#forestwriting

“Okay.” He took a deep breath, scrubbing his face with one hand. “The Flower  Scouts have him. Ah-ahpahpahpahpahpah,” he added quickly, holding up his hand as she moved toward the front door, “this is literally what I was trying to prevent. God, you’re like a goldfish,” he muttered under his breath. “A crazy murder-goldfish. Sit down and take like half a second to think.”

It took her exactly that long to realize he was right; storming the Flower Scouts’ headquarters was the most suicidal thing she could do right then that didn’t involve her former boss and his many explosives. Gwen sat back down, lowering her gun so it was pointed in the general direction of Dirty Kevin’s feet. “Why?” she asked begrudgingly. (She didn’t much care about the “why,” but she thought it’d show cooperation.) “What do they want with him?”

“See, that’s the thing. The Flower Scouts don’t want him, not really. But there’s one person there that does. And she’s the one you need to worry about.”

She sighed, feeling the overstretched tether of her patience begin to fray. “Cryptic. So this is the woman who just left, right?”

“Her name is Jen Stonewater,” he said with an even heavier sigh than her own. “And she’s fucking crazy. But the Flower Scouts love her, especially Priss —” (Gwen vaguely remembered the name from her childhood; Penelope Priss had been the head of the Flower Scouts since Gwen had been a little girl.) “— and they’ll do practically whatever she says. Hence the kidnapping-David thing.” He paused for a moment, seeming expectant, and when she didn’t reply he added, “. . . Don’t you want to know why?”

“I don’t care why,” she snapped, even though part of her was a little curious. She could find that out after this was all over. “I just wanna know the parts that help me save David so I can get the fuck out of here.”

“Okay, let’s start there: you’re not doing anything tonight, so you might as well get comfy and chatty.” She opened her mouth to tell him to go fuck himself and moved to get up off the couch, but he stopped her before she could do more than twitch: “He’s safe — or safe-ish. Safer than he’d be with you burning the place down, anyway — and you’re . . . let’s be honest, girl, you’re a fucking mess. No way are you getting within a hundred feet of the Flower Scout headquarters looking like that. And they’re not gonna be back for a while, so we’ve got a nice evening to hang out, share exposition, maybe get you a shower and some sleep so that you look less like a war refugee, and come up with a plan. Sound good?” He was speaking with exaggerated gentleness, like she was a wild animal he was hoping to sweet-talk into not maiming him.

She hated that this guy, this motherfucker who was literally sleeping with the enemy (or at least sharing a house with them), made sense. And there was no reason to think this wasn’t a trap . . . but she was unarmed, uninformed, and alone. It wasn’t like she had a lot of options. “Fine. You have till midnight to talk me into your plan. If you don’t, I’m robbing an Ammunation and going in  on my own.”

“Great!” Kevin beamed, and for a moment Gwen could see the guy he could’ve been if he’d grown up anywhere but Sleepy Peak: handsome, almost like a movie star if he didn’t have the broken nose and missing teeth, warm and maybe even carefree. Then he let the smile drop from his face and the years of exhaustion and bad decisions washed back over him, eradicating the person she’d caught a glimpse of. “Love to see you almost being sensible. So. What do you wanna know?”

“How do I get to David?” was the obvious question, but she had a feeling he’d be more cooperative if she let him lead her to the point he was so obviously getting at. “Who was the other one?”

“Oh. Him. That’s Daniel . . . Whitewillow? I think that’s it, but I don’t really remember his last name. I just call him Dan. He’s Jen’s twin brother.”

“But —”

“I know, I know,” he interrupted quickly, “names don’t match, but they’re definitely siblings. They came from this weird culty commune thing, no real last names. Very flower-child, hippie-dippie thing, like Coachella but with ritual sacrifices and stuff. So . . . kind of just like Coachella.” Kevin chuckled at his own joke, but when Gwen didn’t he just continued, “I don’t know much about it — Dan doesn’t like to talk about it much, and Jen’s never said anything that made sense, ever — but I guess it was some holdover from the free love movement, which is probably why everyone’s name sounds like a white guy naming Native American characters in a bad ‘save the forest’ movie.” He paused, leaning forward to stand with exaggerated slowness, as though that would stop her from retraining her gun on him. (It didn’t.) “Can I get a drink? Since we’re such good pals and all.”

Gwen followed him into the kitchen without lowering her weapon. “So they’re hippies,” she continued, trying to prod him back on topic. “What does that have to do with — did you say ritual sacrifice?”

“Now you’re getting good and freaked out,” Kevin said approvingly, taking a can of beer from the fridge and gesturing to offer her one. She narrowed her eyes and tightened her grip on the gun, and with an exaggerated eyeroll he turned and meandered back toward the living room, looking way too comfortable with everything that was going on.

“Hold on,” she snapped before he could sit down. She jerked the gun in the direction of the back rooms. “Not in view of the street now that it’s dark.”

“Sure, whatever. I don’t wanna be gunned down by Campbell’s men, either.” And again, much too slowly for her nerves to handle, he switched gears toward one of the bedrooms she hadn’t been in yet. “Anyway, you’re starting to see what we’re dealing with. This isn’t a run-of-the-mill gang war, kid. We’re talking about certified nutjobs.”

She wanted to ask him how much older he actually was than her, because it couldn’t even be a decade, but there were more important things to worry about. “What are they doing here, then?”

Kevin pulled open a door that was practically falling off its hinges and gestured for her to step inside. She used her gun to usher him in first, and he complied after another eyeroll and a long-suffering sigh. “That’s the thing. It turns out this little cult was started in the seventies by none other than a Mister Cameron Campbell.”

Shock made her muscles weak, and for a second the gun wavered. “What?”

He nodded, crossing the cramped and cluttered room to its sole piece of furniture, a dingy, sagging bed, and plopping down onto it. Kicking off his shoes and lying back to stare up at the stained ceiling, he gestured toward the floor with the hand not holding his beer. “Sit anywhere, by the way.”

Like she was going to shove aside piles of dirty clothes and what looked like enough drug paraphernalia to stock the entire state just to crouch awkwardly on the floor. “Campbell?”

“I don’t know the guy’s history,” he said with the shrug, not even bothering to glance her way while he sat up just enough to take another long drink without spilling it all over himself, “but that’s what Dan and Jen say. They never met him, but apparently their mom says he lived there for a couple years, set up a campground full of devoted apostles, sacrificed a few random strangers —” 

Gwen very much doubted they were random. She suspected that her former employer had found a convenient method for disposing of his rivals without questions.

“— and had a few dozen kids before mysteriously vanishing a few days before the FBI came knocking.”

Okay, things were starting to piece together in her mind. It didn’t exactly surprise her to think that Campbell had been fathering children across the country, or even that he’d do something as Manson-esque as start a murder cult; she was mostly just impressed he hadn’t gotten caught yet. “Including your new friends.”

He nodded, then sat up and finally met her eyes. “Including David Greenwood.”

---

“Hey, don’t fucking faint on me!” Suddenly Kevin was standing right in front of her — when had he crossed the room? — his hands on her shoulders like he was trying to hold her upright. “Come on, aren’t you supposed to be some kind of killer?”

Gwen shoved him away, shakily keeping the gun pointing in his general direction, and pressed her free hand to her forehead. “I’m fine,” she muttered, “get away.” A few deep breaths kept the encroaching blackness from overtaking her vision, and she steadied herself with a slow shake of her head. “David is Campbell’s kid?”

“Jesus, if that freaked you out, you’re really not gonna be able to handle what’s coming, kiddo. Sure you don’t want a beer?”

“It’s been a long day!” she snapped, trying to remember the last time she’d eaten. Or slept. Had it really only been that morning that she and David had left for the “party” in the park? It felt like years had passed since then. “Just — just gimme a second.”

For a few seconds she could feel the druggie’s eyes on her, but she tried to block it out and focus. Now was definitely not the time to let the shock and exhaustion of the day hit all at once, not when she still didn’t know how to rescue David. “Okay, killer. Listen, you probably inhaled a lot of smoke, and it’s not like this place smells all that good . . . and you seriously look like shit. How about you go wash some of that gunk off of ya and I’ll get something to eat?”

She glared at him incredulously. “You seriously think I’m gonna use your shower or eat anything you give me?”

“I think if you want to save David you will.” When she didn’t have an immediate response to that (though she did consider just shooting him to simplify things), he took her elbow with the gentleness of a man escorting his great-great-great-grandmother and led her toward the door. “Listen, this has been hell on you, and it’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. Your boy isn’t going anywhere. Come on, I’m on your side here.”

“The more you say you’re on my side, the less I think you are,” she muttered, allowing herself to be dragged down the hall.

He stopped, pinching the bridge of his nose with a sigh. “Okay. Uh, I didn’t really wanna throw this out there, but since you’re so damn fussy about trust, might as well go for full disclosure: Dan and I are dating. Have been for a little while now.” He grimaced and scuffed his foot along the dingy carpet. “Sounds like such high-school bullshit when you put it like that, but . . .”

She stared at him, frowning. “You know I’m going to kill him, right?”

“I’m kinda hoping I can talk you outta that part, actually. But yeah, I get that’s where you’re at right about now.” He shook his head with another sigh, and once again she noticed how run-down he seemed, how desperate.

Because he had to be desperate to be asking for her help, right?

“What is it?” She managed to keep from snapping at him, but only barely.

“I love Dan, I really do. But what Jen’s doing to him . . . what he’s turning into . . . He’s a real sonuvabitch at the best of times, but he was slowly starting to become a person instead of just her hanger-on. And he doesn’t really want to be part of this whole thing. But . . . she’s his twin. They have a weird bond I just can’t figure out.” 

Kevin looked up at her, meeting her eyes for the first time since ushering her toward the bathroom. They were a stunning shade of green, dull but warm with little flecks of gold, and at that moment so open and guileless that they reminded her of David. 

“I think maybe if she’s gone, I can get him back.”

It took her a second to absorb what he was implying. “That’s a really stupid plan.”

His lips twitched into a ghost of a smirk. “Worse than any of yours?”

They were quiet for a few minutes, each mulling over the deal they were about to make. Finally Gwen nodded, clearing her throat and breaking the moment of almost-intimacy that’d descended on them.

“Prepackaged food only. Nothing already opened. And get me a plastic bag for my gun.”

“You’re seriously bringing it into the shower with you?”

She didn’t bother responding, already turning and ducking into the open bathroom door. “I’m not promising anything,” she said, turning to accept the Ziploc bag he’d grabbed from the kitchen, putting her gun inside and making sure she could still pull the trigger through the slippery material. “There’s a good chance your boyfriend dies.”

“There’s a good chance yours does, too. Is that gonna stop you?”

Gwen closed the door in his face and locked it.

They both already knew the answer.

---

“This looks like . . . ham.” Kevin lifted it to the dim, flickering overhead light and grinned. “Hasn’t even expired yet, either.”

She caught the package as he tossed it to her, tearing it open with her teeth and shoving half the slices of deli meat into her mouth at once. “So kee’ talkin’,” she managed around her mouthful of food, resisting the urge to moan; food really was better than sex sometimes, even shitty gas-station ham. “S’Cam’bell really Davi’s dad?”

He winced, presumably at her manners, but she didn’t have even the tiniest shit to give. “Kinda hard to piece together, but Jen spent the first couple months here doing a lot of research trying,” he said. “Near as we can tell, even after ditching the cult to the feds, Campbell kept coming back to what remained of it every once in a while. Not sure what for —”

“Place to hide bodies, probably. Or to take whatever stuff they had. Are those pickles?”

Kevin moved to hand her the jar. “Do you need me to open that?” When she just glared at him (as intimidatingly as she could manage while dressed in one of Jen’s nightgowns), he held up his hands and stepped away. “Sorry.

“Anyway, he spent most of the 80s in New York doing something for the mafia, but at some point he went back to — it’s called the Children of Cam, which is weird and kind of gross in a couple of different ways, considering  —”

“The point,” she snapped, popping the lid off the jar and immediately grabbing a handful of pickles. Cold green juice ran down her wrist and dripped onto the pink satin nightgown, and Gwen took a faint, petty pleasure in ruining Jen’s clothing. The first of a million terrible things I’m gonna do to you, she thought, childishly wiping the juice off onto her skirt. Not that you’ll be alive to care about the pickles. “So he knocked up their mom sometime in . . . what, the 80s? 90s?”

“They’re probably only a couple months older than David. This was right before he settled in Sleepy Peak, and he was running all over the place. But it seems like David’s mom, whoever that was, was one of the first people he met in town.”

Gwen wrinkled her nose, setting the pickles aside. She was finally starting to feel full enough to start thinking about next steps. “But there’s no way — David doesn’t even know Campbell’s his dad. If he even is. How do your cult friends know about it?”

He shrugged. “Public records, hospital paperwork . . . I think someone at the Flower Scouts knows the owner of the orphanage Campbell found David at, and Priss and Campbell go way back. That’s why Jen joined, to try and get access to stuff normal people couldn’t.”

“But why? What do either of them want with David?”

“All right, so . . . the ‘why’ is mostly that she’s fucking crazy. Definitely don’t forget that. But I know before I met them, they were trying to get an audience with Campbell and he wouldn’t have anything to do with them. I think he sent Hook to make them get lost. So they’re pissed about that. And then they see this kid — who looks a hell of a lot like Dan, I gotta say. Resemblance is uncanny —”

“The point, Kevin!”

“They think he stole their life. And they want it back.”

---

“Are you sure you don’t want to wait —”

“I’m done waiting,” Gwen snapped, following him to the room she’d first hidden in, staying close enough to breathe down his neck. “If we’re gonna keep talking, we’ll talk and plan.”

Kevin sighed, ushering her once back into the bedroom and bending down to stroke the gray cat as it streaked out through the open door. “You’re not a shark, you know. You’re not gonna die if you stop moving.”

“I’m not worried about me dying.” Jen’s bedroom was just as run-down as the rest of the house, but oppressively pink walls and posters of boy bands attempted to add some cheer to the scene. Or so she thought . . . leaning forward, Gwen realized that the eyes of most of the people on the posters and photographs had been scribbled out, and pentagrams and other symbols dotted their faces and clothes. “Jesus.”

“I warned you.” He crossed over to the vanity and opened one of the drawers, revealing mountains of cheap makeup but also weapons, disturbing pamphlets with the same satanic symbols on them, and a pile of photographs that looked like they’d been taken by paparazzi.

Spotting her own face, Gwen snatched up the photos and flipped through them. Most were of her — at the daycare, walking down the street, even one of her rappelling out of a helicopter from one of Jasper's heists — but there were a lot of David, and a few professional-quality pictures of Cameron Campbell clearly taken from his TV and magazine appearances.

These last ones were soft from regular contact, with smudging around the edges like they’d been held hundreds of times. “She’s obsessed with us.”

“If it helps, mostly just Campbell and David. You’re just kind of part of the deal.” Kevin tapped her on the shoulder as he passed, drawing her attention to the closet and opening the door. “Any of these look familiar?”

