by M. F. Lorson
“Maybe you could find a way to come to my campsite tonight?” he asked, once we were out of view again. “It would be the closest thing to spending the night together we’ve done.”
He was giving me his best sultry look, tipping my chin up with his thumb and forefinger as he spoke.
Saying yes would be stupid. Saying yes would mean consenting to hiding even more from Reagan and possibly getting caught by her mother. I should definitely not say yes.
Too bad no felt like torture and his perfect full lips were already curving into an excited smile.
Landon
There was careful tip-toeing coming from the darkness, and I knew it was her.
Biker guy was busy rattling on and on about his bike, his criminal record, and his hatred of the Grover police force for over an hour and a half. We shared a campfire where I shared my hot dogs with him since he came prepared for absolutely nothing.
His ears perked up when he heard the crunch of leaves too.
“Drake,” she whispered loudly through the darkness.
His name was Drake—because of course it was.
“That’s my girl,” he said in a tone that made me want to throw the rest of my dinner in the fire.
Harper stepped into the light, and her eyes landed first on him...then drifted over to see me. I expected the moment in the police station again when she was not-so-pleasantly surprised to find me sitting in the seat next to her. Back then, she swore, scowled, and snapped at me.
This time, her face fell. It was the exact look of someone who had been caught doing something they weren’t proud of.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered without moving.
“He’s here to see his girl too,” Drake said, pulling her against his chest and accosting her lips with his.
I had to look away.
Harper knew I lied to her boyfriend as a cover to spy on her. She wasn’t an idiot, and she certainly knew I didn’t have a girlfriend in scouts.
She pulled away from his kiss and looked around the camp. “Where is your tent, babe?”
He pointed back to his hammock hanging in the trees. “Sleeping in the trees. And if I can’t sleep, I can always come crawl in with you.” He nuzzled into her neck, and even I spotted her wincing.
A slicing anger coursed through my veins while I looked at them, knowing that if Hunt knew she was using her Girl Scouts trip to climb between the sheets with this loser, he’d lose his mind. I was tempted to blow the whistle already.
Her narrowed eyes found mine over the fire, and I could see the tenseness in her jaw. “I can show you where your girlfriend is camped out.”
“That would be great,” I answered, unable to keep the annoyance out of my tone.
“Babe, wait here for me, okay?” She kissed his cheek and huffed past me toward the woods where she came. “Watch for rattlesnakes,” she snapped back at me, and I grinned because I knew the only rattlesnake here was me, but it made her angry—which pleased me.
We were far enough into the woods and out of earshot when she spun on me and slugged me hard against the shoulder.
“What is wrong with you?”
“Me? What is wrong with you?” I whispered back, rubbing the aching spot on my arm. Her punches were getting stronger every day, like I was her own personal kickboxing class.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She crossed her arms and glared at me with her chin up and her lips tight.
“Harper, that guy is just trying to get in your pants. He’s such a tool.”
She scoffed and did her best to look offended, but it wasn’t convincing. “How do you know I don’t want—”
“Ick! Don’t even say it. Because I know that this is all just some big show for your image.”
“Keep your voice down!” she said with a shush. “Also, you have some nerve talking to me about my image. You nearly put your family in bankruptcy throwing those stupid parties so no one suspected you weren’t rich anymore.”
“That’s not the same thing. I didn’t break any laws doing it,” I snapped back.
“Underage drinking is sort of against law, idiot.”
I let out a frustrated groan. We were going around in circles, and I knew we could argue for hours if we didn’t get back on track.
“Why are you really here?” she whispered.
“Why are you really here?” I echoed.
“It’s none of your business. I don’t have to answer to you. You’re not my boyfriend.”
Her wide eyes were the only thing I could see in the darkness, and even though I couldn’t see the rest of her features, I could tell by just her eyes that Harper was on edge. She wasn’t just angry. She was scared too. Maybe scared of me ratting on her or scared of what she would have to do with this boyfriend of hers. Either way, I figured that the best thing I could do was what I came out here to do. Keep her out of trouble and away from Drake.
