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In unison, we frown at the window. Fat drops shake the palm fronds outside, and rain runs softly down the balcony door.
“I wanted to paddleboard . . .” I wilt.
He picks the book back up. “Doesn’t look like that’ll happen.”
My knee-jerk instinct is to glare at him, but he’s not even looking at me anymore. I grab the hotel guidebook from the TV stand. There has to be something I can do in the rain; Ethan and I are capable of spending time together outside, but there would be bloodshed if we both hung around in this suite all day.
I pull the phone closer and open the directory in front of me. Ethan moves to my side and reads the list of activities over my shoulder. His presence is already—suddenly—like an enormous cast of heat moving around the room and now he’s standing shoulder to shoulder with me. My voice grows wavery as I read down the list.
“Zip-lining . . . helicopter . . . hike . . . submarine . . . kayaking . . . off-roading . . . bike ride . . .”
He stops me before I can get to the next one. “Ooh. Paintball.”
I look at him blankly. Paintball always struck me as something that gun-obsessed, testosterone-fueled frat boys did. Ethan doesn’t really seem the type. “You’ve played paintball?”
“No,” he says, “but it looks fun. How hard can it be?”
“That feels like a dangerous taunt to the universe, Ethan.”
“The universe doesn’t care about my paintball game, Olive.”
“My dad gave me a flare gun once when I took a road trip in college with a boyfriend. It went off in the trunk and set our luggage on fire while we were swimming in a river. We had to go to a local Walmart to buy clothes—keep in mind, all we had were our wet bathing suits—and it was this tiny town, like seriously just populated by the creepy people from Deliverance. I have never felt more like someone’s future dinner than I did walking through the aisles trying to find new underwear.”
He studies me for several long seconds. “You have a lot of stories like this, don’t you?”
“You have no idea.” I glance at the window again. “But seriously. If it’s been raining all night, won’t it be all muddy?”
He leans against the counter. “So you’d only want to be covered in paint, but definitely not mud?”
“I think the goal is to not get covered in paint.”
“You are incapable of not arguing with me,” he says, “and it is so aggravating.”
“Weren’t you just arguing with me about being covered in paint but not mud?”
He growls, but I see him fighting a smile.
I point across the room. “Why don’t you go over to the minibar and work out that aggravation?”
Ethan leans back in, closer than before. He smells unbelievably good, and it is unbelievably annoying. “Let’s do paintball today.”
Turning the page, I shake my head. “Hard nope.”
“Come on,” he wheedles. “You can pick what we do after.”
“Why do you even want to hang out with me? We don’t like each other.”
He grins. “You are clearly not thinking about this strategically. You’ll get to shoot me with paint pellets.”
A video game montage scrolls through my head: my gun spitting out a stream of Skittle-green paintballs, green splatters landing in bursts all across the front of Ethan’s vest. And finally, the kill shot—a giant green splat right over his groin. “You know what? I’ll go ahead and make us some reservations.”
• • •
THE HOTEL ARRANGES A BUS to take us to the paintball field. We stop in front of an industrial building fronted by a parking lot on one side, with forest all around. It isn’t outright raining—more like a steady, misty drizzle—and oh yeah, it’s muddy.
Inside, the office is small and smells like—you guessed it—dirt and paint. A big and tall white dude in a hybrid floral/camouflage Hawaiian shirt with a name tag that reads HOGG stands behind the counter to welcome us. He and Ethan discuss the various options for play, but I’m barely listening. Above the counter the walls are covered with helmets and body armor, goggles and gloves. A poster hangs next to another door and reads: STAY CALM AND RELOAD. There are also guns, lots of them.
It’s probably a bad time to realize I’ve never held a gun before, let alone shot one.
