Chapter 16 Sadie
Had I known how difficult it would be to paint my nails inside my tent—dim lighting, bottles threatening to tip over every time I shift even slightly, the fumes—I would have saved my manicure session for tomorrow morning down by the lake.
If I were back home, I would be treating myself to a spa day to finish off the emotional cleanse I had back on the cliffside. Instead, I’m doing what I can to pamper myself here—especially since tomorrow’s another hiking day.
I started with journaling, then moved on to dry shampoo. The entire tent smells like a mix of Flowerbomb perfume and lavender pillow spray (and the aforementioned fumes), and I’m feeling fresh in my last pair of clean pajamas.
I brought a five-pack of sheet masks with me (Abby did not get a chance to veto those, as I snuck them in when she was in the other room) and decided on a “nourishing honey” one, which is currently working its magic on my face.
And then, an even harder decision: it took forever to choose a shade of polish—Strawberry Scone, Lava, or Lavender Stems—but the fiery orange-red of Lava paired perfectly with my mood, so I started with that one.
My left hand is shakily painting my right fingernails when I hear yelling so loud it makes me jump, knocking into the bottle of nail polish that was balanced precariously on top of my journal.
Lava polish spills everywhere.
I rush to contain the damage, but it’s too late: my sleeping bag now has a fiery orange splash right where my face will be later tonight, leaving only a little left in the bottle.
The yelling gets louder.
I poke my head outside my tent, looking around frantically for Thorn.
Only when we find each other, and he looks like he’s seen a ghost, do I realize I’m still wearing the sheet mask.
“Sounds like Joshua, doesn’t it?” he asks as I rip my mask off.
We listen together, trying to make out the words.
As soon as the second voice enters the picture, we have our answer.
“Definitely Joshua and Zoe,” I say.
He scowls. Something about it feels intimate: like a peek behind the curtain of his trail guide persona, a flash of how he really feels about the other hikers and their drama.
I follow him over to their clearing, partly because I don’t want to be alone back at ours, but mostly because I’m nosy.
Zoe disappears into their tent before she sees us, and half a second later starts heaving things out of it.
A sleeping bag.
A pillow.
A pair of boxer briefs.
A mass-market paperback of Jurassic Park that nearly hits Joshua in the head.
“Find somewhere else to sleep tonight,” she says tartly, then zips herself in without another word.
Joshua stands there, stunned.
I’d be stunned, too, if Jurassic Park had just nailed me in the temple in the process of getting unceremoniously kicked out by the person I was engaged to.
“Hi, hello,” Thorn ventures. “How can I help?”
Joshua squints, trying to make out where Thorn’s voice came from. We’re in relative darkness—Joshua and Zoe have an LED lantern illuminating their corner of the clearing, but we’re just outside its glow.
We step forward so he can see us.
“I need space,” Zoe says with an exasperated exhale as she emerges from the tent. “I’m suffocating.”
Her hand is still plastered with the bandages I put on last night—this is probably not about the ring, then.
I hope I’m far, far away whenever he finds out she lost it.
“You can have my tent,” Thorn offers after a moment.
“Your tent?” Joshua repeats, like the English language isn’t quite computing with all the other noise in his head.
Thorn shrugs. “I like sleeping outside, especially in places like this. It’s yours if you want it.”
Joshua just sort of blinks at him.
Thorn claps his hands together. “Right. Okay. I’ll go get it and be right back, yeah? Sadie—want to help me?”
He doesn’t have to ask me twice.
I follow him back down the trail to our clearing.
“I’m glad we’re sleeping way over here,” I say under my breath.
Thorn gives a little half laugh. “Seriously. I don’t envy Matteo having to spend the night near them.”
We each take a corner and start pulling tent pegs out of the ground.
Attempting to pull them out, anyway, in my case.
“Did you secure these with cement?” I ask, breathless between efforts. “They—aren’t—budging—at all.”
He comes around to meet me, then slides the stubborn tent peg out with ease. “Just needed the magic touch, I guess,” he says, his flirtatious smile making an appearance once again.
“I must have loosened it up for you.”
He smirks. “We’ll go with that.”
“You must really like sleeping out under the stars,” I say as he kneels to fold his tent into a small bundle. “And here I thought I was special when you gave me yours on the first night.”
He glances up at me, eyes sparkling in the moonlight.
If this were a romance novel, he would say something like, “You are special, Sadie.”
And for a split second? I honestly think he might.
But he just grins and finishes packing the tent, leaving me to wonder.
