Chapter 10
Aiden
When I wake up the next morning, it’s almost like every other morning I’ve woken up with Zoe in the cabin. Her, up in her bunk on her stomach, arms curled above her head and around her pillow. Me, down in mine, flat on my back, with the kind of morning wood I forgot was possible. The light is low, the cabin quiet except for the sounds of our breathing. My bare arms and chest are chilled where they’re exposed to the air, the room always running cooler at night.
But there are differences, too.
Across the way and above me, Zoe’s normally silky-straight hair is mussed, a tangle of it resting against her cheek. Underneath the blanket that she’s got pulled all the way up past her shoulders, she’s not wearing her usual pajamas—loose gray pants, a fitted tank top that she covers with a matching gray hoodie until she gets up in her bunk. Instead, she’d climbed up in her panties and that squirrel t-shirt, her limbs loose and clumsy, her soft smile the last thing I saw before I shut off the light. Separate beds, we’d agreed, both of us deferring to their small size, but probably also deferring to the rules we’ve set: just sex, nothing else.
Where I’m lying in my bunk, I only have to shift slightly to feel the way the rough sheets set off a tingle against the line of faint scratches that start at my right shoulder blade and trail a few inches down, the mark from the second time Zoe came around my cock. And that morning wood I’ve got? Right now it doesn’t feel so much like the kind of useless insult I’ve been waking up to for the last two weekends. It feels like my dick is reporting for duty, like it knows that the three times I fucked Zoe last night were warm-ups, that we’ve got a lot of time and sexual tension to work off, and we might as well get started early.
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, try to settle down. Beneath all the desperation I feel to get inside her again, there’s a thread of unease knowing that I haven’t had that kind of sex in years, the kind of sex where your whole entire body forgets everything. I’d tried for that kind of sex, especially once I’d known Aaron was in trouble. So much of my headspace was taken up with him—where could I get him detoxed; should I move home; did my parents know what to search for in his room; what was his heart function like; how was his liver holding up—that I’d hoped sex might be a release, an empty-headed break from the constant worry.
But it hadn’t been, not really. The feeling of relief would last only about as long as the event itself—but pretty soon after, I’d be worried and guilty again. You don’t deserve any of this, I’d think, even while I’d made my excuses for why I couldn’t stay overnight, explanations for when I’d call again. You don’t deserve this, because your brother is dying, and nothing you’ve done has stopped it.
But with Zoe? With Zoe, there’d been nothing but the two of us. Even in this cabin, stuffed with memories I can’t look at full in the face, I hadn’t thought of anything but her. The smell of her skin. The way her body shuddered underneath mine when I teased the underside of her breast with my tongue. The thready, gasping breath she’d taken when I’d pushed inside her for the first time. When we’d finally worn ourselves out—Zoe collapsed against my chest, my hand fisted in the hair at the nape of her neck—she’d breathed a quiet Oh my God against my neck, and I could’ve fallen asleep right then, not sparing a thought for all the reasons this was probably a terrible idea.
I hear her shift in her bunk and make the soft exhalation that means she’s waking up. On autopilot, I swing my legs from the bed, stand on wobbly, fatigued legs, and try not to laugh at the way my dick tents my shorts, so pronounced it almost looks like a gag from a bad movie. I forgot, last night, in our sleepy, delirious tumbles back to our individual beds, to put my clothes for the morning on the bunk above me, so I stumble over to the pile of them on the floor, pulling my jeans on over my shorts with a quiet groan and shoving my feet into my untied boots before I tug on my sweatshirt and head out onto the stoop to wait, same as I do every morning.
It’s foggy this morning, but there’s sun waiting behind it—it’s the kind of soft, misty swirl that feels like nature’s cleaning crew has shown up to freshen the air before the day begins. It’s even colder than yesterday, when we’d gone out to the zip line, and my body hurts with wanting to go back inside, to pull her out of her bed and put her into mine. But I’ve got no idea where we’ll go from here. In the half-light of the day I’ve got no idea if she’s waking up and thinking it was all a mistake, that we’ve crossed a line that’s too far away from pretend. When I’d gotten back from the infirmary last night—Jesus Christ, I broke into a building so I could fuck her—I’d thought she might’ve changed her mind, a flash of hesitation in her eyes before she’d made me her offer. We only do this here.
Inside I hear the rush of the plumbing, the toilet flushing, and a few seconds later I hear that she’s started the shower. She’ll be quick about it; she always is, so I don’t have to wait out here too long. But maybe I ought to walk this off, not make it weird when we see each other the first time. If last night’s the only night we have like that, I’ll make it work. We’ll go back to the way things were before. Maybe this urge I feel to be with her (and, let’s be honest, this boner I have) will wear off naturally. One night of the best sex of my life but I’ve got to keep focused. I’ve got to make sure this camp is my first priority.