She suddenly noticed a loose thread on one of the leather jackets. She had a jacket exactly like that, with a thread exactly right — “Holy shit, is this my stuff?”

“Not all of it . . . but yeah, most of it.”

Gwen pushed her way into the closet, more carefully inspecting the clothes. “I mean, obviously my shit was getting stolen from the laundromat, but I thought that was just because this town sucks.”

“It does suck. But with her around, it sucks about a hundred times more.” 

The bitterness in his voice drew her away from her stolen clothing, and she turned back to look at him. “You really want her dead.”

He shrugged, sitting down on the bed and not-so-gently shoving the Flower Scouts uniform out of the way. “Not specifically. ‘Gone forever’ would work, too. In prison. In a really deep well.” He sighed, running a hand through his floppy brown hair and completely failing to push it out of his eyes. “The problem is that there’s no such thing as ‘forever’ with her. If she’s alive, she’ll come back worse than ever.”

It sounded like maybe he’d tried to convince her to skip town once or twice before. “So . . . what? They want your boyfriend to impersonate David, and she’s going to try and be me? Is that why they tried to kill us earlier?” she asked, taking a seat at the vanity and inspecting the brushes and makeup left behind. This foundation was way too dark for the blonde woman in the pictures surrounding the mirror, and as she held a bottle up to her own wrist she wasn’t surprised at all to find it was a perfect match. Pushing aside the idle curiosity if this counted as blackface or not, she added, “But why would she wanna take my place? It’s not really a place anyone wants to be at the moment.” 

Including herself.

“That was the plan at first, yeah,” Kevin said. “But I think watching you guys . . . did something to her head. She got madder and more resentful. And crazier, which I didn’t think was possible. I don’t think she wants to replace either of you as much as she just wants to make you all suffer the way she and Daniel have. Make Campbell pay for abandoning them.”

Before she could let that chilling thought sink in, he pushed himself off the bed with a groan that sounded like it should’ve come from a much older man. “Anyway, she obviously can’t see you looking like you, or you’ll never get within a hundred yards of David. So we’ve gotta give you a little makeover.”

It made sense, but “makeover” felt like such a ludicrously inappropriate word for the situation that she couldn’t help but scoff. “How the hell am I supposed to turn into a completely different person?” Sure, she’d heard of some really talented imposters before who could make you believe they were anyone, but acting had never been her strong suit. In fact, if it was a suit it was the most worn, raggedy, threadbare suit in her proverbial closet, and her makeup skills weren’t much better.

“ She did.” Kevin rifled through the vanity drawers, moving Gwen aside like she was just another part of the furniture. “Right now she’s walking around looking exactly like you, in fact. And if you want to see why, we should probably get a move on.”

Oh now he wanted to pick up the pace? She was about to snap at him that she was more than ready when she saw the razor in his hands. Shoving her stool back so hard it nearly tipped her over and onto her back, she scrambled away from him, reaching for her still-bagged gun. “Fuck no,” she said, starting to regret the level of trust they’d built so far. “Get away from me with that thing or I’ll blow your head off.”

“Hey, hey,” he said, stepping back with both hands in the air like one of them wasn’t still holding an electric blade, “we’re still friends here. Shave your own head if you wanna, I don’t care.” He tossed her the razor and settled back down on the bed with exaggerated slowness.

She caught it by instinct, looking down at it for a moment and running her free hand over her damp ponytail. She wasn’t incredibly attached to her hair, but . . . “What good will it do? Sounds like she’s spent months memorizing my face.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got three advantages. One,” he said, sitting up as she took a seat in front of the vanity, “you’re really underestimating how different somebody looks without hair or eyebrows. Trust me, it’s freaky.”

Gwen grimaced and lifted the razor to her hairline. “Two?” she prompted, taking a deep breath before turning it on.

He raised his voice to be heard over the buzzing. “Two, she’s not expecting you to show up in disguise. No offense, but you’re obviously not patient enough and probably not smart enough, and she still thinks I’m on her and Danny’s side.” Hair fell in thick, matted clumps from her scalp, leaving behind dark follicle-dotted skin that she’d kind of expected to look paler, since it never saw the sun. “And three, you happen to be teamed up with one of the least-bad drag queens in Sleepy Peak, back when I could still afford to do it.” Returning to her side, he carefully sidestepped the piles of hair dropping to the rug and gathered a handful of brushes in one hand, peering with a doctor’s precision at each of the powders and bottles littered across the table before setting some aside. “Trust me, I’ve got this.”

Her hair and eyebrows gone, she rubbed a hand over her scalp, watching her reflection do the same. It was crazy how much such a small change had transformed her, but the person in the mirror didn’t only no longer look like Gwen Santos, but it was kind of hard to picture them having a gender at all. She couldn’t square her image with actual hairless people she’d seen before, like cancer patients or skinheads; those were people . But she just felt like a strange, smooth alien. “How long will it take?”

“We have time.” He turned her stool around and angled her face toward the light, his calloused fingers rough against her jaw and cheek. For a moment he just inspected her, tapping one of the brushes against his palm. “Need a glass of water? More exposition?”

Gwen resisted the urge to roll her eyes, worrying it’d mess with her face as he began carefully smearing something wet and gooey just below her cheekbones. “So Jen looks like me right now. What’s she doing?”

Hopefully she’d gone to talk to Campbell. That would clear up a couple of problems real fast.

“She's visiting David. To convince the Flower Scouts kidnapping Campbell’s kid was a good idea, Jen has them thinking they’ll frame the Woodscouts. Turns out when they hired you to kill David, they were gonna pin it on the Flower Scouts, so it’s a whole revenge thing.”

That was why they’d even been willing to hire a woman. And here she’d thought she was just that special. She blinked to try and convey that she was listening without messing up whatever he was doing to her jaw, which seemed to involve a lot of blotting and then wiping it away with a lot of swearing.

“Fuck,” he muttered, his eyes narrowing as he once again dotted a damp brush along her jawline. “Do you have any goddamn idea how hard it is to put makeup on someone that makes it look like they’re not wearing makeup? It’s fine, we’ll get there. Anyway, yeah, so they’ve got David in some sub-sub-basement where he’d never know it was the Flower Scout headquarters, told him he’s in the Woodscout’s base, and Priss is hoping that when David gets out, he’ll get Campbell to destroy their biggest competition.”

Gwen’s stomach sank as he spoke, and once he’d leaned back to grab more powder from Jen’s vanity she said, “So they’re planning on letting him live?” not believing her own words.

His gaze was still focused on the makeup, but she studied his profile as his jaw tightened. “That’s what the Flower Scouts think is gonna happen. But they don’t know the real Jen. They don’t know she’s Campbell’s kid, I’m pretty sure they don’t even know Dan exists, and they really don’t know how much the two of them hate David.”

“What do you think is gonna happen?” she asked as he tilted her face toward the mirror.

He was quiet for a long time before he answered. “I think we need to get your boyfriend out of there quick enough that we don’t have to find out.”

---

Kevin’s work wasn’t bad. Quicker than she’d expected; it was still before her midnight deadline when he sat back with an exhausted sigh and wiped his makeup-smeared hands on his jeans. “All right, that oughta do it. Lemme wash this shit off.”

Gwen barely noticed him leave the room, too intently studying her reflection. He was right about the baldness; without her hair and eyebrows, she looked years younger and kind of sickly, her eyes bigger and rounder and the shadows underneath them more pronounced. He’d used just enough contour to make her nose and jaw more prominent, but she could only tell that it was makeup and not natural shadows by squinting; in anything besides daylight or the halogen glow of the vanity, she was pretty sure it’d be impossible to tell. Her upper lip and cheeks were dusted with faint, wispy black hairs, and she realized (with some distaste) that he’d used eyebrow powder to darken her existing facial hair, making it look like a middle-schooler’s first attempt at growing a mustache and beard. He’d even dotted over her faint natural freckles to bring them into prominence, and drawn on a few red spots that looked like healing acne across her cheeks and chin.

Kevin reentered the room with an armful of drab olive clothes. “Not bad, right? I would’ve done a King Molasses thing if I had anything we could’ve used as a beard, but all things considered . . .”

“I look like a thirteen-year-old boy.”

“Exactly! Perfect age for a Woodscout.” He elbowed past her to rifle through the vanity’s drawers, finding a box of multicolored contact lenses. “What’re you thinking? I remember Jen saying it’s easier to cover lighter eyes with a darker color, so brown or black are probably your best bet.”

She shrugged, letting him drop the dark brown circles into her palm. Suddenly everything was feeling a lot more real. “What if she doesn’t buy it?”

He shrugged, inspecting his fingernails with exaggerated nonchalance. “Then she probably kills you and David immediately, and if I’m lucky I’ll be locked in this shithole of a house forever and only allowed to leave with Jen or Dan chaperoning. If I’m less lucky, I’ll probably also join the pile of corpses.”

She tried to match his casual energy, turning her focus toward putting the contacts in. “Got anything for me to wear?”

“We stole some Woodscouts uniforms a couple months ago. Something should fit more or less.” As she blinked the world back into focus, she met his gaze in the mirror. Despite the attempt at easygoing optimism, his skin was the color of milk, turning the bags under his eyes a sickly purple-gray. “Sure you wanna do this, kid?”

Gwen sucked in a deep breath, shoving her stool away from the vanity and inspecting the uniforms he’d left strewn across the bed. “Of course not,” she said tightly. “But he’d do it for me.”

There was a moment of silence but she didn’t look up, telling herself the blurring of her vision was just her eyes tearing up from the contacts. “Yeah,” he finally replied, his voice surprisingly soft and almost sympathetic. “All right. Just meet me in the living room when you’re done. I’ll text them so they know we’re coming.”

“Don’t text anything without me seeing it first,” she snapped, remembering suddenly that she was in the house of her enemy. Kevin’s helpfulness and general sarcastic-but-friendly demeanor had brought her guard down despite herself, and she kept making the mistake of wanting to trust him.

“Aye-aye, cap’n,” he muttered, and she could hear the exasperation in his voice. “Hurry up, though. We’ve gotta clean up any sign of you being here, too.”

It seemed to take forever, but also like in no time at all she was standing in the living room once again, her gun carefully stowed in the oversized boots of the Woodscouts’ uniform and her original clothes buried in the mess of Kevin’s bedroom. She stared into the eyes of her wan reflection as he punched in the text message to Jen, resisting the urge to touch her sunken cheek and smudge the makeup. It was such an easy illusion to ruin, even with the setting spray he’d nearly blinded her with.

Could it ever actually work? 

“Here.” Kevin’s voice interrupted her thoughts, and she leaned over to read the message: Dropping off a cookie delivery and found something for the Campbell plan. Bring it by in 20?

She nodded, listening to the soft whoosh ing sound as the message was sent. She knew she was the “something,” and his vagueness made her anxious, but he promised that they never said anything too specific over text, and scrolling through his past messages with Jen made that clear enough.

Besides . . . she trusted him. Somehow. He’d stuck his neck out for her, in a way she wasn’t at all sure she’d be willing to do in his same situation, and she just didn’t get the feeling that this was all part of an elaborate trap laid by him and the crazy twins. His affection for Daniel seemed so real — as did his resentment and fear of Jen.

And there was just something about him that made her want to trust him. Not just that she was alone in the world, not just that he was her only real chance to save her boss and best friend, he was . . . disarming. Likable.

Like David.

The buzzing of Kevin’s phone made them both jump, and they glanced warily at one another before he opened the text. It was a simple message, somehow cold and dismissive even in writing, and made dread coil icy and leaden in the pit of her stomach.

“— song you taught me last year,” she said, and he felt a flash of guilt that he hadn’t been listening. She tapped the paper she’d stuck to the wall, the lyrics of his Camp Campbell song scrawled across it in uneven lines. “All the camp activities, remember? At least the most important ones.”

(It was really just the ones that fit best into the rhyme scheme, but he didn’t correct her as she moved on to a second piece of paper.)

“This is a list of all the facts about nature I’ve learned since I started here,” she continued, gesturing. This one was crammed so tightly with writing that he could barely read it, bullet points snaking in all directions and increasingly smaller handwriting as it moved down the page, until finally Gwen had started attaching sticky notes to the wall below and around the list. “I had to keep going back and adding things as I thought of them. I know I’m forgetting something, but I can’t —” She gestured around her head in a classic “scatterbrained” motion, chuckling weakly. “I’m kind of all over the place right now.”

Next: a bullseye, a pencil stuck point-first into the wall. “I couldn’t really shoot an arrow,” Gwen explained, “but remember that summer you taught me archery? I’m still pretty good at it — we went to a shooting range for Claire’s birthday last year and I was the only one who hit the target every time.”

Next: a messy drawing of a forest, a little stick figure kneeling next to a moss-covered rock. “That one time we got lost in the woods trying to find a good place for bug-catching, you got us out because you knew how to find north. You’d be pretty great in a zombie apocalypse.”

Next: a sheet of black construction paper poked through with holes, hastily taped to the back window so light from the lamp outside shone through in little pinpricks. He leaned closer and realized that they were in the rough shape of the constellations visible above Lake Lilac. “I didn't know much about stars and shit outside of, like, horoscope stuff — I mean, in the city you can’t even see them — but you always pointed out which constellations and planets were out during the summer and now I know them all too.”

And on, and on. Scale models of the crafts and activities they’d done at Camp Campbell, nature facts, and on one wall she’d tacked up a typewritten letter to the Director of Admissions at Queen’s University Belfast. Skimming it quickly, it looked to David like an application.

“I was trying to get into their Environmental Science program. I wrote about Sleepy Peak Peak and Lake Lilac,” she admitted, looking almost embarrassed. “I got in. And I mean, they’re not the best program out there, but they’re still in the top 300 worldwide so that’s pretty cool, I guess —”

“Belfast?” He leaned in closer, confirming that he’d read correctly. “Isn’t that in England?”

“Yeah.” She looked impressed, and he suppressed a weary smirk; yes, he did know a bit about the world outside of Camp Campbell. But she surprised him by adding, “I had to look that up, actually.” She shrugged. “Guess I should’ve just asked you, huh?

“Anyway, that was a couple years ago. I didn’t go, obviously,” she added, responding to his unspoken question. “International travel’s a bitch. I needed a scholarship, and my grades weren’t good enough. I think I only got in at all because of my letter.” She gestured at it, not quite meeting his eyes. “Which I never thanked you for. Or most of the stuff I’ve learned from you. I’ve been . . . kinda taking all that for granted. So, uh . . . thanks, David.”

He wanted to tell her she was welcome, that she didn’t need to thank him at all. That sharing these things with her had been the highlight of his life since they’d met, even if it hadn’t seemed like she cared about any of it. But there was a lump quivering dangerously in his throat and he didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nodded.

After a second she cleared her throat awkwardly and led him over to a row of stick figures hanging from the ceiling. “Some of these are from Yoga Camp,” she said, pointing at a few of the ones contorted into uncomfortable shapes, “but also all that other stuff you do. Like smile exercises —” and yes, one of the stick figures had a big pink smiley face, “— and breathing techniques and stuff. I use those sometimes when I’m having a panic attack. They really help, even if smile exercises still make me feel like a dumbass most of the time.”

