“Okay,” he said, “what do you have to show me?”
“I hope you’re ready for a hike.”
* * *
It was only a five-minute walk, through the trees behind the B and B, just over the Garretts’ property line. But the path was thick with brush and branches, the narrow trail overgrown in the years since Sadie and her friends had used it.
She and Eli wound through the evergreens, needles reaching out and grabbing her T-shirt. Then the grove thinned out, and beyond that was her clearing.
It was overgrown now, moss covering the ground, ferns encroaching. There was still a fire ring. Stumps, some on their sides, some still positioned like stools.
It had definitely been used by other people in the past decade, but not, it appeared, very recently.
“This,” she said, “was my home away from home.”
Her chest swelled up with emotion just looking at it, being in it. She wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t sure why this felt so big. Why she felt so naked.
But, like all her big feelings concerning Eli, the flip side was that as much as it hurt, she wanted him to know this part of her.
She wanted him to know her. There wasn’t, she realized, another person on the whole planet—except Toby—who did.
“Alison, Matt, Josh, Brooke and a few others and I all hung out here in the afternoons. Sometimes when we were supposed to be in school. Usually on weekends.”
“Doing what?” he asked.
“Drinking. Smoking...things of varying degrees of legality. Like you do. Well, not like you do, but like a lot of teenage ne’er-do-wells do.”
He looked up at the canopy of trees overheard, then back at her. “I bet it was a great place for that.”
‘Perfect,” she said. “You never arrested me here.”
“I didn’t.”
“But then, in fairness, I never lit the woods on fire.”
“That is true enough.”
He set the blanket down in the middle of the clearing and they sat, putting their food in front of them. Sadie sat on her knees and started to poke at her potato salad.
“I lost my virginity here.” Next to her Eli made a choking sound and she laughed. “Sorry,” she said, “just a Sadie fun fact.” It wasn’t, though. She was minimizing it again. Minimizing why she’d told him. She always did that. So that if what she’d offered was rejected, she could pretend it didn’t hurt.
She shoved her plate to the side and took a deep breath. “Sorry.” She started over. “I told you because it seemed... This is where I learned to run,” she said. “Where I learned to escape. None of us could handle the things that were happening at home and so we came here. Did a bunch of things that made us feel good. Sex was just another thing to do. But that’s changing for me. All the way until I met you, sex was just a part of the logical steps in a relationship. A way to pretend that I was intimate with someone without ever really having to be. And this? Telling you this, showing you this, it’s more intimate than anything I’ve ever done. But that’s fitting, because when we’re together...when we... It was never part of a logical step. It was just a thing we couldn’t not do. And that’s different, too.”
“You’re...different for me, too,” he said.
She wanted him to say more. And she didn’t know what more, but she did. She wanted to say more, but again, she wasn’t sure what else. Wasn’t sure what she could say that wouldn’t scare her off.
She was a flight risk of the highest order, putting herself in a situation that scared her to death.
“Eli...I...” She wanted to say something big. She wanted to try to express what she was feeling but she couldn’t even quantify it to herself.
The thing she wanted to say was the thing she couldn’t say. Because to say it was too much. And way more than this was ever supposed to be.
The one thing she knew for sure, and the thing that terrified her to her bones, was that she wanted to have him here. In this place. The moments of weighted silence, punctuated by heavy sighs and long drags on cigarettes. Days when they’d come and sat in the rain and talked and swore as loud as they wanted, because screw the world. They were in their own world. When she’d come alone with Josh and kissed him and, eventually, taken things further because they’d both just needed someone to touch.
In this place where she’d been with her first guy, she wanted to be with Eli. The last one.
Shock skittered over her skin in an electric current. At the weight of the thought, the depth of it, the truth of it.
So she just said what she could.
“I want you.”
“I thought you wanted potato salad.”
She tried to laugh, shaking from the inside out. “No. Just you.”
He seemed to sense the shift in tone. Another luxury of being with him. Of having him know her. He seemed to know what was happening inside her without her having to say it.
He set his plate off the blanket, too, cupping her cheek and leaning in for a kiss. She returned it, her chest filling, swelling, making it impossible to breathe. But breathing seemed secondary at the moment. Because of Eli.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and he slipped one hand down her back, holding her waist tight as he lowered her to the blanket, his body solid and warm above her. They sat together, his hands stroking her face, her hair.
He kissed her deeper and she laced her fingers through his hair. She felt everything happening on the surface of her skin. The scrape of his stubble against her neck as he kissed her there. As his hands moved over her T-shirt, the warmth of his touch seeping through to her skin.
But it was the echo beneath the surface that really hit. That anchored her to him, to the world. It was like a deep bass note that resonated through her, vibrating along every vein, moving deep to the core of her being.
They broke the kiss, looking at each other, and her eyes met his, emotion building in her chest, bigger and stronger than any sexual climax.
