by Serena Bell
Also, he is like a wall of muscle, and I want to climb him. Parts of my body may actually already be climbing him, even though I have not directed them to do so. I say this only because my knee seems to have hooked itself up near his waist, and his hand is cupping my ass.
His mouth comes down on mine, hard and hungry.
“Mmm,” one of us says. Or both of us. It’s hard to tell.
He picks me up so both my legs are around his waist and carries me to the bed. We fall backwards onto it, me on top. Then he flips me over and covers me with the wall of muscle.
“Clothes. Off,” he says, although I don’t think it’s a command because he is busy removing them. While also kissing me everywhere. Eyes, nose, cheeks, throat, collarbone, ears—his tongue tickling, his lips catching my earlobe and sucking until I whimper—breasts, catching my nipples one by one and devoting himself thoroughly to them.
“Chase,” I beg. “I want you.”
He’s lining himself up when we both say, “Condom.”
He rolls for the night table.
“Hang on,” I say.
He looks at me, all heavy lids and dark eyes and slack lower lip.
“Any chance you have a clean bill of health?”
“Checkup two months ago, no one but you since.”
I smile. “Huh. So I was the first in a while? Wish I’d known that. I would have given you a really damn hard time about it.”
“You gave me a hard enough time as it was. All that kissing assholes while I stayed home fantasizing about doing this to you. What about you?”
“Clean. And IUD.”
Chase is nothing if not efficient. I’ve barely gotten the words out when he’s pushing into me. And I’d forgotten what it’s like to be skin to skin like this, not only our torsos and thighs but him inside me, how much hotter it is. And slippery. And perfect.
“Oh, Jesus,” he says. “I forgot. How. Good. This. Feels. It’s like a fifth gear for sex. Actually, no,” he interrupts himself, withdrawing almost all the way and looking down at where our bodies meet. “You’re the fifth gear for sex. Bareback with you is like a whole thing better than sex I didn’t know existed.”
And he thrusts into me, groaning.
We are both wordless for a long time, until all he can say is my name, and I bite his shoulder to keep from waking Katie.
Chapter 34
Liv
Chase is pawing through my things. “No,” he says, setting aside two pairs of jeans. “No jeans. And what’s this? Three bras? Why three bras?”
“Two changes, and one in case I fall in the lake.”
“In case you—what?”
“That’s what my first foster mom used to say. One extra in case you fall in the lake.”
“Liv,” he says sternly. “You’re carrying everything in that backpack.” He gestures. “You can’t take anything extra. Not even underwear. If you fall in the lake you will hang up your clothes to dry out.”
“I told you I don’t know anything about camping!”
“And what are these?” He holds up a pair of socks.
“Socks.”
“I should have known,” he says, shaking his head as if I am gone beyond help. “I should have known that if you didn’t have any decent shoes, you wouldn’t have any decent socks.”
He leaves the room and comes back with two pairs of ugly brown thick wool socks. “These. Now. What about hiking pants?”
“Chase.” It is my turn to be utterly scornful. “Look at me. Do you think I own hiking pants?”
He rolls his eyes. “I should have made you do this inventory before we went to the store the other day. Athletic pants are fine. Or leggings, whatever—something lightweight and flexible. Just not jeans.”
“My jeans are flexible and lightweight,” I argue, but he gives me a look that shuts me up.
He holds up my warmest sweater, a cotton cardigan, and shakes his head to convey his despair. He leaves again, then comes back with a wool sweater that he thrusts into my hands. It’s rough gray color-flecked wool and when I take it from him, I smell lanolin, Chase’s spicy deodorant, and his skin.
Which makes me want to drop the whole packing project and nibble my way from Chase’s collarbone to his ear and then along the rough, stubbled edge of his gorgeous jaw to his unbelievably talented mouth.
He’s watching me right now, hunger in his eyes. As if we haven’t done it ten times in the last five days.
I remember last night, and my knees nearly buckle.
Unfortunately, Katie is playing in her room next door. Occasionally we hear her voice rise as one of the parent dolls in the dollhouse gets strict with one of the child dolls. One of the parents is a daddy.
The other is a nanny.
It makes me want to cry, and also to snatch Katie up in a fierce hug.
I realize I’m still standing there holding the sweater, and I laugh.
“What?”
“Who needs a wool sweater in July? That’s not exactly packing light, is it?”
“Take my word for it, you will not regret packing a wool sweater.”
“It’s hot right now.”
It is, unseasonably for the Seattle area.
“Liv. Just do what I say, okay? And we’ll both live to tell the tale.”
Right now, I’d do pretty much anything he said, which scares the crap out of me.
He finishes criticizing my packing choices, and then we move on to the actual packing. He lines my pack with a garbage bag first.
“What’s that for?”
“In case it rains.”
“We won’t go if it rains, will we?”
