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His jokes are horribly lame, but they still make me smile. And he doesn’t smell bad; he smells just like I hoped he would. I take comfort in him, leaning into him and closing my eyes. I wait, letting the moment of loneliness pass.
“Is it bad that I don’t miss my parents?” I now ask, realizing I miss Zoey more than I miss them. Not that this feels unusual to begin with.
When I left home for college, I was never homesick for my actual house or my parents. I missed the normalcy and the comfort of Tahoe and Badger Creek and Zoey, and really all the things I had grown used to having around. Skiing on familiar slopes and eating at my favorite restaurants and going to Zoey’s house and having her parents greet me like I was their own kid. But I never missed my parents.
“Is it weird that I don’t miss my dad?” Alex asks, almost repeating back to me my own question.
“Not for me it isn’t. Maybe this is just who we are.”
“Maybe we’ve learned to live without them all this time and the people who have come into our lives have made a bigger impact,” Alex says, sounding far too wise. He’s usually snarky and full of jokes, all of it coupled with his arrogance. But as we stand here, his arms wrapped around me, he sounds like he speaks from way too much experience.
A silence falls over us, and we stand together, letting our thoughts linger, our words sinking in. It’s not just a struggle being here, it’s a struggle being here with our thoughts.
Breaking the silence, I say, “So are we making some more pine needle tea or what?”
Alex pulls back, smiling, he replies, “I knew you liked it. That’s why I grabbed some more branches.” He pauses, winking at me and it makes me let out a laugh. He’s just so damn arrogant, but it’s also so damn cute. “Let’s do it. It beats drinking water, not that I’m complaining about the water we have, because without it, we’d be dead.”
“We even have some crusty old honey that was in the pantry and a hunk of old sugar, too. It might be pretty good in the tea,” I suggest and Alex nods as he begins stripping the needles from the branches.
“You want to take over this?” Alex asks, motioning to the small pile of the pine needles on the table. “I’ll get started on our pasta dinner.” He smirks, grabbing the pile of the bright orange mushrooms he managed to find out in the woods.
“Tell me about that…those…whatever that shit is,” I say, laughing a little since I have no idea what that is, but Alex says it’s edible. He already ate a handful earlier.
“It’s witches’ butter. It’s a fungus that grows on dead pine tree bark. It’s one of the only things that grows all year long and it’s easy to spot in the snow because of its color. I wish I could say it tastes amazing, but it kinda tastes like eucalyptus.”
“And you’re going to put it in our pasta?” I question, hesitant to eat it. It could ruin our perfectly good pasta.
“I am. It’s actually really good for you. It has all kinds of vitamins in it and even better, it’s supposed to keep people from getting scurvy,” Alex says with confidence, like either of us are at risk for contracting that. I’m pretty sure it’s irrelevant in the modern world.
“I had been wondering if I’d somehow contracted scurvy in the last week,” I tease, mindlessly pulling more needles off the branches.
I watch as Alex walks over to the fire with the box of pasta, pouring some into his hand, he looks at it, like he’s measuring it. We did decide that we shouldn’t eat more than two ounces each so we can make it last longer.
Just when I think he’s going to set it aside and measure out another portion, he moves his hand over the pot on the fire.
“What are you doing?” I ask, trying not to sound like I’m judging him, but I totally am.
“I’m gonna put these noodles in the water,” he replies, knitting his brows together as he looks over at me.
“The water isn’t even boiling. If you add the pasta now, it’ll all clump together in a big mushy mess.”
“Pfft,” Alex sounds, blowing out his mouth and flicking a hand in my direction. “I do it all the time and it’s fine.”
“Fine as in it’s a big mushy pile of pasta?”
He doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, watching me, like he’s waiting for me to say I don’t care if he makes shitty pasta, but like hell I don’t. We have very few exciting things that happen out here, eating is one of them. It’s the best part of the day and I’m not letting him cook this like he’s making a bowl of Easy Mac.
“Okay fine, it is usually mushy and kinda stuck together. Tell me what I need to do, Chef Laney,” Alex jokes, holding out the handful of pasta to me.
“First thing, you need to wait for the water to boil and since we have it, we can add some salt to it too. It’ll give the pasta more flavor.”
Alex pours some salt into the palm of his hand and walks over to where I’m now standing by the fire. The water is just beginning to boil and I tell Alex to toss the salt in.
“Do you like to cook?” he asks, as we watch the tiny bubbles in the pot simmer.
“I do, but I don’t do it a lot. It’s hard when my work schedule is hectic and when I don’t…” I stop, shrugging. “When I don’t have a lot of money.”
“Yeah, I hear that. Although, I don’t even really know how to cook. I can make ramen and grilled cheese. And now I almost fucked up our date night dinner,” he says, clenching his teeth together and the look on his face makes me laugh.