“Thank god for that,” I scoffed, throwing in a little hint of disgust to sweeten the deal.
Squinting her eyes at me, I recognized the angry girl I knew.
“Get over yourself.”
We stopped talking when we heard someone walking on the dirt road not far from where we were hiding. She grabbed my arm to silence me, and I realized it was probably the first time she had ever touched me without hitting me.
I didn’t even know she was capable of being anything less than brutal. When I glanced over at her, I noticed she had stepped into the moonlight, and it illuminated the rest of her face. The long blonde hair on the opposite side of her head danced through the breeze, and for the first time ever, the haircut didn’t look completely stupid. It actually looked a little nice.
“Please don’t tell on me, Landon,” she pleaded through a heavy sigh.
“Don’t stay at his camp, and I won’t.”
“Fine.”
Then taking her hand off my arm, she stomped away toward the girl’s camp, and I turned to go back to my tent.
Harper
Don’t stay at his camp, and I won’t. I repeated the phrase over and over again in my head. On the one hand, I would rather eat my own arm than take direction from Landon Maxwell, but on the other hand, my heart was beating so fast I could hardly breathe just thinking about Drake and I alone overnight.
It wasn’t the first time Drake had made it clear he was waiting for the physical part of our relationship to escalate. It was just the first time my dad wasn’t around to keep it from happening. I didn’t know what I wanted. But I knew one thing for sure, I was not trying to lose my virginity in a hammock ten feet away from my mortal enemy.
I had made my decision. I was not going back to Drake’s camp. He was going to be a royal jerk in the morning, but it was too risky now that I knew Landon was on the premises. Either Landon was here to make a skin suit out of me and wear it home to take his rightful place as my father’s daughter and number one fan, or (and this was only slightly more likely) he wanted to get whatever he could on me so he could use it later. And to think I almost enjoyed hanging out with him on taco night.
With ninja-like stealth, I crept back across camp to Reagan and I’s tent. My shoe snapped a twig in half causing a loud crack just before my hand reached the zipper and I thought for sure Mrs. Riley was going to pop her head out of the tent next door, but then a rumbling snore from Abigail drowned out all other noises of the night, providing just enough coverage for me to slide the zipper open and crawl inside.
Mrs. Riley hadn’t heard a thing, but her daughter was sitting up with her knees to her chest and her flashlight pointed straight at me.
“Sloane was right,” she whispered. “You’ve been hiding stuff from us.”
I tried to act cool as I unlaced my tennis shoes and crawled into my sleeping bag, but I was so totally caught and we both knew it.
“You can’t just act like nothing’s going on,” said Reagan. “It’s midnight, and you’re creeping around our campground like the Hamburglar.”
&n
bsp; I wanted to make fun of her for referencing the Hamburglar, but I swallowed that urge because I was on seriously thin ice here. I didn’t think Reagan would go running to her mom and rat me out, but if I didn’t start explaining, she was definitely going to hightail it to Sloane’s house the second we got back home, and Sloane was a lot less predictable than Reagan.
“Turn off the flashlight,” I whispered. “Someone is going to see it and know we’re up.”
“Good,” she snarled, “Maybe you deserve to be caught.” She clicked off the light anyway.
I knew it was a risk, but I had to come clean about Drake. I didn’t have any problem not telling Sloane and Reagan I had a boyfriend, but I had a big problem lying to them.
I waited a beat before launching in. “I went to see someone in another campsite.”
“Duh,” said Reagan. It was pitch black, but I was just certain she had her arms folded over her chest all huffy like.
“My boyfriend,” I whispered. “My boyfriend is camping on the other side of the bathrooms.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath, and I was grateful that it was too dark to see the hurt expression I was sure accompanied it. Dating Drake felt great whenever I thought about Alice finding out, or the great annoyance it would cause mom and dad, but it felt a little bit less great everytime he reiterated I had to keep it a secret from my friends. It wasn’t like they were going to tell, and I hung out with his friends all the time.
