“What is it?” I ask, steeling myself.
“Well, the good news is that lunch is ready. Plus Toby ordered three cases of beer, so these guys are going to be very happy campers.”
“And that’s good why?” I ask, thinking of the hangovers we’ll have to deal with tomorrow.
“Because hopefully they’ll pass out and we won’t have to listen to any more anaconda stories and humblebrags.”
“Okay,” I say, seeing his point. “And the bad news?”
“The bad news is that Toby only booked four tents.”
I take a deep breath in. “Are you sure?” I ask.
Jake nods. “And before you ask, I checked. They’re fully booked. I even had them call the other campsites. But they’re all fully booked as well.”
I turn to stare across the water back toward Bainbridge, visible as a blurry green outline in the distance. Damn.
“Look,” Jake says. “It’s just one night. It’s warm enough. I can sleep outside.”
I frown at him. “It’s okay,” I mumble. “We can share a tent.”
Jake follows my lead and stares back across the water toward Bainbridge. He takes a deep breath and then turns back to me. “No,” he says, “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, Em.”
What’s that supposed to mean? I’m about to ask him, but before I can, the bachelor comes over, wearing a neon yellow mankini. Because the bachelor is short, stocky, and hairier than a Yeti, the effect is stunning, and not in a good way, but in a stupefying, rendering-sentient-creatures-speechless kind of way.
“I have to get a stranger to autograph my butt,” he tells us, swaying slightly on the breeze.
Jake and I stare at him and then at each other.
“Please?” the guy slurs. “It’s a dare. I have to do twelve dares or else they’re going to make me kayak naked for the rest of the trip.”
“I’m not touching his butt,” I say, shaking my head.
Jake sighs and grabs the proffered Magic Marker from the guy’s hand. The guy turns around, and Jake and I both flinch backward. The mankini is a thong, and it’s riding between his butt cheeks like a strand of yellow dental floss.
Taking a deep breath, Jake scribbles his name across the guy’s butt. His friends all cheer. The bachelor walks off, unsteadily, waving his arms in victory.
* * *
Jake’s right. After a lunch of grilled fish and potato salad and a dozen more beers, the bachelor partiers all crawl into their tents and pass out, including the buck, still wearing his mankini and now missing half of his back hair thanks to the others performing an experimental waxing session on him. His screams still ring in my ears.
“I’m going to take a walk,” Jake says to me as I’m unfurling my sleeping bag and mat and laying them out in the tent. He pauses. “Do you want to come?” he asks.
“I . . .” I stop. I was about to say no, but something about the way he’s looking at me makes the words dissolve on my tongue. There’s a yearning in his eyes, and it makes a shiver run up my spine. “Okay,” I say.
Emerson
(Then)
I take a step toward him, reaching for my skates, but he pulls them out of my reach. I frown and reach for them again. He jerks them even higher out of my way. I glare up at him, confused, ignoring the voice in my head that I can hear clearly now—the voice that’s telling me to turn around and run out the door. To catch up with Jake.
I don’t listen because I convince myself that I’m being stupid. It’s just Coach Lee.
But then he strokes his free hand across my cheek. It burns as if he’s pressing a hot poker to my skin. I can feel my heart beating in my throat as though it’s stuck there, and I think for a moment I’m going to throw up. My brain tells me to move. To say something. To do something. But I don’t move. I can’t move.
He’s just being friendly, I say to myself. Be polite. Don’t cause a scene. Don’t embarrass yourself.
He moves his hand so his thumb is resting against my bottom lip. I shudder and turn my head, trying to make it seem like I’m not freaking out.
“Can I get my skates?” I ask.
“How about we trade?” he murmurs.
I frown up at him, not understanding, yet starting to.
“A kiss,” he says, smiling, “in exchange for the skates.”
My stomach drops with leaden weight to the floor. What’s he talking about? He’s the same age as my dad. He’s Jake’s uncle. He owns half the kayaking business, alongside my parents. I have known him all my life. Why is he asking for a kiss?
