Better

by Carey Heywood

  He changes the subject, ushering me out of his room. “Did you like bungee jumping?”

  “Not something I have any interest in ever doing again,” I admit sheepishly. “Have you ever been?”

  “Once, in Florida. I remember being exhausted after the adrenaline wore off.”

  His words are almost magical. As soon as he says them, I struggle to keep my eyes open. He almost smiles as he leads me across the lounge and into my room. I pause, seeing the door is open.

  “The hotel manager has a key,” Adam answers my unspoken question before sitting me on the edge of my bed.

  I watch him, detached and half-asleep, as he sits me up, unzips my windbreaker and slips it off me. He then kneels at my feet and unties my sneakers before sliding them off my feet. I feel like a rag doll in his grasp as he lowers me until my head rests on my pillow. He eases the blanket from under me and gently tucks me in. The last thought that crosses my mind as he lowers the mosquito netting is how confusing this side of him is to the Adam I met in the lobby.

  Too soon, the covers I’m hugging are being pulled from me as a bossy Adam attempts to wake me up.

  “It can’t be morning yet,” I mumble, burying my face into my pillow.

  “It’s only been three hours.”

  I lift my head. “Why are you waking me up if it’s only been three hours?” I can’t be held responsible for the whine that accompanies my question.

  He looks boyish and up to no good as he tugs on my arm. “Come on, you have to see this.”

  He helps me to a sitting position. I wipe sleep from my eyes as he tries to hurry me along.

  “Do I need shoes?” I ask, each word punctuated by a yawn.

  He starts to put my shoes on for me, but I push him away, already embarrassed because he tucked me in like a little girl earlier.

  Once my shoes and windbreaker are back on, he leads me outside to the back of the lodge by the pool. I cringe, looking at the pillar I shimmied down during my escape, before he directs my attention skyward.

  “It’s called a moonbow.” His breath tickles my ear. “The light from the moon is reflected off the mist of the waterfall.”

  The moon is full, the mist an arched halo over it.

  “Beautiful,” I breathe.

  “I know,” he agrees. Only, he’s looking at me, not the moon.

  I’m awake now.

  We stand side by side for maybe fifteen minutes before I acknowledge the emptiness that is my stomach. “I’m going to head inside and grab a late dinner.”

  He turns to follow me. “I’ll hang out with you.”

  I still feel guilty about earlier, so him being nice isn’t helping. “You don’t have to.”

  He almost smiles. “It’s cool. I want to hear more about your adventure today.”

  The restaurant area is still open but not fully staffed. I order a simple chicken dish with the sauce on the side and some rice. I sip my water while we wait for it to come out.

  After telling Adam about my jump, he asks, “The way you describe it, it doesn’t seem like you wanted to do it. Why did you?”

  I pause, not wanting to share the whole Ally thing with him. “Remember my tattoo?”

  He nods. “How’s it healing?”

  I haven’t needed to bandage it since the last time he did it. I’ve just rubbed cream on it a few times a day.

  “It itches,” I admit before continuing. “So, the tattoo was for my aunt. Bungee jumping was something she always wanted to do.”

  He drums his fingers on the tabletop before leaning toward me. “Both times you’ve run off, you were doing something for your aunt.”

  I dip my head in acknowledgment.

  “Tattoos and bungee jumping…”

  I nod.

  “She must have been really cool.”

  I bite my lip as I try in vain to blink back the tears, but the floodgate opens, and they stream down my face.

  “Shit,” Adams says, pushing his chair closer to mine. He wraps his arm around my shoulder and tucks my face into his chest. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  “She was so cool.” My words are muffled against his shirt.

  As I cry, it hits me that he’s stroking my hair, like he’s petting me. I don’t know why I find that so funny in that moment, him petting me, but I start to laugh. He must question my sanity as I laugh-cry on him. When I get the hiccups, it only makes me laugh harder.

  His arms grip my shoulders as he pushes me backward to look at me. “Did you take anything with Conner?”

