“What?”
“I know I’m the one who’s been hyper over saying nothing we’ve done was a date and we aren’t together—and nothing was and we aren’t. But I don’t know…”
“Dancing in towels in the moonlight is a pretty romantic thing to do.”
I expected her to scoff, or to deflect, but she just said, “Yes.”
“But also illegal, according to the Gretchen Miller view of the world.”
She laughed. “Also yes. But maybe there’s a loophole if you’re only my camp boyfriend, you know?”
“Is a camp boyfriend one step up from an imaginary boyfriend?”
“Exactly. Low effort. Superlow in this case, as you didn’t even know you were my camp boyfriend until the eve of our breakup.”
She was saying all this laughingly, with a hint of self-deprecation. I couldn’t get with the vibe. I couldn’t stop glitching on this idea that she’d been thinking of me this way and I hadn’t known. “Except,” I said, “I think if you’re using the camp friend analogy, the idea is that camp friends see each other every summer, right?”
What was I saying? That I wanted to see her next summer? I wasn’t going to be back next summer.
Was I?
Would I even be invited if I wanted to come back?
“Sure, sometimes,” Gretchen said, “but I was talking to the dance counselors recently about this very topic, and they said sometimes a camp friend doesn’t come back.”
“And what happens then?”
“Nothing. They’re sad for a while, but there’s enough else happening that they get over it.”
I for one was never going to forget Gretchen. I wasn’t sure if what I’d undergone this summer was attributable to the place or to her or to some alchemical combination of the two, but I was a different person from when I’d arrived. A better person.
I didn’t know how to say any of that, though, so I let the hand that had been wrapped around her float up and rest on her cheek so I could tip her head up and kiss her.
She sighed into my mouth, and something like a sighhappened to me, too, to my whole body. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been so relaxed, so rooted. We kissed for a long time. Maybe we were making up for those early, kissless encounters. Or maybe we were banking kisses for the future. Things eventually heated up, but not in the usual way. Normally when we had sex, things were frantic. We’d be tearing our clothes off and going at it like teenagers—that was why we’d skipped the kissing initially. This time, though, it was slow. I would have said lazy, but that wasn’t the right word. We were exacting in our ministrations, careful as we let hands glide over skin, as we let towels fall to the floor.“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately.”The line snaked through my consciousness as we touched each other with such focused intent.
Eventually she led me to her bed, and we lay on our sides facing each other. She stroked my face, like she had that night in the forest. It felt like she was trying to memorize me. I wanted to do the same. Not that I was in any danger of forgetting her—that was impossible—but I wanted the sense memory. I wanted to caress her face and tangle my fingers in her hair. I wanted my hands to remember what she felt like. So I did all those things. I wondered if she’d been struck with a similar impulse, because she brushed her hands over my tattoos—the ones she could reach, anyway. She would find one, rub her fingers over it in a little circle, and look at me with an expression I couldn’t decode. Something that contained fondness, but also sadness.
When she was done with her tour of my ink, which felt like she was done with her tour of my life, she heaved a big, shaky breath and turned away to get a condom. She tipped me to my back and climbed on top. I grabbed her hands, and she rode me, staring at me and holding my hands like she never wantedto let go. I knew I didn’t. She was upright, and the moon river hit her, painting her shoulders and breasts in its white light.
“Gretchen, I—”
“Shh.” She shook her head, and I swallowed the rest of the sentence. Once it was gone, I wasn’t even sure what it had been.
Slowly we carried on, staring at each other and holding hands as she ground herself on me. When she came, it was with an almost surprised-sounding cry. And it was a cry. A wail, almost.
I knew this feeling. It was building in me, too. It was pleasure, but pain. Sorrow. It was goodbye.
When we’d finished, she slumped forward and buried her head in my neck. We lay there a long time. It reminded me of when she’d slept in my arms in the woods. Except this time, when we got up, it would be the end.
I wasn’t used to being in Gretchen’s cabin. The nice thing about mine—aside from not having to do the James Bond walk of shame to get home—was that I didn’t have to make the decision about when we were done. She could leave whenever she wanted. Which, historically, had been not long after our encounters. She’d usually loll around a bit. We’d even had one or two serious post-sex conversations—about teaching, about our childhoods. But she never fell asleep. She always left.
So I should probably do the same.
But now, with us wrapped up in each other after the most intense sexual experience I’d ever had, I didn’t know how to leave.
We’d been lying silently for a good ten minutes when she shifted against me. “Is it OK if I stay a bit?” I whispered into her hair.
“Assuming you don’t mind slumming it in my low-thread-count sheets, sure,” she said, turning onto her side to face awayfrom me. She flashed me a smile over her shoulder that felt like it was scooping out my insides.