He doesn’t dignify that with an answer. He begins rolling my clothes and stuffing them into the backpack. He throws in an assortment of objects, identifying them as group gear. Some are familiar, like a first aid kid, a plastic plate, and a fork. Others are mysterious—a red canister, a small black bag, a ziplock with—
“Is that toilet paper?”
He nods.
“We have to bring our own toilet paper?”
He closes his eyes.
“Chase! What is the orange trowel for?”
“For digging holes.”
“Why do we have to dig holes?”
He opens his mouth to say something—I have no idea what—when his phone rings.
“Chase,” he says, and listens. Then, “Oh, Emily. Oh, God, I forgot. Yes…No…I…I was going to take her camping, but…”
Does this mean I am going to be reprieved? Because that would be spectacular.
There’s a long pause, and I watch Chase’s face, the spasm of the muscle at his jaw, the set of his mouth.
“I think she would like that. I think she would like it very much. I think—I think I should check with her first, but—”
He listens, and his eyes find mine, full of grief.
“I’ll—I’ll call you back, but if there’s any way, yes, of course, of course we’ll get her to you.”
He gets off the phone, and turns a look on me that—well, it stops me cold. It’s so shattered.
“Shit. That was Emily. Oh, shit.” He paces.
“What?”
Turned away from me, staring at the far wall, he says, “It’s Thea’s birthday weekend. I’d actually forgotten. I can’t believe I forgot. She asked if she could see Katie, if she could take Katie overnight…” He puts both his hands on the wall. “Fuck. You should have heard her. You’ve met her, she’s this dour Scandinavian—and here she is, crying, telling me she’ll take Katie to the zoo, to the aquarium, out for ice cream, anything Katie wants. Begging. She said—”
He closes his eyes.
“She said, ‘I just want to see my little girl.’ ”
My heart squeezes painfully. “Oh, shit.”
I cross the room to him, put my hand in the middle of his back. The heat soaks into my palm. I place the other hand beside it, slide them around his sides until I’m hugging him, my front to his back. He doesn’t turn to hug me back, but slowly, his breathing eases and his body relaxes, and that makes me feel like the champion of the world.
“I have to bring her.”
I nod against his back.
“But she’s going to be so upset about the camping.”
“No, she’ll be fine. Here’s what you do. You present it to Katie like it’s the most exciting news in the world. ‘Grandma wants you to come have a sleepover at her house! She wants to take you to the zoo! And the aquarium! Do you want to go?’ ”
His face brightens. He nods. “Okay. Yeah. She’ll totally want to.”
“You don’t even mention the camping. She’s young enough that she might not even realize that one activity is happening in place of the other. But if she brings it up, you say, ‘We can go camping next weekend!’ ”
“But you won’t be here.”
Right. Because I’ll be gone.
I’ve been trying not to think about that too much. Because what started out originally as the perfect end point to our extracurriculars is approaching way too fast.
Meanwhile, I should be thrilled, because now I don’t have to go camping.
I release Chase and start removing my clothes from the backpack where he’s stuffed them.
“What are you doing?”
“Unpacking?”
“Why?”
“Because we’re not going camping.”
He crosses his arms. “I didn’t say that. I said I’d go again with Katie next weekend.”
I stare at him.
“Liv, you can’t bail on me now. We’re almost completely packed. Half the group gear is in your pack. I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”
“To torturing me.”
“Maybe a little,” he admits. “You bought candles and dishes. And placemats. You turned my guest room into—a work of art.”
I can tell he doesn’t mean that as a compliment, which, sadly, makes me smile.
“And anyway, it’s not just to torture you. It’s to hang out with you. Hanging out around the campfire isn’t that different from watching movies together.”
“Minus the toilet, the warm bed, the electronics, the hair dryer, and all the other trappings of civilization.”
He makes a face. “Civilization is overrated.”
“I think it’s underrated.”
His brows draw together. “Let me ask you this. Why did you do it? Why did you buy the placemats and make the nice dinner? Why did you redo the guest room? Did you do it to torture me?”
I don’t have to think too hard about the answer. “Of course not. I did it because it was important to me. Beautiful things are important to me.”
He nods, as if that makes perfect sense. “That’s how the woods are for me. Important. And I want to show you why.”
I open my mouth to protest, to say that he can tell me why, he doesn’t need to show me.
“Also,” he says, quickly, “I’ll make you s’mores with really good dark chocolate and then we can go skinny-dipping and I can spread you out on your sleeping bag in front of a blazing fire and eat you out in view of the sky and God and the whole world, while the cool breeze makes your nipples hard.”
I’m honestly not sure if it’s the marshmallows and oozing chocolate or how hard my nipples now are, but I’m a goner.
“Chase, I hate you.”
“I know, babe. I hate you, too.”
He doesn’t say it like he means it, though. He says it like he means the exact opposite. And for a moment, not even a whole second, I wish he did, and then I stop, because—
Because he’s him and I’m me and I’m leaving.
