by Lili Valente
She giggles as she adds that what I’m doing to her under our shared sleeping bag is also probably grounds for eternal damnation, or at least a good long stint in purgatory. But that doesn’t stop me from making her come on my mouth so hard I have to cover her lips with my hand to keep the sounds she makes from being overheard by the people in the next tent.
And when she whispers that she’s ready, that she wants me, I don’t hesitate to roll on a condom and push inside her for the first time. There is no guilt, no hesitation, nothing but bliss and pleasure because that’s how it is with Addie. It feels like I’ve known her forever, and been in love with her even longer.
Maybe it’s the magic of summer or the crazy way we met or the fact that she’s shown me what making love is supposed to feel like—close and beautiful and so perfect it’s almost scary—but I don’t question the certainty that this isn’t the first time I’ve fallen for Adeline.
And by the end of the summer, as the August nights grow cooler and the first leaves turn golden at the edges, I don’t question the voice in my head that says all my plans aren’t worth a single precious hair on her head.
Addie has taught me what it’s like to be in love, real love, the kind that sinks its claws in deep and invites your big plans to go fuck themselves because plans are a dime a dozen and love is hitting a target the size of a pinprick in the dark.
The big plans aren’t mine, anyway. My father is the one who wants me to major in pre-law while playing football for his alma mater. I went along with pre-law because I knew he would throw a fit if I applied to the creative writing program, and football because I’m good at it and it seemed stupid to stop doing something I’m good at just because it stopped being fun years ago.
But this summer with Addie has been a wake up call, a reminder that life is incredible and magical, just like making love to her.
I don’t want to settle for good enough, or making my father happy. I want the big adventure. I want to explore and dig deep and wring every drop of excitement and mystery out of the world, and I want to do it with this beautiful, brilliant person by my side.
***
“Getting nervous yet?” I ask as I turn off onto a gravel road that isn’t much more than a drainage ditch, heading deep into the mountains near New Paltz.
“Do I look nervous?” Addie props her bare feet on the dashboard. “Seriously, Nate, if my mom hasn’t called to check up on my ‘charity work’ yet, I don’t see why she would start this weekend.”
“Because we’re going to be gone for two nights instead of one,” I say, willing to play devil’s advocate while we still have time to turn around and get back to Addie’s house before nightfall. “And because you’ve been fighting with her about living on campus.”
Addie’s lips twist. “I have a full scholarship that includes room and board. It’s stupid for me to stay at home when I could live next door to the library and be able to walk to my classes in ten minutes.”
“And be able to sneak your boyfriend in to sleep over every night,” I say, deciding now is as good a time as any to tell her I can’t quit her and hope she can’t quit me, either.
She goes still, her gaze fixed on the road ahead, but she doesn’t say a word, not a word, for so long that I can’t help asking, “Did you hear me, Einstein?”
“I heard you. Pull over.” She waits until I pull to the side of the narrow road and shove the car into park before she turns to face me, pushing her glasses higher on her nose. “Did you just say what I think you just said?”
“That I want to sleep with you every night? Assuming you’re lucky enough to land a private room or your roommate isn’t a bitch about overnight guests?”
“And how are you going to manage that? It’s a seven hour drive from Duke to Rutgers.” Her frown deepens. “And you’re the one who said this is only for the summer.”
“I may have made a miscalculation,” I say softly.
“About how far it is between schools?”
“About how much I was going to love you.” I reach out, taking her hand as tears fill her eyes. “I’m sorry, Ad. If you need to take time to think about what you want, I understand, but I’ve already made my decision. I’m transferring to Rutgers and joining the Writers House program. I’m going to learn how to write better stories and keep loving you because those are the things that make me feel alive, and I don’t want to go back to doing what other people think is best for me. I can’t. Not after this summer, and you, and everything we—”
“Oh, shut up.” She blinks, sending a tear down her cheek.
Before I can apologize again, or find a better way to say all the things I’m feeling, she says, “Of course I want you to keep loving me. I just wish you’d said something sooner so I wouldn’t have spent the last week crying myself to sleep because you were leaving next Friday.” She sniffs. “I’ve been flipping miserable, but I promised I was okay with the summer so I tried to act like I was okay. But I wasn’t, P.D. Not even a little bit.”
P.D., short for pretty devil. The nickname has become another shared joke, but today is the first time that I’ve actually felt like a devil. A stupid devil.
“Fuck, I’m an asshole. I’m sorry, Einstein.” Relief rushes through me as she dives into my arms, hugging me tight. I bend over her, kissing her wild hair. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”
“Yes,” she says, voice muffled against my chest. “You will. I want pancakes in bed tomorrow. And then I want you to lick the syrup off my fingers.”
“Is that the only place I get to lick syrup from?” My hand moves to cup her ass through her faded jeans.
“You can do whatever you want with the syrup.” She pulls back, meeting my naughty look with a prim one so cute I have no choice but to kiss the tip of her nose. “As long as we do it in your sleeping bag so I don’t end up with ants in mine.”
“Done,” I say, already imagining how hot it’s going to be to lick maple syrup from her nipples and the hollow beside her hipbone and the sweet folds between her legs.
