Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Somewhere Along the Way
I don’t see Oliver before I head to bed tonight, but I can see the evidence that he’s been around the house.
His boots are by the front door, fresh dirt caked on the soles.
He must have gone for a walk while Tina and I were in the hot tub.
The game we were playing has been put away, the box tucked back into its spot next to the fireplace.
I go upstairs. I hesitate when I reach the room with the bunk beds.
I look down the hall toward the other room.
I wonder if Oliver is in there right now.
Maybe he’s sleeping, or maybe he’s lying awake.
He’s probably asleep. He’s not as bothered about what happened as I am.
I think about what Tina said. Don’t sleep in separate rooms .
With a sigh, I open the door to the bunk bed room and go in anyway.
I lie down on the narrow bed and stare up at the bottom of the bunk above me.
All week, I had been thinking about this moment.
It was supposed to be the first night that Oliver and I spent together, sharing a bed.
During the week leading up to this trip, I wouldn’t have guessed that things would escalate with him the way they did earlier.
I imagined it being awkward, us lying in bed next to each other, while I pretend that I don’t have feelings for him and we both pretend that we do.
We would lie on our backs, each trying our hardest not to roll too much and bump the other.
My mind would be spinning, and he would probably fall asleep first. Then eventually I would drift off to sleep too, and maybe we would wake up and find that we had both moved in our sleep, and in the cold night found warmth with each other.
But then after what happened in the shower, my fantasy of how tonight might go changed.
I imagined that we would head upstairs to bed together, but we wouldn’t fall asleep.
There wouldn’t be any awkward lying side by side, each of us too afraid to touch the other person.
We would undress each other slowly, and then he would ease into me, and we would spend all weekend like that until the idea of using twenty condoms in two days didn’t seem so ridiculous anymore.
Somewhere along the way, this fantasy failed to address my real feelings for him.
I guess I had this dumb idea that I wouldn’t need to say anything.
We would let our bodies do the talking. There would be an unspoken change from a fake relationship to a very real one, and both of us would somehow know when that change took place and neither of us would have to bring it up.
How na?ve of me to think that would work.
I roll over, facing the wall. I know that Oliver is on the other side. I wonder again if he’s asleep yet. I wonder if he’s bothered at all that I’m not in the room with him. Maybe this distance away from me is good for him and he’ll be over our fight by the morning.
* * *
I wake up to the sound of the bedroom door opening. I’m cocooned inside a blanket and pressed against the wall, so I don’t know that it’s morning until I lift the blanket off my face and see the light coming in through the window.
I look at Oliver. He stands in the doorway, still holding onto the door.
“Haven’t you ever heard of knocking?” I grumble.
“I did knock,” he says. “You didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure if you were in here.”
I watch him for a moment. His hair is messy and his eyes are hooded. “You look tired.”
He rubs his face. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.” He’s quiet for a moment, waiting for me to ask why. I don’t take the bait. He continues anyway. “I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what the hell went wrong last night.”
I’m surprised that it’s bothering him this much. “And what did you come up with?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing. One moment we’re playing a game, and the next you’re storming away from me.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re either really good at playing dumb, or you have a terrible memory.”
I slide out of bed. This room doesn’t have its own bathroom, so I walk past him and let myself into the room that I was supposed to share with him last night. The bed is still made. I wonder where he slept. I go into the bathroom and stick my toothbrush in my mouth.
“And you’re very good at demonstrating how you stormed off last night,” he says. I look up at him. He’s leaning in the bathroom doorway, arms crossed. “Like right now.”
“Maybe you should put those observation skills to use and figure out what you said that hurt me.” I spit out my toothpaste and push past him. I head out of the room and down the stairs.
“Hurt you?” he repeats behind me. “ I hurt you? ”
I turn around at the bottom of the stairs. He stops abruptly so that he doesn’t run into me. “Why are you saying it like that?”
“Like what?” he asks.
“Like you can’t believe that you could have possibly hurt me.”
“Morning, sunshine,” Tina says behind me in a cheerful voice. I look over my shoulder at her. I don’t notice her and Ryan sitting at the kitchen table until now.
