“All right. Pause.” He held up both hands like I was robbing him. “Pause.” He got up and pulled me to my feet. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. Step one: we’re going to kind of… hug.”He moved toward me and put his arms out as if to embrace me but stopped short of actually doing it. “Except horizontally, on the ground, OK?”
“Horizontal hugging. Is that what they call it these days? Sheesh, no wonder I quit dating.”
“Shut up.”
“You say that to all the girls, don’t you?” I lowered my voice in a parody of masculinity. “Come on, baby, let’s hug horizontally.”
He ignored me, pulling me against his chest with one hand and using the other to measure the amount of space we took up relative to the blanket. “This is going to work. And we should try to sleep, right? It will be easier if we’re lying down.”
“Yeah, OK,” I said, and he lay on the ground and pulled me down with him.
“Do we actually have to hug, though?” I asked. “Can’t we lie side by side?” Because not only was I not going to sleep if we were hugging, I was not going to relax even one iota. “I feel like we take up less room this way than we did sitting.”
“Let’s try.” He tucked one edge of the blanket under himself and handed me the other. I tried to do the same, but I had to tug it into place.
“No, no, it’s coming out on my end,” he said.
“It’s not wide enough,” I said. “It’s not going to work.”
“It’s going to work, but I’m sorry to say, we have to resort to hugging. Here, come here.”
Somehow, I wasn’t even really sure how it happened, we ended up lying face-to-face, or face-to-neck—my face to his neck—near the edge of the blanket. There wasn’t time for it to be awkward, though, because he shouted, “OK, roll!”
“What do you mean, roll?”
“Roll!” He hoisted me onto his body. Before I could adjust to the fact that I was literally lying on top of Teddy Knight, he’d rolled me down the other side. “Oh, I see what you’re going for—like a burrito.” I tried to bring the bottom of the blanket up with my feet.
“No!” he said. “We’re going for flauta, not burrito.”
“What’s the difference?”
“We’re just rolling, we’re not fussed about filling coming out of the bottom, so there’s no tuck-in.”
“Well, I for one am fussed about stuff cominginthe bottom, so maybe thereshouldbe a tuck-in!”
“What’s going to come in the bottom?”
“Bugs! I don’t know… wolves? Frigid air?” My face was jammed into his neck—which smelled weirdly good—so I couldn’t see his face, but I suspected he was rolling his eyes. “You know what I mean!”
“Yes, but the blanket isn’t long enough. We can either have our feet in itorour shoulders covered. We have shoes on, so we should prioritize the shoulders. Yours are bare.”
They were. He was wearing a T-shirt, but I was wearing a tank top. “OK, OK. I surrender. Flautas. Or maybe a Fruit Roll-Up is a better analogy.”
“Let’s start again.” He pulled away from me and futzed with our setup. “OK, roll!”
I rolled.
But I also started laughing.
“Be serious!” he admonished, but there was amusement in his tone, too. “We can get this. Try again.”
By the time he was yelling, “Fruit Roll-Up, take three!” I was snorting with laughter, though I tried my best to roll at the same time.
He was laughing, too, and he had a great laugh: low and rumbly and, I don’t know… hard-won sounding. It called to mind a rusty engine taking a minute to start but then roaring to life. My face was once again nestled into the crook of his neck, so I couldfeelhis laughter. It was like the purring of my cats—but more. Bigger. Like the purring of a lion, maybe: cozy but dangerous.
Soon enough I had to abandon my high-minded similes because we were in hysterics. We weren’t even trying to tuck ourselves in anymore, we were just lying there smooshed up against each other, convulsing with laughter.
“Oh my God, my stomach!” I gasped. I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt. When was the last timethathad happened?