  My mouth drops, and I promptly hiccup in his face.

  “Are you on drugs?” he continues.

  I drop my head to the table and cover it with my hands, mortified. “I haven’t taken anything. I promise,” I manage to get out between hiccups.

  He rubs my back as I try to pull myself together. When I straighten, he offers me a napkin to dry my eyes.

  “Were you laughing?” he asks cautiously.

  I’m no longer laughing or crying, but the stray hiccup still plagues me. I look up at the ceiling, unable to look him in the eyes. “It felt like you were petting me, like a cat or dog, when you started to rub my hair. It caught me off guard.”

  I glance at him and he has the decency to look embarrassed. I mean, he was petting me.

  “I was just trying to comfort you,” he stammers.

  I reach out to touch his arm. “You did. You made me laugh.”

  He sags back against his chair as my food comes out. I’m starving. I make no attempt to disguise my desire to shovel the entire plate into my mouth in one bite.

  “You’re hungry,” he says dryly, watching me.

  I nod, mouth too full to politely reply. I should be embarrassed. He is one of the most beautiful men I have ever seen close-up. I guess cry-laugh-hiccuping all over someone will remove fear of future embarrassment.

  When I’m done eating, we walk back to our suite together. I email my parents while Adam uploads some pics from the trip to his Twitter page.

  “Why don’t you have a blog?” I ask, looking up from my phone.

  “I like the one hundred forty character limit.”

  I don’t tweet, so he turns his computer to me to show me what that means. Each tweet is kind of like a text message with a picture attached. Short and sweet.

  He closes his laptop. “We have a long car ride ahead of us tomorrow. We should probably get some sleep.”

  Just thinking about where we’re going tomorrow makes falling asleep seem impossible. It’s a four hundred mile trip from Livingstone to the Kapani Lodge in the Luangwa National Park. We’re going on safari.

  Conner meets me in the morning, whispering in my ear that he’s going to kiss my cheek to piss off Adam. We exchange email addresses, and I promise to keep him posted on our timeline on the off chance he can meet up with us when we reach Australia. In what seems to be great a personal strain, Adam manages to shake his hand and wish him well before we leave.

  Crossing Zambia by car proves to be an adventure all on its own. The speed our driver goes varies from what feels like fifteen miles per hour to a time trial for NASCAR. At one point, we’re stopped indefinitely as a herd of puku blocks our way. I look over at Adam, who’s hanging out his window, camera in hand, taking pictures.

  When we finally make it to the Kapani Lodge, all I want to do is get into our room and collapse into bed. That’s until I see the room setup. The beds, while separate, are right next to each other with only an area wide enough to walk in between them. Maybe if they each had their own mosquito netting, it wouldn’t look so intimate. Tonight and the two following it, Adam and I will be underneath the same net.

  Suddenly feeling less tired, we make our way to the outdoor deck. I’m relieved when I see the menu with so many Western courses on it. Adam is adventurous and orders a local fare while I have a hamburger and french fries.

  After dinner, we watch the sunset before going back to our room. I decide against telling my dad how this room i
s laid out. I know he assumes it’s a suite with two separate rooms like the Royal Chundu. I get ready for bed first while Adam tries in vain to get a wireless signal.

  He gives up, not wanting to keep me up, as he swears at his laptop under his breath. I’m pretending to read a book as I watch him walk from the bathroom over to our beds. He’s shirtless, his basketball shorts hanging low on his hips. My mouth feels dry as I forgo my farce of reading, setting my book on the nightstand instead.

  He starts untying the net around my bed first. He struggles with the first knot, his abs right at my eye level. He must notice I’m watching him.

  “If you want to help, you can untie the netting around my bed.”

  I gulp, getting out of bed and making my way over to the far post of his bed. We work in parallel, moving from post to post, until we meet in the middle. He holds his netting up, so I can pass under it. He checks the edges, making sure there aren’t any gaps, before getting into his bed. We lie there, each on our side, facing each other, neither moving to turn out the light.

