“Phantom limb,” my partner had muttered as we got to work, but even though I’d known about this from years of training, had seen it time and time again, I’d felt those two words like a punch to my face. That’s what I have, I’d thought. I have a phantom limb.
I’d obsessed over the idea at first, clinging to it as an explanation for the literal, physical, pain I’d felt since Aaron died, an aching in my joints that never seemed to leave me. But after a while, it wasn’t enough of an explanation. I didn’t have a phantom limb, after all. I had a phantom self. I was half myself without Aaron; I always would be. When I’d looked down at that little girl last weekend, I’d had about fifteen different feelings all at once, more feelings than I’m used to having in a single day, and the worst one, the worst one of all, was jealousy. I was fucking jealous of her, the way she’d looked over at her twin. I could remember the way that felt, to find Aaron in a room. Like the ground underneath me got more stable.
I should be annoyed, maybe, at what Charlie’s said. Married to Autumn for a year and saying she’s her other half? Six months ago, I would’ve been so bothered that I would’ve had to leave the room. You don’t understand, I would’ve thought. You could never understand. But I don’t feel annoyed, not even a little. If Charlie feels even a quarter of what I felt over my brother, I hope something turns around for her, and soon. I hope she goes up there this weekend and they work it out. The same way I woke up on Sunday and hoped I hadn’t hurt that little girl’s feelings.
I shut off the TV, listening to the slight crackle of the dispatch radio in the other room. I don’t want to think too hard about why I feel different now than I did six months ago. It feels a little like betrayal, like having that fight with Aaron all over again: You do everything without me. Here I am, in our hometown, at my job, with people who I get closer to calling friends every day. It’s just time, I guess—that fucker keeps moving forward, no matter how you try to stay perfectly still in your anger. It’s time that’s changing me, that’s all.
But hell if I don’t think, just for a second, about a pair of gold-brown eyes staring up at me. Hell if I don’t think of her, laying something else on the line about herself, so she can save my ass again.
Those gold-brown eyes are lowered—shy, even—when we get to the cabin on Friday afternoon and Zoe pulls my binder out of her pack, holding it out to me.
“I made some suggestions,” she says, when I take it. There are bright pink tabs sticking out the sides, a couple of them with her handwriting squeezed on. “You don’t have to use any of them, obviously,” she says, turning away to tuck a few items of clothing into her drawer. We’ve got a system now: she takes the three drawers on the left, and I take the two on the right. She always uses the bathroom stall closest to the door, and prefers if I never use that one. She gets in bed first, turns over, and then I change after. She likes to leave the light on at night in the entryway, which I almost always forget until she says, “Light on, please,” in this snippy voice that I find weirdly hot, especially right before I get in bed. In the mornings, I get up first, pull on pants and a sweatshirt, and go out to the stoop and wait. Twice I’ve had to piss so bad that I’ve had to walk out into the woods and relieve myself.
“Thanks,” I tell her. “You want to—” I’m about to ask her if she wants to go over them together, but she grabs her phone and a pair of headphones from the side pocket of her pack.
“I missed my workout today so I’m going to head out for a walk,” she says.
The weird thing is, I can tell she’s lying. At first, of course, I thought Zoe was lying all the time. But it’s this small, harmless fib—her not wanting to be around me while I look at her notes—that gives me a glimpse of what she looks like when she’s really lying, or at least when she’s lying to me: she blinks twice, rapidly, and I can tell she’s caught the inside of her cheek with her teeth.
“Which trail?” I ask her.
“What?”
“Tell me which trail. So I know where you’ve gone.” She rolls her eyes, but I’m not budging on this. It’s broad daylight and the safest place I know in the world, but I follow the rules around here, and one of them is to always tell someone where you’ve gone.
“The one headed toward the swimming hole.”
“Fine, east trail. Stay on it, all right?”
“God. Do you need to see my permission slip too?”
“Do you have one to show me?” I don’t know why, but it sounds a little dirty, the way I’ve said it. Damn, I must need a nap. I take the binder over to my bunk, flop down, and rest it on my chest, close my eyes. “See you in an hour.”
