Chapter 35

Chase

We’re a couple hundred feet into the woods and already I’m feeling like a whole new man.

Nothing else is like this.

I love the forest. The way everything hovers dark and close, sun filtering down like it’s been tossed in handfuls. The trees are older than the Constitution, their trunks bigger around than I can wrap my arms, muzzy with lichen and moss. Overhead, the treetops spear patches of blue sky, and you get dizzy from the sensation of falling upward. And there are the smells. Leaves and needles and hardwood and loamy dirt and life and decay.

Also, Liv’s hair is in a ponytail. A high ponytail, which, if anyone’s polling, is the sexiest kind.

I watch it swing behind her as she walks, long and thick and the color of copper.

I am so going to wrap that ponytail around my hand later and hold her head still while I kiss her and fuck her.

The thought makes me want to whistle.

Ahead of me, Liv pauses.

“You okay?”

“Is it supposed to hurt?”

“What hurts?”

“My shoulders.”

“It’s going to hurt a little. Because we didn’t train ahead of time and you’re carrying almost forty pounds.”

Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get her pack any lighter than that. She insisted on a few things I knew she wouldn’t care about in the end, like having her own toothpaste and her own deodorant. And a mini bottle of shampoo in case—

In case what? I demanded.

I don’t know. In case there’s a shower.

I didn’t try to talk her out of it.

“Here, hang on,” I tell her. I lift the pack from the top and tighten her waist strap a little. Then the chest compression strap.

“You just like the way it makes my boobs look.”

“Not gonna argue with that.”

But I’m not actually looking at her tits. I’m looking at her face. I’m standing so close to her, and suddenly it occurs to me: she’s not wearing makeup.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her without makeup before. Not even in the middle of the night.

Her eyelashes are a pale blond flutter, her skin is pale and creamy, her eyelids almost translucent. She is delicate and vulnerable and incredibly beautiful. So beautiful it makes my throat hurt.

I look away, yanking on her shoulder strap to shorten it. “Better?”

“Oh, yeah, lots better.”

“Most of the weight’s supposed to be on your hips and chest, not your shoulders.”

We hike on. One foot in front of the other. The perfect meditation.

We stop for lunch and lean our packs against a boulder beside a stream. The sky is blue, the stream glints in the sun, burbling as it runs over the rocks. It’s like something out of a storybook.

I pull food out. I take it from her pack, to lighten her up as best I can. We’re doing pitas and peanut butter. Oh, and oranges. If I can, I like fresh fruit the first day.

“It’s not gourmet,” I say, feeling unusually apologetic.

The corner of her mouth tips up. “I was hoping for a vichyssoise starter course.”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“I know—that’s why I said it.”

She eats, though, with gusto, which is one of those things camping does for you. Makes you hungry.

I watch her lick the last of her peanut butter off the plastic knife. I must make an unintentional, appreciative sound, because she gives me another of those sexy half-smiles and licks more thoroughly. I narrow my eyes at her.

“Be careful,” I warn. “Or you will get taken over the top of this rock.”

She eyes it.

“I’m not kidding.”

“I’m not refusing.”

I yank her toward me and kiss her, licking into her mouth the way she was going at that knife, until she moans and clutches my shirt. Then I release her. We both know it’s not going to happen here. We’re still too close to the trail entrance and only a couple of yards off the main trail. Later today, we’ll take a little-traveled side trail to a lake I know, and then we’ll make camp and—

“Have you ever had sex in the woods?”

Apparently she boarded the same thought train I did. I am such a fan of Liv’s dirty mind, I can’t even. I shake my head.

“Really?” She is obviously delighted. “I’m your first! I’m not your first anything!”

You’re the first woman since Thea who—

—I care about, is how I finish the thought. I’m not sure why it feels so much like if I use the word love, there’s no going back. No way to keep from being hurt if she can’t love what I love.

If she can’t love who I am.

If she tells me we’re too different.

If she tells me she’ll always need me to change.

If she won’t stay.

“Woods blow job?” she asks, eyebrows high.

“Nope.”

“Hand job?”

“If we go back to high school and college, yeah. Also, a lotta cars parked at the edge of the woods, but that’s different.”

“Yeah, no, that doesn’t count. Oooh. This is going to be fun.”

I don’t say, I told you so, but I’m thinking it.

Another couple of miles in—when we realized we wouldn’t have Katie, I planned a longer hike—she stops and I nearly crash into her.

“I need the…um, facilities.”

I dig out the ziplock bag with the TP and trowel and hand them to her.

“Leave no trace,” I say.

She scowls. “I hate you.”

“So you’ve said.”

She disappears, returning a few minutes later with a dark expression on her face.

“For my going-away present, you’re taking me to the fanciest restaurant in Seattle.”

I groan, loudly.

And am grateful she’s walking ahead of me and can’t see me grinning.