The decorations started to get more abstract as they made their way around the room, simple crafts and trivia giving way to colorful scribbles and symbols, representing things he’d said to her about her relationship with her parents, her love life. “You have really good advice, you know that? You could be the next Dear Abby or something, seriously. I think that’s still running.”

(It was; he read it every morning with his pre-breakfast tea.)

“These get worse, sorry . . . I was getting tired.” Gwen jerked her chin up at a wobbly butterfly — or was it a bird? — dangling over their heads. “I use your advice about hummingbird-ing all the time. With writing, mostly, but sometimes at work or something, too.”

He gently reached up and touched the bird’s feet, watching it spin in a lazy circle. Technically the idea had been his mother’s, a way to avoid burnout by flitting from one project to another and adding just a little bit to each, instead of devoting all energy and resources to one thing and slogging through until it was done. The whole idea was part of his ethos of being a counselor — wasn’t Camp Campbell a place to get a little taste of everything, after all? He remembered explaining it to Gwen during her first week at camp, just over five years ago.

He wouldn’t have ever imagined that she’d actually remembered.

He didn’t think she remembered any of this.

But the evidence was all around him — on the walls, hanging from the ceiling, dozens of examples, mementos of the tiny moments that meant everything to him. Immortalized, remembered, in increasingly sloppy handwriting and doodles.

In the corner was a bright red card that looked familiar. David moved over to it and laughed in recognition: it was one he’d sent her after her first or second summer at Camp Campbell, when he’d seen on Facebook that she was looking for work. He tugged it off the wall, careful not to damage the cheap cardstock, and smiled down at the deer wearing a plaid hunting cap, which he’d made out of tissue paper and markers (he’d gotten much better since then, thanks to a few years of Decoupage Camps).

‘Good luck on your job HUNT! I know you’ll slay the interview!’

“I’ve kept that for years to show my friends,” Gwen said, making him jump; he hadn’t realized she’d come up behind him, but she was close enough to nearly rest her head against his. “I felt like it really captured the kind of guy you were.”

Her breath prickled the side of his neck, and he distracted himself by opening the card — ‘oh deer, is this joke going on too long? I feel like it’s overkill!’ — noticing how worn the crease was, like she’d opened and closed it hundreds of times. “Does it?”

He felt her shake her head without having to face her, stray wisps of hair that’d escaped her ponytail tickling his cheek. “Not even close.”

Unable to resist, he looked back at her over his shoulder, and she took his arm, turning him around the rest of the way. He thought she was going to kiss him — she was close enough that he could see a smeary glue thumbprint on her cheek and what looked like half a smiley-face sticker in her hair — but she just took the card from him, setting it carefully on the couch before taking hold of both his hands. Her expression was grave, shining faint with hope, and between the craft debris and her naked earnestness, she looked incredibly young and vulnerable.

“There’s more,” she said, gesturing with her chin toward the far wall, “and I’ll let — I want you to look at it, but . . . I just had to tell you, I’ve been taking you for granted and it’s not right. I’ve been pretending I still think of you as this —” Pulling one of her hands away, she picked up the card again, her fingers shaking so the deer’s toothpick antlers clacked together, “— sweet, silly, kinda childish David, who belongs with someone sweet, and silly, and kinda childish. And I tried to be that and . . . I mean I sucked at it,” she said, breaking off with a weak laugh, dropping her eyes to their joined hands. “And it . . . kind of broke me. But I didn’t even think to ask if that was what you wanted, because I thought I knew what you needed, and that was — so, really fucked.” She looked back up at him, her eyes dancing with purple fire, her grip on his hand tightening. “And I — I don’t, you know so much that I don’t — I could fill the entire cabin with stuff I’ve learned from you, this doesn’t even scratch the surface.”

She paused, like she was waiting for him to interject, but David felt like he’d been turned to stone, paralyzed and unblinking while his brain whirled.

“But none of it matters if it doesn’t show . . . if you don’t know —” Her voice cracked, and she dropped his other hand, pressing a fist to her mouth. “— h-how amazing you are, how much you matter to this camp and to me and . . . and I didn’t know people could actually be happy 'til I met you. I mean, I guess I knew technically, but not that it was a real thing people actually were. But you figured it out. You’ve known what you wanted since you were a kid and then you got it and I’ve never done anything without second-guessing myself a million times but you just did it, and it meant making so many decisions about your life that could’ve turned out wrong but they didn’t because they were the right ones for you. And you knew it. You always have.” She swiped at her eyes with the heels of her hands, crying in earnest now. “You’re a marvel, David. I should’ve said that every fucking day. And I know it’s probably too little, too late, but I’m sorry. For not telling you and — and for everything.

“And I . . .” She swallowed hard, taking a few heaving breaths before continuing, and he knew she was trying to hold onto her composure even as tears poured down her cheeks, “I don’t know what you wanna do. With — with us, I mean. But you’re right, I haven’t been a good girlfriend to you, and if you don’t want to . . . if you want me to leave right now or after the summer ends or if you just wanna be friends or whatever , that’s fine. A-and — if you do . . . y’know . . .” Her face crumpled, her shoulders curling in on themselves. “I love you so much,” she managed, her words harder to make out through damp, hiccuping breaths. “Whatever — whatever you want — I — I — I trust you.”

Understanding pierced his chest, a small pinhole that allowed light to pour, warm and white, into his heart.

“I trust you.”

David hadn’t realized how desperately he’d needed to hear those words until that moment.

He stepped forward, plucking the card from her hand and tossing it onto the floor (he could make her another one, dozens if she wanted, hundreds) and tilting her chin up so he could kiss her. Her cheeks were wet under his palms, her mouth salty and acidic with the taste of not-quite-morning breath, and each brush of his lips against hers was broken by her pulling back to drag in a sobbing gasp, her mouth moving clumsily like she was as close to fainting from exhaustion and emotion as she looked.

It was, without question, the best kiss of his life.

He broke away to press his forehead against hers, sliding his hands from her face to cup the back of her neck and closing his eyes. “I love you too, Gwen,” he murmured, his heart fluttering at the giddily-incredulous, teary laugh she gave in response. “And I think you need to go to bed.”

She leaned back, and the bleary confusion on her face was so precious he rose up on his toes to press a soft kiss to her forehead. “Huh? But what about . . .”

“I’ve got some stuff to think about,” he said, then gestured at the crafts she hadn’t shown him yet, “and look at. And after that . . . we should talk. But it won’t be a very good talk if you fall asleep,” he added with a laugh as her eyes drifted closed.

She opened them halfway, just enough to glare at him, but the effect would’ve been more intimidating if she hadn’t been swaying slightly. “’m fine.” The adrenaline that’d been keeping her going was clearly wearing off fast, and David was a little worried she wouldn’t make it to bed, that he’d just find her unconscious on the floor of the hallway. “You didn’t sleep either,” she accused, pointing at him with a finger stained silvery with graphite.

Goodness, he loved her so much he couldn’t stand it. “I had a nap.” Not a long one, but he was used to not sleeping much. “Get some rest. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“It’s already the morning,” she complained, but like a sleepy robot she turned and shuffled back toward the front of the cabin. “I’m gonna brush my teeth and shower and stuff. So I look less like a sludge goblin.”

“You do that, Gwen.” He waited until the bathroom door had clicked shut before turning back to the mess she’d made of their living room. It was almost hard to tell the difference between what was art and what was trash left over, there was so much of both; it looked like an explosion had hit a crafts store.

Gwen wasn’t someone who put a lot of effort into things she didn’t care about. It was one of the most frustrating things about having her as a coworker, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t love how unabashedly honest she was, how he could read her feelings just by looking at her work.

There was the soft sound of tape unsticking and one of the decorations sagged, a corner curling away from the wall and drooping down. He pushed it carefully back into place and fumbled for his phone, setting it to camera mode.

This was worth remembering.

---

Gwen was positive she’d never be able to fall asleep; how could she, when things were still so up in the air? But she wasn’t twenty anymore, and after the exhaustion and emotional turmoil of the last few hours — days, weeks; hell, if she was being honest it’d been years since she’d truly felt well-rested — and despite the anxiety buzzing inside her skull she was out in moments.

Soft fingers in her hair drew her back to earth, and when she opened her eyes David came into focus, crouching next to her bed so they were at eye level. He smiled as she blinked at him, warmth and sunshine he probably didn’t even know he was emitting. “Goooood morning, Gwen!” he chirped, his voice way too loud for how close they were, and she winced. “Sorry,” he added, his voice dropping to a murmur. “Habit.”

“It’s fine,” she said, because she’d missed his morning bellow so much more than she could ever miss having non-punctured eardrums. She sat up, clumsily swiping at her face to double-check for drool or errant eye gunk. “Morning.”

“How are you feeling?” He hopped onto the bed, making her and everything else on the mattress bounce. He was being so . . . normal, like all the drama last night had been a dream.

Fuck it. They had some hard, painful conversations coming; she could enjoy a little bit of normalcy while her brain booted back up. “Good,” she replied, yawning. “I mean, tired, but I’m always tired so —” Her blood chilled, and suddenly she was wide awake.

There went normal. All because she had to remind him of what an unloveable disaster she was.

But when she looked back up he didn’t seem annoyed. He leaned against the wall, stretching his legs out so they dangled off the edge of the bed. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.” She scoffed before she could stop herself, and his gaze flicked up to hers, taking her breath away. (God, how she’d functioned for almost four years without feeling more than a flicker of attraction to this man was unfathomable.) “Really. I want to know what’s going on with you.” His hand landed on her knee, light as a bird but blazingly warm even through her blankets. “All I want is for you to let me in.”

A swell of emotion swept up from somewhere in her chest, causing her eyes to prick with tears for the thousandth time. She looked away and sniffed as discreetly as possible — which wasn’t very, she assumed, since he immediately reached over and handed her a tissue from the pack he kept stashed in his pockets. “I mean, if you want me to complain, I can do that,” she muttered, tamping down another flow of tears through willpower. “I can complain about fucking anything.”

David’s laugh made her turn back toward him, because it didn’t have a trace of sadness or pity or anything she’d expected. It was so purely, entirely delighted , more than even he could fake, and he was looking at her like she’d said something surprising and wonderful.

“You really like it,” she blurted out, unable to hide the awe in her voice. “That I’m like this. Whiny and —” she waved vaguely “— bitchy, and whatever.”

“I don’t.” He shook his head and her stomach plummeted. But as she took a breath to respond he shifted closer, gently cupping the back of her neck so he could tap his forehead against hers. “I love it, Gwen. I love everything about you.”

A laugh burbled out of her before she could stop it, and she pulled away to hide her face. “Oh my god. You bastard. You’re so cheesy.”

His fingers closed around her wrists, tugging her palms away from her face. “I love you,” he said, kissing the skin she’d covered with her hands — the tip of her nose, each cheek, her top and bottom lip, her eyebrows.

“I love you, too.” She could already tell that if he was going to keep saying that to her she’d spontaneously combust, because this was all too cute and romantic and lovely and she still didn’t fully understand how this was happening, why he didn’t hate her.

But she’d promised she wouldn’t question his decision, whatever it was. She owed him that much.

His smile faded slightly, a faint line appearing between his eyebrows. “What’re you thinking?”

“Nothing,” she lied automatically, and when that only made him sigh she added, “I said I was going to trust you,” hating the note of defensiveness in her voice, because of the two of them she didn’t have much grounds for righteous indignation.

“Then trust me with how you feel.” It should’ve sounded too much like a cliche, something she’d tease him for, but he was right and they both knew it.

She’d put him through hell by not telling him the truth, and they both knew that, too.

Gwen closed her eyes, taking a deep breath and forcing herself to relax. Things were — they seemed okay, didn’t they? Almost normal, but better, because all her ugliness was out there for him to see and he knew about it and he didn’t seem to mind. And wasn’t that something she’d never thought she’d ever actually find? “I don’t get it,” she admitted, her voice sounding small and stupid. “I keep feeling like . . . like I tricked you somehow. Like I didn’t explain well enough why you shouldn’t want me, because if you really got it you wouldn’t be here. Not because I think you’re stupid,” she added quickly, desperately, “because I don’t, really! But — but even smart people can be . . . I don’t know, manipulated?”

The confusion in her voice made her pause, sit back. Manipulated? That couldn’t be right, could it? She wasn’t trying to manipulate anyone, and she was pretty sure you couldn’t manipulate someone by accident.

Or maybe you could; she hadn’t always paid a ton of attention to her psych classes in college.

“I’m sorry,” she managed after a few deeply uncomfortable moments of silence. “I’m trying, I promise, but I understand if . . . you know. Whatever.” (She still hated saying it, especially now that it seemed like it might not happen. Breaking up with David was hard enough without having to say it.)

He put his arm around her shoulders, tugging her into his side and kissing her temple. “Thank you for telling me, Gwen.”

“You’re not mad?”

She felt him shake his head as she rested hers on his shoulder, scooting down to make up for their (lack of) height difference. “I wasn’t really mad when I came back this morning,” he said, “even before I saw everything you’d made. I had some time to cool down, and I . . . started thinking, I guess.”

Gwen wanted to look up at him, but she wanted to soak in his warmth more so she nuzzled into the curve of his neck, inhaling the smells of floral detergent and piney-woodsy cologne left over from the day before. “About what?” she asked, like there could possibly be more than one answer. Like maybe he’d been pondering the sociopolitics of Malaysia or something.

He let out a little huff of laughter, and she knew without looking that he’d glanced up at the ceiling in a slow blink (that he insisted was less rude than rolling his eyes outright, even though it was just as obvious). “You. Everything that’s happened this summer — and before it.” His shoulder shifted slightly under her cheek, a shrug aborted halfway through so she’d be comfortable. “Things started making more sense after everything we talked about tonight. Like the day we . . . well, when you told me about that gentleman you . . . almost took home.”

“He wasn’t a gentleman, he was a douchebag,” she interrupted, immediately feeling like an asshole. But David chuckled and squeezed her closer, like he enjoyed her company even when she was being annoying (which he did; somehow he actually did) and she let herself relax against his side, believe that maybe things were going to be okay after all.

“I’ve thought about the stuff you said a lot since that day. Mostly the parts that made me feel the worst.”

She flinched. “I’m so sorry —” she began, but he cut her off with a kiss to her forehead.

“I have trouble with . . . rejection,” he continued, sounding embarrassed. Like that minor character flaw even came close to the millions of ways she was fucked up. “I — I guess you could call it ‘abandonment issues’? But at first, and for a while, all I could hear were the ways you didn’t . . . seem to want me around anymore.”

“But I did —”

“I know.” Another soft kiss, and she wasn’t sure if it was to reassure her or himself. “I know that now. And I think, knowing that . . . it made what you said sound different.