I shake my head.
His expression alters. It’s subtle, as though a light has flickered on behind his eyes, and I don’t know what it means, but I do know that I’m scared, that panic is starting to drag its claws down the inside of my rib cage, and that I’m also frozen solid and my voice has vanished.
His hands are there, on my collarbones. What’s he doing? He pushes me back against the cold metal lockers. I can’t breathe. Where’s my voice? The combination lock digs into my shoulder blade. This isn’t happening. It can’t be happening. What is happening? I don’t understand.
Coach looms over me. His breath is minty and also fumey—it reminds me of my granddad after he’s had his nighttime bourbon. Coach’s fingers are like blunt screwdrivers and they’re digging into my waist. And still I say nothing. My brain has shut down. It’s as if I’m watching it happen from a distance to somebody else.
“Saw you out there with Jake just now,” he says, smirking. “Don’t play innocent with me, Em.”
His hand starts stroking my hair. He tucks a loose strand behind one ear, and I hear a whimper that I don’t at first recognize as coming from me.
“Oh, come on, Em,” he says in a husky voice.
Come on, what? I want to say, but before I can, his mouth is on mine.
It takes a few seconds—how many, I don’t know—before I react. Finally. And it’s more because I can’t breathe. He’s suffocating me. His hands all over me like an octopus, pushing and groping and grabbing.
I push him in the chest. He stumbles back and starts laughing, a soft chuckle that grows into a full-throated laugh. But then the smile vanishes, replaced with a heavy-lidded, ice-cold stare.
He strides toward me and I can’t even scream because his hand is over my mouth and he’s shoving me up against the lockers once more. My head slams against the metal, the sound ringing deafeningly in my ears.
I start to struggle, adrenaline surging through my bloodstream, but he’s holding me tight and he’s too strong and he starts whispering, “Shhhh, shhhhh,” and I stop struggling because it’s useless and because I think maybe if I do, he’ll stop and let me go and I can walk out of here and pretend this never happened and everything can go back to normal. But he doesn’t stop. His other hand slides beneath my clothes. His fingers—calloused and rough against my skin—start prodding and squeezing. . . .
Tears well up and start to fall. My body tenses. If I squeeze my eyes shut, maybe I can pretend this isn’t happening. Maybe I can block it all out and pretend I’m somewhere else. But it doesn’t work. I’m still here.
His hand crushes my mouth. His lips, wet and gross, are on my neck. My lungs burn. My vision blurs.
“Em?”
Coach Lee springs away from me as if he’s been electrocuted.
It’s my mom. She calls my name again, and I almost burst into sobs I’m so relieved.
I want to shout out, call to her, but I can’t find my voice. I’m pressed up against the lockers, shaking. A geyser of vomit rushes up my throat, and I barely swallow it down. I have an urge to rip my skin off. Everywhere burns as though I’ve been stung by a jellyfish. A sharp, stabbing pain echoes through me even though he’s no longer touching me.
My mom sticks her head around the door. “There you are!” she says. Then she sees Coach Lee and stops. Her smile fades when she looks back at me and sees my tearstained face. A furrow appears between her eyebrows.
&nbs
p; “Hi, Audrey,” Coach says to my mom in a totally ordinary voice.
I dare a glance at him. He’s acting so normal. Did I just imagine what happened? How can he stand there and sound so normal?
“I was just giving Emerson a little pep talk. She got in a fight with one of the Walsh boys, hurt him pretty good.”
My mom frowns at me. Coach Lee gives me a look and I know he’s telling me to go along with it, to keep quiet. Or else.
“I told her she can’t behave like that if she wants to stay on the team.” His eyes stay glued to mine. “Isn’t that right, Em? It’s all about being a team player.”
I just stare back at him, barely breathing. This can’t be happening. Say something. Say something! But I can’t. I can’t speak. Tongue-tied. Now I know the meaning of the word.