Behind me, just as I’ve stepped off the stoop, the door opens.
She’s there, her hair still messy and dry, a pillow crease across her cheek, a towel wrapped loosely around her body. “Oh, jeez, it’s cold,” she says first, hunching her shoulders. But then she looks down at me and smiles. “Coming?” she says, turning back inside, leaving the door open so I can see her drop the towel before heading toward the shower.
I’m up those steps so fast, pulling off my sweatshirt before I’m all the way back inside, and I hear her laugh as she steps behind the curtain. I’m desperate to get in there, but I make a stop by my bunk to grab a condom, and then I brush my teeth faster than I ever have in my life, glad she can’t see me clumsily shoving down my pants, one handed. It’s a wonder I’m not short of breath when I actually step behind the curtain.
And it’s a good thing too, because Zoe’s body—holy fuck. It’s enough to make my heart feel like it’s stopping. I’d seen her, of course, last night, but it’d been mostly dark, and it sure as shit hadn’t been with water pouring all over her. Those long, toned legs, that high, plump ass and trim waist. The way she moves that body with full confidence, smooth and strong, owning every inch of it. I’ve always loved women, loved their bodies, but I don’t think any one of them has ever affected me like she has, like she’s got one fist wrapped around my dick and another one shoved right through my chest, too close to everything inside me that still feels kicked around and roughed up.
“Good morning,” she says, stepping back so I can get closer, partway under the dinky showerhead. I slap the condom down onto the windowsill, hoping she doesn’t tag me for being too presumptuous. Hoping I haven’t been too presumptuous.
“You sore?” I ask her. Which sounds pretty presumptuous. I should’ve taken a walk; it’s too early for me to attempt conversation. “I mean, good morning.”
She smiles. “You know I have done it before. It’s not like you planted the flag there.”
“I didn’t say—”
“I’m not sore,” she interrupts, leaning her head back under the water, raising her arms to push her hair back from her forehead. I feel like every pint of blood in my body is racing directly to my dick. In about thirty seconds I’ll probably reenact a different version of our first meeting and pass out on this shower floor. I set my hands on her hips, and she makes a little hmm under her breath before she speaks again. “I feel good.”
“I feel good too.” I duck my head, feel the hot water rain over the back of it while I dip my mouth lower, lick a drop of water from her shoulder, feel the press of her nipples against my skin. The relief I feel to be doing this—touching her again—is all out of proportion to how I should feel about an arrangement like this, two people in a strange situation, fucking the tension off and drawing clear lines in the sand. “Could feel better,” I say, my voice gruff, my hips pressing forward. I need to keep this...I don’t know what. Light. Simple. Her body and mine. This is sex, nothing else.
But then she surprises me, straightening her spine from where she’d been arched back into the water, setting her hands on my chest, trailing them down as she drops to her knees, her mouth opening against my hip. For a second my mind is blank with the promise of it; I’m all anticipation. This is simple. Her mouth, my dick. I don’t even have to look her in the eye.
But just as quick my body rejects it. I bend so I can set my palms underneath her elbows, pull her up. “No,” I say to her, and her brow furrows. I don’t know how to explain it to her, this feeling. She knows by now I’m shit at talking things out, but it’s one thing to be rough at conversation; it’s another to say the wrong thing when you’re naked with someone, about to do something that’s intimate no matter what boundaries you’ve drawn. I’d said it to her last night, out by the fire—this can’t be about anything she owes me. And I don’t know if Zoe gets off on what she was about to do. But I know myself, and I know if I let her do this, I’ll feel it the wrong way. “Let’s just—” I begin, backing her against the cold tile of the wall. When she gasps, I reach up and wrench the showerhead down so it still pours over us, so she’s warm and wet. She stretches into me, wrapping her arms around my neck and tilting her face up so I don’t have to finish my thought, so I can kiss her and touch her and feel her grow more restless under my mouth and hands. She raises her knee to my hip, presses it there in invitation, and there it is again—that perfect blankness in my mind, nothing but her and me, nothing but this thing we can give to each other.
* * * *
We’re late to breakfast.
The Dwyers have already taken off, so it’s quieter than usual when we come in, and everyone—all gathered around the same table—looks up at our arrival.
“Uh,” Zoe says quietly, beside me. “Are we wearing sandwich boards or something?”
“What?”
“Like, ‘WE HAD SEX’ sandwich boards?”
