No. I wasn’t going there again. “I think we should prepare for the possibility that we might have to spend the night here,” I said when Teddy came back from his latest tree-decorating excursion. “And I don’t think you should go off on your own anymore.”
He blew out a resigned breath. “Agreed.”
“When it gets dark, it’s going to getdark.”
“The question is, How cold is it going to get?” he asked.
“Not cold enough to harm us, I don’t think. But probably cold enough to be unpleasant.”
“It’s been so hot at camp so far. There were nights I would have killed to be ‘too cold.’”
“Should we try to make a fire?” I asked.
“With what?”
“I don’t know. Rubbing sticks together? Does that only work on TV?”
“I have no idea,” he said, “but I guess it’s something to do.”
As the ambient light around us dimmed, we went around and collected leaves and twigs and made what looked like a decent approximation of a firebed—neither of us had experience with outdoorsy pursuits.
“I have concluded this does only work on TV,” I said after a good ten minutes of rubbing two sticks together.
He stopped, too, and shook out his hand. “I think maybe you need a flint for this to work?” He paused. “Is that a real thing? I don’t even know what a flint actually is.”
“Remind me never to go onSurvivorwith you.”
“Oh yeah, we’d be dead immediately.”
We laughed and gave up. He came to sit next to me where I was leaning against a tree. We sat in what I would have called companionable silence, except it was more like companionable anxiety.
“Let’s eat the granola bars before it gets fully dark,” I finally said. We’d been holding off, but I didn’t want to die because a bear had sniffed out my Kashi. Teddy tried to make me eat both of them, but I forced one on him. We tapped them together as if we were cheers-ing, and after we ate, we returned to our companionable anxiety.
Eventually, and out of the blue, he said, “That thing you said about contexts. I think I’m freaking out right now because I don’t have a context. Well, notright now–right now.Right now–right now, I’m freaking out because I’m lost in the woods.”
“Maybe you’re lost in the metaphorical woods.” I paused. “In addition to the literal woods.”
He blew out a breath that made his lips vibrate, which I was starting to recognize as something he did when confronted with a perhaps-uncomfortable truth. “Basically. The band that’s been my life for the last seventeen years is dead.”
“And you got dumped.”
“Yeah, but I’m over that.” He waved a hand dismissively. “That’s just a logistical problem at this point, not an emotional one. I need her out of my apartment, but she’s already out of my heart.”
I thought about the lyrics to that “Lemon Tree” song. I thought about how happy he and Karlie looked when he’d appeared on her Instagram. “Are you sure?”
He shot me a quizzical look. Fair. When a person repeatedly questioned if another person was over an ex, it was generally because Person A was getting jealous and territorial.
And jealous and territorial were states of being associated with dating. Which I did not do anymore.
“Pretty sure,” he said mildly.
I needed to stop poking at the girlfriend thing. “It’s like you got divorced.”
“What? No. I mean, yes, we were together for a few years, but it’s not like that at all.” Cue another quizzical look. A more serious one: he was staring at me like he was trying to see my thoughts.
“No, sorry, I meant the band. I meant Scott Collier.”
He looked away. “Right.”