“Morning,” I mumble.
“Do you want to continue this conversation upstairs?” Oliver asks.
“Actually, Ryan and I were about to head out,” Tina says.
“For a very romantic hike,” Ryan adds.
Tina giggles and elbows him. “Yes. The most romantic of all hikes. We’ll leave you two lovebirds alone to sort out your quarrel.”
Oliver and I stare at each other. Neither of us moves until Tina and Ryan leave the cabin. As soon as we’re alone, we both start up at the same time.
“What do you mean I hurt you?” Oliver asks at the same time as I say, “How do you not know that you hurt me?”
We both pause. I wait for Oliver to speak next.
“You hurt me ,” he says.
Even though I want to disagree, I know that I have to hear him out. “How?”
“Last year when you shut me down in front of everyone at the bar and then acted like a total—” He cuts himself off.
“A total what?” I prod. “Total bitch?”
He shrugs. “I was going to say asshole. You insult me and make me feel like an idiot every chance you get. How stupid of me to think that anything had changed over the last few weeks.”
“As if you’re not guilty of the exact same thing,” I argue. “And I didn’t shut you down back then. You embarrassed me in front of everyone.”
His brow wrinkles. “That was never my intention.”
“I have a hard time believing that, Oliver. You used what I said to Tina against me. Not only that, but you did it in front of everyone at the bar. That was a real slap in the face.”
“I was not trying to embarrass you.”
“Then what the hell were you trying to do?”
“I was trying to hit on you,” he says.
I scoff. “Yeah, right.”
“Believe it or not, I actually liked you when we first met.” He says this with a scoff that makes me wince.
“Ryan knew, so when Tina told him that you said you liked me or that you were obsessed with me or whatever the hell you said, he told me. I had it all planned out, you know—everything that I was going to say. I guess I thought that if I tried to be funny, it might break the tension and then it wouldn’t be so awkward.
” He clears his throat, then recites what he had planned on saying: “You’re obsessed with me, huh?
I guess that makes two of us.” He sighs.
“And then I was going to ask you out, but of course I never made it that far and all I got out was that stupid first question that probably made me sound like an asshole. So, there I was, standing in the middle of the bar feeling like an idiot after being rejected by you. And ever since, you’ve made it pretty damn clear that you can’t stand to be around me. ”
“Oliver…”
“You know, I just can’t figure you out,” he continues.
“I really thought we had a connection, but every time it starts to feel real, you find a way to remind me that it’s all fake.
Which I guess is my fault for getting us into this situation in the first place, but yesterday…
” He shakes his head. “I don’t do things like that with someone I’m not serious about. ”
“Do you really mean?—”
“And I guess I thought that things were finally different after yesterday,” he continues, interrupting me.
“But then I almost slipped up and told you that I love you, and honestly? I didn’t even realize what came out of my mouth until you ran away again.
Which, admittedly, maybe I shouldn’t have gotten so close to telling you how I feel during a board game with our friends, but I guess I let my guard down.
I didn’t think you would run away again. It hurt.”
We stare at each other while I process everything he’s saying.
“Can you please explain how I hurt you so that I can fix it?” he asks.
I shake my head, swallowing around a lump in my throat.
He sighs. “Then I don’t know what we’re still doing here.” He turns around and heads back up the stairs. I can’t bring my legs to move. It’s like my body is in shock and I can’t get my brain to tell it what to do. It’s not until I hear the bedroom door slamming that I spring into action.
I run up the stairs and follow him into the bedroom. He turns around to face me when I come in.
“I can’t explain how you hurt me because my version doesn’t make sense anymore now that I know your version,” I blurt out.
“I thought that you were being mean. I thought all you wanted was a fake relationship. It killed me every time you kissed me because I was falling in love with you but I knew that it wasn’t real for you. At least that’s what I thought.”
“You thought it wasn’t real for me?” He shakes his head. “Every bit of it was real for me.”
I hiccup around a laugh. “I thought I was the only one who wanted the real thing with you.”
He smirks, and then it turns into a full smile. “How could we be so stupid to not just ask what each other wanted?”
I laugh. “We figured it out now. That’s what matters, right?”