“I didn’t say I’d be back in an hour.”
I crack open my eyes and look over to where she stands, her hands on her hips. “An hour, or I’ll come looking for you. Keep your phone on.”
She slams the door behind her, and I’m smiling, a hot rush of something like gratitude that we’re still this way, still rough and tumble, still back and forth.
I tell myself I’ll rest my eyes for a minute or two, then get to work. I don’t want her coming back here thinking I don’t care about the work she’s done. But I must doze off, because the next thing I hear is the thud of footsteps out on the stoop, the door opening and then quickly slamming shut, Zoe’s heavy breathing and a muttered curse.
I’m off the bed as quick as I can be without knocking my head into something, the binder falling to the floor while I rush into the entryway. “What happened?” I say, taking in her flushed cheeks, the twig she’s got stuck in her hair. I have a brief, thudding moment of panic—is this not the safest place I know in the world? Holy fuck, could something have happened to her out there?
“Jesus, Aiden!” she shouts, interrupting my thoughts. “It’s like—I don’t know what! It’s Cocktoberfest out there! At the swimming hole, I mean! Just—just—a whole lot of naked dudes!”
I blink, taking a second to process what she’s said—Cocktoberfest?—and then I nearly double over with laughter, not only at her crass language but at her wide-eyed expression, the pink flags of color high on her cheekbones. “Stop laughing at me! Why did you let me go out there?”
“I didn’t know anyone would be out there,” I say, between breaths of continued laughter.
“I saw Paul do a cannonball! In the nude!”
“Wow,” I say, rubbing a hand over my hair, down my face, schooling my expression. “It’s always the quiet ones, though.”
“Oh my God,” she says, fanning her face. “I haven’t been this traumatized since I saw Simon Callow’s penis in A Room with a View.”
“Is that porn or something?”
“Porn?!” she shouts, shocked. “It’s Merchant Ivory, you heathen!”
I don’t know what Merchant Ivory is; maybe it’s upscale porn or something, but I add it to the mental list of things Zoe says that I’ll have to Google later. She’s at the sink, washing her hands vigorously, mumbling to herself.
“You didn’t get a handful of anything, did you?” I nod toward her busy hands, trying to keep down the smile that’s threatening to break my face wide open.
“A handful…? What! No.” She looks down at her hands bemusedly, shuts off the water, and shakes them over the sink. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m in shock!”
“I should’ve warned you. It’s kind of an old tradition around here, jumping naked into the swimming hole before it gets too cold. Paul and some of the staff and a few of his buddies from the area usually do it.”
“Well, I guess!” She’s turned to face me, crossing her arms over her chest, and I realize something—it’s the first time, between me and Zoe, that things feel comfortable, that there isn’t something a little ugly between us, the lie we’re both telling sitting heavily on both our shoulders. This moment—this funny shock she’s had, it could have happened to anyone, to someone I was really with, someone who was here by choice and not because of guilt. And now that she’s settled, she’s smiling too, leaning back against the sink
and shaking her head in disbelief.
“I’m pretty sure they saw me too,” she says, and then she laughs, bold and expansive, same as the way she speaks. “I think I gave this—like, squeak? Sort of a meep! noise?”
Oh, man. She fucking does the noise, the meep! she describes, and damn, it’s cute, and the ribbon of laughter she lets out after sends a shot of heat straight to my dick.
“Didn’t count you for a prude, Zo,” I say, not even thinking about it, and her laughing eyes snap to mine, widening for just a second at the nickname. The implication of it. That we’re friends, that we’re close.
It feels like I’ve removed an article of her clothing.
I wait, holding my breath, for her to correct me.
But she doesn’t. She smiles and says, “I’m really, really not. But I met my penis threshold. A couple of them, all right, but more than seven and I go nonverbal.”
“Maybe it was Paul’s. Paul’s dick is your threshold.”
“Don’t talk about it!” she exclaims, but then she’s laughing again, her hands coming up to cover her face.