He kept saying, after you turn eighteen we can tell the world, but eighteen was six months away, and Reagan wanted answers now.
“I wanted to tell you,” I continued. “But he’s not really into…” I was at a loss for how to explain why Drake didn’t want to call me his girlfriend or meet anyone that mattered to me. “He’s kind of private,” I finished.
“How long have you been seeing him?” she demanded.
“Six months-ish,” I squeaked.
“Seriously?” hissed Reagan. “Six months! Is he the reason you were grounded half of spring term?”
I smiled in the dark. “That was the honeymoon period.”
“You have so much talking to do,” said Reagan.
It took a full twenty minutes to finish filling her in on my relationship with Drake. She had a lot of questions, mostly revolving around what he looked like and whether or not he had any single friends. It felt good. Heck, it felt more than good. It was great finally being able to tell someone what I had spent six months hiding. What was the point of being a seventeen-year-old girl with a super hot rebel boyfriend if you didn’t get to brag about it? I basically unloaded six months worth of swoony motorcycle stories in record time, and by the end, I was kind of regretting not sneaking back over to Drake’s campsite.
I could barely keep my eyes open when Reagan whispered, “I think it sounds magical, but I also think it sounds like trouble.”
“I like trouble,” I said through a yawn.
“Yeah,” said Reagan. “But maybe you’re outgrowing it.”
I didn’t answer. Instead I rolled to my side and let my mind wander. When I thought about hugging tight to Drake’s chest, night air and the combination of his touch making me feel invincible as we cruised around Grover on his bike, I felt a thousand miles away from outgrowing trouble. But when I thought of him trying to coax me to spend the night with him, or the way he brushed off meeting my friends as a nuisance, it was hard not to wonder if I was setting myself up for a fall.
Landon
I told Drake that Harper got caught walking me through the woods last night and neither of us would be cuddling up to our girlfriends that night. He wasn’t happy about it. Until he blazed up and forgot all about Harper.
The next morning, I wondered what a guy like Drake would do all day while waiting for his girlfriend to snuggle up to him after midnight, and I learned the answer to that question was bug the ever-loving crap out of me.
I planned on doing a little recon anyway, so I figured listening to this criminal-wannabe regale me with his tales of lawbreaking would work just fine. No matter how absolutely skull-splitting it was.
“Then, I got busted for curfew. Can you believe that?” he whined while we sat around the morning fire.
“I didn’t even know you could get busted for curfew,” I lied. Of course, I knew. Breaking curfew was a slap on the wrist for minors, and if Drakey-poo was doing anything that was actually against the law, curfew wouldn’t have even made it into the paperwork.
This guy was the lamest poser of all. He was so dead-set on making everyone believe he was such a badass, and all I could think was that Harper was falling for it. Falling hard it seemed—and that grated my nerves.
“Then I got arrested for shoplifting, which I didn’t even do. They totally pinned it on me.”
“Seriously?” I asked, feigning interest.
“Yep. So, now I’m on probation for another six months.”
It took actual effort to hide my disgust. “
The cops in Grover are on such a power trip,” he said while scrolling through his phone.
“Uh-huh,” I mumbled as I stirred the glowing-red embers.
“It’s that police chief with an attitude problem. I hate that guy.” He said it so quietly that I almost ignored him, but then I paused. Holding the shovel in my hand, I stared at the burning logs when realization hit.
Everyone knew that Hunt was the chief of police in Grover, which meant everyone knew Harper was his daughter. Why would a guy with such a chip on his shoulder toward the cops date the chief’s daughter?
My eyes lifted from the fire as I glared at the guy sitting across from me.
Revenge. Of course. He was dating Harper as a big F-U to her dad.
