“Okay, I think that’s enough scary stories for tonight. I don’t want you to all end up having nightmares. Time for showers and bed, I think.”
There were several groans, but almost everyone was pretty tired after the long day, and soon it was just me and Drew left at the campfire.
“You cold?” he asked, noticing the goose bumps on my arms.
“A bit. Mostly just freaked out.”
“What, by a bunch of twelve-year-old’s stories?” he said with a smirk. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no monsters out in the forest.”
“I know, I know, it just creeps me out to hear stuff like that,” I said. “Especially the part about Bigfoot living in the woods here. When I was here a few years ago, I swear I saw something out of the corner of my eye running around in there.”
I gestured towards the trees, and Drew laughed. “Probably an animal or something. Anyway, we better go clean up the kitchen.”
“True.”
We headed into the main cabin again, and I stacked the dishwasher with dirty plates, cups and utensils as Drew wiped down the bench. The other volunteers had already gone to bed, but for some reason I wasn’t tired at all. When the kitchen was spotless, I glanced over at him.
“Well, I guess it’s time for bed,” I said reluctantly, wishing I’d brought my laptop so I could keep writing my story until I actually got tired.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he replied. “I better shower before I…”
His sentence was cut off by a strange cracking sound from outside.
“What the hell was that?” I said, my mind instantly conjuring up memories of the Blair Witch movie.
“Probably just a tree branch in the wind,” he said with a shrug before the sound came again, louder this time. I almost jumped out of my skin.
“Are there any bears in this area?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No. Mom’s friend has wildlife surveys done out here every so often, and there haven’t been any bears anywhere near this land in years.”
“Well, we should go check that sound out,” he said. “Sounded like footsteps.”
“It’s probably just one of the other adults.”
“No, they all went to bed ages ago. Why would they be wandering around outside?”
We heard what sounded like more footsteps, further away this time, and then what sounded like a shrill cry. The cry was probably just some sort of bird calling out, but I couldn’t be sure.
“The sound is coming from over near the tree line now,” Drew said, peering out the window that faced the forest behind the main cabin. “I think there might be someone out there. Let’s go check it out.”
“Are you freaking crazy?” I said, my eyes wide. “It could be anyone. It could be an ax murderer!”
He chuckled. “Or it could just be some lost hikers. We need to check. If it is an ax murderer, do you really want him coming over here where the kids are sleeping?”
He was right about that, but I didn’t want to admit it.
“Well, by all means, go ahead and tell the possible trespassers to leave,” I said, gesturing towards the door. “I’m not going over there unless I have a shotgun!”
His jaw clenched, and his lips pressed into a thin line. “Fine. Pussy.”
“Oh yeah, I’m a pussy because I don’t want to walk up to a possible serial killer in a dark forest.”
“We don’t even know what it is. It could just be the wind making sounds,” he said.
“Whatever.”
He shot me an angry look and then headed outside, and I sighed in exasperation and ran after him. As scary as this was, I couldn’t actually let him go out there alone. What if there really was some crazy person out there in the woods? He turned and saw me trailing behind him and grinned.
“Ah, so you’ve come to protect me from Bigfoot and his serial killer pals,” he said.
“Shut up. Let’s figure out what that sound was and then get back inside.”
We trudged away from the cabin in the direction the sound had come from, and Drew turned to the side and spoke in a low voice. “You know what I heard about this part of the state?” he said as we crept towards the tree line.
“What?”
“I heard people used to go missing in the woods in this area all the time. About seventy years ago, a group of hunters went into a forest not far from here to hunt some deer, and only one of them ever returned. He was in shock, and he never spoke again. Ended up killing himself not long after.”
I rolled my eyes. “Bullshit. I think I would’ve heard that legend by now, considering how long this land has been in Mom’s family, but nice try.”
“Damn. Thought you were easy to scare.”
We paused and cast our eyes around, but we couldn’t see anyone out here, even with the moonlight slicing through the night sky, illuminating the area for us.
“I guess it must have been the wind rustling the trees,” I said. “There’s nothing here, and the crying sound we heard was probably just a bird.”
Drew put a finger to his lips. “Shh. You hear that?” he whispered.
More twigs snapping. Every hair on the back of my neck suddenly stood on end, and I gulped back hot tears of fear.
“Drew…” I said. “We should go back to the cabin. Now.”
There was another strange sound all of a sudden, and my heart almost stopped. It was like a mixture of grunts and clicks, and it sounded like something from Alien vs Predator.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
Drew crept forward, and I followed him, my eyes wide as I looked around in every possible direction.
“Hello?” Drew called out. “Is someone out here?”
We’d reached a small clearing, and suddenly two deer dashed past us, startled by Drew’s words. One of them was making that same strange sound we’d heard. Of course. I hadn’t seen a deer in ages, and I’d totally forgotten that they could make some really weird sounds.