I’m on a yacht, sunbathing and eating grapes straight from the vine against the backdrop of coastal Italy, when a boom of thunder rips me right back to reality.
I sit straight up, panting.
A few fat raindrops land on my tent, and it isn’t long before the patter becomes a full-on downpour.
Thorn.
Thorn was in my dream, I realize—he was the one feeding me grapes.
And now he’s probably soaked to the bone.
I turn on my LED touch lamp and unzip my tent just enough to peek out. Wind and rain whip against my face; I spot him immediately, huddled under his sleeping bag, a poor excuse for an umbrella. I can just make out the scratchy sounds of a weather report coming from a radio somewhere.
“Hey,” I say, loudly enough so that he can hear me over the storm and the forecast. “You should come in here!”
“Sounds like this will probably be the worst of it,” he says. “This heavy part shouldn’t last much long—”
A flash of lightning cuts him off, casting everything in a split-second shock of brilliant white.
“Thorn!” I squeal.
“Okay, yeah,” he agrees, rushing over to climb in with me, lime-green emergency radio in hand. “Sorry, but I’m about to get everything really wet.”
He’s not kidding—he’s dripping on everything.
“I’d offer you some of my silk pajamas,” I joke, “but they’re all on the laundry line right now.” Definitely not any less wet than they were when I hung them out to dry. “It’s a little late for my poncho, but I do have an oversized hoodie—want to try that?”
He glances down at the puddle beneath him. There’s no way either of us will sleep if he gets the rest of the sleeping bag that wet.
“I’ll try it,” he says. “Thanks.”
He peels off his drenched shirt, revealing a torso straight out of my dreams—it’s nothing I haven’t seen before, as he was gloriously shirtless all afternoon at the lake, but it feels different somehow being this close, at night, in my tent.
His athletic shorts are every bit as wet as his shirt; after a moment of hesitation, he takes those off, too.
Don’t stare, Sadie.
Do. Not. Stare.
I tear my eyes away and dig around for my hoodie instead. I’m not at all confident it will be big enough for him, but it’s worth a try.
He tugs it on, and we both laugh.
“Oh, this is a good look for you,” I say. “The black boxer briefs really make it work.”
“And here I was thinking it was the sleeves that made it work.” He stretches out his arms—the ribbed cuffs pull almost all the way up to his elbows, showing off his strong forearms.
“Are you warmer now, at least?”
“Definitely,” he says, though it’s hard not to notice the goosebumps all over his arms. I reach out to rub them away on instinct, and we both look down, registering the contact between my skin and his at the exact same time.
I start to pull my hand away, but it snags his in the process and he holds on.
Stay, his hand says.
So I do.
His fingertips are rougher than mine, but not as rough as I would have expected for someone who lives most of his life outdoors. I look up and find him grinning, watching me.
“What’s the story there?” he asks, nodding to my absolute wreck of a manicure. I never got around to painting the ring and pinky fingers of my right hand.
“A miserable attempt at pampering myself,” I admit. “It sort of turned into a disaster.”
I shift the touch lamp over so he can see the full damage on my sleeping bag.
“Is that what that smell is?” he says, laughing. “I thought maybe you were dissecting something in here.”
“First of all, my best friend will think it’s hilarious that your first thought was that I was dissecting something—she teaches middle school science.
” She’s never made it through a full story about lab experiments without me getting squeamish.
“Secondly…yes. That is, unfortunately, the smell. I knocked into it earlier when Joshua started yelling, and…well. You see what happened.”
He shifts his focus back to my hand, lifts it up to inspect it. His touch sends both shivers and warmth coursing through me.
“And that’s why you didn’t finish painting them? It all spilled out?”
I shrug. “Mostly it’s because I got distracted and fell asleep.”
He runs his thumb over my ring finger, considering it. “Want me to finish it for you?”
It takes me a minute to realize what he means.
“Finish…painting my nails?” I guess. “You?”
He grins. “Why not?”
Maybe he’s thinking what I am: it’s a good excuse to touch me just a little more.
And who am I to say no to that?
I grab the Lava polish only to discover it actually did all spill out. “Well, there went that idea,” I say, turning the empty bottle over in my hands.
“I know we only met recently,” he says, “but would it be wrong of me to assume that wasn’t the only bottle of nail polish you packed?”
Heat fills my cheeks, but I can’t help but smile.
“I’ve got two more,” I admit, holding up the bottles of Strawberry Scone and Lavender Stems. “Though they won’t match the rest of my nails…”