He turns to my mom. “Well, I’d best be going. See you next week at practice, Em. And mind you work on your attitude.”
My mom steps aside to let him through the door, and then he’s gone and I suck in a breath and then another.
“Em?” my mom asks.
I sink to the ground as if the bones have evaporated from my legs, and my mom races toward me and catches me, sinking to her knees, still holding me.
“What happened?” she asks.
Emerson
For at least ten minutes, we say nothing to each other. We just walk in silence through the forest. I guess you could call it a companionable silence.
“I miss this,” Jake finally says, throwing his arms wide and tipping his head back to the sky.
I smile, but a little tightly. You can only miss something if you have the opportunity to leave it in the first place.
“What do you miss most?” I ask as we keep walking through the woods. There’s a sense of warmth flooding through me at the familiarity of being with him, of walking beside him through woods.
He glances in my direction briefly, then looks away fast. “The sky. And the trees. And the water.” He pauses again. “Do you remember that time we planned to run away together and camp out here?”
“Oh my God.” I laugh as the memory comes back to me. “I’d forgotten about that. How old were we?”
He shrugs. “Eight? You got into trouble at school—”
“And I was too scared to tell my mom and dad!”
“So you made a plan to steal a kayak and run away—”
“And you agreed to come with me.”
“I was worried you wouldn’t make it in the wilds on your own.”
I turn to him, surprised. “Really?”
He shrugs. “Yeah. Plus, you had a big bag of marshmallows. I’d follow you to the ends of the earth for a bag of marshmallows.”
I fall silent. Jake does too. We keep walking.
This could be the moment. I remember what my mom said about talking about what happened, but as soon as I contemplate it, my throat squeezes shut as if someone is strangling me. I know what I want to say to him. I want to ask him whether he thinks I’m a liar. I want to know why he left and never got in touch. I want him to know how much it hurt me. But there’s no way I can put any of that into actual words.
“It would have been cool,” Jake muses. “Setting up home here. Living on berries and marshmallows.”
I smirk. “We would have lasted a night before you got hungry and made us go home.”
“I would not.”
For a moment I can almost hear the eight-year-old versions of us arguing, their voices echoing through the woods.
Without realizing, I have slowed down so he can catch up with me. We walk alongside each other again, arms almost brushing. “Why didn’t we run away in the end?” I ask Jake.
“Your dad busted us trying to sneak a tent and a bag of marshmallows into a kayak.”
“Oh yeah.” I laugh as the memory comes back to me. “You tried telling him we were just acting out a scene from Huckleberry Finn, but you’re such a bad actor he didn’t believe you.”
Jake laughs. I almost do too.
“What did I even do? Why was I in trouble? I don’t remember.”
“That particular time?” Jake answers, raising his eyebrows at me in amusement. “Who knows? Was that the time you glued Tanya Hollingsworth’s hair to the back of her seat?”
A smile bursts across my face. I’d forgotten that, too. “The temptation of a hot glue gun. I put some on Reid’s hockey stick too. Do you remember? His hand got stuck to it.”
Jake glances sideways at me. “Remind me never to get on your wrong side.”
Another awkward silence descends. His smile fades. Mine too. I think about turning around and making an excuse about needing to get back, but I find my feet are following him. Push, pull. Push, pull. I’m a magnet that can’t work out its charge.
“Why did you choose Boston?” I ask him when we’re almost a mile down the trail.
Jake gives me a one-shouldered shrug and a half smile. “Full scholarship. Great hockey program. Interesting choice of major.”
Makes sense, I suppose. “Do you think you’ll stay in the game?”
He draws in a deep breath, then lets it out. “For the moment. It’s tough sometimes,” he explains, “trying to balance the academic side with the athletic side. They don’t cut us much slack.”
“But is it what you want to do? After college, I mean?”
“I’ve got a contract already to play. So yeah, I think so.”
“You think so?” I ask, surprised.
