Chapter Eight
The people who will make tomorrow’s bad canoeing decisions sit around the campfire, lightly stunned from exhaustion and Jasvinder’s simple, unbearably delicious evening meal—fresh wild salmon with homemade dill and caper aioli; plentiful fingerling potatoes with a touch of Brazilian barbecue spice; flame-roasted asparagus glistening with butter sourced from an independent creamery north of Pendleton.
Dessert was a delicate lemon tart that melted in my mouth like morning fog under fresh sunshine.
The combination of sun, exercise, and Jasvinder’s hot chocolate with optional “rations” of opalescent violet-flavored liqueur is catching up to everyone.
Now that McHuge has put away his harmonica and the rhyming song portion of the night is over, the guests are stifling yawns, with the exception of Trevor and Petra, who somehow found the twentysomething energy to go for a romantic evening paddle.
I probably shouldn’t position myself so my peripheral vision catches the way McHuge’s loose ginger curls flirt with the firelight, or the way his hoodie is giving outstanding shoulder. Or, since we’re supposed to be engaged, maybe I should?
I catch him evading my gaze as he brings his mug to his lips, and I think I see…
something in his expression as he turns away.
A flicker like a glow of eyes shining back at your flashlight when you step out of your tent in full dark.
It’s gone in an instant, leaving me wondering whether it was all in my imagination.
McHuge pushes up from his stool. “Hot water at the wash stations in five minutes,” he announces, heading uphill to turn on the on-demand water heaters.
Everyone gratefully levers themselves up. “Put your cushions in the overnight bin, thank you,” I call, jogging after McHuge.
He and I run through the evening chore list—mostly making sure nothing gets wet, catches fire, or tempts the bugs and bears.
Jasvinder’s already packed up the food and dishes to take back to his commercial kitchen in Pendleton, where he does most of the prep.
I scan the clearing, put away Brent’s cushion—no surprise there—and douse the fire with water hauled from the river.
And then there’s no reason not to go back to my tent.
Correction: our tent.
McHuge and I arrive at the same time, both of us stopping awkwardly ten paces apart, like this is a duel.
“You can change first,” he says, indicating that he’ll wait outside.
A gentle raindrop hits the bridge of my nose, then another. Not far away, a flashlight bobs along the path to the groover. We can’t negotiate who gets to use the tent in front of witnesses who think we’re engaged. In love. Banging each other’s brains out.
I lower my voice. “It’s going to pour. We should both go in, or one of us will end up steaming up the entire tent.”
He blinks, crooked eyebrow reaching for the sky.
At least it’s dark enough that he can’t see my burning cheeks. “Oh, for god’s sake. You know I meant we’re going to get wet.”
I wouldn’t have thought that eyebrow could go higher. It can.
“I mean rained on ,” I snap, stomping to the tent. Perching my butt inside, I pull off my boots and tuck them under the overhang before scooting my legs through the door.
The sound of McHuge zipping the flap closed feels uncomfortably final.
And then it’s just the two of us, looking anywhere but at each other.
Our domed tent with its tight, angular rain fly isn’t like the client tents with their miles of headroom and luxe textures.
McHuge thoughtfully got a six-person size with front and rear entrances, but it still feels small with both of us in here.
It would be small with just him, his stooped head threatening to bash the orange nylon ceiling every time he turns to avoid my eyes.
There’s barely room for our backpacks, our camp cots—no fancy bedroom furniture for us—and the microscopic twelve inches I insisted on putting between our cots after McHuge hypocritically wanted them to be closer together than the guests’ beds.
McHuge drops onto his cot, facing the back entrance. “You go first. I won’t look.”
We should have discussed a lot more in advance. I didn’t think to put a Just One Tent Protocol in place, but I feel its absence now.
“We’ll take turns. You go first tonight, I’ll go tomorrow.” I flick on the solar-powered lamp, hang it from the loop at the tent’s peak, and reach into my backpack for my e-reader.
It’s a long minute and two fake page turns before he believes I mean business. I don’t love that I’m making him uncomfortable, but I can’t handle an entire summer of his automatic self-sacrifice.
I hear the uncertainty in his movements: a shift of weight as he makes sure I’m not looking, a rustle of ripstop nylon as he leans forward, then stands up.
