.” Simple. But honest.
“Fair enough. It’s a big decision. I did wonder if you might have gone back to school,” he mused.
I chanced a look at him, and he was leaning back in his chair now, eyes fixed on the mountains.
“You used to talk about that sometimes.”
I huffed an empty laugh. “I don’t know what I would go to school for, to be honest. If I go back to the city, I’ll probably stay at Dogwood. It’s just…” I trailed off, searching for the right word. “Easy.”
“Is that really what you want, though? Easy?”
He was staring at me, the casualness wiped from his face. Then I clocked it: He was clean-shaven now. The way he knew I liked him best.
I swallowed. “I don’t know what I want.”
Trevor’s hand flexed, like he might be about to reach for me, but then he curled it into a fist on the table.
“Are you still in Boulder?” My voice was strained, high-pitched.
Trevor squinted at the sky, and several seconds ticked by before he finally answered. “For the time being,” he said at last, echoing me.
It was the gin and his fresh shave that gave me the courage to ask, “Are you seeing anyone?”
This, he answered much faster. “No.”
I hated how this made molten relief course through me. The air between us seemed to crackle.
“Are you?” he countered.
“No,” I said, even more quickly than he had.
I took a serious sip of my drink, big enough that the gin burned my throat. Then I took another. “Any other questions?”
“Yeah, actually,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I want to know what you and Margo have been scheming about. And why you’re arguing.”
My cheeks burned. “We are not scheming, she’s been staying with me. You know how she is—she can be very, um, persuasive.”
“But you’re not friends.”
Part of me wanted to snap at him—How would you know who my friends are these days? But I bit back the urge. “I’m helping her with her story. She works at the Times. We need a great feature.”
“And Margo Pierce, the girl who called us all fucking murderers, is supposedly writing this ‘great feature’? No strings attached?”
I hesitated, and he leaned across the table, so close that our faces were nearly touching. I could smell the gin on his lips. “Tell me what you’re doing with her, Greer.”