“See? No serial killers and no Sasquatches,” Drew said. “Just deer. Anyway, let’s…”
He was cut off midsentence by a nocturnal bird swooping down right past our heads, giving us the shock of our lives, and I screamed and lost my balance. As I flailed around, I tried to grab the nearest thing I could to keep myself standing, and I ended up grabbing at Drew’s T-shirt and pulling him down to the ground as I fell. I landed on my back on a soft bed of leaves and moss, and Drew landed right on top of me. His face was only inches from mine, and he murmured breathlessly.
“You okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
He was still right on top of me, and he was making absolutely no effort to get back up. His mouth was close to mine, too close, and suddenly it happened. He kissed me.
Chapter 7
Drew
Lying here on the ground with my face only a breath away from Sophie’s, I could see the expression changing in her eyes, even in the dim moonlight. First shock from falling over, then desire as she realized I was still on top of her. She subconsciously bit her lower lip, and I almost lost it right then and there as her eyes danced over my face, searching for affirmation.
And then I did lose it. I couldn’t help myself.
My lips crushed against her mouth. Her lips parted under my embrace, and she almost pulled away, but something kept her glued to me. I slid my hands under her back as my tongue snaked into her mouth, and she let out an incoherent murmur as I deepened our kiss. Her whole body trembled under my touch, and despite the cold air, every part of me felt scorching hot. Christ, she was perfect.
Suddenly it all felt wrong.
I pulled away, unable to keep it going. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to; hell, I wanted to do a lot more than kiss her…but it didn’t feel right. I’d been pretending to be nice to her for the last week all for the sake of Caleb’s stupid dare, and it had only just struck me how utterly pathetic it was. I was an ass. I’d been using the dare as a smokescreen to hide my true feelings, and no
w I couldn’t go through with it. She was more than a stupid dare to me, and she was more than a stepsister. I wanted her to want me for who I really was, not for who I’d been pretending to be. If she was ever going to kiss me back or do anything else with me, I didn’t want it to be because I’d tricked her into doing so.
She looked up at me when I jerked away, her eyes wide with confusion.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, getting up and extending a hand to help her to her feet. “I shouldn’t have done that. Imagine what our parents would think.”
Truthfully, I didn’t give two shits what they might think, but I needed an excuse for now. She didn’t meet my eyes, but she did reply.
“Yeah. I’m kinda seeing Dan now anyway,” she said quietly. “That was a mistake.”
“Yep. Won’t happen again.”
We trudged back to the cabin in silence, and as we stepped inside, I looked at her.
“So…Dan, huh?”
“Yes. We’ve been on a few dates,” she said. In the light of the cabin, I could see the color rising in her cheeks.
“So you aren’t gonna listen to me when I tell you he’s a jerk?”
“How do you know he’s a jerk?” she said, her eyes narrowing.
“I don’t know him very well. He’s more of an acquaintance. But I know enough to tell that he’s a sleazy little fuckface.”
“How?”
“Just a feeling I get from him.”
“So I should stop seeing him because of a feeling my stepbrother has?” she asked, folding her arms.
I sighed. “You can do whatever you want, Sophie. It’s your decision.”
But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to check up on Dan to make sure he isn’t up to anything shady, I silently added.
Awkwardness over everything that had just happened pervaded the atmosphere, and I tried to think of something to change the subject. “Well, all that excitement over Bigfoot has suddenly made me fucking hungry again. What about you? Do you wanna eat, or are you just going to go to bed?” I said.
One thing I remembered from when we were kids was that being scared made her hungry. I had no idea why, but it just did. Her Dad had been a fucking asshole, and every time I ran out to her playhouse to comfort her when he was arguing with her Mom, I’d made sure to take a bag of snacks. Munching on popcorn or something sugary seemed to calm her down, and it was the least I could do. Really, what I wanted to do was go into her house and beat the shit out of her Dad, but an eight year old boy going up against a fully-grown man wasn’t exactly the best idea.
“Yeah, I could eat,” she said.
I figured something warm would be best, given the cool temperature up here at night, and I hunted around in the cupboards for something quick and easy.
“How does mac and cheese sound?”
“Sounds good,” she said, taking a seat at one of the tables. “But you’re making it. I made most of the dinner tonight!”
I grinned. “I was going to make it anyway, Your Highness.”
I set about heating it up, but I ran into trouble when it was time to serve it.
“There’s no plates left in the cupboard,” I said, hunting around.
“I think they’re all in the dishwasher from earlier,” she said.
I looked down at the dishwasher, and the damned thing was still going.
“Oh well. We’ll have to make do with these,” I said, opening another cupboard and pulling out two wine glasses I’d seen earlier.
“Why are there wine glasses here?” she asked. “I’ve never seen them before.”
“Maybe some of the volunteers drink to cope with having to be around kids all day,” I said jokingly, scooping up a mound of mac and cheese into a glass for her.
She wrinkled her nose. “You really expect me to eat mac and cheese out of a wine glass?”
“It’s the classy way to do it,” I replied. “Trust me, I went to a private school.”
“All the private schools in the world couldn’t teach you class,” she said, poking her tongue out at me before digging into her food.
