“No,” Hunter snaps. I have no idea why he’s so on edge. Was it the conversation with Eli? Can he really be that mad at me about skipping South Dakota? “We’re having lunch at this café,” Hunter says, and that makes it final.
The café is nothing special, just a nondescript downtown lunch place with standard sandwich, soup, and salad choices. I know it couldn’t have any sentimental value for Hunter. It isn’t the kind of special hometown place that would hold any kind of nostalgia. I have the weird feeling that Hunter is stalling, that there’s something he’s not telling me, something he’s trying to hide.
We order our lunches and take a seat in the corner in the back of the restaurant. The customers are a generic mix of downtown office workers and tourists. Hunter keeps fidgeting and checking his phone.
“Are you expecting a call?” I say, just trying to make conversation, but he fires back with “Why would you say that?” His voice is sour and suspicious.
His phone buzzes at the same moment our food arrives. Hunter looks at the text message, then at me, and I think I see a brief flash of regret in his eyes, like an apology. “I’ll be right back,” he says. “Go ahead and eat.” Then he gets up and hurries around the corner to the front of the restaurant where I can’t see him. Maybe he’s just going to the counter to buy a Coke. Maybe he’s calling his mother and wants privacy. Or maybe he’s walked out the front door and left me stranded in Chicago without saying good-bye.
I take a bite of my turkey sandwich. It’s dry and flavorless. Hunter’s lunch sits untouched on his plate. I look around at the stone-faced workers in suits, the sunburned tourists in khakis and tacky T-shirts, and I wonder if I’ll end up like these people, these two versions of the same soul, one in uniform to make money, the other in uniform to spend it.
I force a few more bites of my sandwich and Hunter finally returns, looking slightly relieved.
“Just had to use the bathroom,” he says, though I can see the sign for the restroom right behind him, which is not the direction he went. But I don’t have the energy to confront him right now. I don’t care where he was for the last five minutes. I just want to get out of here.
“Are you going to eat your sandwich?” I say.
“I’ll take it to go,” he says. “Let’s get on the road.”
* * *
The car is silent for the rest of Illinois. Suburbs thin until we’re in the rolling hills of Iowa farmland. We keep passing semi trucks pulling the long white pieces of wind turbines, a hundred feet of smooth white blade, like the polished bones of dinosaurs. The car goes up a hill and we can almost see over the top, like there’s some promise of a horizon, but then all there is is more of the same, hill after hill after identical hill, as far as the eye can see. Then we go back down to repeat it all again. The terrain doesn’t change, but I’m nagged by the impatient feeling like it should have by now, but I missed it, just barely, and I’m being tricked somehow, stuck in some kind of twilight zone where we’re cursed to do the same thing over and over again, going up and down these hills forever but never really getting anywhere.
Hunter’s sandwich is untouched and sweating on the dashboard. It has been there for hours. “The mayonnaise is going to go bad,” I say.
He picks up the sandwich, rolls down the window, and throws it onto the Iowa freeway.
“That was dramatic.”
He just shrugs his old apathetic shrug.
“What the hell is going on with you, Hunter?”
He shrugs again.
“Oh, come on. Don’t try that shit with me. I’m not going to beg.”
Hunter sighs.
“Is this about Eli?”
He looks at me—tired, defeated. He looks back at the road.
“He’s changed,” Hunter says. “A lot.”
“For the better, sounds like.”
Hunter nods.
“So?”
“So I haven’t.”
“You’ve been doing it for the last three days,” I say. “You haven’t had anything to drink.”
“Three days.” He laughs sadly. “You know what’s the saddest part? It’s been really hard. Three fucking days.”
“You seemed happy.”
He says nothing.
“You fooled me.” I don’t know why, but I feel hurt. I know this problem has nothing to do with me, but some part of me thinks he should have been happy enough to forget about it. I should have made him happy enough. “I thought you were happy,” I say, and I don’t try to hide the hurt in my voice.
“I was. I am. Shit, Kinsey. I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t having any fun. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t having any fun with you. All it means is I’m a fucking idiot. Okay? It means I’m a pathetic piece of shit who has to sabotage everything good that ever happens to me.”
“So stop,” I say. “If you’re so miserable, why don’t you just stop doing the shit that makes you miserable?”
“It’s not that easy. You don’t get it. I’m not like you. I’m not perfect like you.”
“Perfect? Are you insane?”
“You’re beautiful and smart and talented and people respect you,” he says. “You respect yourself.” I stare at him hard, trying to find a hint of teasing or insincerity. But all I see is sadness. He really believes what he is saying. Even the beautiful part.
“I’m a mess, Hunter. You have no idea. I’m just really good at hiding it.” The words come out so easy, despite the fact that this is the first time I’ve ever said them, not even to Camille. “Sometimes it feels like hiding is the only thing I’m good at. At least you’re honest. At least you know who you are.”
“I hate who I am.” His voice breaks. I look away, wishing I could give him some privacy. What can I say to that? What can I do to let him know he is so much better than he thinks he is?