“You were drunk — I know, you downplayed it, and it wouldn’t have excused . . . but your judgment was still impaired. And you didn’t kiss him. Thinking back, it didn’t even sound like you really wanted to. Did you?” She shook her head, not willing to look up at him because no matter how gently he tried to frame this she still felt like it was her fault. “And I just couldn’t stop thinking, how if this had happened a few years ago you would’ve told that story so much differently. If we were still just friends, maybe. You would’ve stormed into the cabin raging about how some jerk had ‘put his mitts all over you’ —”

Gwen couldn’t help it; she burst out laughing, pushing away from him and resting her head in her hands. “That can’t be how you think I talk!”

“It was an edited version,” he admitted, flushing. His smile was wide enough to illuminate the room, catching and refracting the dreary dawn light. “Please come back?”

She snuggled into his outstretched arms, her heart panging at the plaintive note in his voice. She wrapped herself around him, legs entangled with his and arms squeezing his waist; she’d missed him just as much. “Your impression of me is really bad,” she said with an uncontrollable giggle that made her feel like she was fourteen.

“I’ll work on it.” For a moment he just held her, soaking in the relief of being together and being okay. (At least, that's what she was doing.) “Why did it bother you so much?” he asked after a minute or so. “It doesn’t . . . well, it just doesn’t sound like you did anything wrong.”

“I guess — yeah, maybe not, technically anyway. But you’d just visited and saw how terrible my life is, and I was having an even harder time being a less-shitty version of myself . . .” He made a soft noise, almost pained, and pulled her closer. “So when this asshole showed up and was, like, exactly the type of guy I usually go for, it felt like . . . I don’t know. Like the universe was telling me we didn’t belong together. That sounds stupid. Never mind.” She pressed her face against his chest with an embarrassed groan. “Pretend I said something that doesn’t make me sound like I write horoscopes for a living.”

“I like horoscopes!” he replied, because of course he did. After a moment he added, “Thank you for telling me. It . . . helps confirm some things I was thinking earlier, when I left. Because what you said, and what you’ve been saying for a long time . . . I’ve been hearing it the way that’d hurt me the most, but I think you meant it to make me hate you.” He paused for a second, then added, “Do you think I’m right?”

Gwen shrugged, feeling more than a little like one of his campers receiving an aggressively pacifist talking-to. “Yeah. I don’t . . . like myself all that much.”

“I’ve noticed.” And David pressed another kiss to the top of her head, like he was rewarding her for being honest. Or like he just couldn’t help himself. “You haven’t treated me very well lately, Gwen. And I was — am very unhappy about that. But I don’t think it holds a candle to how you treat yourself.”

She wriggled away enough to sit up and look at him, frowning. “So you’re, what? Willing to come back to a shitty relationship because you feel sorrier for me than for you?” she demanded, even though it would’ve been smarter to just not say anything and enjoy his pity while she still had it.

But again, she said she’d be honest. And the true Gwen was kind of a bitch.

His smile turned sad, and he carefully tucked a flyaway hair behind her ear. “See, that’s what I mean. You never give yourself the benefit of the doubt.” When she frowned, not understanding, he took her hand and began playing with it, wiggling her fingers and twining them with his. “I understand better, now. How you’re feeling and what you’re thinking. And I’m not going to let you treat me like I’m a kid, or — or stupid, or whatever. I know you don’t really think that,” he added as she opened her mouth to argue. “There’s a whole cabin’s worth of proof in the living room that you don’t really think that. That’s why I wanna try again. Miscommunications, misunderstandings . . . those are fixable. And now that I know what’s been going through your head, I don’t think you’ve done anything I can’t forgive.”

Her eyes filled with tears — again, and she was going to die of dehydration if she didn’t get ahold of herself — but this time she couldn’t resent them too much, not when it felt like she was brimming over with hope that was eager to burst free. “What’re you saying, David?”

He shifted back, turning so he was sitting cross-legged facing her, and took both her hands in his. “I keep . . . trying to find a way to say it,” he admitted, looking down at their twined fingers and flushing pink, “because ‘do you want to be my girlfriend again?’ is maybe too middle-school, but ‘dating’ sounds too casual, and —”

Gwen pulled out of his grasp and closed the distance between them, straddling his lap and taking his chin in one hand. His face lifted toward her before his eyes did, darting from her chest to over her shoulder before finally meeting her gaze. She wound her free arm around his shoulders, sliding her fingers into the short, soft hair at the nape of his neck. With the hand cupping his jaw she gently swiped her thumb across his lower lip, slightly chapped but still warm and softer than it looked, each breath skating across her skin feather-light and making her skin prickle. “Yeah,” she said, closing her eyes and pressing her forehead to his, holding back a laugh — or maybe a sob, she wasn’t quite sure; the emotions roiling inside her were too much to separate between happy and sad. “Whatever you’re asking, yes, I want it.”

She felt his smile spread under her thumb before he brushed her hand away, tilting his head so he could kiss her. “Good,” he murmured with a breathless chuckle, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her closer. “I mean, I was pretty sure you’d say that, but still — that’s a relief.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “You idiot.” Her blood turned to ice, and she pulled away from him, stricken. For fuck’s sake, couldn’t she be anything but herself for five minutes? “I didn’t mean — !”

David smiled, far more fondly than she deserved. “I know, Gwen.”

Groaning, she buried her face in his shoulder. “I’m trying, really I am.”

“Don’t.” He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back until she was upright, looking down at him again. “Please don’t try so hard to be what you think I want. Just be you.”

“Right.” She forced her shoulders to relax, tilting her head back and rolling her neck until it cracked. “I’m . . . gonna have a hard time with that. ‘Just me’ is kind of the worst.”

“I know you think that,” he said, pressing his half-open mouth to the hollow of her collarbone and making her shiver. “And I’ll keep reminding you until you don’t think it anymore.”

She managed a weak chuckle, leaning into his lips as he moved up her neck. “Good luck with that.”

His answering laugh rolled over her skin, warm and teasing. “Haven’t you heard, Gwen? I like projects.”

Jesus. Grabbing a fistful of his hair, she tugged him upright, taking a moment to appreciate his gasp that wasn’t just surprise. “I love you,” she said, loosening her grip and kissing his forehead, petting away the furrows her fingers left in his fluffy red hair.

His expression softened. “I love —” he began, and Gwen tightened her hold on his hair and pulled back, just so she could watch his eyes flutter shut and his breath catch, “— y-you too.”

Dragging her palm down the side of his neck, she settled her thumb on his throat, feeling his pulse flutter rapidly, and bent to kiss him again. She hadn’t necessarily meant to turn it into anything, just wanted to feel his lips against hers, but her fingers tightened involuntarily in his hair and he moaned, and it was a lit match dropped down her throat to a stomach full of gasoline, a whoosh of heat blazing to life in the pit of her belly. “David,” she breathed, not so much because she had anything to say but because she needed to say it, to roll the sound of his name around in her mouth, let it melt like chocolate on her tongue and infuse her whole body with sweetness.

“Gwen,” he said, and she thought he was doing the same thing, saying her name just because he could, but then his hands were on her shoulders and he was pushing her away, gentle but firm. “Gwen, wait, we should — talk about this —”

“Oh, shit, yeah. Okay. Sorry.” She sat back, her face warming. But as she settled her weight more firmly in his lap he jolted; and if she’d thought she was embarrassed it was nothing to the way his already-flushed cheeks flamed pink, spreading in blotches up to his hairline and the tips of his ears, down to disappear underneath his bandana. He stammered out an apology, avoiding her eyes even as his cock twitched, like bashfulness could disguise how hard he was against her. She quickly rose back up — the last thing she wanted was to make him feel ashamed, or pressured; everything between them was as tremulous and new as the first time — but realized almost instantly when David squeaked that this just shoved her chest in his face.

She hovered there for an awkward second, the two of them staring at each other in mortified horror. Then his whole expression wavered, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth before quickly flattening into a thin line, and the break in his composure took hers out too. She snorted, and they both burst out laughing. “I’ll just sit over here,” she said through giggles, rolling off his lap and settling on the other side of the bed with her feet curled under her so they were no longer touching. He made a small sad sound like a squeeze toy deflating, and Gwen rolled her eyes and stretched out one leg until her foot brushed his knee. “Here, hold my foot if you’re that lonely. It’s practically holding hands.”

His eyes widened, hands closing around her ankle and setting it on his thigh with something like reverence. “Thank you,” he murmured, gently tracing the outline of her foot with his fingertips. “That was very sweet, you know.”

God, she was blushing, wasn’t she? She had to be. “Yeah,” she agreed, trying to ignore the ticklish feeling as he kept playing with her foot like it was a toy doll. “Felt weird, too. I kinda wanted to insult you or something, just to balance it out.”

He smiled, wiggling her big toe like he was playing that little piggies game she used to do with her nieces when they were babies. “That’s my Gwen.” And he sounded pleased, almost proud, like she’d done something wonderful.

But that was David; even though sometimes he was completely oblivious, sometimes he noticed and appreciated the tiniest, most inconsequential things. That’s my David, she thought, her heart swelling like it was going to burst. “You wanted to talk about something?” she reminded him, waggling her toes to get his attention.

“Oh! Right.” He gently took her foot and set it on the bed next to him, grabbing a pillow and hugging it to his chest. “Sorry, I was getting distracted, and that was the whole point of you moving over there.” (He said it with a pout, like she’d gone to Spain instead of just out of arms’ reach.)

“I thought the whole point of me moving over here was so you could cool down, tiger,” she teased. But when he didn’t respond except to flush darker, his gaze firmly on a fraying edge of the pillowcase in his arms, something weird and hilarious clicked in her head. “Oh my god, are you into feet?”

“No!” He lifted his head to give her a tragically betrayed expression. “Not a weird amount!”

She grinned, poking his thigh with her outstretched foot. “What’s a weird amount?” she asked.

He shrugged, not quite able to maintain the kicked-puppy look when a smile kept trying to break through. “I don’t know. Watching people in heels step on fruit. I don’t like that sort of thing, I’ll have you know,” he added defensively, and for a second Gwen was sure he’d stick his tongue out at her.

“Sure, but you’re into them enough to know those videos exist.”

“I think I’d like to go back to you being nice to me,” he muttered, and she felt a stab of panic before he gently patted her ankle and met her gaze with a slight smile. Like he knew what she was thinking.

So she shoved past her nervousness and said, “But I thought you wanted me to be myself. And as myself, I can’t believe you never told me you were a foot guy!”

“I’m a you guy. And . . . you know. All of you. You’re perfect.”

“Yeah, but the feet are a thing, huh? At least a little bit.” When he didn’t answer she laughed, shaking her head. “So do you, like, want a footjob or something?”

“I really don’t.”

“How have we been dating this long and I didn’t know about this? What other freaky sex things are you hiding?”

“Nothing!” he said, hugging the pillow tighter. After a moment he looked away and added, “I didn’t want you to think I was weird.”

“David.” She leaned forward, waiting for him to look at her and see in her expression just how ridiculous that was. “You can’t get weirder than I am. You know that.” When the color in his face receded just a little bit, and his eyes flicked back toward her hopefully, she sighed and attempted to dredge up one of the strangest kinks in her vast library. “I’d totally fuck Drogon.”

He frowned thoughtfully. “From Game of Thrones? So would I- Iiiiiii mean, s-so would most people.”

“No, not Khal Drogo, Drogon. The dragon. Not like a humanized version, either — just full lizard.”

“Oh.” He smiled a little, almost a smirk, and Gwen felt distinctly, lovingly judged. “That does make me feel better. Thank you.”

“No problem. And tomorrow I’m gonna go into town and get a pedicure, just for you.” She wiggled her toes at him, grinning. “I’m thinking something slutty, like hot pink.”

“Gwen!” He shoved her foot away, laughing. “I was trying to have a serious conversation before you started talking about — about slutty toes and dragons!”

She cracked up too, falling over onto her side and nearly toppling off the bed. “Slutty toes,” she repeated breathlessly, and it took a few minutes to recover; every time they tried to make eye contact they burst out laughing again.

“Okay, okay.” Gwen finally sat back up, trying in vain to smooth her hair out of its mass of tangled bedhead. “I’m sorry, you were trying to say something serious. What’s up?”

“Right.” He took a deep breath, fingers knotting in her blankets until his knuckles were white. “It’s just . . . it was starting to seem like we were going to — um, you know. Be intimate.”

She resisted the urge to tease him for his word choice. “I was open to it, yeah.”

“M-me too! That’s why . . . well. Okay.” He took a deep breath, dragging his hands down his face, and Gwen noticed for the first time how tired he looked.

“Hey, we don’t have to do anything,” she said, shifting closer so she could put her hand on his shoulder. “You know that, right?”

He nodded, patting her hand before brushing it away so she didn’t feel rejected, and once again she felt a rush of love so intense it almost brought tears to her eyes. He could be so simply, effortlessly kind, without even thinking about it. “I do. At least, I think I do. I- I mean, I know I do, but it’s hard to . . .” He waved his hand around his head like his thoughts were scattering birds.

“The night before we . . . well. Ended things.” He flinched at his own words, and she felt the same pain flicker over the surface of her heart.

It’s okay, she reminded herself, wishing she could sweep him up in her arms and block out all the bad memories she’d put there. It still hurts, but we’re going to be okay.

Like he’d been thinking the same thing, David stretched out his hand to find hers, squeezing her fingers. “I said I didn’t want to,” he continued in a rush, “you know. Be together like that. And you . . . seemed to get mad — at me. And then the next day you broke up with me.” He squeezed his eyes shut, taking a shuddering breath that had tears behind it, and she tightened her grip on his hand. “It’s okay,” he said, opening his eyes and giving her a slightly-watery smile. “I’m okay. But I just need to know . . .”

“God, no,” she jumped in, taking up the thread of his question as it trailed off into nothingness. “David, no, it had nothing to do with — I freaked out, but I was already — I mean, I was gonna fall apart over anything, it didn’t have to be that. You didn’t do anything wrong, I promise.” She couldn’t stand it anymore, so she pulled his hand to her lips, kissing his knuckles because she wanted to respect his need for space but she had to touch him or she was going to die.

He swallowed, watching their joined hands for a moment before looking away. “You — that really hurt me, Gwen. I just needed to tell you that.”

All the anger he’d thrown at her in the past several hours, all the pain and frustration, and it was those small, matter-of-fact words that slashed her heart in two. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

She hated apologizing — it always felt weak, or dangerous, or something. Like it was an opening for someone to hate her even more, like she was handing them a weapon to hold over her head for the rest of her life. (It was why she hated receiving them, too; she could be spiteful and vindictive as anyone, but it was uncomfortable watching someone flay themselves in front of her.)

But with David . . . it didn’t feel like she was giving him leverage when she told him she was sorry. She wasn’t scared he’d hold onto it and throw it back in her face someday. She wasn’t resentful of him, and she wasn’t worried about how he’d react.

She wasn’t anything but truly, genuinely sorry.

