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When I parked in my garage and turned my car off, only then did I realize I had spent the last hour pretty much exclusively thinking about Lily. Even as I wrote up the notes and put them on all the elevators in the office building, all I was thinking about was her. The thought of her was so distracting that I even misspelled the word ‘broken’ on one of the signs and had to go back up to the break-room to make another one.
Now that I was home, I had to laugh at myself as I got out of the car. This was exactly what had happened to me after our night together in Hawaii. I didn’t want to admit it before, but everything Matt said about me having talked about her for weeks after we got home was true. She had infected me, for lack of a better word, and what Matt and my other brothers didn’t know was that even though I eventually stopped talking about her, perhaps two months after the wedding, it took a lot longer for me to stop thinking about her.
If I had to come up with a crude timeline, I would say that ironically, I only stopped thinking about her a week or two before she started working at Becker Technologies. And now it would appear the cycle was starting all over again. I wasn’t going to be able to shake her from my mind, only this time, I wasn’t trying nearly as hard to forget about her. I let my mind wander back to thoughts of her that whole evening as I made myself dinner and sat down to watch a little TV. Whereas before, I felt like she’d rejected me so I made a conscious effort to try and move on, this time around, I didn’t feel as brushed off. Quite the opposite, actually.
There had been a moment, just before I came, where I got the distinct impression from the way she was looking at me that she was feeling somethingveryintense. Whether or not it was a sexual intensity or a romantic one, I couldn’t say, but what I did know was that it felt amazing to be able to make her feel whatever it was she was feeling.
And I wanted to give her that feeling again.
Andagain.
* * *
In a strange turn of events, that weekend crawled by very slowly. Usually, I felt as if my two days off every week went by in the blink of an eye. I’m sure some of that was due to the fact that I tended to spend a lot of my weekend hours in the office anyway, but still, even the rare weekend that was entirely made up of my own free time always seemed to be over before it began.
But not this weekend. This weekend felt as if it was never going to end. I tried to fill my days by running errands, working out, and dropping by the offices, but nothing made the minutes tick by any faster. It was like Monday couldn’t come fast enough.
By the time Sunday night rolled around, I was feeling something I’d never really felt before on a Sunday night—excitement. I was excited to go to work the next morning. Of course, a part of me knew exactly what was causing me to feel this way, but I didn’t want to overanalyze that feeling too much.
I was excited to see her, obviously, but I couldn’t let that feeling distract metoomuch. I did still have a job to do, as did Lily, and we hadn’t discussed what exactly we were going to do moving forward, so there was a good chance that she would tell me that was the last time anything like that would ever happen between us.
A little lump began to form in my stomach as I thought about that being her response.
Of course, it was highly possible that would be how she chose to handle this situation, and what would I do then? Would I be able to walk away? Could we still work together, with all this…desirebubbling just beneath the surface?
I shook my head, looking back at my worried reflection in the bathroom mirror and pulled my mind out of a spiral to finish getting ready for bed. Just a moment ago, I was happy about going to work for probably the first time in over a decade, and I wasn’t about to let those feelings go so quickly. I focused on the positives and let myself remember what I had felt the moment before I kissed her that night sitting on the floor by the elevators. With that feeling taking me over once again, I got into bed and closed my eyes.
* * *
“Where did you learn to do all of this anyway?” Lily asked as I bent down by the pile of timber and lit a match. “Did your dad teach you?”
This made me laugh. “No,” I said. “This probably won’t come as much of a surprise, but my dad isn’t much of an outdoorsy kind of guy. Even when I was younger, before he started to grow the company and he was around more, he never wanted to do stuff like this with me. He was always trying to get me interested in computers instead of showing any interest in the things I already liked. Like camping. But hey, at least he was trying, which was something he stopped altogether as I got older.”
“So, are you a self-taught survivalist then?”
I looked over my shoulder at her. She was sitting on a log near where I was building the fire. She was wearing leggings and a cute little puffer vest. Her hair was pulled back in a braid and she had no make-up on. She looked gorgeous.
“I learned most of this stuff in boy scouts,” I said. “And my mom knew how to pitch a tent as well. She grew up in a family of campers, so she taught me a little. Before she got sick, that is. After she was diagnosed, everything changed. I don’t think she ever slept outdoors after that, which is a real shame because I think it would’ve brought her a lot of joy.”
“We didn’t camp when I was a kid, so this is all new to me.”
The fire was lit and I messed around with it for a few more seconds, before gently placing a couple of larger pieces of wood on top of the kindling and then stepping back. “Well, then it’s a good thing you’ve got me. I’ll make sure nothing bad happens to you out here in the wilderness.” I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She rested her head against my chest, and for a while, neither of us said anything. We watched the flames grow, burning up parts of the wood and slowly warming our chilling bodies. She put her small hands out and spread her fingers wide. “That’s nice,” she said. “I didn’t even realize how cold I was until I started to get warmed up again.”
“Yeah, that’s how it goes,” I said. “Do you think you’ll be warm enough tonight? Maybe we should’ve bought you that thicker sleeping bag after all.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll have you next to me, won’t I? We are zipping our bags together, right?”
“If you want,” I said.
“Why wouldn’t I want that? You know that all I want is to be as close to you as I can, as often as possible.”
I laughed. “Right back at you.” I kissed the top of her head and then went into the tent to grab the ingredients needed to make s’mores. We ate, talked, and laughed. Soon, we were crawling into the tent and getting ready to sleep. It was just warm enough for me to take the rain-fly off, which meant we could see the stars through the sheer plastic top of the expensive tent I purchased just before our trip. We curled up next to each other in our combined sleeping bags and looked up at the night sky.
“You know how I always say that there isn’t anything in this world I love more than you?” I said, after a few seconds of calm silence.
“Yeah,” Lily said. “I think I recall you saying that once or twice.” She laughed. “Why?”
“Well, maybe I was wrong.” She sat up and frowned down at me. I smiled back at her. “There might be one thing I love more than you in this world.”
