Chapter 24 #2
He straightens his face. Tina turns the hourglass over.
I look into his eyes. Even with all of the time I’ve been spending with him lately, I don’t think I’ve ever looked directly into his eyes like this before.
At least not while there’s no conversation going on.
It feels intimate and a little bit intimidating.
His lip twitches. I can tell that he’s trying to keep from laughing, which makes it harder for me, too.
I pinch my lips together. My eyes start to burn.
I wonder how much time we have left. It feels like it’s already been ages.
“We can’t blink?” I ask.
“You can’t speak, either, so you just lost,” Tina tells me.
“What? But I didn’t know!”
“Rules are rules,” she says. “Time for your punishment. Pick a black card.”
She holds the black deck out to me. I reach for it, but I hesitate. “I’m nervous.”
“It’s not that bad,” Tina says. “Just pick one.”
I grab the first one and turn it over to read it. I start laughing before I can even get the words out. “Climb up onto the roof, get completely naked, and yodel.” Once I’ve finished laughing, I glare at Tina. “I thought you said it wouldn’t be that bad.”
“I’ve never drawn that one before,” she says.
“Do I have to do it?” I look at each of them.
“A rule is a rule,” Oliver says. “Let’s see this naked roof-yodeling.”
I sigh. “I think there’s a reason you can’t find these games anywhere. This was never meant for the public to see.”
I get up off the floor. “Is there even a way to climb onto the roof?”
“There’s a trellis on the back that you can climb,” Ryan offers.
“Is that safe?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Oliver and I used to go up there all the time.”
Oliver and Tina stand up and follow me to the back door. Ryan stays seated on the rug. “I’ll wait right here,” he says.
I find the trellis at the back of the cabin. It looks sturdy enough that I can probably make it up. I grab onto a bar and then the next and I start climbing.
“I can’t believe she’s doing this,” Tina says below me.
“It’s in the rules,” I remind her.
“How much have you had to drink?” she asks.
“Only one glass of wine,” I remind her. “You saw me drink it.”
“This actually seems a little dangerous,” Oliver says. “Maybe you should come back down.”
“I have to do it. It’s my punishment.”
“You can draw a different card,” he says. “You’re not too far up yet. Just come back down.”
I continue climbing. Oliver and Tina’s protests only serve to make me feel more determined to do this. “You and Ryan used to do this all the time.”
“We were seventeen,” he says. “We weren’t thinking about safety, and we got lucky.”
“I should have known better than to play this game with her,” Tina says to Oliver. “Give Priscilla a ridiculous challenge and she’ll take it and run.”
“You’re right,” he agrees. “She is a little…”
His voice is too quiet, so I can’t hear the rest of what he says, but my mind fills in the blank with “obsessive.” I frown.
My heart starts hammering as I climb. Did he really just say that about me?
I tell myself that he didn’t. He must have said something else, because why on earth would he bring that up now?
I decide to ignore them and pretend I didn’t hear anything. I keep climbing until I reach the top. I grab onto the roof and pull myself up over the edge. Once I’m there, I turn around and raise my hands. “I did it!”
I look down, and it finally registers just how high up I am. I start to sweat a little.
“Okay, you’re up there,” Tina says. “Let’s hear the yodeling.”
“Naked yodeling,” Oliver reminds me.
“It’s a little cold,” I complain.
“Seriously?” Tina says. “You climbed up a trellis onto a two-story roof and you draw the line at taking your clothes off? It’s not like this is anything either of us haven’t seen before.”
She has a point. She and I have gotten dressed in locker rooms together since we were kids.
Earlier today, I might have blushed at the idea of undressing up here with Oliver watching, but just a couple hours ago, he had me naked in the shower with his face between my legs.
The only other person around has wisely chosen to stay inside.
“We’ll light a fire when we get back inside,” Oliver says. “Think about how nice that will be.”
I would rather think about climbing into bed and being wrapped up in Oliver’s nice warm arms.
“Or we can get in the hot tub,” Tina says.
“Fine,” I shout down to them. “I’m doing this.”
I strip, dropping my clothes at my feet. Tina laughs down below, while Oliver watches, arms crossed, with a smile on his face. Once I’m completely nude, I do my best attempt at yodeling: I cup my hands around my mouth and call out, “Yodel-aye-yodel-aye-hee-hoo!”
The sound echoes around the valley, followed by Oliver and Tina’s laughter, and then my own. I grab my clothes and dress as fast as I can. Then I get on my hands and knees and I crawl back to the edge and find the trellis.