And he didn’t brush it aside, act like she had no reason to apologize the way she’d half-expected. Either she hadn’t been giving him enough credit, or he’d grown up while she wasn’t paying attention. Maybe a little of both. But whatever the cause, he just stroked her cheek with the backs of his knuckles and nodded, a ghost of his smile returning for a second. “It’s okay,” he said, looking at her like she was — god, like he loved her. “Hearing it helps.”

She wasn’t sure if he needed more than that, but she wasn’t going to let a single doubt linger in his mind. “Seriously, David, you can — I won’t ever be mad at you for saying no, ever. For any reason, or no reason or . . . whatever. It’s okay. It’ll always be okay.”

“I — um, I had a reason.” He spoke fast, his eyes wide like he’d surprised himself. Still, he pressed his lips together into a flat line and met her gaze, clearly nervous but just as clearly not intending to end the conversation until they’d said everything they needed to. He was so brave. “I should’ve mentioned it at the time, but I guess I was scared.”

Gwen snorted, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, I can relate to that.”

He rewarded her with a small, soft smile before continuing, “The thing is, everything had just been so gosh-darned strange between us, and it felt like you were avoiding me all the time — except when we were together like that.” He scratched the back of his neck, looking embarrassed. “It sounds silly, but I couldn’t help but worry that maybe that was . . . all you were interested in me for.”

Her stomach sank. “And then when you said no, and I freaked . . .”

David nodded, his throat moving as he swallowed again. “Yeah,” he murmured, looking away. “It — it sure felt like you only wanted me for that one thing, all of a sudden, and when you couldn’t get it . . .”

“I dumped you,” she finished, covering her mouth in horror. “Oh, David.”  

“I was a little nervous to tell you to stop.” He pulled his hands from hers so he could fidget, twisting his long fingers together. “Earlier — just now. A minute ago. So we could talk. I — I know it wasn’t fair, but I couldn’t stop thinking you might get mad at me again.”

“I wasn’t mad,” she replied, her hands shaking with how badly she wanted to hug him. (And god, what a change from their normal paradigm, that she was the one who had to hold herself back from a hug.) “I mean, I was, but never at you. I was mad at me, for screwing things up. I — you’re right, I was avoiding you, or avoiding talking to you, I guess. Because I didn’t know how to talk to you, how to act so you wouldn’t find out that I’m . . .” Her throat closed, thick and gummy with tears, and she took a deep breath and swallowed them back. “Rotten,” she finished, which was a stupid, melodramatic word but it felt right; it described the way she still felt despite everything, squishy and overripe and putrid. “It was getting harder to hide, once we were together all the time. And when we were fucking —” She couldn’t tiptoe around the words like David, not when she could just say it and watch him flush red. Even her rotted heart skipped a beat whenever he smiled. “It felt like I didn’t have to try so hard. I couldn’t be amazing, but I could make you feel amazing. And if I could do that . . .” She sniffed, looking away and wiping her face clean. “I thought I was letting you know how much you mean to me,” she admitted, the realization coming right on the heels of the words. “I mean, obviously I wasn’t — add that to the list of things I suck at — but when you didn’t want to have sex, it . . . I took it really hard.”

Her face was turned away, so his hand on her shoulder made her jump. “It felt like I was rejecting the only thing you had to offer,” he guessed, his voice soft and sad but no longer on the verge of tears. “Gwen . . .”

“It’s fine,” she said, shaking her head like she could rattle her self-pity out of her head. “That was just me being stupid, I know that. More importantly — seriously.” She looked back at him, at his beautiful open face, at the way he was watching her like she could possibly have something to say that mattered. “It’s never been about sex with you, David,” she said. Felt the encroaching tears yet again and decided to ignore them. If they came, they came; they weren’t going to stop her, because it was the most essential thing in the world that he knew, that he believed her. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, the sex is really good —” He chuckled, blushing exactly the way she’d hoped he would, and it gave her a little glowing spark of strength, “— but it doesn’t even come close to being what I love most about you. None of that stuff —” She gestured toward her bedroom door, and the mess of crafts cluttering their common room. “— comes close. It’s — everything, a billion other things I don’t know how to explain or describe or show you but I love you, so much, more than I’ve ever loved anyone and it scares me, and — I’m rambling. Sorry.” She shrank back, feeling like an idiot again. “I just wanted you to know that. It . . . we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, ever, and I’ll never be mad at you, or disappointed, or anything like that.”

“Thank you, Gwen.” He was quiet for a minute, and she felt the tension ratcheting up in her shoulders with each long, spiraling second. Part of her wanted to snap at him to just say something, finish the damn thought before he gave her a heart attack, but that was her anxiety and regret talking, and she never wanted to take her own issues out on him ever again.

(She probably would, considering what a mess she was. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to do it on purpose.)

“You’re right, though.” David’s voice was a surprise, as was the soft laugh accompanying his words. He was sitting with his head tilted back against the wall, looking up at the ceiling like he could see through it to the fading stars and brightening sky. His gaze dropped to meet hers, and he immediately looked down and away, biting his lip to try and hide a smile. “We are pretty darn great together.”

A massive weight dropped from Gwen’s chest, rolling away like a stone. “Yeah,” she agreed. Then, to test the waters: “I taught you well.”

It worked; he turned back toward her, his shyness replaced with half-serious indignation. “I like to think some of it was natural talent!”

“Ehh,” she teased, holding her hand out flat and seesawing it back and forth in a “so-so” motion. “Pretty sure enthusiasm was doing most of the heavy lifting in the beginning there.”

He crossed his arms over his chest with a disbelieving scoff. “Well, I never!”

She pressed her lips together to keep from giggling. What a dork. “Y’know, I should say we were insanely good. But I dunno, for all I know you’ve totally lost it.” Shaking her head mournfully, she quickly glanced over to make sure he wasn’t actually offended.

His mouth dropped open, his eyes growing wide before narrowing. “I haven’t lost anything!” he snapped, and — oh, the playful irritation in his voice made her stomach twist. Not in the awful sick way she’d been tied up in knots earlier, but with a flush of heat that took her breath away.

Managing a smirk, she laid back on her elbows, a warm glow of satisfaction blooming in her chest as his gaze dropped to her stomach, to the narrow strip of skin where her camisole had ridden up. She waited until he dragged his eyes back up to her, dark and intense like the ocean in a storm, then grinned at him.

“Wanna bet?”

His face lit up — or, not quite. Because his smile was bright and warm as sunshine, but underneath the tenderness was a sharp competitive edge that he almost never turned on her. It was almost intimidating, but the shiver it sent down her spine had nothing to do with fear. “Always,” he replied.

Before she could respond he’d pushed himself to his knees and grabbed her just above her calves; a quick tug forward and Gwen was pulled flat on her back, dragged down the bed until her body was sprawled out beneath him. He let go of her, bracing his hands on either side of her head and bending down to capture her mouth in a kiss.

She curled one hand around the back of his neck and pulled him closer, bending her knees so he was caged between her legs and arching her back to bring as much of her skin against his as possible. He was warm, almost uncomfortably so — her furnace, her own personal sun, and she wanted nothing more than to melt into him. When he abandoned her mouth in favor of trailing long, suckling kisses down her neck she pressed her lips together, biting hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from making a sound.

“You could’ve —” A gasp, too sudden for her to swallow it back, and she felt David’s satisfied smirk against the base of her throat as he bit down again. “— given me a concussion, you asshole.”

He hummed in assent, his lips skating up to her ear and his tongue lapping at the sensitive spot just behind it. “I know,” he said mildly, “but I didn’t.”

He gently took her earlobe between his teeth, and she couldn’t help the strangled noise that was somewhere between a moan and a sigh. Grabbing his hair again, she dragged his mouth back for another kiss, enjoying the shudder that rolled down his spine and made him tremble everywhere his body was touching hers. For a few dizzying minutes she held him there, barely allowing either of them to draw breath. His mouth was blood-hot, warmer than even her fevered skin, and she didn’t know exactly where she wanted it because she wanted it everywhere — against hers, his tongue lapping at the roof of her mouth and making her shiver; around one of her nipples, his teeth catching on the pebbled skin; sucking bruises into her inner thighs, closing around her clit, dipping inside her cunt, her asshole, along the sensitive strip of skin between the two. She wanted him to kiss her places that weren’t even close to erotic but she knew would burst into flame if he so much as brushed his lips over them: the bone jutting out from her ankle, the ticklish spot inside her elbow, wherever the fuck he wanted to press the gorgeous wet heat of his mouth she wanted to let him, because from the very first kiss he’d been good, better than he’d had any right to be but time and experience had worked their magic and now his mouth could ruin her; without even trying he could reduce her to twitching, shuddering goo.

“Take this off,” she gasped, not sure if she meant her clothes or his because she was wriggling out from under him and trying to remove both at the same time, her fingers clumsy and shaking with how badly she needed to touch him without any fabric in the way. She struggled to her knees, practically yanking her camisole off and throwing it across the room before hooking her fingers in his belt loops and dragging him close enough for her to undo the buckle. “Come on —”

“So I won?” He laughed breathlessly, untucking his shirt and pulling it over his head in one fluid motion, smugness making him unfairly graceful like he was trying to show off.

“Sure, whatever,” she muttered, because who cared about some bet when he was kneeling half-naked in front of her? They’d had silly, jokey sex but that was not this, not when he was so beautiful she was having trouble looking directly at him, hair mussed and lips damp and swollen and pink blooming in blotches under the light constellations of freckles across his skin. He looked debauched, flushed and obscene even with half his clothes still on, and there wasn’t room in her brain for humor when all she could feel was clawing shaking need. She dropped onto all fours, leaning down to trace the hard outline of his cock with her tongue, and even through his shorts he was burning warm. He sucked in a sharp breath, his pulse spiking under her mouth, and Gwen couldn’t resist closing her lips around the shape of his erection, breathing in the salty-ammonia smell of precome and feeling her mouth water. “David,” she began, but there was no end to that sentence so she lifted her head slightly, bit the delicate ridge of his hipbone where it peeked out from the waist of his shorts, caught him as his hips stuttered forward. She kept him steady, one hand splayed across his lower back, as she rose to her knees without lifting her mouth from his skin: over the barely-there softness of his stomach (no werewolf six-pack here, despite his lean strength), tongue swirling among the faint red hair below his belly button, following the curve of his ribs, just barely brushing one nipple — he made a small, strung-out noise in the back of his throat, almost despairing as she moved on up to his neck — until she found his lips again, dragging him into a bruising, breathless kiss.

When she pulled away David’s smile was gone, drawn out of his mouth and leaving him panting. “Okay,” he murmured, soft and almost reverent, but before she could figure out what specifically was okay he hauled her forward like she weighed nothing, capturing her lips for a second before trailing down her throat, pausing at a sensitive place above her pulse point and biting down hard, sucking the skin between his teeth.

Pain bloomed under his mouth, rippling out into shockwaves of cold-hot pleasure, and when he bit her again she couldn’t hold back a moan. “You’re gonna — leave a mark,” she gasped, gently shoving his head away and running her fingers over the damp skin. It was already tender, and judging by David’s expression, contrite and amused and darkly heated, it was going to be a hell of a hickey. “I can’t hide this!”

“I’m sorry!” he tried, but it wasn’t close to convincing when he couldn’t hide his grin. His eyes drifted down to the mark again and he licked his lips, expression growing dazed for a moment before he snapped back up to look at her face. “I can make you a bandana, if you want. Just until it fades.”

“Fucker.” Gwen laughed, not so much because it was funny but because it was him, and she loved him more than she could possibly stand. Tired of the overheated, confining clothes she was still wearing, she shimmied out of them, tossing her pajama shorts and half-soaked underwear without bothering to see where they landed. “Come here,” she said, pressing her legs together and shivering at the wet slide of her inner thighs and labia, a thousand nerve endings sparking to glistening life. “You can make it up to me.”

She swore she could almost see his mouth water, his gaze dropping between her legs as he took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “Yes, ma’am,” he said — and they’d never tried that before, but judging by the way his cock twitched and his eyes jumped sheepishly to hers, it was something he’d thought about a lot. Filing the information away for later, she held out her hand and pulled him closer when he took it, resting her forehead against his. It took just the slightest shift in the angle of her head to kiss him again so she did it without thinking, her hand sliding between their bodies to curl loosely around the outline of his erection.

He gasped shakily against her mouth, his hands fluttering up and down her waist like he couldn’t decide where to touch her. One of them dropped to her ass, a light, almost hesitant touch, and she rewarded it with a soft groan; he made a weak noise in the back of his throat and pulled her closer, kneading her ass before slipping lower, between her legs. The heel of his hand brushed teasingly against her clit as he pressed two fingers into her, and she mimicked his pace, gliding her palm down the length of his clothed cock and relishing the way his fingers twitched against her inner walls.

He fingered her like that, slow and steady, for — she didn’t know how long. Lost track of the strokes that sent warmly buzzing tendrils up her spine, lost count of the breaths gasped raggedly between their lips, of the kisses that melted into one another until she wasn’t entirely sure where she was, she was hyper aware of the heartbeat pounding in her clit and every too-gentle drag of his hand but numb to literally everything else that wasn’t right here, wasn’t David —

“Fuck,” she breathed, pressing her forehead against his shoulder with a shuddering sigh. She turned her head and lapped at his throat, sucking his skin into her mouth and biting down hard enough to make his fingers jolt inside her, pressing against her g-spot for one delicious moment. “God, I -- please, David, just make me come, please --”

Another shiver, another twitch of his fingers that took her breath away. “Okay,” he said, his voice strangled and hoarse. He pulled out of her and sat back on his heels. “Lay down, all right?”

Yes, yes, whatever he was thinking was 100% all right with her. She almost kneed him as she scrambled into position, but her embarrassed giggle evaporated as he lowered himself onto his elbows, scooching her up the bed like she weighed nothing and settling between her legs. Alarm cut through her arousal, her mind immediately trying to calculate the last time she’d showered, let alone shaved --

His eyes flicked up to hers, a small smile tugging at his lips. “I know,” he replied before she’d even opened her mouth. “I promise, I really want to.”

Oh, god. She covered her face to muffle a squeak, flopping onto her back and looking up at the ceiling. “I’m that predictable, huh?”

David hummed thoughtfully, the sound vibrating up the inside of her thigh. “Only with some things. Other times you surprise me quite a bit.”

“Yeah?” He kissed the top of her mound, his tongue dipping into the V formed by her lips and just brushing her clit — a teasing touch, his mouth moving away even as she lifted her hips instinctively. “I’m surprising?”

“You are,” he said, the camp-counselor cheer in his voice making what he was doing feel even more obscene. He traced the line of her cunt with his mouth before gently fingering her open. “The first time you did this, for example. That surprised me quite a bit!”

“This?” She knew exactly what he meant — her stomach still dipped and swooped at the memory of kneeling on the floor of his shower, the heady rush of confidence and vulnerability she’d felt looking up at him with his cock at her lips — but she tilted her head back with a sigh and breathed, “Pretty sure I’ve never eaten you out before. Not that I wouldn’t be into that, just saying.”