Weirdly, I look down at my chest, and Zoe cracks out a laugh. “Quiet, you,” I say, raising a hand awkwardly in greeting as we walk toward the table.
“I think someone broke into the infirmary,” says Paul, and I choke on a surprised cough. Zoe claps my back while I clear my throat, once, then again.
“I need to—” I begin, and then clear my throat again. Zoe slaps me just a little harder on the shoulder. “Paul, that was me. I’m sorry. Uh, after the bonfire, we—” I break off, having no idea how to finish this sentence. Wanted to have tons of sex but I didn’t have condoms? I don’t even know if he’d notice there were a few gone. I’d never even known about this stash until I’d become a counselor. Paul and Lorraine knew that the older kids didn’t always follow the rules about staying out of cabins belonging to the opposite sex, and during our training they’d had a nurse come in to give a long, embarrassing talk about safe sex that was more detailed than anything any of us had heard in public school.
“I burned myself,” Zoe says. “While I was doing the”—she crooks out an elbow, makes a fist and a funny circular motion with it—“the stirring thing? To help put the fire out.”
“Oh!” exclaims Lorraine, looking back and forth between Zoe’s hands, her face concerned. Right away Zoe looks like she’s realized her mistake, and her face flushes.
“The burn’s on her stomach,” I say, ignoring Zoe’s eyes on me. Lorraine looks stumped by this, but I rush out a clarification. “She leaned over and caught the tip of a smoldering branch.”
“Yes,” Zoe says. “Just the tip. It was—hot.” Oh, fuck. I have never wanted to laugh this hard in my life. But I keep my face straight.
“I wanted to make sure I got a good-size bandage,” I say. “I’m sorry. I thought I’d gotten in without damaging the lock.”
Paul looks up at me, all forgiveness. “That’s all right, son,” he says. “I only noticed because you must’ve forgotten to close up the lock latch all the way when you’d left.” I can believe it. By that point, my hands had been shaking with need. “You know, Lorraine, we should’ve given Aiden a key anyway. He’s the medical professional around here. We only know basic first aid, and don’t keep a nurse here when we don’t have campers. Where’d you learn to pick a lock like that?”
At this, I do laugh. Zoe and I settle at the table, Lorraine handing us each a plate so we can dig into the egg casserole that’s in the center of the table. “Actually, I learned it here. You guys used to have a pretty easy lock on the storage unit and one time a group of us picked it so we could play a midnight game of badminton.” I pause at Lorraine’s doubting expression. “Okay, more than one time.”
Tom chuckles, sips his coffee, keeping his eye on Little Tommy, who’s toddling his way around the table beside us, his shirt wet with drool. “I tried a few against-the-rules things when I was here too,” Sheree says. “One summer Jenny Gregson and I stacked logs up on the side of our cabin so we could climb up onto our roof and look at the stars. It’s a wonder we didn’t break our necks.”
Lorraine shakes her head, putting a hand to her brow as if the mere thought of this stresses her out. “It amazes me the stuff we missed,” she says, her expression growing more serious. “Last year, we had two campers who’d smuggled in a small flat-screen and two gaming consoles, a bunch of those... What do you call ’em, Paul?”
“Adapters,” Paul says. “Extension cords.”
“We don’t let our kids have those,” Walt says, and I’m assuming he means the games and not the extension cords, but since the Coburg children seemed pretty shocked last weekend by how a tire swing works, I wouldn’t be surprised by either.
Still, Lorraine and Paul had always been strict about electronics at camp, even before everything had reached the kind of peak plugged-in state the world’s in now. No TVs, only emergency weather radios. No phones in our cabins. No handheld games.
“Anyways, they’d wait until their counselor came and did the final lights-out check, and then they’d set up all these things on that single outlet in their cabin,” she says, then purses her lips and shakes her head again.
“We had a small electrical fire,” says Paul, patting her arm. “Everyone was fine. Those boys lost all the equipment they had, though.”
“And then there were the kids with the—” She shudders a little before she continues, “The marijuana.” Rachel lets out a dramatic gasp, like Lorraine’s just revealed a sex trafficking ring. Obviously I’ve got complicated feelings about drugs, but there’d been more than one counselor who’d managed to get a joint into camp back during my days here. I’d never thought twice about it until now, seeing Lorraine looking like she might cry.
Sheree clucks her tongue in sympathy. “Oh, Lorraine,” she says, putting an arm around her and giving her a brief, sideways hug. “I know how you feel. I worry about my kids at my school night and day. The world is changing so fast.”