She had a point. Just because a school was expensive as fuck didn’t mean it taught any decent behavior to its students. The boarding school my father had sent me to was basically a dumping ground for bad rich kids. A lot of godawful shit went down there. For example, in the course of one year, the following happened: One girl gave five guys chlamydia, another girl had a three-way with two guys in the campus chapel (a real Devil’s threesome, huh?), four guys got high, stole a teacher’s car and crashed it, and three others beat up another kid so badly he was hospitalized for a month. Oh, and six students also got together and had an orgy in a classroom. Definitely not the best environment for a well-rounded education. My Dad could have afforded a better school for me, but he hadn’t wanted to bother doing so. Apparently I’d been acting out too much at my previous school to be worth sending to one of the very top schools in the country.
I hadn’t done too badly since I graduated a year ago, though. I’d done heaps of work for him at his company, and I’d also toyed with modeling all through my senior year upon the suggestion of an old friend of mine whose mother was a famous photographer. After the first proper shoot, things had picked up, and this year I’d been offered a contract with an agency in the city. My agent wasn’t the best, but she’d managed to get me a couple of decent gigs, including the billboard ad. I was also meant to be flying out to Australia in a month to shoot some magazine thing, but I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to go. Call me crazy, but I kinda wanted to savor the time I had left with Sophie around before she headed off to California for college.
“So what’s with all the tattoos?” she asked, peering at me over the top of her cheese-stained wine glass. “Trying to look like a bad boy?”
“What makes you think I’m not?”
“I don’t know. I kinda thought you were, but then I saw you today with all those kids. You’re secretly still nice, aren’t you? Just like when we were children.”
I hesitated. I’d only agreed to come up to this summer camp and help out as part of my plan to pretend to be nice and entice her, but the fumbled kiss earlier had made me realize that wasn’t exactly what this was all about. I’d actually enjoyed spending time with her and the kids out here. The way I’d interacted with them had been real. I hadn’t even had to try to fake it. It was genuinely fun, and what she’d said earlier about this land having more than financial worth was dead right.
Her mother was lucky that my business-minded Dad hadn’t already tried to talk her into selling the land to his company so he could develop it, because I was willing to bet they’d both make more than a pretty penny from that scheme, and it was exactly the kind of thing he’d do. Not that he needed any more money.
“This one’s my mother’s name,” I said, smoothly changing the subject back to my tattoos.
I rolled up my sleeve to show her the name on my shoulder. Elizabeth.
“You know, you never talked about her when we were kids,” Sophie said. “What happened to her?”
“She died when I was two. She was pregnant with my little brother, and she had really high blood pressure. Neither of them made it.”
“Shit. I’m so sorry. I had no idea. For some reason I always got the impression from your Dad that she just left.”
I shrugged. “He kinda saw it that way, honestly. He was really cut up after she died, and for a long time he blamed her for leaving him alone with a kid after she died, not that she could help it. It wasn’t his fault he saw things that way, though. Depression can fuck you up, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
We were silent for a while, mulling over our own thoughts.
“So your Dad,” I finally said. “He went missing from his boat a year after I moved away, right?”
“Yep.”
“Sorry if this offends you, but thank fuck for that.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t offend me, don’t worry. He was a prick. I still feel really
bad for saying it, though. I was talking about it to an old friend ages ago, and she made me feel like a total monster for not missing him at all. She said he was my father, and I have to love him no matter what he did.”
“Yeah, well, she wasn’t there to see the shit he did,” I said, once again remembering Sophie cowering in my arms in the backyard playhouse after the bastard had put out a cigarette on her leg. A lot of kids in my school had taken up smoking to be cool when I was around fifteen or so, but every time I so much as looked at a cigarette, it reminded me of that moment and I felt sick to my stomach. Some things you just don’t forget.
“I better take a shower and go to bed,” she said, standing up a moment later. “I still have twigs in my hair from when we…um, from when I fell over in the woods.”
“Okay,” I said, grabbing our wine glasses and walking over to the sink. “I’ll clean these. You go shower.”
She smiled and said goodnight before walking out the door towards the other cabin, and I watched her out of the window until she’d gone inside. There was a funny twinge in my guts as I looked at her, and strange emotions took hold of my mind; emotions that I’d been trying to suppress for a long time now. It had been in a childish, innocent way all those years ago, but I’d loved her back then…and now I was pretty sure I still did.
Chapter 8
Sophie
I was back in the city now, and I was on Skype with Cerie and Lana as they helped me plan out an outfit for my sixth date with Dan. The kiss with Drew had only happened a week ago, and I’d tried to push it as far from my mind as possible. We’d both agreed that it was a mistake, and I didn’t want to be the kind of girl who cheated on the guy she was seeing, even if Dan and I hadn’t exactly made things official when it happened.
But damn…it hadn’t felt like a mistake at the time, as much as I’d tried to convince myself it was.
“What do you think of this?” I said, holding up a crimson dress to my webcam.
“It’s cute,” Lana said.
“It’s more than cute, it’s sexy,” Cerie said. “But if you wear a little red dress like that on a date, I think Dan’s gonna be expecting a lot more than a goodnight kiss afterwards. Seriously, if I was a guy and saw you wearing that, I’d go and buy myself a stack of condoms and book a hotel room.”
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