It was a mistake to grab my book instead of my headphones.
The night we hooked up, I left the room to take a shower and told him I hoped I’d come back to find him naked, which I did.
I didn’t see him getting undressed, much less hear him, so now I have no reference point for the whisper of his shirt and the snap of his pants, the chime of his ring against some metal fitting on his pack, the unmistakable sound of skin on skin as he puts on whatever he wears at night.
He makes a sound as he settles into the warmth of his sleeping bag, a low breath of comfort and pleasure.
Suddenly I’m not in a brightly lit tent, politely facing away from him.
I’m back in a darkened room, his face framed by my thighs, my soul pinned by that same sound, held firmly by the deep weight of it.
My skin shivers in a wave from my heart to my fingertips.
“I’m good,” he whispers, and I think about how many things those words can mean when two people are alone together. We’re talking to walls instead of each other, the familiar antagonism not feeling half as safe as it used to.
I set down my book to grab my sleep shorts and shirt. Much more of him is covered than if he were chopping wood in his overalls or skinny-dipping in the river, so it’s not wrong for me to face his side of the tent while I change.
He’s on his side, his curls caught in an elastic at his nape, tense shoulders golden where they’ve caught the sun, then suddenly pale where they haven’t.
His gear is a touch messy in a way that’s untamed and endearing rather than sloppy, because he’s clearly trying to get it together.
He’s left his backpack unzipped, his things peeking out the top: a red-and-black checked overshirt, a beaten-up pair of Levi’s, a black beanie, and a couple of those small drawstring sacks outdoor stores sell as backpack organizers.
A carabiner clipped to an axe loop holds his bone necklace.
The pendant is a salmon vertebra, I’d guess.
A peace sign is clumsily etched inside its round, concave body, like someone used a woodburning tool.
The largest backpack pocket, also unzipped, bares the edge of a battered hardcover notebook and a pair of black-framed glasses that look adorably nerdy. I immediately want to see who he is when he’s wearing these.
I turn away instead. “You want the lamp on?”
“No. I’ll probably go to sleep after we talk.”
He sounds tired. Lucky him. I’ll probably lie awake, every nerve ending angry from whatever he’s about to say. It’s not going to be like the hospital , I tell myself. We signed the paperwork; I have the right to purchase my percentage, and no one can take that away. I’m sure of it.
But I was sure about other things, too. My clinic. My mom.
I flip the light off and climb into my sleeping bag by feel. “Let’s get the fight over with, then.” The client tents are a reasonable distance away, but we’re both keeping our voices down.
In the dark, his sigh is so close. “Not everything has to be adversarial, Stellar. I’m not upset about today. Tipping is simply a sign that we need to do better.”
“I know my whitewater technique is a little rusty, but—”
“It’s not our technique!” He so rarely breaks through his calm persona that his passionate whisper hits like a shout. “It’s that I can’t read you. I can’t predict what you’re going to do, so I do the exact wrong thing.”
His words serve me an unexpected burst of loneliness.
Liz and I could read each other when we used to do overnight trips. I loved knowing what she was thinking when she glanced at a hazard. I loved that she always knew what steering stroke I wanted her to do without me asking. I miss the deep happiness of being out here with someone who knows me.
“I’m sorry I tipped us. That was my fault, and you paid for it. I won’t make a move like that again. But tomorrow we’re paddling solo, anyway.”
“Yes, and as much as we planned for me to do all the instruction and debriefing, I’m occasionally going to need your help.
We can’t discover we have major philosophical differences in the middle of running a rapid.
We need to build trust now . I need you to open up,” he says firmly.
“Stop hiding behind that unbreakable shell.”
“Oh, I’m hiding? Interesting, because which one of us does the Summer of Love act with the clients and then drops it the second we’re together?
Why am I the only person who gets pushback from you, McHuge?
Do you even believe any of that positive affirmation, universal love, higher consciousness shtick? ”
“If you’re asking whether I was born this way, the answer is no,” he says. His flat calm makes me regret being forceful the way a return of hostilities never could. I’ve poked something important to him. Maybe even something sore.
“And yes, I choose to do this, but that doesn’t mean it’s fake. Being different is a gift I give people, Stellar. I make a space for them to be as weird as they want to be in a world where it’s safer to be ordinary.”