He gasped and spluttered, pulling back to wipe his mouth and staring at her with wide, shocked eyes, then coughed, tapping his chest with his other hand. “Excuse —?!”

When he lowered his head to cough again and take an unsteady breath, Gwen sat up on her elbows, not sure if she should be amused, worried, or mortified. “Oh my god, please tell me you did not just choke on cunt juice!”

David gave her a disgusted look, shaking his head and clearing his throat. “There had to be another way to word that,” he said, as primly as he could while still struggling to catch his breath. “But — um, you didn’t…w-was a joke, or…?”

“I meant it,” she admitted, “but I get it if you don’t want to, don’t feel pressured either way —”

“No — I want to.” He looked startled by his own words, and immediately dropped his gaze, smoothing his palms down her thighs like he could disguise how his fingers trembled. “Sometime. If — if you do.”

Gwen let the awkward silence linger for another moment, not quite sure how to move forward. “Good. That’s…something to put on the to-do list.”

“Y-yes. Okay.” He did meet her eyes then, brightening. “See, you did it again!”

She frowned. “Did what?”

“Surprised me.” He leaned over her body to tug her into a slow, sweet kiss. When she pulled back to breathe he cupped the back of her neck, holding her close and brushing his nose against hers. “You’re an adventure every day, Gwen,” he murmured.

“Yeah, I’m a real goddamn roller coaster,” she grumbled, shifting her hips upward in a blind search for his touch. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d fucking ride me already.”

David laughed softly against her mouth before turning his attention to her jaw, throat, collarbone — a damp, shivery brush of his tongue against her skin moving down her body. “Well goodness, Gwen, now I’m confused.” She both hated and loved the smug, teasing tone he got whenever her composure cracked. “I could make love to you,” he continued, nipping the skin just below her bellybutton and making her jump, “but I thought you wanted me to do this first.”

He closed his lips around her clit and sucked gently, catching her with an arm behind her back as she arched toward the maddening wet heat of his mouth. Lowering her hips back to the bed with infuriating tenderness, he paused, resting his cheek on her inner thigh and looking up the length of her body. When she met his eyes he smiled, pausing to press a chaste kiss to her leg before returning her gaze.

“What do you want, Gwen?” And he asked it untauntingly. Seriously. Like he wanted nothing more than for her to tell him what to do, and like he’d do it without question.

His sincerity was going to be the death of her, she decided with a groan, burying her hands in her hair and shielding her face from his view with her arms. “Fuck. I don’t know. Everything.”

When it came to David, she always wanted everything.

“That’s a real swell coincidence, then!” He traced the seam where her hip and leg met, then dipped down, dragging his fingertips through the wetness smearing her thighs before swiping them up to circle her clitoris. “Because ‘everything’ is exactly what I’d like to give you.”

She barely had time to absorb the statement before his mouth was on her again, sliding the hood back with his lips before swirling his tongue beneath it and around the exposed clit. It was almost too much, too sensitive, bordering on painful and if he stopped she might actually die; she knotted her fingers in the flimsy sheets to keep from pushing his face harder against her, vaguely aware that she was mumbling nonsensical pleas, an incoherent litany of “oh god yes please fuck don’t stop” —

He didn’t. Without lifting his mouth he braced one hand under her knee and pushed it toward her chest, bending her leg and using two fingers of his other hand to enter her. It took him a second but when he found her g-spot he pressed up hard, stroking with the same rapid pace of his flicking tongue. It was more pressure than she was used to, strangely achy but pleasurably so, and it was impossible not to writhe under his touch as the need to come coiled tighter, dragged her higher, kept her suspended on the brink for a frustrating, dizzying, electrifying moment that stretched like a rubber band…

Then it snapped — a dam breaking, a wave cresting and finally letting gravity take over — and she curled forward with a sob of relief, pleasure rippling through her limbs and turning her bones to liquid, trembling through the aftershocks.

The shift from overwhelmingly perfect to just plain overwhelming was a split second. “Nngh, stop, stop —” She pawed weakly at his head, just barely smacking the edge of his fringe with her fingertips, but he lifted his mouth from her with a look of concern. “You’re fine,” she added quickly, struggling to catch her breath and shivering from the buzz of overstimulation, “s’just too much.”

David nodded, relieved, and sat back, wiping his face with the back of his arm. “Wow,” he murmured, eyes wide and awed. “Wowzers. Gwen, have you ever done that before?”

She sat up, frowning. “Come like a train? Like every time we — whoa.”

The sheets between her legs were wet. Not damp, wet like she’d spilled a glass of water (and cooling rapidly, she realized with a grimace, shifting to avoid the blotchy patch). Presumably the same wetness dripping down David’s chin.

“Oh my god.” She groaned, hiding her face in her hands like if she couldn’t see it, it would disappear. Or feel it slicking her inner thighs. “And uh, not really,” she finally muttered, a belated answer to his question. “Once or twice, but you’ve really gotta work over the g-spot to make it happ --” She glanced up just in time to catch his expression, a flash of recognition mixed with pleased sheepishness. “Which you were.” David quickly looked away, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth and flushing pink. “On purpose?”

“I -- I’d read about it, that’s all!” he said, meeting her gaze defensively. “I knew it was, well . . . a thing. That some wom- people can do. And I was -- I’ve seen -- I was curious!” Gwen tried to stifle a laugh and failed, turning it into a choking snort, and he blushed even darker. “I know I should’ve just asked, but I couldn’t figure out how to say . . .”

She waited for him to finish the sentence, but when it became clear he had no intention of doing so, she injected as much demented cheer into her voice as possible and chirped, “‘Golly gee, Gwen, could I try making you squirt sometime?’”

Her imitation of his voice was passable -- she’d spent enough years making fun of him to get good at it -- and though he turned his head away she was positive he rolled his eyes at her. “I don’t know if that counts as bad language or not.”

“Oh no. It’d be so shocking if I said one of the no-no words.”

He chuckled, trying and failing to disguise it as a sigh, and climbed out of bed, tugging the rest of his clothes off. (As he picked up his shirt and wiped his face clean, Gwen quickly bent forward and sniffed the damp spot on the mattress. A little like saline, mostly like nothing. Good to know.)

“So how often do you trawl the internet for sex tips?” she asked, grinning. “Or -- god, tell me you’re not checking out books from the library.”

“Of course not!” He looked horrified at the thought. “And . . . sometimes. More often, after we started dating. I . . .” He paused, looking like he was reconsidering the rest of that sentence, and joined her on the bed to lean back against the headboard. “The time you visited, when I -- used my mouth on you for the first time.” (And what was it about his delicate tiptoeing that made it sound so much more filthy than if he’d said it outright?) “I thought -- or, well, I hoped . . . anyway, I did a little reading. Online, obviously. Just in case.”

So that was how he’d been so goddamn good right off the fucking bat. Always prepared, her boy scout. “Well, I appreciate it,” she said, and sat up, throwing one leg over his lap and draping her arms around his shoulders. “Can I please fuck you now, Mr. Greenwood?”

He sucked in an unsteady breath, his cock twitching up against her; the tip of his head slipped between her outer folds, making them both gasp. “C-condom,” he breathed, his voice raspy and uneven, and she scrambled off his lap before she could give in to the voice in the back of her head insisting they didn’t need to stop and get anything, he was right there , if she’d angled her hips right he could’ve been inside her already --

Her fingers were shaking as she retrieved the foil packet and brought it over, letting him take it with relief. (There was no way she wouldn’t have ripped it, with the way her whole body was trembling like the room had dropped ten degrees.) She watched him roll the latex down his cock, unable to tear her eyes away from how beautifully flushed it was, precome beading at the tip and slicking the inside of the condom.

God, she needed him inside her. Immediately.

David caught her with a breathless laugh as she vaulted back up onto the bed, curling his fingers around her hips and holding her steady. “Careful,” he murmured, and she rolled her eyes, fumbling blindly between her legs to line him up. “Have I- hhha --” He cut off, squeezing his eyes shut with a sigh as the head of his cock pressed into her, “t- told you how beautiful you are?”

Gwen frowned. It was kind of hard to focus on the question when her body was fluttering and pulsing as it adjusted to the welcome intrusion. “A lot?” she guessed, sinking down the last few inches too fast and bottoming out with an electric shock of pain and pleasure. “Fuck.”

“No. Not like that.” He slid one arm between their bodies, parting her folds to see the way she stretched around him. “I -- think you’re so pretty,” he managed, gently tracing her inner labia with his fingertips. “I like your colors. And how we -- um, contrast.”

No one had ever told her that her cunt was pretty before. It was just the kind of stupid, romantic thing David would do. And he was right; his cock looked so pale against her, where she faded from shocking pink into a dark purplish-brown that lightened as it blended into her normal skin tone. There was something about it that reminded her of a sunset -- which was just the kind of stupid, romantic thing David made her think.

“You’re an idiot,” she said, pressing her forehead against his and raising up a few inches, “and I love you so much.”

“I — love you too.” Suddenly he froze, his eyes widening and his grip tightening around her waist, keeping her from moving.

“David? Everything okay?” God, he wasn’t having some kind of terrible flashback, was he? Maybe they shouldn’t be doing this.

His eyes flicked up to hers, and a wide, sunny smile spread across his face like spilled honey. “This is just like the first time.”

It took her a moment to understand what he was talking about, but then it hit her: this was like the night they’d first had sex, from the position to the location to the dizzying, giddy strangeness of it.

God, he was perfect.

“Sort of.” She pressed a hard, quick kiss to his lips before grabbing a fistful of his hair and tugging his head to the side so she could reach his neck; he whimpered and twitched twice, each pulse against her inner walls taking her breath away. “Except I know you way better now.” She punctuated the statement by licking a wide stripe up the side of his throat, then sucked a mark right beside his Adam’s apple, where it’d be safely hidden by his bandana. “All your weak points.”

“I—” He swallowed, tilting his head obediently as she trailed a line of open-mouthed kisses up to his ear, “d-don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She just hummed; that wasn’t worth dignifying with a real response, and the vibrations against his damp skin made him shiver. Instead she toyed with him: tracing the shell of his ear with her tongue, nipping at his earlobe with just a hint of teeth, exploring the delicate area around his ear and neck she knew so well, had staked her claim to a hundred times before.

David’s breathing quickened, roughened, and she had to tighten her grip on his hair to keep him from squirming. Her hips weren’t moving but his were, minute jolts she was positive he couldn’t control. “Gwen,” he gasped, “please, I -- hhit's too much, I can’t --”

“Could you come like this?” she asked, fighting to keep her own voice level. She could feel his pulse pounding in his cock and in his throat, under her lips; her clit throbbed in response, a metronome perfectly attuned to him. “Without me even moving? Or just . . .” She squeezed her internal muscles, clenching around him in a quick staccato pattern, and lapped her tongue against his neck in time.

“Nnno. Or -- yes?” His fingers tightened around her hips, a helpless spasm. “I don’t know. It’d . . . be torture.”

His voice was so low, wrecked, and Gwen’s stomach went into a dizzying, delicious free-fall. “Good,” she said before she could stop herself, think it through and reject it as sounding weird and freaky. David successfully pulled back from her, his eyes wide and blown out with arousal, and he looked so beautiful she couldn’t stop herself from blurting out, “I want to torture you sometime. Nothing you’re not okay with -- and not now, but . . .”

“Yes,” he breathed, and the word was barely out of his mouth before his hand curled around the back of her neck and he was dragging her mouth to his, a kiss made of teeth and desperation with words gasped out against her lips: “yes, god, whatever you want Gwen please I love you --” His other hand slid to cup the curve of her thigh, urge her up onto her knees so he could fuck her properly, pull her back down to set a rhythm that bordered on frantic.

She couldn’t help but laugh, even as she braced her palms against the headboard for better leverage to ride him faster, harder. “Told you,” she teased, biting his lower lip hard enough to drag a breathy whine from him. “Weak.”

That made him moan, drawn-out and broken, and he slipped one hand between their bodies; curling it into a loose fist, he splayed his index and middle fingers just enough for her clit to glide between them, adding an extra jolt of friction every time she moved her hips. Gwen gasped, clutching at his back with one hand as her second orgasm coiled tighter at the base of her spine.

She bit his shoulder because she could, because she had to, because he’d like it and because it was that or scream loud enough to wake the entire camp. “Fuck, god, David --”

He shuddered and buried his face in her hair, his breath hot with a stream of pleasured mumbles beginning and ending in her name --

Gwen didn’t know which of them came first. It didn’t matter, really, because they dragged each other over the edge. His cock was almost painfully hard, unyielding as iron as her muscles tightened and fluttered around it, and the sudden snap upward of his hips as he came nearly knocked her breathless.

She was going to be sore tomorrow. Or . . . later today. She turned her head and mouthed at David’s neck, relishing the sweet-salt taste of his sweat, and let him hold her up as they caught their breath.

“I love you too,” she whispered belatedly. David huffed a weak laugh into her hair, stroking her back with a touch that was light and ticklish. “But we’re sleeping in your room tonight. I don’t wanna deal with the wet spot.”

Yeah, she was going to be sore, and exhausted, and facing a hell of a cleanup both in her bedroom and outside of it.

David groaned and gently pushed her upright, sliding out from under her and taking her hand, like she was a camper who needed to be ushered back to bed. “Phone,” she bleated, weakly reaching for it as they walked past, and he paused to pick it up for her, and in that second she loved him even more, more than she’d ever thought possible.

She retreated back toward the common room, tripping over something — a book, a shoe, the random detritus of two people’s lives tangled together — and barely catching herself on the table. The back door wouldn’t be locked, because that was one of David’s jobs

(and he was busy, distracted)

and she didn’t have a flashlight but that was okay, the darkness would be a relief she just needed to get out out out out —

“Gwen!” David’s fingers closed around her upper arm, tugging her to a stop. She could break his grip — her fingers twitched with the desire to grab something and beat him over the head with it until he let her go — but in her moment of hesitation he took her other arm, swung her around gently so they were facing each other. “Gwen, sit down, okay? Just take a seat.”

“It’s fine —” She shrugged free, backing up against the door, but it opened inward and David was in her way so she couldn’t shove it open. Her legs gave out and she slumped to the floor, drawing her knees up to her chest and trying to remember how breathing worked. “Don’t — just . . . check your messages, okay? Later, when you’re not . . . just — there was something I needed to tell you, that’s all. That’s why I was there.”

He glanced back toward the front of the cabin, then sighed and knelt down in front of her. They were alone in a pocket of gloom, the only light coming from the hallway glowing like a beacon, a hallway where his

(friend? girlfriend? booty call?)

was waiting for him to wrap things up with his crazy ex-girlfriend so they could enjoy their evening.

A few summers and a lifetime ago she would’ve been delighted if David brought someone home for the night. Delighted, and endlessly amused; she would’ve never let him live it down.

A few summers and a lifetime ago she was a better person. “You’ve got something on your face.”