A single tear drops down his cheek, making a line through the unshaven stubble. Before I have time to even think about what I’m doing, I lean over and trace the wet trail with my lips, placing a final salty kiss on the side of his mouth. He turns and looks at me, surprised out of his sadness. I smile and he smiles back, as close to shy as I’ve ever seen him.
We don’t talk for the next several miles. The car is so charged with electricity, there’s no room for words. Somehow, I manage to doze off for a while. When I wake up, we are pulling into a rest stop and I can tell by the color of the sky that it is close to sunset.
“Can you drive for a while?” Hunter says gently as I stretch myself awake. “The map says there’s a campground in about two hours. We should be able to get there before it’s too dark.”
“Sure,” I say. Neither of us mentions the earlier conversation or half kiss.
The sky holds on to the last of its light and lightning bugs blink on and off as we pull into the “campground.” There are only a few actual campsites, which are not much more than a line of concrete slabs so close to each other that your tent is practically on top of your neighbor’s. If there were neighbors. The place is empty except for a couple of lonely cars parked on separate sides of the property. A vacancy sign still blinks optimistically, but even it seems to know it’s only a few steps away from becoming another abandoned roadside business like the overgrown place where we camped on Lake Superior. The majority of the campground is made up of varying sizes of cabins for rent. We’re exhausted and neither of us feels like setting up camp, so we decide to splurge on their cheapest one-room cabin. I never knew I could be so excited to sleep on a real bed between real walls.
“There’s no bathroom.” The tiny woman at the front desk coughs between wheezing breaths. She’s puffing on a long, thin cigarette with an oxygen machine attached to her nose with plastic tubes. She’s ancient, her face as wrinkled and dry as tree bark. One of her eyes is completely clouded over with cataracts. Her thin white hair is clumped haphazardly with pink plastic lit
tle-girl barrettes.
Hunter and I look at each other. “Um,” I say. “Then where are we supposed to—”
“Shared bathroom,” she croaks as she stubs out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. “Between cabin seven and cabin nine. Next to the vending machines. They’re out of order by the way.”
“The bathroom?”
“The vending machines!” she shouts, looking at us with hatred in her one good eye. She lights another cigarette with a lighter decorated with surfboards that says Hang ten, dude!
“Okay, thanks,” I say, wanting to get out of here as quickly as possible. Hunter hands her his credit card and I look in my wallet for cash to pay him for my half.
Her one eye squints at us. “You two are married, ain’t you?”
“Married?” says Hunter.
The woman points an arthritic finger at a faded and smoke-stained poster of Jesus on the cross, gory with his blood and suffering. “He’s watching, you know. He sees everything.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. Then it hits me: We’re staying in one cabin. With one bed.
She has the keys to our cabin in her hand, but she’s holding on to them tight like she’s thinking twice about giving them to us. The credit card machine beeps its acceptance and spits out a receipt, making the decision for her. She hands Hunter the keys, her eye still squinted, and says, “Cabin four. To the right of the Dumpster.”
“Thanks,” he says, and signs the receipt, and we can’t walk out of there fast enough.
“Young lady!” the woman shouts just as I’m about to walk out the door. “You obey your man,” she says. “You bow to him.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say, and manage to get out the door before Hunter and I burst into laughter.
“I saw a pool on the other side of the office,” I say as we carry our bags into the cabin. It’s not much more than four walls and a lumpy queen-size bed, but it feels extravagant. “Want to go for a swim?”
“Hey,” Hunter says. “I’m supposed to have the ideas around here, woman. You’re supposed to bow to me.”
“Sorry, Master. Please forgive me.”
“Just this once. A night swim, huh? Isn’t that kind of dangerous? Aren’t you worried about the lack of lifeguard or something?”
“Very funny.”
“You’re living on the edge.”
Just carrying my bag the few feet from the car has me already drenched with sweat. Even with all the windows open, it’s stuffy inside the tiny cabin. I thought Michigan summers were hot and humid, but this Iowa night takes it to a whole new level.
“Hey, where are you going?” Hunter says.
I pull my shirt over my head and throw it on the bed. I’m in a sports bra and shorts, the closest thing I have to a swimsuit. I can feel Hunter’s eyes burning into my back as I walk out the door. If only the gruesome Jesus poster could see me now.
The pool is tiny and shallow, but the water feels like heaven. As I slide through it, the weight and dirt of the day washes off me. Everything I’ve been carrying—all the pain, all the regret, all the fear—all dissolves and floats away, gets sucked into the pool filter, where who knows what happens to it.
I lift my head out of the water and see Hunter coming my way. He looks uncharacteristically shy as he unbuttons his long-sleeved shirt and sets it on a cheap plastic chair, and I realize this is the first time I’ve seen him with his shirt off. The moon paints his skin silver, makes shadow slivers where ribs turn into tight abs, lights the small forest of chest hair that turns into a trail under his shorts. But on the surface of his thin, toned body is something else, something he has been hiding, a layer of pain and memory he will never be able to wash away.
The skin of one of his arms and half of his chest is grotesque—melted, cratered and pocked, deep burns barely healed, still raw and shiny with newness. This is what the crash did to him.
