“Aww. I guess you’re so sweet they can’t resist you.” The notion was so amusingly outrageous that I cackled.
He looked around. “What are you doing here? You in the market for new shoes, too? Those shoes aren’t going to be good for hiking and shit.”
Those shoes.I wasn’t sure how he even knew what shoes I was wearing, as my feet were hidden from his view by a stool/mirror thing between us. But he was right. I stepped out from behindthe fixture and examined my sandaled feet. My pedicure was starting to chip. “I packed hiking boots. I just haven’t gotten them out yet.”
When he didn’t say anything, just looked sternly down at my feet—Karlie Carroll probably never let her pedicures chip—I added, “I’m here to buy a couple essentials.” I held up a travel alarm clock. “I’ve decided to take the radical step of putting my phone away for the rest of camp, but I need a way to wake up for sunrise circle, so I’m going old-school.” Next I held up a bathing suit, a utilitarian red one-piece. “And I got this.”
“Don’t you… already have a bathing suit?”
“I need a second one. I’ve been swimming so much that my suit doesn’t dry by the time I’m ready to wear it again, and there’s nothing worse than trying to shimmy into a damp bathing suit.” When he still didn’t say anything, I kept going, for what reason I do not know. I didn’t think of myself as a person who rambled. “So now I’ll have this ugly Target suit for my morning swims and my existing suit for my evening swims.”
“You’ve been swimming in the mornings?”
“Not at the beach proper. Just a quick dip off the dock in our neighborhood.”
“Right in front of my cabin.”
“Yes.” What, did he think he owned the lake outside his cabin?
He blinked. “I gotta go find Jack.” He checked the time—he was wearing an old-fashioned wristwatch, which was, for some stupid reason, charming. Apparently I was into analog timepieces now. Maybe that was a crone thing. Made sense: Weren’t curses always coming due at midnight or princesses going into comas for a hundred days or whatever? A crone needed a way to keep track of this stuff.
“I’m overdue to meet him in the books section,” Teddy said.
“Jack’s in the books section? Why? So he can turn up his nose at everything there? So he can peel the Blair’s Book Club stickers off books he doesn’t approve of?”
“Probably.” He smirked. “See you.”
“Teddy,” I called after him, and he turned, eyebrows raised. I already regretted what I was about to say, but somehow that didn’t stop me from saying it. “I said a lot of stuff last night, and some of it was kind of embarrassing. I was hoping we could keep it between us.” He’d promised as much last night, but I wanted to make sure.
He came back toward me. “So you had some shitty dates. Who am I gonna tell?”
“Jack?”
“Nah.” The way he said it, as if Jack wasn’t worth telling secrets to, gave me a little thrill. “Anyway, right back at you.” He pointed at me with the orange not-Crocs.
“What do you mean?”
“I told you some embarrassing stuff, too.”
“Well, I can say, ‘Right back at you,’ too. Who amIgonna tell?”
“The tabloids? ‘Disgraced Musician Walks in on Influencer Girlfriend Cheating.’ They’dpayyou for that scoop.”
“Oh, well, in that case…” I lifted my phone to my ear and pretended I was talking on it but cut off the joke when I saw something flash in his eyes. Just for a second, but it looked an awful lot like hurt. “Just kidding.” I slid the phone into my purse. “You know I’d never do that.”
“Do I?”
He had a point. He didn’t know me, not really, despite mydrunken confessions. “You do,” I said firmly. “You might not like me, but you can trust me.”
“Who says I don’t like you?” The question came out with a hint of cockiness, of challenge. He was back to his old self.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The feeling’s mutual.”
“Well.” He softened. “You can trust me, too.”
The weird thing was, I knew that I could.
Little Women, but with dancing wasn’t going superwell, and the kids could sense it. It wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t really coming together.