And I don’t know what it is, when she lowers her hands. I don’t know if it’s the fatigue or the shock of adrenaline I got, waking up to the sound of her coming back in, fast and breathless, or maybe it’s the fact that I now know what Zoe’s laugh—her real, spontaneous laugh—sounds like, but before I can think of what I’m doing, I’m taking a step toward her, reaching out a hand. I’m trailing my fingers across the blush that’s settled high on her cheekbones, running them across that soft swoop of skin to tuck a length of hair behind her ear.
And—oh, fuck. I’ve touched her before, but not so many times that I still can’t count them—a count I’ve actually made, one sleepless night last week. But I’ve never reached out to touch her like this, just for my own benefit, just to feel her skin against mine. It’s the work of a second, maybe two or three, to make that journey across her face, to feel the tickling strands of her hair between my fingers, but it’s enough to make her breath hitch and her flush deepen.
I don’t linger. Because I know if I do, I’m going to let that hand trace down her neck, down to that vee of skin that’s showing between the two open buttons of her flannel shirt.
I step back, my smile fading along with Zoe’s. She clears her throat and straightens up from the sink. “Did you look at my notes?”
It’s possible I’m working up a flush of my own—my neck feels hot underneath my collar—and I turn toward the main room. “Was just now getting to it.” She doesn’t respond, and when I look back at her, she’s still by the sink, looking toward the door.
“I should probably go back out, take a different trail.”
“Chicken,” I mutter, smiling to myself about this old insult I’ve drudged up, straight out of a file of immature shit I used to say when I was an actual camper here.
“What?”
“You heard me,” I say, picking up the binder from the floor, sitting back on my bunk. “You don’t want to be around while I look at this.”
“I don’t care when you look at it,” she snaps, but even she’s got to know how childish she sounds. She comes in behind me, sits on the bunk beneath her own, so we’re facing each other. When I look across at her, I have to fight another smile. She’s trying to keep up that stiff posture, but she’s too tall for it with the top bunk in her way, so she scoots forward, crossing one leg over the other, folding her hands in her lap, like that first day she sat in my kitchen. “Anyways, they’re just suggestions,” she says, when I open the front cover.
She doesn’t move while I read over the list she’s tucked into the front pocket, a summary of the changes she’s made, small arrows instead of bullet points, her tidy script in sharp, black ink. “You sit in the front row a lot at school?” I ask her, recalling that first meeting we had in the outdoor classroom.
“I sat wherever I wanted to, Boy Scout,” she says, smirking at me when I meet her eyes. Damn, I’ll bet. I’ll bet she’s the smartest person in any room she’s in. There’s that hot feeling, right around my collar, and I look back down at the binder in my lap, grateful for something else to focus on.
Zoe’s copied my schematic for the Wilderness/Wellness site onto one of those clear sheets my elementary school teachers used to use on the overhead projectors and mapped it onto Lorraine and Paul’s cartoonish map of the campground, a numbered x by all the major components. Then she’s written out a plan for a tour of it, pieces of my original presentation in the binder tabbed to the various “stops” she’s planned.
“It’s not that the spreadsheets are gone,” she says. “But they’re supplements now. And if you do this right, Lorraine and Paul will be interested enough to look at supplementary materials.”
“Right,” I say, in plain, stupid shock at all she’s done. “It’s a—so it’s a tour?”
She shrugs. “After Val, I figure everyone else is going to follow the leader. Don’t be surprised if Tom and Sheree bring some of the kids from his program in Shaftesbury Park for tomorrow. It’ll be in the lodge, the projector, the PowerPoint, the whole thing. Val set the tone, I’m telling you. If we go last and do that, we look like we’re falling in line. We’ve got to do something more memorable. Paul and Lorraine have lived their whole lives on this land. We show them your vision for it, while we’re actually out on it, and they’ll remember.”
“It’s a good idea,” I say.
“It’s a great idea. Ideal if the weather is perfect, but even if it’s not—Paul and Lorraine won’t care, and I’m guessing you won’t, either. It’ll work.”