  I break the silence. “Kinda feels like we’re camping, doesn’t it?”

  He looks up at the tent-like netting surrounding us. “It does. Do you like to camp?”

  “I haven’t been in forever. I remember liking it, but I think I was a girl scout the last time I did it.”

  He almost smiles. “You were a girl scout?”

  I grin. “Don’t sound so shocked. Were you a boy scout?”

  He gets a faraway look in his eyes. “A long time ago.” Then, he reaches over and turns out the light, promptly ending our conversation.

  I lie there, my eyes adjusting to the now dark room. I consider saying something else, asking if he’s still awake or something. Instead, I bite my tongue and let the sounds of the park around us lull me to sleep.

  The bug-to-net ratio when I awake is significantly higher than my previous nights in Africa. There’s a particularly large brown bug crawling upward right over my head.

  “Adam,” I breathe in a hushed whisper as though the sound of my voice might alert this giant bug that I am aware of its presence.

  “Mmm,” is all I get in reply as I hear the rustle of his sheets.

  I keep my eyes on gigantor.

  “Adam,” I whisper again, just a fraction louder than the first time.

  “Hmm?” The slight rise at the end of his mumble signifies a question.

  “There’s a really big bug on my net.”

  I hear more rustling and the sound of his feet touching the ground. My eyes are still locked on the slow upward trek of the bug. I squeak when Adam climbs on my bed, straddling me, to get a closer look at the bug. He moves the net around, so he can get a look at the backside of the bug. He looks down at me as I clutch my sheets to my chest.

  “Harmless.”

  “Can you still get rid of it?” I plead.

  His mouth twitches. He eases off my bed and puts on his sneakers before slipping under the net. He grabs a magazine from the top of the dresser and approaches the bug.

  I sit up, eyes wide. “You aren’t going to kill it, are you?”

  He stops mid-stride and puts a hand on his hip. “No, I’m not going to kill it.”

  I feel too close to the bug and move over to Adam’s bed. He shakes his head at me before sliding the magazine under the bug, between it and the net. Once it’s all the way on the magazine, Adam calmly walks it over to the balcony and shakes it onto the railing.

  He sets the magazine back where he found it before ducking back under the net. I’m still sitting on his bed. He looks at me and shrugs before stepping out of his shoes and into my bed. He flops onto his belly, burying his face into my pillow.

  “That’s my bed,” I say, feeling silly for stating the obvious.

  He turns his head, so he’s facing me. “And you’re on mine.”

  He’s right. I am on his bed, the bed where he spent last night shirtless. I can’t help myself. I lower myself until my head rests on his pillow. I face him.

  He raises a brow. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Does he want me to ask him for permission to be on his bed? “Can I lie on your bed?” I ask softly.

  His eyes widen. “You never have to ask that.”

  My breath catches in my throat.

  “I meant, are you going to thank me for getting rid of your bug?”

  “Oh…” I half laugh, half stammer, feeling like an idiot. “Thank you, Adam.”

  I relax further onto his pillow, quietly inhaling his scent. What did he mean by I never have to ask? He wouldn’t lie with me before.

  After the bungee-jumping incident, I started feeling less annoyed by him. Since the first night I met him, I’d found him attractive, but his bossiness put me off. Am I starting to like him?

  I peer over at him. His eyes are closed, and he looks like he’s already fallen back asleep in my bed. I envy that—the ability to turn off your brain and just sleep.

  Right now, looking at him, my mind races as I try to reconcile how I feel about him. My internal pro and con lists are interrupted by the sound of an alarm. I sit up and look on the bedside table as the noise gets louder.

  Adam lifts his head from my pillow and squints at me. Recognizing the alarm, he moves from my bed to his, lying across my stomach. His head and arms reach to the other side of the bed.

  I’m frozen. His weight is pinning me beneath him. Last night, he dropped his jacket and jeans on the floor next to the bed. He fishes his phone out of his pocket and turns off the alarm before inching off of me.

  “Sorry about that,” he manages, rubbing the back of his head.

