Page 67 of Fate Fiction

thirteen

. . .

As the sun streamed down on my skin and I felt Evan breathing in rhythm with the lapping lake water, there was one thing I had to admit to myself. It all felt so normal.

My head was resting atop his chest, his arm was draped over my shoulder. We were both warm and tired, both circling the edges of a nap in the sun. It was the sort of feeling I wanted to bottle up to savor forever.

There were a handful of truths I’d processed on our descent down the mountain. Evan’s aforementioned “wild attraction” to me converging messily with my own. The admission that we were both falling for one another. The ridiculousness of it all.

It had been three days. Seventy two hours.

I wouldn’t question his judgment or beg for answers, nor would I doubt my own affection towards him. Instead, I happily accepted when Evan had asked if I wanted to lay on the dock for a little while after we cooled off in the water. The red wooden boards had served as an anchor of sorts for this newness unfolding between us.

I had gotten suspiciously good at being in the moment for the last hour—but old Dani, real life, practical Dani, still crept in through the cracks of this idyllic snow globe we were currently in. We were halfway through the week, and there was no actual talk of what was to become of this once it was over. He’d implied extending this beyond the confines of camp, but I was rational. I needed a true plan.

If he wanted to keep this all here within the protected bubble of the camp—where no one existed but us—I wouldn’t fault him. Just because he told me otherwise doesn’t mean I can believe it as fact. I’m not unfamiliar with the idea of someone only liking the idea of me. Nick did.

“What’s the story with the tattoo?” my fingers gently traced the outline of the circle on his soft, sun-warmed chest.

He looked down, seemingly forgetting it was there at all. “Not much of a story, more like I was nineteen, about to sell my soul to Hollywood, and got drunk enough to get a permanent tribute to the motherland. The details of the night are admittedly a little fuzzy. My mam was mortified. And I was terrified I’d lose the job.”

“You obviously didn’t,” I laughed. “Do you miss it? Scotland?” My vacations growing up were of the tropical resort variety or here at camp. My scope of the world was embarrassingly limited. I knew Scotland was rainy, with no shortage of old beautiful buildings. Beyond that it was a mystery. I fantasized Evan holding my hand walking through cobblestone streets, or standing on a grassy cliff surrounded by sheep. An alternate universe where we had a simple coexistence.

He sighed, and I felt his chest rise and fall. “Every day. I love New York but it can be so loud and crowded. Up until I left, Edinburgh was the biggest city I’d been to.”

I mouthed Edinburgh to myself to feel the way the word felt. I loved the way it so casually lolled off his accented tongue, I wanted him to list off every Scottish town name he could think of so I could hear how he said it.

“Do you go back often?”

“I try to, between filming and for Christmas, but it’s never the same once you leave. I get homesick sometimes, but I don’t think I’m homesick for a place, more like the person I was before I left.”

“Like you’re a visitor in your own life,” I said quietly. I didn’t have a homeland laced with fond nostalgia, but I still found myself missing my sterile and empty childhood home and the mall I’d wandered for hours as a teenager. Evan’s hand had migrated to my head and he was mindlessly playing with my hair as I lay curled up beside him.

“What about your family? Sue is…”

“My mom’s sister. They’re nothing alike,” I scoffed.

“In a good way or a bad way?”

“I don’t have a typical relationship with my mom. We’ve never really been like mother and daughter. I was the accident child who she raised out of obligation. It’s why Sue and I are so close. I used to cry and beg her and Randy to adopt me when I was a kid, whenever my mom picked me up I’d leave literally kicking and screaming.”

“That explains why you love it here so much.”

“It’s the only place I get homesick for. I dread Christmas every year because it’s the most time I spend with my mom every year.”

“Is it only you two?”

I nod, chewing at my lip anxiously. “My dad died when I was in high school.”

Evan’s thumb brushed against my temple. “Oh Dani, I’m so sorry.”

The distant apologies always felt odd to me. I mourned my dad, but I mourned the idea of a father figure more than the actual person. I shook my head, effectively rejecting Evan’s platitude. “It was tough then, but in retrospect he and I were basically strangers. He was kind, I remember that much, but he was always working. Sue was the first adult in my life who treated me like a person, not a problem.”

“You’re not a problem,” Evan affirmed, I felt his head shake above me.

We slid back into silence and watched the clouds pass above them, save for some birds chirping in the distance and breeze rustling through the leaves. There was complete quiet.

I had made a silent pledge that I would never put pen to paper about any of the formal details of what happened between Evan and I. I could write scribbled notes, poetry that could be separated from the factual events, but their meaning would be mine alone.