“I love the game. It’s what I want to do. For now. But, you know, I’m not going to be able to play forever.”
“What will you do after? Any ideas?”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking about something like architecture, like Toby, but with a focus on sustainable design.”
I nod.
“Maybe it’s thanks to having grown up here,” he says, gesturing at the woods around us, “among so much nature. I want to get back to it. Hockey’s all about the buzz. Everything’s about the kill. About winning. Out here it’s just about the quiet. Winning doesn’t matter so much. I like that.”
“It was the tree house,” I tell him.
“What was?”
“That was what inspired you to want to build stuff.”
He laughs. “Yeah, it probably was.”
“I guess we can share it,” I say, increasing my pace so I’m ahead of him once more. “You did build most of it, after all.”
He catches up to me and bumps my shoulder with his arm. “And there I was on the verge of calling in the lawyers.”
I smile despite myself.
“So, what about you, Em?”
He’s done it again. He keeps calling me Em. There’s a piercing joy to it. No one has called me that in such a long time. I didn’t want anyone to at first—insisted, in fact, that people call me Emerson—but hearing Jake call me Em, I feel a desperate sadness that I let Coach take my name as well as everything else. “What about me?” I ask quietly.
We’re strolling side by side again. Jake’s hands are swinging free by his sides, and I can’t stop focusing on them and on his forearms, no matter how hard I try not to. There’s just something about the strength in them that I’m drawn to. I can’t stop myself from imagining what it would be like to be held by him. How good it would feel.
There’s no more denying that I’m attracted to him. I can barely breathe whenever he’s nearby; every time we come into contact, lightning tears a path through me. I can feel my pulse beating in my belly, against my ribs, in my throat. Everywhere. I remember the way he was looking at me earlier in the store when I walked out in my bikini top. Am I reading into the way he keeps looking at me? Is it possible he likes me? The thought makes my heart race—though whether that’s panic or excitement, I can’t tell. Angrily, I remind myself that he can’t possibly feel that way about me.
“If you didn’t have to stay and help with the business and your dad, where would you go? What would you do?” he presses.
“What?”
“Wh
at would you do if you could do anything, go anywhere?”
I come to a halt, no longer focusing on his hands or his arms or on the possibility he might like me. Did he seriously just ask me that question? I shake my head and march on.
Jake chases after me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
I stop and stare at him, frustration biting at me. “It’s just a stupid question, Jake. What’s the point of having dreams like that? Some of us don’t have the luxury of planning for the future.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Em,” he says softly, almost an entreaty.
“Oh, really? Do you see another option? Because I don’t.”
Jake chews his bottom lip and doesn’t say anything.
I exhale loudly and kick a pile of sticks lying on the ground. “I guess I’d study journalism and I’d go somewhere like Washington State,” I hear myself say after a few seconds. “Somewhere near home.”
“Is that because of Rob?” Jake asks. He throws it out there like a casual comment, but I sense that he’s holding his breath on the answer. The forest seems to fall silent waiting too.
I make a face at him, my heart starting to beat faster. “Rob? I couldn’t care less about Rob.”
“But—” Jake says.
“We’re not dating anymore,” I blurt.
Jake takes that in. He tries to suppress a smile, but he can’t, so instead he turns his head so I can’t see it. Will he ask when we broke up? Or why? “It’s over,” I say. “For good this time.” There, I’ve told him. “How about you?” I ask, then straightaway wince, wishing I could take the question back.
“How about me what?” Jake asks.
I shrug and look away, cringing.
“Am I dating anyone?” Jake asks.
My cheeks scald. Is he teasing me? I can’t bear the thought that he might think I care if he’s dating anyone.
“No,” he says quietly. “I’m not dating anyone.”
I shoot a quick glance in his direction, surprised at the news. He looks me in the eye. Is he a player? Is that why he doesn’t date? Because he has too many girls throwing themselves at him, so why bother limiting himself to just one?