I say nothing as he steps into the water, as he swims a few circles around me. When he emerges, he is just inches in front of me. I trace my fingers across the lava flow of his arm. I feel where he was melted.
“Does it hurt?” I say.
“Sometimes.”
“Does it hurt right now?”
“No. Nothing hurts right now.”
His wet hair is slicked back and his eyes are big and bare in the moonlight. Exposed. Vulnerable. Brave.
I place my hand on his chest, on the place above his heart, the place where the burn stops, where the bubbled pink turns to smooth tan skin.
“You saved me,” I say. “You pulled me out of the car.”
“I didn’t think you knew,” he says softly. “You were out. Unconscious.”
“You didn’t tell anybody?”
He shakes his head.
“Why not? You were a hero.”
“What, like I’m going to go around saying, ‘Hey, guys, guess what, I’m a hero’?”
His breath is warm on my face, my lips.
“You should have told me.”
“But I didn’t have to. You remembered.”
“I remembered.”
My mouth is inches from his. Just as I realize I’m holding my breath, he looks down.
“Pretty gross, huh? My skin. I didn’t want you to see it.”
“It’s not gross.”
He meets my eyes again.
“Thank you,” I say.
“No problem.” He grins. “I’d pull you out of a burning car any day.”
“Thank you for everything. For this trip, for reaching out. For being persistent even though I was a bitch.”
Hunter shrugs and I can tell he’s embarrassed. He doesn’t have a witty comeback for so much sincerity.
“You’re a good friend, Hunter.”
His face hardens. The lightning bugs blink off. The magic fizzles away into the darkness. That was the exact wrong thing to say.
He smiles sadly. “Yeah.” He pulls his body slowly through the water back to edge of the pool. “I’m tired,” he says, his voice trailing behind him. “Time for bed.”
Way to ruin a moment, Kinsey.
I follow him out of the water and back to our cabin. I know I should say something, do something to fix what I broke, but nothing seems right. We stand on opposite sides of the bed with our backs to each other, silently root in our bags for towels and a change of clothes. I change into a dry tank top and pajama shorts inside while Hunter changes out on the semiprivate porch. By the time he comes in, he’s already sweating.
“There’s no way I’m getting under those blankets,” he says, doing his best to sound cheerful. Now that I’ve finally seen his scars, I guess he doesn’t feel the need to wear a shirt to bed. He lies on one side of the bed in just his boxer shorts. I lie on the other side, being careful not to touch him. We are all skin. We are sweat and heat.
“Good night,” he says. He lies on his back with his eyes closed. He is not sleeping. I will not be able to sleep. Not with his skin so close. Not with this heat and humidity. The air is too heavy to keep pretending we’re just friends.
A voice inside tells me what to do. It is not Camille’s voice. It comes from somewhere deep down, somewhere Camille can’t touch.
I roll onto my side and face him. “Hunter,” I whisper.
“Yeah?” he says, his eyes still closed.
I lean over and place my lips softly on his. He does not startle or seem surprised. He opens his mouth as if he was expecting me, as if he’d been waiting all this time, all these days and nights, for me to kiss him. I can feel him smiling.
He reaches out his arm and pulls me close, his hand on the small of my back, strong and confident, guiding me toward him. Our skin touches, all the heat and sweat of it, our arms, our legs, our hands, our faces, but it is not enough. Hunter’s hands are under my tank top, circling my ribs, his thumbs under my breasts, inc
hing their way up. I pull my top over my head. I want every part of me to touch him. His chest slides against mine. The muscles in his back flex under my hands. His mouth is on my ear, my neck, my breast, my nipple. We are panting, feral. I have never felt so wild.
But there is another voice, a familiar voice, not the one that told me to kiss him. It’s the voice that tells me no, all the time, no—don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t be stupid, Kinsey. This pleasure is not yours. You do not deserve it. There has been a mistake. Give it back, you foolish girl.
His hands slip beneath the waist of my shorts. My body wants to bend to him, open, let him in. But the want is my curse; it is the mark of what’s forbidden. My mind senses it and says no, clenches tight, punishes my body for daring to be so free.
“No,” I say, but so quietly I hope he will not hear.
He freezes where he is, his hand motionless on my hip.
“No?” he whispers, as out of breath as I am.
I want to take it back. I can’t take it back.
“I can’t do this,” I say.
“Okay,” he says, pulling away. “Okay,” he says again, as if in pain.
“I’m sorry.”
“Were we going too fast? We can take it slower.”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, I don’t know.”
“What is it?”
I can’t speak. I see Camille in my memories, blissful, telling me she’s in love.
“Kinsey, you kissed me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry you kissed me?”
“No.” A million words swarm around in my head and none of them are right. I have no idea how I feel. I have no idea what I want to say. Why does this seem so easy for him, this forgetting of Camille? Did he love her as much as she loved him? Did he love her at all? Or was he just using her? Was she just some girl he fucked who happened to die?
“I want to understand,” Hunter says, a tinge of anger entering his voice. “I think I deserve that.”
The heat in the cabin is oppressive. The humidity is suffocating. I search my mind for an explanation. I grasp for an excuse.
“You’re my best friend’s boyfriend,” is what comes out of my mouth.