Chapter Twelve
Sleep is for people who have their shit together. It’s for people who don’t see the rise and fall of perfect breasts heaving off the mattress and straining towards them whenever they close their eyes. Who don’t hear gasps of lust and mixed moans of need and frustration when the lights are off—when they should be resting.
Sleep is for people who are content and satisfied and not in a constant state of wondering what the fuck they’re doing.
So I’m not surprised that Amy’s already up when I let myself into the rec hall the next morning. The door bangs shut behind me when I catch sight of her in the middle of the room, ass in the air, palms on the floor.
My eyes flick over her body, and I swear she shifts her weight on purpose, wiggling her hips so slightly that I barely see it, but can imagine exactly how it would feel against my dick. I clear my throat. “So. Some people do actually use those pants for yoga.”
“Apparently.” Her voice is strained, the air cut off in her bent position. It’s the same way she sounds when she’s under me, and it sets my skin on fire.
I swing the pack from my back and chug some water to douse the flames from inside. Bottle chucked back inside, I fumble around in the pack until I find an energy bar. I slide it across the floor and it stops a foot from her head, but she doesn’t move. “Come on,” I say. “Eat up. We’ve got work to do.”
If she hears me silently begging her to put her body into another position—some position where I can’t see how easy it would be to grab onto her hips, tug those pants down, and fuck her from behind—she doesn’t let on. An eternity later, she folds her body to the floor and sits cross-legged, facing me. We’re separated by the floor between us, and bound by the deal holding us together and pushing us apart, but she reaches for the protein bar—for the offering I laid at her feet. I force my eyes closed before she puts it in her mouth.
I wish I could remember the first time I touched her. That I could savor the memory. It was probably during a camp-wide game, clinging on to each other’s hands to form a barricade. Or maybe her fingers skimmed over my skin with the flaky paint we used to pick and designate teams. I don’t know when our skin first touched, or what year I started to hug her when she got to the bus. I can’t remember when I started watching for her family’s old station wagon, driving in from the suburbs to drop her off. But I remember waiting for her. Watching for her. Ditching whoever I was standing with to wrap my arms around her for an instant.
A wrapper crinkles in the present. “What are you thinking about?”
She looks up at me from the floor, a smear of chocolate next to her lip. “Hugging you,” I say. “Years ago. Before we got on the bus.”
Amy smiles. “Those hugs were always terrible.”
“What?” I laugh. “They were not.”
Her soft chuckle joins with mine. “They were! Your arms were all wet-noodle. I may as well have been circled by a light breeze for all the effort you put into them. It’s the hugs when we went home that I remember.”
“Man, so you know how much effort it took to give you your goodbye hug? You were always hiding.”
She flattens the wrapper to the floor. “Not hiding. Just...”
“Preparing to make a run for the woods? Building your forest shelter in your mind?”
Amy flicks her eyes up. “Exactly.”
I stand and hitch the backpack onto my shoulders. “Alright, then. Let’s go build it.”
“A shelter?”
“Yep. Whatever kind of shelter you want.”
“Might be a little late for that, Paul. I get your house, remember?”
I swallow. “Yeah, but only if I get you trained to take over. When’s the last time you built a shelter?”
She slides her hands down her legs. “When we were sixteen. The camp I worked at was a little more country club than cabins.”
“Then come on.” I reach my hand down to her. “Staff always go to the director with questions. Let’s make sure you know what you’re talking about.”
She grips me tight. In one tug she’s on her feet. My thumb skirts down her cheek and I half expect her to pull away after the shit I pulled last night, when I left her riled, a wet spot on the apex of her pale denim shorts. But she tilts her head instead, giving me better access. “Chocolate,” I say.
She opens her mouth in an offer to suck it off my thumb, but I wipe it on my jeans and get us the hell out of there before I back her onto one of the vintage couches in here and tease her until she can’t help but want me.
Amy doesn’t drop the hand I used to help her up, and I don’t relax my fingers, either. I tell myself that it’s innocent. Totally nonsexual. And it isn’t—a turn-on, I mean. But our hands stay wrapped together as we leave the rec hall, pass the cabins, and weave our way into the quiet of the forest.
I clear my throat. “We should talk about REFF.”
“Respect, environment, forestry, fun,” she says without pause. “Camp’s ruling principles. Unless you’ve changed them?”
I squeeze her hand. “Nope. They’re still the same.”
“And kids still call a time-out on each other whenever someone forgets them by, I don’t know, not scraping every morsel of food into the compost?”
“Or worse. We had a kid a couple of years ago who took the environment credo a little too seriously. He’d call a time-out on anyone who flushed the toilet without clearing it with a counselor.”
“If it’s yellow, let it mellow,” she singsongs.
“If it’s brown, flush it down, alright. But no counselor wants to look at their campers’ shit.” Her laugh is muffled by the forest. It stays with us instead of spreading and I breathe it in.
“Do the kids get punished if they forget about REFF?”
“Not really. Someone yelling ‘Time-out!’ in their face is usually punishment enough. Embarrassment is killer for kids.”
Amy’s hand flexes in mine. “Tell me about it.”
“The tough part for you is making sure the staff can’t get timed-out.”
“What do you mean?”
“They need to lead by example, but they’re barely more than kids themselves. They like their phones. Hell, they like flushing after they take a piss.”
“It is kind of nice.”
I chuckle. “So nice. And nobody can call you on flushing the toilet in your own house, so that’s a win, at least. But yeah, sometimes staff get a little too opinionated. One year, we had a counselor who loved trees way too much and forgot that we’re supposed to be teaching about sustainable forestry, not tree hugging. He chained himself to a cedar.”
“Seriously? I mean, this is a demonstration forest, but that just means that none of these trees are even slated to be logged, not that it’s a great place to demonstrate. All these trees will live out their natural lives and decompose when they come down on their own.”
My thumb brushes along the back of her hand. “You’re right.”
She releases her grip and tugs her hand from mine. Her palm skirts over her hip and down her leg. “So what you’re saying is that I have to search the staff for chains and cuffs upon arrival.”
I swing my backpack off to give my hands something to do—to give my fingers something to hold on to. I’d tell myself that removing this bag is a mandatory task that I need to do right this instant, but it would be pointless. I know I’m just doing it to keep myself from reaching for the hand she reclaimed for herself.
She steps away from me and crosses her arms over her breasts. She tilts her head back, taking in the canopy above. “I’d forgotten how, I don’t know, heavy this place is.”
I turn my head towards her. “Heavy?”
“The forest, I mean. There’s all these layers of dirt and rock below, and we’re just little humans, sandwiched between the slowly changing forest floor and the protective leaves and needles above. It’s heavy like falling asleep with someone’s arm draped over my chest.”
The backpack falls onto the combination of fallen trees and needles that looks like dirt to most people. “Uncomfortable,” I say, “and kind of limiting?”
She looks over her shoulder and her lips curve into the slightest of smiles. “It’s not like that at all. It’s comforting. Like I have another layer of protection over me.”
My hands itch to reach for her. To lay their weight on her—to give her the comfort and security I can provide. But I pick up a fallen branch instead. I hold it out to her and she takes it, leaning it against a downed old-growth tree. Stick by stick we build something that wasn’t there before, molding it from the broken and discarded remnants of the life around us. Together, we build her hideaway—her space where she feels comfortable and safe.
And I can only hope she invites me inside.