  I pull my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around them. I look away when I say, “It’s okay.”

  “Ready for a safari?” he asks, rubbing his hands together.

  I nod. “Do you want the shower first?”

  He leans back against my bed. “You can go first, so you can wake up,” he teases.

  I slide off his bed as he starts opening the net and using the ties around our bedposts to secure it. I slip past him and grab my toiletry bag before heading to the bathroom.

  I’ve just set everything out on the counter when I realize I forgot the shirt I’m going to wear today. I walk back out into our room and see him moving the pillow from my bed and switching it with the pillow from his.

  He turns to see me watching him. His eyes are bold and unapologetic as he tells me, “I liked smelling you as I fell asleep.”

  I say nothing. I just walk over to my bag to fetch the shirt I forgot before speed walking back into the bathroom. To say I’m turned on is an understatement.

  My solo shower might have been the most erotic of my life as I imagine his hands and his lips all over me. I touch myself, wishing he were in there with me. I bite my lip to keep from crying out as I shiver under the warm stream of water.

  Knowing that he’s waiting out there, I pull myself together and rush to get ready. I tug at my hair, willing it to grow long enough so that I can pull it back into a ponytail. Giving up, I tuck my hair behind my ears and walk back into our room.

  Adam is standing over by his bed, taking clothes from his suitcase and putting them into a white garment bag. “Grabbed an extra one for you if you need any laundry done,” he says, lifting another white bag.

  “Thanks.” I walk over to him and reach for the bag.

  Getting laundry done for us is a giant perk of this lodge. He finishes loading up his bag before heading to the bathroom. I’m still in awe of how little time he needs to get ready.

  We go have breakfast before meeting our tour guide. We ride in an open-top, almost military Jeep. Our guide carries a shotgun and rides in the front passenger seat. There’s a couple on our tour sitting on the middle bench. Adam and I are behind them.

  Chelle, the Mrs., turns around and asks us how long we’ve been together. Adam wraps his arm around me, pulling me closer to him, as he tells her we’ve been together for a year, and we’re here to cele
brate our first anniversary. I start to correct him, but he covers my mouth with his hand.

  While the roads we travel aren’t paved, they’re smoothed by use. We head west toward a popular watering hole in search of zebra or elephants. Our only rule for the tour is to remain in the vehicle. They provide binoculars. I spend most of the tour looking through them, smacking Adam on the arm and pointing whenever I see something.

  An hour into it, all we’ve seen are more puku, the same deer-looking animal we saw the day before on our way up to the lodge. Someone on a walkie-talkie directs the driver to head north.

  My mouth drops as I see elephants through my binoculars. There are five of them—four large, one small. Our driver slowly brings us closer to them, keeping the front of the Jeep angled away from them. I assume it’s in case they charge. We stay there for twenty minutes, watching them and taking pictures until the driver is notified that zebras are west of us. After the four hour tour we return to the lodge for a late lunch.

  Adam is bummed because we didn’t see any lions. I am more okay with not seeing any lions in the wild than I thought I would be. It’s the elephants I really wanted to see. I can picture the image of them on Ally’s Better board. Seeing them like how they were in her picture made me feel close to her.

  I’m quieter than normal during lunch. Adam tries to get me to talk, but my thoughts are far away. I leave him to socialize with our guides as I go back to our room. I’m thrilled to see our laundry has already been returned. I start to unpack mine, but I end up lying down instead.

  Our sheets were changed while we were on our safari. I don’t know why this bugs me as much as it does. I expected to smell Adam on my pillow.

  I’m reading my book when he comes in to check on me. I set it down and look up at him.

  “Why did you tell that couple we were together?”

  “It’s just safer for you to have a boyfriend than to be single when traveling, so you can avoid unwanted attention.”

  “Unwanted attention?” I raise a brow.

  He shrugs. “Trust me on it, okay?”

  I nod. I’m not trying to argue. I’m just curious. He talks me into going back out with him. He says that there are a whole group of guests hanging out on the main deck.