“I think we’ve realized that we’re not as able to keep up anymore. We hired two assistant camp managers last summer, but when you run a camp, you’ve got to be the one willing to get up at all hours of the night. You’ve got to be the one convincing those kids you’re always watching,” Lorraine says. I feel a pulse of tension go up my neck, settle across my shoulders. Even if I can get Lorraine and Paul to see this camp not as a place mostly for kids—even if I can get them to picture a bunch of addicts out here, good people who need another shot—I know the weakest link in my plan is Lorraine’s you. I’d own this campground, so of course I’d have a stake. But it’d be counseling professionals running the thing, not me. I wouldn’t be living and breathing it, not like Lorraine and Paul. I don’t think I could. The worrying I did over Aaron—I couldn’t relive even a diluted version of that, spread out over however many people might be treated here. From the beginning of this plan, I’d known I’d want to keep my distance. The guy you report to, not the guy in the trenches.
“Been tough getting used to that,” says Paul, his expression more melancholy than anything I’ve ever seen. “Don’t have the energy we used to, and the kids—they see us as…well…old.”
“They’ve probably never seen you do a cannonball,” Zoe says from beside me, forking her eggs, and then she immediately claps a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide as saucers. There’s a beat of silence while Paul looks over at her, a second of confusion before he bursts out in his booming laugh, always a surprise when you get used to his quiet way of speaking.
“Oh, Zoe. I am sorry about that. I wondered if that was you,” he says. “Didn’t have my glasses on!”
Lorraine covers her face with her hands, shakes her head. “Paul, I told you to skip the fall swim.”
“Well, sweetheart, it’s a tradition, you know, and the guys would’ve been disappointed—”
“You traumatized poor Zoe,” says Lorraine.
Zoe waves a hand, swallows the bite of eggs she’d nervously shoved in her mouth while Paul laughed. “I’ve seen worse,” she says, and then she makes this squeak noise in her throat, maybe the beginnings of that meep! she described on Friday. “I don’t mean worse. I mean, it was fine, everyone’s—everybody looked fine? It’s not like I was doing an assessment. Basically I didn’t even see anything—”
“Woo, honey,” Sheree says, laughing. “You ought to quit now.”
Zoe’s shoulders slump, and I put an arm around her, pulling her toward me and shaking her playfully, while everyone except Walt and Rachel—who look like their milk’s turned—laughs. There’s a shock of something familiar that runs through my body, and I almost jolt with it, this need to chase down what I recognize. It’s like when you catch the smell of something delicious cooking in the air, something you haven’t had in forever. That half second where your memory syncs up with your senses and you realize, Oh, right, cinnamon rolls.
I drop my arm from around Zoe’s shoulders when I’ve realized it.
It’s family. That’s what it feels like. I’d almost forgotten.
* * * *
“You’re awful quiet,” Zoe says, when we’ve pulled out of the campground. We’d packed up in silence, Zoe moving slower than usual, and I’d wondered if she’d been thinking the same thing as me—should we, one more time, before we go back to real life? But in the end, I was stuck back at that breakfast table, too in my head about everything Lorraine and Paul had said, and when I’d zipped up my bag and set it by the door, she’d seemed to take the hint—moving more quickly, making a joke about how she thought her boots finally fit her, or maybe they’d just beaten her toes into submission. I’d wanted to kiss her for that, for pressing on—but I didn’t know how. Didn’t know how to initiate affection with her that wasn’t a prelude to something else.
“Just tired.” I reach forward to turn the heater vents her way, like she likes. I can feel her watching me, working me out. It’s the best and worst thing about her, the way she watches.
“They won’t like that you don’t plan to run the camp,” she says.
It’s the worst. It’s the worst fucking thing.
“I know that,” I grind out, my voice sounding harsher than I intend it to. I know before she even starts talking that she won’t quit, either. We’re past that—we were past that before the sex. The more time she’s spent with me, the less she holds back.
“The business plan for the other Wilderness/Wellness locations has a position for a camp manager. No special credentials for that, really. It’s separate from the counseling functions. You don’t want to do that?”
I rub a palm over my head, let out a gusty sigh. “Not really.”
“Because you want to stay working as a paramedic?”
“Zo, come on.” Let me off the hook, I’m saying.
“You can’t give that answer to Lorraine and Paul. And they’re going to ask the question. It’s going to be their most important question. You want to buy this campground and hand it over to someone they’ve never even seen.”
My answer is a roll of my shoulders, a tightening of my hands on the steering wheel.
“You can’t just throw money at this. Believe me.”
It’s that quick that I get angry, and I’m grateful to be driving, to know I have to keep half my attention on some other task. “Are you kidding me with that?” I ask her. “Your actual job was throwing money at this. I’m just the guy who had to catch all that money, and you know what? I can’t fucking wait to be rid of it. You know what the check I got said? The one that came from your firm?”