He rubbed at his mouth with the heel of one hand, grimacing, and wiped the gloss off on his leg without looking away from her. “Gwen.” He kept saying her name, like he thought it would ground her — like the sound of it didn’t tear through her chest like a shotgun blast every time. “What were you doing in my room?”

She took a deep breath. “I needed to tell you . . .” This was okay. She could say what he needed to know: that he was a good person, that he’d done nothing wrong. That he could move on without carrying ‘might almost be a rapist’ around his neck like an albatross. “Last night.”

He flinched. It broke her heart all over again.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, David.” The words tripped over themselves in a hurry to get out as fast as possible, like they were as desperate to reach for him as she was. “I wanted you to kiss me. You — didn’t hurt me. At all.” She tightened her hold on her knees, lowering her cheek to rest on them. “Okay?”

“What? I . . . no, it’s not okay.” He frowned and sat back. The gulf between them widened a few inches, a few miles. “I don’t . . . are you saying — but you told me to stop.”

She shook her head, wishing she could change everything about herself. “I told you not to stop.” When the furrow between his eyebrows deepened, she shrugged helplessly, fighting the absurd urge to giggle at the ridiculousness of the situation. “I just — it was poor breath control. Made a pause where there shouldn’t’ve been one.” Proof that her two years studying vocal performance in college were a waste of time and money; the stupid hilarity in her chest tightened, and she pushed down a laugh with effort. “I would’ve explained sooner, but I didn’t know . . . that.” She paused and licked her lips, took another shaky breath — because she still didn’t have good breath control, clearly. “Was what you were freaked out about. So I’m sorry.”

And she was.

For that, and for everything else.

David didn’t reply for a few seconds, and with every breath the darkness of the room seemed to settle in deeper, grow thick and heavy. “You . . . wanted me to kiss you,” he repeated, doubt etched into every word like claw marks in stone. She longed desperately to smooth them away and didn’t know how. “But you — why would you ever want that?”

Gwen let out a huff, something between a groan and a laugh. “Who cares why? I just — it doesn’t matter, okay? You didn’t do anything wrong, you don’t have to feel guilty about anything, so just . . . go and — have a good time.” She pushed herself to her feet, suddenly exhausted.

She didn’t want to have this conversation. It could wait until tomorrow, or never.

She just needed to get out of here.

“Wait, Gwen —” He reached for her, his fingers brushing against her wrist, and she yanked her arm to her chest.

“Listen, she’s gonna leave soon if she hasn’t already. No one wants to wait around while their . . . whatever talks to his . . .” She couldn’t finish that sentence. Couldn’t say out loud what they weren’t anymore. “Go. I’ll be okay,” she added, softening her voice so it sounded less harsh, less raw.

If he needed to believe she was fine with him moving on, she’d figure out how to pretend to be fine.

David sighed, swiping his hand down his face before nodding and glancing back toward the hallway. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something else — like there was anything they had left to say to each other — but shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’re not done,” he finally said, stepping away from her.

Her heart leapt even as her brain knew what those words meant — and didn’t mean. “Of course not,” she replied, trying as hard as possible to keep her voice steady. “Counselor Buddies For Life, right?”

He paused for another moment. The light fell across half of his face, throwing harsh black shadows that sliced the other half into a patchwork of dark grays and glowing, luminescent almost-white. There was no reason the sight should make her tenuous grasp of self-control slip away, except that he was beautiful and he was perfect and he wasn’t hers.

“Go,” she snapped, too loud — if that waitress was still out there she probably jumped. Tears crowded hot and aching in her throat, and she couldn’t wait for him to do what she said so she shoved past him for the second time that night, staggered into the hallway where the woman was still waiting, patiently and politely playing on her phone like she hadn’t been listening. Gwen bumped into her for the second time that night, not bothering to return her startled and unnecessary apology, and slammed her door shut. She moved a chair under the door handle, something that made little logical sense but gave her a tiny sliver of security, and made it all the way to her bed before the first sob tore out of her chest.

She put in earphones, pulled a pillow over her head for good measure, and cried until exhaustion finally, finally pulled her under.

---

It wasn’t morning when she woke up. The room was still dark — even when she pulled the pillow off her face and sat up, the weak moonlight was gone, the night still and empty and buried in deep shadows. She grabbed her phone to check the time, bracing herself in preparation of the screen’s blinding glare.

scraaape

Thunk.

rattlerattlerattle

Thunk.

Thunk.

Thunkthunkthunkthunkthunk

“Gwen? Are you there?”

She sat up, her phone forgotten. After a moment of silence the sounds continued, and she silently hopped out of bed, padding over to the window. She pulled open the curtain, squinting to see into the darkness. “David?”

He scrambled backward with a shriek, tripping over his feet and tumbling to the ground; the crowbar he’d jammed under Gwen’s window frame stayed in place, quivering like a plucked string.

“Oh!” He climbed to his feet, catching the crowbar as she opened the window. “Good mor — I mean.” Coughing awkwardly, he looked down at his feet, tapping the crowbar against the toe of one boot.

Her brain still foggy with sleep, she tried shaking her head to clear it. “Did you lock yourself out?” It’d happened before, but usually he just called . . .

She suddenly remembered the phone in her hand. It didn’t respond to her touch, the screen black and dead, and she vaguely remembered turning it off when it wouldn’t stop buzzing at her.

Right. Oops.

“Not exactly.” It was weird, having a civil conversation with her co-counselor through the window of her cabin, but it was an almost-nice kind of weird. A normal kind of weird. “You weren’t answering your phone or the door, and I couldn’t get it open so I —” His voice dropped to a murmur, and his shape in the darkness shuffled its feet like he was embarrassed. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Okay.

Yeah, she was okay all right. That was Gwen: an endless font of okay. “I locked the door because I wanted to keep you out,” she snapped, which wasn’t quite the truth; what she wanted to keep out wasn’t David but his questions, his worry, his lovely face and the warm buzz of afterglow from someone who wasn’t her. “I put a chair under the handle, David. Take the hint.”

He paused for a second, and she was relieved there wasn’t any moonlight to illuminate the hurt on his face. “I — I know,” he mumbled, sounding sheepish. “When I picked the lock I could tell. That’s why I —”

“You picked the lock?” Gwen wanted her response to that to be horror, fury — but the closest she could muster was a faint simmering blend of disbelief and amusement. “They teach that in Boy Scouts now?”

“It’s a valuable skill! And when I was a junior counselor there was a camper who liked spy novels . . .” He trailed off, and as the heat of his embarrassment cooled what was left behind was a sickening sense of corrupted normalcy; the ashes of a genuine conversation, one they would’ve had if everything hadn’t fallen apart, congealed into awkward silence. “Can I come in?”

“It’s the middle of the night, David.”

His outline lifted its chin, the same hard stubborn set she associated with terrible camp ideas, and her heart twisted horribly. “I — not to be unkind, Gwen, but you owe me this conversation. And we can’t . . . I can’t keep going on like this. So . . . please.”

This conversation was what she wanted, what she’d sprinted into his bedroom to have because she couldn’t stand putting it off another second. Now that it stood directly in front of her, she wanted nothing more than to delay again.

But he deserved better.

She sighed, stepping back from the window and moving toward the light switch. “Fine.”

When she turned back around, flinching at the sudden invasion of fluorescent light, David had one leg over her windowsill, ducking through the small opening and wriggling his way into the room. “What?” he asked, face reddening as she stared at him. “It . . . it was faster than going around the cabin.”

Gwen wanted to laugh. She wanted to pull him against her and kiss his forehead and fix his hair where the window frame had messed it up and she couldn’t do any of those things so she turned her phone on, watching the logo glow to slow and bleary life. It was barely 1:30; she hadn’t been asleep for more than an hour. “Where’s . . .” She gestured at her hair without looking up, realizing too late that she shouldn’t draw attention to the tangled mop on top of her head (and how little it looked like a diaphanous cloud of pink silk). “What’sername?”

He cleared his throat. “She, um — she went home.”

“That was fast.” The words left her mouth before her brain had fully processed them — stupid words, awful words, words she could’ve said to tease her best friend back when they still were best friends but that weren’t okay to say now , not after everything. She’d been lulled by the uncomfortable domesticity, the weird holding pattern they were trapped in now that some of the truth had slipped free and she didn’t have to be quite so careful. She felt more than saw him recoil, a little flash of movement in the corner of her eye that could’ve been nothing but was almost certainly a wince, and she dropped her phone onto her desk a little too roughly, forcing herself to meet his eyes. “Sorry, I —”

“We didn’t.” He looked as horrified to blurt the words out as Gwen had been just a second ago, and he broke their gaze first, scuffing his boot along the carpet. The pretty flush darkening his cheeks was spreading down his neck and up to his ears, slow and sweet like a honey spill, and the urge to chase it with her tongue made her knees wobble. He swallowed and added, “do, y’know — gosh, I just couldn’t. A-anyway, she wanted to see the camp before leaving, so that took . . . a little while, I don’t remember.” He laughed, awkward and higher-pitched than usual, and scratched the back of his neck. “She was really nice about it. Wouldn’t even let me pay for the cab back into town.”

Shame coiled heavily in her stomach, a thick and glossy snake. “I’m sorry I ruined your night,” she said honestly.

He shrugged, still not making eye contact. “I mean, jeez, it probably wasn’t the best idea anyway.” Gwen realized he’d been drinking. Not much, and he had to be sobering up fast, but his “aw shucks”isms multiplied exponentially when he was tipsy. It was one of the most cruelly adorable things about him, and she hated herself for knowing that, for recognizing it and loving him even more. “I just needed . . .” He groaned and shook his head, tugging his fringe upright. “You said you wanted me to kiss you. H- how come?”

The sudden change of topic gave her whiplash until her brain put together the missing pieces. Tonight hadn’t just been a rebound: he’d needed to go home with someone he actually knew wanted him. It wasn’t just for an ego boost or out of touch starvation, but to prove to himself that he could tell the difference between a yes and a no.

And she felt it again — love and compassion and pity and self-loathing and despair — a quagmire of feelings so powerful they made her sick to her stomach, and because she was herself, a hateful monster shaped by heartbreak, instead of softening her voice to match the way she felt about him she hardened it, snapped, “Because I did,” like she was frustrated with his stupidity when what she was actually frustrated with, what she really despised and wanted to tear apart with her fingernails, was her own unloveable, broken self. “I made the first move — because I wanted to. No other fucking reason.”

“Why?”

It was just like when she’d told him she’d almost cheated on him, the day their relationship fell apart — except instead of betrayal quavering in his voice, there was something dangerously close to hope. It scared her. Pissed her off. “Feelings aren’t like a light switch, David! Getting over you is —” Impossible. “— taking more time than I thought.”

“But why?” And this time he didn’t sound small or hopeful; there was a dark, furious bite to his voice that rivaled her own. “The feelings should — they’re already gone, aren’t they? Wasn’t that the entire point?”

“No!” she cried, digging her fingernails into her palms to keep from raking them down her own face. This was what she’d dreaded: the agonizing task of trying to make him understand. “They weren’t gone when we broke up, and they aren’t fucking gone now!” This wasn’t right; she’d wanted to keep things simple and to the point: she wanted him, he shouldn’t ever want her, so logic dictated they couldn’t be together. What was all so simple and clean in her head kept coming out ragged and snarled like fraying yarn. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” she muttered, squeezing her eyes shut against tears.

God, she couldn’t even walk away from him properly.

“What was supposed to happen?”

This would be infinitely more bearable if he wasn’t so fucking nice. “We were supposed to survive the summer,” she said, unable to hold back a harsh noise that was supposed to be a laugh but felt like a sob, “and then you’d go back home and move on. Maybe hire a new cocounselor and fall in love with them. I don’t know!” Her voice rose, both in pitch and volume, and she had to force herself back to something that sounded even remotely normal. “You were supposed to get away from me.”

Like he almost had tonight.

Before she’d ruined it.

Again.

Misery tightened around her throat, a choker made of bloody thorns.

His voice was soft, barely a fraction of his normal speaking tone, but it made her jump nonetheless: “And what about you?”

She shrugged listlessly. “I don’t know,” she replied, her lips strangely numb and tingling, like she’d smeared her gums with Novocain. He was trying to get her to share something real, was using open-ended questions and everything; she’d taught him that trick, a leftover from one of her many useless degrees, but she was too tired to fight the urge to finally be honest. “Go back home and meet someone broken and fucked-up enough to deserve me. Just . . . go back to normal, I guess.”

“Oh, Gwen.” She felt David step closer, the wood floor creaking and shifting under his weight, the sunlit warmth of his body creeping into her orbit, and he sounded the way he did when talking to their more difficult campers; it was his “we can work out a solution together” voice, and panic constricted her chest because it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. His fingers brushed against her cheek, gently wiping away tears she hadn’t even noticed. “Why don’t you think you deserve to be happy?”

“You know why!” Gwen jerked back, because the touch of his skin against hers sparked her nerve endings and she had to either move towards him or away, and only one of those options was acceptable right then. She took a shaky breath, swiping at her face to try and stop the hot flow of tears down her cheeks. “You saw what I’m like outside of here. Maybe I’m important at some shitty backwater camp, but in the real world? I can’t even m-make my family —” She pressed her lips together, breathing in heavily through her nose. She was going to get through this. She owed it to him to get through this. “Ever since you visited I’ve been . . . waiting, I guess? For the other shoe to drop, for you to put it together that I’m not — and I tried to be good enough, I really fucking did, but it took a lot out of me. Too much. Waiting for you to come to your senses, trying and failing to be someone who could actually make you happy — trying to be happy, oh my god, do you have any idea how impossible that is for me?”

She was babbling. She could tell by the look on David’s face, by the slight furrow between his brows that he was trying to follow what she was saying but couldn’t, because she wasn’t making any goddamn sense.

Another deep breath. Time to try again.

“Earlier, like a week ago, before we — yeah. Whatever — I couldn’t get out of bed. Not like I was tired, or like I was sad or freaked out because I didn’t feel anything. I just couldn’t move. And I’ve done that before for days, David! I got fired once because I missed a week of shifts and couldn’t even call in sick. And that just happens sometimes, and for a while being with you was enough to get me out of bed but then it wasn’t and I don’t know how to pretend to be okay, okay?! I want to be — I wanna be normal and happy and anyone else but I can’t, and you don’t seem to get that yet but you will and I couldn’t stand waiting so I . . . ended it. Because somebody fucking has to.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach, shivering in the cool night air.

His hand brushed against her elbow, and she allowed herself to be ushered over to her bed, sat down and wrapped in blankets until she was warm again. And he was looking at her with the softest, warmest eyes, like he hadn’t heard a word she said properly because if he had he wouldn’t be staring at her like that, like she was some sort of beautiful broken doll he wanted to fix up and make pretty again.

But she couldn’t be made better. This was all there was.

And she didn’t know how to make him understand that she was a lost cause.

Gwen wasn’t sure how long she sat in her little blanket cocoon, staring at the floor and trying to find the words to explain how she was wrong for him — just wrong, period — but after a moment or an hour fingers brushed through her hair, suddenly appearing in her peripheral vision and making her jolt away.