***
I do such a dangerous job of imagining it, in fact, that by the time we get to the deserted campground—apparently other paranormal enthusiasts aren’t free to go camping on a Tuesday night—I’m so hard I can’t wait to set up the tent. I pull Adeline into the backseat and get her out of her jeans as fast as humanly possible, while she kisses me like I’m oxygen, water, adventure, and all life’s other necessities rolled up together.
It’s so hot that I end up ripping the buttons on her shirt in my hurry to get her tits in my mouth. I suck and bite and make love to her nipples until she’s panting my name. And then she straddles me and I’m suddenly inside her, buried deep, and it’s perfect, so insanely fucking good to feel her breath comes hot and fast on my lips as she rides me, grinding so deep that my cock hits the end of her with every thrust.
I’m so gone, so wild, that all it takes is her voice rough in my ear, saying, “I’m coming, Nate, I’m coming!” to send me over.
I dig my fingers into the swells of her ass and come so hard, so long, so fierce and fantastic that it’s almost more than my body can take. I go out of my head for a second, out of my skin, out of space and time.
When I finally drift back, Addie is still straddling me, watching me with an intent expression on her face.
“Hey.” I pat her bottom. “You okay?”
“I don’t know. On the one hand, that was the hottest thing ever. But on the other hand…” She points a meaningful finger down to where I’m going soft inside her without a single thing to separate my hot, pulsing flesh from hers.
I curse. “Condom. How could we forget the condom?”
“Is that a serious question?” she asks, arching a brow.
I shake my head. Of course it isn’t a serious question. I know exactly how we forgot the condom. We forgot it because the sex was explosive and crazy hot and we both went out of our heads for a little while.
“Okay.” I swallow as I run a soo
thing hand up and down her bare back. “We’ll get dressed, head back into New Palz, and find a pharmacy where they sell the morning-after pill.”
“Except that I’ll need a prescription for it because I’m under seventeen,” Addie says, making me curse again. She smiles in response, which confuses me until she adds, “So it’s a good thing I had my friend Steph get one for me a few weeks ago before she left for Princeton. I’ve got it in my purse.”
My head falls back against the seat as I go limp with relief. “Thank God. You scared me. We scared me. That can’t happen again.”
“Agreed.” She leans in, pressing a soft kiss to my lips. “As soon as school starts, I’ll go to the campus health center and get on the pill. Then we won’t have to worry.”
“You’re very smart.” I pull her in for a deeper kiss, humming into her mouth as her tongue slips out to tease mine. “Though, I admit, I do like getting out of control with you.”
“Me, too,” she says, pulsing her hips. “And I like you with nothing in between. I love feeling your skin against mine.”
I grip her ass, pulling her closer as I start to get thicker. “Should we get a condom before I make you come again, beautiful?”
“Doesn’t seem like it matters now.” She laughs softly at my no doubt unabashedly thrilled expression. “I say we make the most of our day of freedom, baby.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” I roll her beneath me, and this time I set the pace. I slide my hand beneath her, tilting her pelvis as I thrust inside her until her sharp gasp lets me know I’ve found the spot that makes her wild. I fuck her harder than I ever have, driving in fast and deep until she comes screaming my name, holding nothing back.
And when we’re done, I’m high, dizzy, drunk on the knowledge that she’s mine and the future is ours and that soon I’ll get to have her bare every time.
I’m so out of my head that I don’t think twice when she suggests a hike before we set up camp. Yes, it’s late afternoon, and the sun sets earlier between the mountains, but it’s still summer and the sun is shining and I’m so full of energy that the thought of being patient with my piece of shit tent isn’t appealing.
***
We strap on our CamelBaks, spray each other with bug spray to keep off the ticks, and head into the woods. For the first couple of hours, we’re so busy talking books and school and plans that we don’t pay much attention to where we’re going. According to the map, the Harmony Ridge trail is pretty basic—a big circle that leads up to the top of the ridge and then dips back into the valley before rolling back up to the campground again.
The campground was once the site of a leper colony in the late eighteen hundreds. The foundations of the old buildings are still visible if you take the shorter Lost Souls trail down toward the river, but Addie and I agreed that we would save exploring that until the morning. We’ve yet to find any evidence of paranormal activity in any of our adventures, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t spooked by creepy places, especially after dark. We agree that weirdness is best investigated early in the morning, and we’re usually headed for home no later than four or five o’clock. Addie’s mom’s rules against boys and riding in cars and any combination of the two means that most of our dates have taken place during the daylight hours.
This will only be the fourth time we’ve spent the night together. Thoughts of making love to Addie again after dinner, taking advantage of the pill she’s brought one more time before it’s back to condoms is enough to keep me distracted for a good thirty minutes after I should have realized something was wrong.
But my head isn’t where it should be, and it’s Addie who eventually realizes we must have gotten off the trail.
“Look at where the sun’s setting.” She points to the ridge on the other side of the valley. “It shouldn’t be that far away. We must have missed the switchback somewhere and veered onto another trail.”