“No,” she says, her voice firm. She’s got a spine of steel, Zoe does.
“Aaron O’Leary Settlement. Right in the fucking memo line.”
She takes a deep breath through her nose, like she’s got to recover from that piece of information, even though it can’t be new to her. “But if you’re just trying to—get rid of it…”
“Let me ask you something, Zo,” I say, my voice low, angry. “How’ve you been doing, spending all that money you’ve got?”
I see her, out of the corner of my eye, rub her palms up and down the thighs of her jeans, see her jaw firm briefly before she answers. “I told you, I’m taking some time.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t fucking feel like taking some time. Because your money and mine, those are two different things. You had a lucky night. You got drunk and bought a lottery ticket and beat the odds. My brother didn’t. He died like a bunch of other poor fuckers who get hooked on something, and every single dollar of this money feels like it’s for a hit he took, a bad decision he made. The best thing—the only fucking thing I can think to do with it that won’t make me sick is this camp.”
It’s maybe the most I’ve ever said to Zoe all at once, probably more than I’ve said to anyone in the last six months. She’ll quit now, after that, I think. She won’t fight me.
And for all of two minutes, she doesn’t. She sits silently, her eyes straight ahead, and as my words echo in the car around me, I feel all that quick-fire anger flame out. Now all I feel is tired, and confused, and sorry. Sorry for going so hard at her when all she wanted was to help.
“Hey,” I say, soft now.
“Don’t apologize,” she says, sharply. “You’re right that I had a lucky night, and you’re absolutely right that I didn’t deserve it.” I open my mouth, ready to dispute that—who said anything about deserving it?—but she barrels on before I can stop her. “But I’m taking time so I don’t screw up again.”
What “again”? She reaches up and drags her fingers over her brow, a brief, casual touch that I notice more now that I know how her skin feels under my own fingertips. “Look, I don’t know what it’s like for you,” she says. “But for me, it’s easy to make mistakes when big things change. When my dad died, I—I made big mistakes, mistakes that lasted a long time. And winning this money—well, it’d be easy to make mistakes with this too. I’ve got a second chance here, and I want to do it right.” She stops, clears her throat, reaches out to adjust one of the heater vents away from her. It’s the barest, briefest pause, not enough time for me to even ask all the questions I have about what she’s said: What mistakes? How long did they last? What does it mean to you, to do it right? “I’m sure you do want to get rid of this money. All I’m asking is whether you’ve really thought about it. About the particulars.”
“You’ve seen all the work I’ve done.” But as soon as I’ve said it, I realize I don’t so much mean it as an explanation. I think maybe I mean it as a question.
She shrugs her shoulders, all nonchalance, like we haven’t exchanged harsh words. Maybe it’s the way we started, me and her—the fact that it was hostile from the start means that we don’t feel so uncomfortable when things turn tense. “How much work you do on something has nothing to do with whether it’s the right idea.”
I slide my eyes over to her again, take in the smooth lines of her profile. Anyone else would see her and think she’s entirely unbothered. But already I know better. I know her better. I know she won’t answer if I ask her anything else, about her mistakes, her work, her money, anything. I know she’s given me all she’s willing to, and my chest feels tight with something like—frustration. Longing.
But that’s bullshit. Me and Zoe, we’re not the same. The camp is what I’m holding on to, what I’ve been holding on to for all these months, and hell if I’m going to get talked out of it now. I’ve wanted this so bad I’ve been willing to lie to people I care about. I’ve been willing to get involved with a woman who’d been on the wrong side of my brother’s death. That I’m sleeping with her now makes no difference.
Zoe is temporary. This camp is my family’s—my brother’s—legacy.
“I want this to work,” I say.
She leans her head back onto the seat and turns her face my way. For what feels like a long time, she doesn’t say anything. She only watches me, and I wish I could get in that head of hers, hear the gears that grind, the ones that make her so good at figuring things out. “Then I want it to work for you,” she says, finally.
It’s enough, this truce, enough for two people who’ve committed to a short-term arrangement, who don’t have to ask each other the big questions. But after this weekend, it’s different between us, however casual we’re keeping the sex. I reach out across the bench seat, take her hand in mine. She doesn’t have the ring on. Every week, when we get in the car to go home, she slides it off, puts it back in the box, then back into the glove box. I twine my fingers with hers, feel that bare finger between two of mine, ignore the answering disquiet that goes through me at the sensation. I give her palm a light squeeze.
She turns her face back toward the windshield, but she doesn’t pull away.