I’m blinking down at the binder, at everything she’s managed to do in less than a week, stunned and grateful and a little embarrassed. Even on the page I’m looking at, I can see a mistake, where I typed Widlerness instead of Wilderness. She must think I’m an idiot.
“I don’t have the story, though,” she says, interrupting my thoughts. “Everything you have in there is important. You’re going to have to find a way to say it all. But I don’t have the story for this. That’s down to you. You’ve got to be able to tell them why this matters.”
I reach up one hand, rub it up the back of my neck, where my muscles are tight with fatigue. She doesn’t have to say it. I know what she’s talking about. I know who she’s talking about. Lorraine and Paul knew Aaron, and they loved him. They’ll want to hear that I’m doing this for him. Help me tell it, I’m thinking, deep down inside myself, but I don’t know who I’m thinking it to. To her? Because that’s ridiculous. No matter how I feel about her now—Cocktoberfest and her laugh and the feel of her skin—there’s still this thing between us, this thing about Aaron that brought us together in the first place. This obligation she’s fulfilling to me and my family.
As if she’s heard what I’m thinking, she smooths her hands down her thighs, stands from where she sits on the bunk. When she speaks, her voice is cool again, no trace of that big laugh. You’d never imagine this is a woman who’d make a noise like meep! in embarrassed shock. “There’s only so much of this debt I can work off, Aiden.”
There’s no reason why it should hurt, what she’s said. It’s only exactly what I was thinking. It’s only exactly what this thing we’re doing is all about.
There’s no reason why it should, but it does.
Chapter 9
Zoe
There’s nothing quite like a long day of camp and a fading bonfire to make you double down on your commitment to fake affection, I guess.
It’s Saturday night, an hour since Tom and Sheree finished their presentation, and I’ve spent the better part of the last thirty minutes—ever since I licked the remnants of my last gooey s’more off my fingertips—tucked against Aiden’s side, his back leaning against one of the thick tree trunks that surround the fire pit, my body fitting right into the space his arm makes. Every single place where we touch I’m warm, and I wish I could say it was just the fire.
We’d been woken at dawn this morning, the
thunk of a fist against our cabin door. Aiden had leapt from the bed, every inch of the chest and torso I’d avoided looking at on full display in the dim light from the window. While he’d pawed at the bunk above him for his shirt, I’d watched his muscles move, the golden-brown skin on his corded forearms pebbling with the chill of the early morning. When he’d finally pulled on his thermal and marched to the door, a grumbled hang on in his dark, scratchy morning voice, I’d turned my head to press my face against the pillow, to press my knees together in shocked, frustrated longing. It’s not that I hadn’t known I was attracted to him. But in the early-morning fog of sleep, I hadn’t yet remembered why I shouldn’t be.
It’d been Hammond at the door, announcing that Paul had a surprise, which I could only hope had nothing to do with the swimming hole. Barely twenty minutes later and Aiden and I had hiked, groggy and cold and silent—still a little bruised, maybe, from yesterday’s awkward exchange over the tour plan—out past the storage warehouse, a satisfying crackle of leaves on the trail beneath our feet.
Zip-lining, that had been the surprise, and from the beginning almost everything about it seemed designed to break the tension lingering between Aiden and me. When it was my turn up on the deck, Aiden having already gone across, Paul had helped me into a harness and I’d basically done gymnastics with my eyeballs to avoid looking anywhere near his face or his crotch, and even though Aiden had been five hundred feet away, I could feel his smile. I could almost hear that low laugh from yesterday, the one that had lit me up from the inside. And once I’d kicked away from the decking? I’d laughed in delight, seeing everything Lorraine promised—early-morning light winking through the changing colors of the canopy, leaves shiny and pronounced with morning dew. When I’d landed on the opposite side, Aiden waiting there, I’d looked up at him and he’d smiled down at me with the same look he’d given me yesterday in the cabin, just before he’d touched me.
It looked something like affection. Something like desire.
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