Did Harper know that? Was she dating him to get back at her dad too? Either way, I was fuming just thinking about it.
Hunt wasn’t the kind of guy you outsmarted. If he was on a power trip, it was because he earned it, and this clown actually thought he could get one over on the biggest guy in town. My jaw ticked just thinking about it.
“Now you have to keep your hands clean if you don’t want to go to jail,” I said carefully. I just wanted to poke the bear a little to see what he would tell me.
“Nah. I just can’t get caught.” He laughed, and I actually managed to chuckle along.
He leaned forward, and I felt his eyes on me for a moment. “Hey man, can I trust you?”
My cheeks burned while he glared at me over the fire. “Of course, dude,” I lied.
“I really shouldn’t be telling you this, and I can’t go into too much detail, but my girl and I have big plans of sticking it to that police chief. He won’t even see it coming.”
I stopped breathing as my gaze leveled on the guy sitting across from me, and I did my best to keep my poker face. “Your Girl Scout girlfriend?”
He snickered. “It’s all a cover. She’s a cute little delinquent.”
“I bet,” I grumbled.
I think what irritated me most was that I let my guard down around Harper. She had me convinced she was just a nice girl with a bad haircut.
“Alright,” Drake yawned with a long stretch. “I’m gonna head into town for the day, but I’ll be back before sunset.” He actually winked and it took everything in me to not put this shovel to good use.
“Sounds good, man.”
As he loaded up his few possessions in his backpack and climbed onto his motorcycle, I was itching to run to Harper’s camp to give her hell about this news. I hadn’t quite decided if I would give her a chance to explain it, but all I knew was that she wasn’t about to let her get away with whatever she was planning.
Harper
The sun beat through the thin fabric of our tent with unrelenting fury.
“My eyes,” cried Reagan. “My delicate eyes!”
She flung her forearm across her face in protest.
“Do we have to get up?” I grumbled sinking lower in my sleeping bag to keep the sunlight from forcing me to rise. I was hard
core regretting not setting up under a tree like the others.
Reagan rolled over to face me. “I blame you for my sluggishness.”
I smirked from beneath my sleeping bag. Reagan could blame me all she liked, but we both knew she was not a morning person. Everything about Reagan and her mother was different. Where Reagan was a brunette, Mrs. Riley was a blonde. While Reagan barely filled out a size 2, Mrs. Riley was...voluptuous. She couldn’t be a morning person. Not when her Mom got up at five am to power walk the neighborhood with my mom and the other trophy wives of Grover County.
Outside the tent Mrs. Riley whistled along to the theme song from Full House.
“Lord help us all,” muttered Reagan as she crawled out of her sleeping bag and dug through the pile of clothing at the end of our tent for her ambassador uniform. I frowned when she held up her khaki shirt, the patches puckering with wrinkles.
“In general, I like your mother, but insisting we wear our uniform for anything other than formal ceremonies is really pushing me toward disliking her.”
“Just the uniform bit?” asked Reagan, one eyebrow cocked with judgement. “Just the uniform bit, not the constant pressuring me to audition for dance solos or replacing my Doritos with carrot sticks and loving notes about keeping my figure while I still have time to make something of myself?”
I laughed. “Well, I kind of enjoy it when you open your lunch bag and discover you’ve been carrot bombed. The rest I’m sympathetic too.”
Reagan tossed a pair of khaki shorts at my head. “Get dressed. We’ve got eggs to scramble and gibberish to listen to.”
The brightness of the sun was misleading. Once I had changed out of my warm flannel pajamas and into my uniform I was covered in goosebumps.
I crawled out of our tent and scanned the tree-line for Drake and Landon. I didn’t see either, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. I was pretty sure that Landon knew how to keep a low profile, but not Drake. Drake lived for the get caught moments. I loved that about him on paper. Like if he had a dating profile it would say, unapologetic rule breaker, must love a wild ride. But in practice sometimes dating him felt like learning to drive on the freeway without insurance.
