Page 65 of Fate Fiction

“Trust me Dani, if I wanted to avoid you this week I easily could have. Did you think I actually needed a guide to take me to the falls after your uncle wrote me detailed directions down to every last twig? I’m not impulsive or rash, I’m of sound mind and body right now, and I want you, desperately.”

I was straddling a chasm between truth and fiction. It was getting harder to hold on. “I don’t understand,” tears sparked by confusion and stress were welling in my eyes, the storm cloud bursting open. If I walked away the tears wouldn’t have to fall. I began trudging up the hill again. He followed closely.

“And you don’t have to,” he was nearly chasing me up this mountain. My legs were moving abnormally quickly. “At a minimum there’s clearly some chemistry with us, I think you can agree with that.”

Enough chemistry we needed our own lab.

“I can,” I said without looking at him.

“So, are you open to letting this week play out before resigning yourself to the fact that it won’t work? It’s only a few more days, we can manage each one as it comes.”

He was reading my mind. I’d be mad about it if he didn’t peg me like this. I wanted to be stubborn. I wanted to word vomit all the reasons why yes, of course it won’t work. There was a persistent devil on my shoulder whispering all these doubts in my ear.

I stayed quiet.

Evan’s brows lowered and he nervously ran his fingers through his hair, “do you actually want anything to happen with us?”

“Yes,” I squeaked out.

Everything. I wanted everything to happen between us. This was the stuff of passing fantasies I’d make up when trying to fall asleep. My tired mind would conjure up scenarios just like this one, fingers grasped around a bicep, bodies close together. A future, if my subconscious was daring enough.

Behind these walls I’d tried and failed to build up there was one pressing thing: fear. I was nothing more than someone scared of the new and unfamiliar. This was a risk that couldn’t be calculated. How could I begin to quantify the benefits—and the consequences—of dating Evan McLeod?

“I think I’m allowed to be terrified of all this, no?” I asked quietly.

He took a step backwards, as if he was the one who was terrifying. In a way he was. “You can be. I don’t want to pressure you, I don’t want you to feel any obligation to me because I’m spilling all this out to you or because of who I am.”

I had to correct myself before I let this all slip away, my avoidance was surfacing like a floating, bloated corpse. I needed to bury it and not let it fester. I willed myself to do something, to say something.

“You don’t understand how much I want it. None of this feels real.” My breath was getting shaky and I couldn’t tell if it was from the physical stress of the hike or emotional stress of this conversation. “This entire week has been one wild shock to my system after another. And it’s incredible, don’t get me wrong, but it scares me, a lot. I like things that are easy and this is definitely not easy.”

“Not easy because of me, right?” he stiffened and paused before stepping over a root.

I rubbed my temples with my index fingers. “That’s not what I’m saying. It’s not your fault the world has a weird relationship with celebrity, and that everyone in your sphere has a microscope on them.”

Evan lived like an ant under a magnifying glass in the hot sun. I lived like a pill bug under a rock. There would never be an equal comparison of our two lives.

Evan nodded slowly. “But my end of things would be what complicates us. I’m not completely immune to that fact.”

“I know, I know, I regret saying it. I have a lot of…stuff…I need to get over.”

“I can help you get over it, you’re not the first non-famous person to date a celebrity.”

“But I’m the first Dani Grant to date Evan McLeod.”

Evan smiled when I’d said date so casually. “So we agree, this thing we’re doing is dating?”

My heart was pounding. I didn’t know if this was dating, or a fling, or a well-crafted fantasy conjured by my comatose subconscious.

“Dating is the closest word in the English language to describe whatever this is.”

“You’re right, Merriam Webster hasn’t come up with anything that properly conveys ‘being stuck in the middle of the woods with someone you’re wildly attracted to and think about constantly but can’t take on a proper date’.”

I repeated the phrase “wildly attracted to” silently to myself, letting the consonants play on my lips.

Evan was wildly attracted to me.

Without either of us realizing, we had made it to the summit.