“Shit, you’re right. Let me check the app.” But when I try to access the trailblazer app, my phone can’t connect. Thankfully, Addie has the paper map in her pack. We get it out and spread it open on a tree stump with a killer view of the forest below, but none of the spur trails shown would have led us in this particular direction.
“Weird,” Addie says, chewing on the pad of her thumb. “So what do you think? It will be getting dark soon. Do we retrace our steps or head through the woods down to the river and—”
“And then follow the river back to camp,” I finish, squinting at the rapidly disappearing sun.
“We’ve got bug spray so we shouldn’t get too covered in bites,” she says. “Though the poison ivy is pretty gnarly.”
“But there’s a path through it.” I point to the bare forest floor under the thicker growing trees. “And we’re wearing jeans. I think we should take our chance with the poison ivy. We’ll get back to camp twice as fast and won’t end up wandering around in the woods after dark without a flashlight.”
“I should have brought the flashlight. I wasn’t thinking.”
“No, I should have brought it.” I put my arm around her, kissing her forehead. “You already did your part to prove you’re super prepared.”
She hums in agreement. “I did, didn’t I?”
I tuck the map into my back pocket with a smile. “Let’s do this.”
***
Forty-five minutes later, we still haven’t reached the bottom of the valley or the river or another trail leading back toward the campground and the sun is shining through the trees at a sharp slant that promises it’ll be gone any second.
I’m silently starting to freak out, wondering what I’m going to do if Addie and I are still out here when it gets dark, when the ground dips sharply and I stumble. Addie grabs onto my arm, and we both go skidding through the loose leaves, coming to a stop at the edge of a clearing.
And there, in the middle of the woods is a tiny cabin with smoke coming out of the chimney and one hell of a fight going on inside. I can’t make out what the people are saying, but it sounds like a man and a woman, and they’re clearly in the middle of World War Three.
I’m about to suggest we get the hell out of here—screw asking for directions from people who sound like they’re about to kill each other—when someone inside starts screaming. It’s a weird, distorted sound, almost like it’s coming through a radio, but it’s the same woman who was shouting a moment before.
Only now she sounds like she’s being carved into tiny pieces while the man roars something about her being a whore.
“We have to do something,” Addie hisses, gripping my arm tight. “Nate, we have to do something!”
“But what?” I ask. “I can’t call 911. I’m not getting reception.”
Addie glances around, bending down fast and scooping up a rock about the size of a baseball. “Do it, please,” she says, pointing to the window. “We have to do something, and you can throw harder than I can.”
Inside, the woman screams again, and I move without thinking, hurling the rock at the window with all the strength in my star quarterback arm. The second the glass shatters, I snatch Addie’s hand and haul ass down the hill.
We’re almost out of sight, when someone in the house cries out something that sounds a lot like—
“Addie!”
—and Adeline spins to look back, her eyes wide in her pale face.
But I don’t let her stop. I wrap my arm around her waist and haul her bodily down the mountain, refusing to let her be shot by angry hillbillies who consider breaking a window a shooting offense. I carry her until she starts sprinting beside me, both of us setting new personal speed records as we crash through the trees.
We keep going, pushing hard until the river comes into sight. Only then, when we’re minutes from the safety of the car, do we pause to catch our breath.
“You heard it, right?” Addie braces her hands on her knees, sucking in air. “You heard someone call out my name?”
“Could have been Abby, too, or…” I shake my head. “I d
on’t know, some other name that sounds like yours.”
“Like what?” She paces back and forth, her troubled gaze fixed on the mountain as her breath slowly returns to normal. “Not many names sound like mine, and the voice was almost familiar, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Honestly, my heart was pounding so hard by that point I wasn’t paying attention to anything except getting out of there.”
Her brow knits. “Do you think she’s okay? Do you think he…?” She trails off without finishing the sentence, but I know what she’s thinking.
“No, I don’t think so. I think we scared them, and they stopped fighting.”
“I hope so.” She turns to me with a sigh. “But it was so weird, Nate. When I looked back, it was so dark inside the house. Dark like the bottom of a pit in the middle of the night. I couldn’t see anything, but I swear I could feel someone looking at me. Right at me.” She shudders. “I think I finally get that saying about someone walking over your grave.”
“No one walked over your grave.” I take her hand, tugging her back into motion along the path beside the riverbank. “And no one’s going to. How about we forget camping and go get a room in New Paltz? I’ve got enough to pay for a night and then we can find somewhere sane to camp tomorrow.”
She nods, picking up her pace beside me. “Yes, yes, and yes. That’s the smartest idea you’ve had since you begged me to be you girlfriend for real.”
I smile. “I didn’t really beg. But I would have.”
She glances my way, her eyes flashing in the setting sun. “I know.”
***
We make it back to the car and out of the forest without any more drama, and by the time we’ve checked into a hotel, grabbed a pizza from the mom-and-pop place down the street, and settled in to watch television while we devour an extra large pie, we’ve put the memory of our close call with the woods and the hillbillies behind us. We don’t even consider calling the police. Addie’s sixteen, I threw a rock through someone’s window, and those people chose to live out in the middle of nowhere together.