Once I’m safely on the ground, Oliver pulls me close to him and kisses me. I can feel him smiling against my lips. “I think you might be my favorite person,” he says.
“Might be?” I repeat. “How much competition do I have?”
He smirks. “Let’s get you inside.”
Even though I ask the question as a joke, I don’t like that he doesn’t answer it.
I think about what I thought I heard him say a few minutes ago.
He’s made no indication that he’s talking to anyone else, but I can’t help but think of all the girls he’s brought around in the past. I wonder if he still talks to any of them or if there’s a new one he hasn’t told me about.
I wonder what he would tell her about me.
Am I just some obsessive girl who’s forcing him to go along with this silly ruse for another week, and then she’ll have him all to herself?
The thought makes me feel a little sick.
It’s not like he’s promised me anything.
I knew this when I got into the shower with him earlier.
All we agreed to was a fake relationship.
I don’t think either of us anticipated the physical aspect of it turning real.
I hate the thought that there might have been someone he was talking to before this whole thing started with me.
I hate all of this second guessing, this doubt.
I wonder briefly if I’ve fallen back into the same pattern as before.
Maybe I’ve become so obsessed with the idea of being with Oliver that I didn’t stop to think about any of this until now.
But then it occurs to me that maybe these are the obsessive thoughts that I need to put a stop to.
Oliver hasn’t given me any reason to not trust him.
I don’t even know what he said to Tina. My shoulders begin to relax.
“Did you hear her?” Tina asks Ryan when we reach him.
“I think every lumberjack and mountain man in the valley heard her,” Ryan says. “She kind of sounded like a dying coyote.”
“Hey. It wasn’t that bad.” I sit back down on the rug next to Oliver. “Was it?”
Oliver shakes his head. “I thought it was beautiful.”
I laugh and push his arm. “You did not.”
“Oh, did you think I meant the yodeling? Because that’s not the part I was talking about.”
“Get a room, you two,” Tina says.
“If I remember correctly, we were rudely interrupted when we were in our room,” Oliver says.
My cheeks flush. I hand him the dice because it’s his turn and I don’t want the conversation to continue in the direction it’s headed—at least not until I have him alone. He lands on another flag space.
“Why is everyone but Ryan landing on these spaces?” he asks. “It’s not fair.”
Ryan shrugs. “I’m just really good at this game.”
“Bullshit,” Oliver says with a laugh. “It’s pure luck. You can’t be good at rolling dice.”
He picks up a red card to find out who he needs to answer a question about. It’s purple.
Tina cheers. “This better be juicy, and you better not choose to stare,” she warns him.
He picks up the next card. “What do you like most about this person?” he reads. He looks at me. “This is easy.”
I smile. “Okay, let’s hear it,” I taunt him.
“I really like how spontaneous and adventurous Priscilla is,” he says.
“And how she’s always ready to do something no one else would do, like climb up on a roof and yodel in the nude.
” He pinches his lips together, like he’s thinking.
“But, if I had to choose what I like best about her, I think it would be how determined she is to succeed.”
I smile. I’m not expecting how much thought he puts into his answer. He makes eye contact with me before he looks back at Tina and Ryan.
“I guess that’s why I’m in…” He pauses, then restarts. “That’s why I’m so obsessed with her,” he continues.
Tina and Ryan frown at him. I’m too caught off guard to say anything.
“Oh, that’s… interesting,” Tina says.
She looks at me. I’m incapable of disguising the confused look on my face long enough to play along with this.
I’m not even sure I want to play along. It hurts to hear him using this word, and all but confirms that this is what he said to Tina a little while ago.
I’m reminded that this all started as a game, and I’m not entirely sure where we stand after what happened upstairs in the shower earlier.
I shoot a look at Oliver. He seems oblivious to what he’s said.
“What?” he says with a laugh. “You said it first.”
I frown, confused. I try to think of when I might have said something like that, because I swear that I didn’t…
and then it hits me. He’s not talking about recently.
He’s not even talking about during our fake relationship.
He’s talking about last year when I drunkenly told Tina that I was obsessed with him and then he used that fact to embarrass me in front of everyone at the bar.
He does remember. And worse, he’s using these words to hurt me all over again.
I get up and I storm away. I’m so angry that I can’t even come up with an excuse for leaving.
“Ouch,” Ryan says behind me.