“Nah.”
“How come?” I answered my own question with a self-deprecating snort. “I guess because not everyone can lose consciousness on the ground in the middle of a probably-teeming-with-bears forest they’re lost in.”
“It’s more that I thought I should, I don’t know, keep watch? Is that dumb?”
It was actually sweet. Chivalrous. If you went for that kind of thing, which I no longer did. I’d developed an immunity.
“Also, there was a mosquito feeding frenzy on the back of my neck as it got dark, and now I’m lying here tormented by the itching.”
I chuckled sympathetically but switched to wincing when pain shot through my hip. “I gotta turn over, I’m sorry. I know we worked hard for the reverse–Fruit Roll-Up arrangement here, but my hip is killing me.”
“No worries.” He rattled the edge of the crinkly blanket. “I’m not sure how much this thing is doing anyway. It’s fucking freezing out here.”
I shivered as I rotated. And then again when I was situated. He returned to hugging me. It was starting to feel normal. “I’m not sure this is doing anything, either,” he said, giving me a little squeeze to indicate that “this” referred to the horizontal hug.
“Eh, it’s doing something in the keep-Gretchen-from-freaking-out-about-bears department.”
He tightened his hold on me. “OK, good.”
I wasn’t lined up with his neck this time. We were face-to-face, and I could feel his breath on my skin when he spoke. “Why are we whispering?” I asked, trying to resist the absurd but intense compulsion to reach out and touch him. Like, I wanted to run my hands all over his face as if I were a blind person? Huh?
“I don’t know,” he whispered back. “Can bears hear?”
His breath hit my ear in such a way that it tickled. I snaked an arm up to scratch. And then… I don’t know… His face was so close. I still wanted to touch it. And my hand wasright there.
He didn’t react as my hand settled on his cheek. He had a serious five-o’clock shadow going. I could hear the raspy sound my fingers made as they slid over his whiskers.
I only had to move a couple inches to touch my mouth to his. His lips were as soft as his face was sharp. It was a chaste kiss, on the surface of things. Brief, gentle, no tongue. But my insides roared to life. I was suddenly remembering my ill-fated date with Scott. Not the date itself, but the idea behind it: one last hurrah. I never got that.
“What was that?” he asked after I pulled away—or as away as I could get, which was only a few inches. He spoke gently—he didn’t seem upset. He had kissed me back, after all.
“I believe that was a kiss,” I said.
“But you’re retired from dating.”
True. But also: “Is this a date?” I asked in such a way that there could only be one answer.
Which he gave me: “No. God, no. This is a brush with death that we will tell as an amazing story on Monday at sunrise circle.”
“But we’ll leave out the kissing part, right?”
“We’ll leave out the kissing part,” he agreed.
“Does that mean we’re going to do it again?”
I still had my hand on his face, so I couldfeelhim smile.
He got right to the point, opening his mouth on a groan and letting his tongue slide into mine. It wasn’t subtle this time. It washot. So hot I wondered how I had ever been cold. It had been so long since I’d been so well kissed. I felt like someone had come up to me and hit me with a baseball bat. In a good way.
I would have said I saw lights. That fireworks went off.
Except I did see lights. Flashlights hitting the trees. And I was pretty sure the fireworks were actually flares.
I heard it then. “Teddy! Gretchen!”
And I heardhim. He probably thought I hadn’t, because he mumbled it under his breath, but I heard him clear as anything, whispering, “God damn it.”
9
