“No, you’ve got everything,” I say, stuffing a lamp into my bag.
He’s silent for a moment. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” I say, looking up at him. “Why?”
He stares at me and then looks back at the gear. Rubs the brim of his beanie with his mitten.
“What is it?” I ask.
Forrest’s eyes close like he’s struggling for patience. “There’s no tent here.”
“What are you talking about?” I say. The first hint of dread rolls through my stomach like the rumble that precedes an avalanche.
“Thetent,Margot,” he says through his teeth. “It’s not here.”
“Of course it is! It’s right there!” I say, pointing my mitten at the bright blue fabric laid out in the snow.
Forrest picks it up. “This is the tent fly. Not the tent.”
“What the hell is a tent fly?”
“It doesn’t matter, because it’s not atent,” he snaps. “So I need you to search your pack again for that missing bag, and tell me you didn’t forget the single most essential piece of your equipment.”
My face blanches as I reckon with the possibility that my tent is currently having a cozy hang with my crampons back in my cabin. The thing is, I packed all my tent gear before anything else. Iknewit was important. But Forrest is looking at me like I’m the biggest airhead to ever airhead.
“I didn’t forget it,” I declare. “If it was in the box, I packed it.”
“Then it has to be in your bag.”
“I just dumped everything out! It’s not in there.”
“Then you forgot it,” he says, shoving tentpoles back into their bags with way more aggression than they deserve.
“Ididn’tforget it,” I growl.
“Everything okay?”
Our heads snap up at the same time to see Ollie at the edge of our pit again.
“My tent manufacturer apparently neglected to include the tent portion of my tent,” I say.
“Oh my God,” Ollie responds. He glances at Forrest, whose jaw muscles look like they’re skipping rope, and then back to me. “Where are you going to sleep?”
Where am I going tosleep? Good fucking question. “I don’t know!” I say as panic begins to set in.
“It might be a squeeze, but you could totally share me and Topher’s tent,” Ollie offers.
I don’t want to even contemplate the smell of that scenario, much less actually experience it, but before I can come up with a polite way to refuse, Forrest interrupts. “She’ll stay with me. I’ll have more room in my tent than you and Topher, or Alice and Yoon.”
“How about we let Margot decide, man?” Ollie’s tone is deceptively light as a look colder than the windchill factor passes between them.
Eventually, they turn their attention to me, waiting for my decision. I glance at Forrest’s tent, then at Forrest. “More room,” my frostbitten ass. His tent looks hardly big enough for him, let alone another person. Not to mention I’ve already been through enough tropes with this man to fill my favorite Nora Roberts trilogy, and that was before One Bed got downgraded to OneTent. Internally, I groan. But it’s either camp with Forrest, get hotboxed in Ollie and Topher’s tent, or crash Alice and Yoon’s romantic getaway. I chew my bottom lip. “I’ll stay with Forrest. Thanks for offering, Ollie, but three’s a crowd.”
Forrest nods like I’ve chosen wisely, and I resist the urge to throw snow in his face.
After I’ve made my decision about where to sleep, it’s like the sun decides to fall out of the sky. It’s nearly pitch black by the time everyone has eaten, filled their extra Nalgene bottles with hot water, and retreated to their tents. Getting inside is an ordeal in and of itself. The ceiling is barely a foot above my head while I’m sitting, and our sleeping bags overlap because the tent isn’t wide enough to accommodate both.
“There isn’t enough room,” I hiss as Forrest crawls in, trying and failing not to brush against me about thirty times.