It’s my mantra now. It would be so damn easy to forget.
He says, “So you’ll still go with me this weekend?”
“Fuck you,” I tell him, but we both know I’m going camping with him.
Because Chase possesses the ability to convince even the smartest girls to leave their in-case-you-fall-in-the-lake panties home.
Chapter 35
Chase
We’re a couple hundred feet into the woods and already I’m feeling like a whole new man.
Nothing else is like this.
I love the forest. The way everything hovers dark and close, sun filtering down like it’s been tossed in handfuls. The trees are older than the Constitution, their trunks bigger around than I can wrap my arms, muzzy with lichen and moss. Overhead, the treetops spear patches of blue sky, and you get dizzy from the sensation of falling upward. And there are the smells. Leaves and needles and hardwood and loamy dirt and life and decay.
Also, Liv’s hair is in a ponytail. A high ponytail, which, if anyone’s polling, is the sexiest kind.
I watch it swing behind her as she walks, long and thick and the color of copper.
I am so going to wrap that ponytail around my hand later and hold her head still while I kiss her and fuck her.
The thought makes me want to whistle.
Ahead of me, Liv pauses.
“You okay?”
“Is it supposed to hurt?”
“What hurts?”
“My shoulders.”
“It’s going to hurt a little. Because we didn’t train ahead of time and you’re carrying almost forty pounds.”
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get her pack any lighter than that. She insisted on a few things I knew she wouldn’t care about in the end, like having her own toothpaste and her own deodorant. And a mini bottle of shampoo in case—
In case what? I demanded.
I don’t know. In case there’s a shower.
I didn’t try to talk her out of it.
“Here, hang on,” I tell her. I lift the pack from the top and tighten her waist strap a little. Then the chest compression strap.
“You just like the way it makes my boobs look.”
“Not gonna argue with that.”
But I’m not actually looking at her tits. I’m looking at her face. I’m standing so close to her, and suddenly it occurs to me: she’s not wearing makeup.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her without makeup before. Not even in the middle of the night.
Her eyelashes are a pale blond flutter, her skin is pale and creamy, her eyelids almost translucent. She is delicate and vulnerable and incredibly beautiful. So beautiful it makes my throat hurt.
I look away, yanking on her shoulder strap to shorten it. “Better?”
“Oh, yeah, lots better.”
“Most of the weight’s supposed to be on your hips and chest, not your shoulders.”
We hike on. One foot in front of the other. The perfect meditation.
We stop for lunch and lean our packs against a boulder beside a stream. The sky is blue, the stream glints in the sun, burbling as it runs over the rocks. It’s like something out of a storybook.
I pull food out. I take it from her pack, to lighten her up as best I can. We’re doing pitas and peanut butter. Oh, and oranges. If I can, I like fresh fruit the first day.
“It’s not gourmet,” I say, feeling unusually apologetic.
The corner of her mouth tips up. “I was hoping for a vichyssoise starter course.”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“I know—that’s why I said it.”
She eats, though, with gusto, which is one of those things camping does for you. Makes you hungry.
I watch her lick the last of her peanut butter off the plastic knife. I must make an unintentional, appreciative sound, because she gives me another of those sexy half-smiles and licks more thoroughly.
I narrow my eyes at her.
“Be careful,” I warn. “Or you will get taken over the top of this rock.”
She eyes it.
“I’m not kidding.”
“I’m not refusing.”
I yank her toward me and kiss her, licking into her mouth the way she was going at that knife, until she moans and clutches my shirt. Then I release her. We both know it’s not going to happen here. We’re still too close to the trail entrance and only a couple of yards off the main trail. Later today, we’ll take a little-traveled side trail to a lake I know, and then we’ll make camp and—
“Have you ever had sex in the woods?”
Apparently she boarded the same thought train I did. I am such a fan of Liv’s dirty mind, I can’t even. I shake my head.
“Really?” She is obviously delighted. “I’m your first! I’m not your first anything!”
You’re the first woman since Thea who—
—I care about, is how I finish the thought. I’m not sure why it feels so much like if I use the word love, there’s no going back. No way to keep from being hurt if she can’t love what I love.
If she can’t love who I am.
If she tells me we’re too different.
If she tells me she’ll always need me to change.
If she won’t stay.
“Woods blow job?” she asks, eyebrows high.
“Nope.”
“Hand job?”
“If we go back to high school and college, yeah. Also, a lotta cars parked at the edge of the woods, but that’s different.”
“Yeah, no, that doesn’t count. Oooh. This is going to be fun.”
I don’t say, I told you so, but I’m thinking it.
Another couple of miles in—when we realized we wouldn’t have Katie, I planned a longer hike—she stops and I nearly crash into her.
“I need the…um, facilities.”
I dig out the ziplock bag with the TP and trowel and hand them to her.
“Leave no trace,” I say.