“Sorry,” David murmured, drawing back for a second before returning his hand to her temple, gingerly unsticking her hair from the dried salt on her face and tucking it behind her ear. He didn’t meet her eyes, his expression stern and solemn and fully dedicated to this task, and when it was done he looked down at her hands and took one of them, sandwiching it between his own. “I wish you’d told me you felt like that.”

“I didn’t want you to know,” she said, managing a sad little huff of air that could almost be called a laugh. “I wanted you to think I was perfect.”

His answering smile was wan and sad, but heartrendingly genuine. “I do.”

The words jolted her into action, so discordant and wrong that she couldn’t sit still no matter how tired she was. She pulled out of his reach and climbed to her feet, letting the blankets fall away as she paced across the room. “How?!” she demanded, whirling on him and nearly tripping over the fabric strewn across the floor. “Were you even listening?”

“Of course I was!” he replied, indignant and hurt. “You have . . . struggles, but so does everybody —”

She rolled her eyes, kicking the blankets to the wall so she had more pacing room. “Yeah, struggles,” she repeated, bile coating her tongue. “Like this camp has struggles, right?” She ran her hands through her hair, forcing out a heavy breath to try and tame her anger — again. “You see everything in the best possible light, David. I love that about you —” Her voice caught; it was the first time the words “I” and “love” and “you” had been in the same sentence since she’d realized how she felt, and the force of it nearly knocked her breathless. “— but you can’t just pretend problems don’t exist because you don’t wanna see them! I tried that already, and guess what? It fucking makes things worse!”

“I’m not pretending! But there are ways to deal with — it’s not the end of the world. And you’re — you’re catastrophizing, Gwen. That’s not helpful, either!”

“‘Ways to deal with’ it? Like there are ‘ways to deal with’ Mr. Campbell being a fraud? Like your ‘ways to deal with’ Max?” He didn’t answer and she turned from him, stalking toward the other side of the room. It felt like she couldn’t get enough air, like the walls were closing in on her. “I know you like projects. People you can fix. But I can’t be fixed, okay? I’m just like this!”

“I don’t want to fix you,” he said. A frown line appeared between his eyebrows, and she wanted to kiss it smooth. “I don’t think you need to be fixed, Gwen.”

She groaned, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. She wasn’t sure if she was trying to squeeze away a headache or tears; it felt like she was on the verge of both. “Whatever you think you’re seeing in me just isn’t there. There isn’t anything worth seeing in me, and no amount of positive thinking is going to change that!”

“Gwen, stop!”

The suddenness of his shout made her freeze. He cleared his throat, his face flaming pink with embarrassment, but he met her gaze steadily.

“I’m not delusional,” he said, softer. “I know — I wish Mr. Campbell cared more about this camp. I wish this camp was everything it could be. I wish Max would give things here a chance, even just once. I know nothing’s perfect — I know that. But I also know you’re wrong about yourself, and you need to stop assuming you know what I think because you don’t!”

David took a step closer, holding out his hand uncertainly, like she was a deer he was afraid would bolt. She felt like a deer, frozen in the headlights of his warm, bright eyes.

“I don’t want to fix you,” he repeated. He moved close enough to stroke her cheek, cup the side of her face in his hand. “Or change you. All I want is to be with you — exactly like this. The way you are, right now.”

Tears stung her eyes, made him dissolve into a soft blur of her favorite colors. She looked away and took a deep, shaky breath. “Why?” she whispered, leaning into his palm. She knew she had to shove him away, tear the two of them apart with daggers until he learned to stop believing in her, but she was tired.

Tired, and so relieved to feel his touch it hurt.

He sighed but didn’t say anything until she turned back to him, the tears clinging to her lashes giving way and spilling down her cheeks. One of them skated into the divot his thumb made against her skin and he brushed it away gently, automatically. The look on his face was somewhere between awe and resignation, the bitter twist of his mouth so harsh against his soft, wide eyes. “Because I’m in love with you.”

Her breath caught.

Oh.

Her heart leapt into her throat, a dense lump of clay that ached just above the dip of her collarbone. She opened her mouth to reply but the lump swelled, choking, strangling any words that tried to surface.

He loves you! He loves you!

God, this was so much worse than she’d feared.

David stumbled back as she collided with his chest, twining her arms around his waist and pressing her cheek against his shoulder, gasping for breath as the lump in her throat gave way into water. After a moment’s hesitation he embraced her, one arm across her shoulder blades and one around the small of her back, and his warmth and smell and the gentle thrumming of his heart were like fresh air after months spent underground, beautiful and precious and necessary .

“I love — you too,” she sobbed into his shirt, barely able to form the words. “I — love you too, I’m — sorry, I’m so — sorry — I love you . . .”

“Gwen, it’s okay,” he murmured, smoothing his palm in wide circles over her back, “it’s fine, shh, don’t cry . . .” When her breathing returned to something resembling normal he pulled back, holding her by the shoulders like he was worried she’d bolt. Or like he couldn’t bear to break contact any more than she could. “Do you mean it? Do you really love me?”

The hope on his face — naked, tender, a little flame of joy so eager to leap into a blaze with the right stoking — lanced through her heart, because he still didn’t get it. A confession of love from her wasn’t something good , her love was poison —

But he was waiting for an answer and she couldn’t lie anymore. “Yeah,” she replied, swallowing hard to push back another wave of tears and then hiccupping when they came anyway. “I’m sorry.”

“Jeez, Gwen, why would you ever be sorry?”

She swiped at her face with her palms, smearing the tears around more than actually wiping them off. “That I — didn’t let you go . . . you deserve so much — better . . .”

He didn’t say anything, silence filling the air between each of her damp, pathetic sniffles, and finally she looked up to meet him. His expression was so full that it was hard to read, emotions jostling for room on his lovely, expressive face: confusion, concern for her, for her well-being (for her sanity, maybe). A tattered shred of his normal smile, like he was waiting for the punchline of a joke he didn’t understand yet. And there was joy flitting underneath it all, relief and love and more gentleness than she’d ever had pointed in her direction, more love than anyone had ever had in their eyes when they looked at her.

Then a shadow crossed his face, his eyes darkening like the surface of Lake Lilac during a storm, and the faint ghost of a smile disappeared.

“Why don’t I get to make that decision?” he asked. And there was a bite in his tone, a frisson of anger that cut through everything else and made her shiver. “How come you’re the only one who gets a say?”

Gwen fumbled for words like landmarks in a pitch-black room. “David, you’ve never — this was your first — you’re so . . .”

“‘Come to my senses,’” he repeated, his frown deepening as he looked away, at the wall, at nothing. “That’s what you said earlier, right? That I’d — that the only smart decision is to leave you, because nobody with a brain could . . . could know you and still want to be with you.”

She flinched, the flat, emotionless statement like needles against her skin because it was true and it was the realization she’d been dragging him toward and she still wasn’t prepared to hear it from him.

His hands fell from her shoulders, and the air cooled even further as he took a step back. She looked up and he crossed his arms over his chest, squaring his jaw.

“I still want to be here,” he said. His voice wobbled and he cleared his throat, so hard she felt it tearing her own, and the statement floated fat and pregnant in the air. So full of good possibilities but said with so much cold fury that it could only be a bomb waiting to go off. “So which is it, Gwen: is it that I don’t know you or that I don’t have a brain?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she managed, panic closing in and constricting around her ribcage.

“How did you mean it, then?” he snapped. His arms untangled and fell to his sides, hands curling into fists tight enough to turn his knuckles white. “Because it sounds to me like you think you’re the only one who’s allowed to make decisions about our relationship. You could’ve talked to me — I wanted you to talk to me! But you didn’t think I was . . . I don’t know, smart enough to see the real you? Able to do what’s best for me? Like I can’t know what I want?”

“You’ve never —”

He sliced one arm through the air, cutting her off instantly. “I know this is my first relationship, Gwen! I know that better than you do! Did you think this was — an, an accident? That I just stumbled into falling in love with you, like I didn’t know what I was doing? But I still can’t be trusted with what you’re really thinking and feeling — because I just won’t get it! Because I don’t know what it’s like to be sad.”

David laughed, hollow and humorless.

“What else do you think I can’t do? Should I not be allowed to light the campfire either? Or maybe I’m not smart enough to drive into town anymore — huh, Gwen?” His second laugh was sharper, damp with unshed tears. They made his eyes glisten as he looked back up at her, his face hard as stone. “Do you actually respect me at all? Or am I just a dumb kid to you?”

She felt sick. “Yes, I . . .” she began, then paused, tripping up over which part of the question she was supposed to be answering. “Of course I respect you!”

“Then tell me the truth!” He stalked closer, his breathing harsh and rapid. “If I asked you to be my girlfriend again, tell me you’d say yes. Tell me it’s because you trust me.”

Her mouth fell open, but the muscles in her throat wouldn’t move — just sat lifeless and paralyzed.

He was right.

She loved him so much, thought he was kind and wonderful and all the good things that she could never be . . . but she hadn’t been thinking of him as a partner. Never someone who could know better than her. He was sweet, innocent, naïve David. She was jaded and jagged, but above all she was right. She knew things he never could, learned from painful experience, and she had to protect him from herself and from the rest of the world.

It hadn’t even occurred to her to question it.

He must’ve read her thoughts on her face. Hurt flashed across his expression — a slight widening of his eyes, a tremor of his mouth — and then he looked away, wrapping his arms around himself. “Gwen, I love you. But I don’t think you see me as an equal.”

“It’s not that . . .” she began, but his face had shut off, the light behind it gone like a heavy steel shutter had closed behind his eyes.

“I . . .” He shook his head, scrubbed a hand across his face. “I need to go. I need . . . to think. To figure out . . .” He gestured between the two of them, still not meeting her eyes. “I want to say we can make this work. But I can’t be treated like this. I — I do deserve better than that.”

She nodded, unable to meet his eyes. “I know,” she croaked, more tears swelling her throat and making her voice crack.

“Yeah. You need to think, too.” He stepped past her, crossing the room and opening the door. He paused in the frame for a moment, not turning back to look at her. “I’m going out. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She didn’t move until the sound of the campmobile had faded into silence.

---

“Jesus, Davey.”

“I know.” He chuckled through his tears, leaning back against the windshield and looking up at the sky. His sleeping bag (the one he kept in the trunk for camping emergencies) was rolled out on the ground under the shelter of a tree, but the lookout’s reception was better by the car, and the cool metal was a relief from the hot, still air. “But she said she loves me.”

“Yeah? She has a real shitty way of showing it.” There was a moment of silence, and David closed his eyes, letting his breathing steady to match the night songs of the crickets. “I hate to say it . . . but I kinda think she’s right.”

He frowned, opening his eyes and sitting up. “What?” he asked, his heart shrinking in on itself with her words. How many more people in his life thought he wasn’t smart enough to make his own decisions?

“You deserve better.”

“Oh.” He sighed, settling back with relief.

He knew that, too.

“Julia . . .” He sniffed, wiped his nose on the hem of his shirt (it was laundry day tomorrow anyway). “Is it bad if I still want to be with her?”

“Of course not.” There’d been only a few times David could remember where his best friend’s voice had been so soft, so kind. And it was always when he was at his absolute lowest point. “You love her. That’s never a bad thing, even if she doesn’t deserve it.”

He didn’t say what he was thinking: he couldn’t shake the feeling, despite everything, that maybe she did . “W-what should I do?” he asked, knowing Julia wouldn’t have an answer but desperately hoping she might.

“I dunno, Red.” Julia sighed, just as a breeze ruffled David’s hair. For a second it felt like they were kids again, sitting on the dock of Lake Lilac and talking about Jasper. “I’m on your team whatever you decide.”

“Thanks, Jules.” He finished the call and stood, walking over to the drop that looked out over the entire lake. His gaze was drawn toward the small black speck that he knew was Camp Campbell, dark and quiet from so high above the world.

Whatever you decide.

He just had to figure out what that could possibly be.

---

David was right: she had to think.

And because he deserved it, she was trying very hard not to be apocalyptic or self-pitying, even though he now knew how terrible she was not only in the ways she’d already been aware of, but fun new ones she hadn’t even noticed.

She wasn’t very good at not being apocalyptic or self-pitying. But she was trying.

Gwen wandered into the cabin’s main area, the little not-quite-a-living room they’d filled with the camp’s one crappy TV and some leftover furniture that couldn’t fit in the Mess Hall. Next to the back door was a bulletin board covered in photos — David as a camper, the hated group photo taken at the beginning of every summer. Dozens of little snapshots, things that made David happy and that he thought were worth remembering.

She caught sight of a photo near the back, half-buried under the others, and smiled despite herself. It was from the year she’d started at Camp Campbell, making that stupid salute in front of her bedroom door. David had insisted on a photo of her in her new uniform, and the smile on her face was already strained, like she’d had an inkling of how insane the next half a decade was going to be.

Another photo snagged her attention, one from last summer: her and David’s faces smushed together, his arm stretching out to try and capture both of them in their ridiculous Order of the Sparrow outfits. They had red lipstick smeared across their cheeks and feathers in their hair, and she hadn’t even bothered trying to smile — though Gwen noticed, leaning in and wincing, that even through the terrible “war paint” on her face it was obvious she was blushing.

Less than twelve hours after that picture was taken, David would get injured and give her the worst scare of her life.

Less than a day later, the people in that picture would be dating.

And just about a year later — almost to the day — the annoyed-looking woman in the photograph would be alone in the counselors’ cabin, while the pale, scrawny not-Native-American would be . . . somewhere. Away from camp. Away from her.

Because of her.

David had been right. She loved him so much — more than she’d ever loved anyone else, which scared her to the point where she kinda wanted to throw up — but she’d been treating him the way she always had: as her goofy, lovable coworker. Not dumb, most of the time anyway, but naïve and sweet and vulnerable, who needed to be steered away from bad ideas like Sword Juggling Camp and officiating a green-card wedding for Mr. Campbell and falling in love with her.

Because she was his best friend, and that was what she was supposed to do, right?

She flopped onto the couch with a groan, flinging an arm over her eyes to block out the unforgiving fluorescent light.

“I don’t think you see me as an equal at all.”

The problem was she didn’t; she saw him as better than her, kinder and more patient — but putting him on a pedestal wasn’t any more respectful, not really. It wasn’t any truer, and it sure as hell wasn’t any more flattering, didn’t hurt him any less. She couldn’t tell him how she felt for so long, because she didn’t think he’d be able to understand. Or if he did, it’d change how he felt about her, like he hadn’t been paying attention, hadn’t noticed the basic primary colors of her personality in the years they’d known each other. Somehow she’d been thinking of him as both too good and not good enough for an honest conversation, and hadn’t even noticed the contradiction.

But she thought he was the one who hadn’t been paying attention? God, she’d been so self-absorbed, so myopic —

(something pinged in the back of her head)

(just enough to cut off the churning stream of her thoughts)

Myopic. David had taught her that word. He’d heard it on some podcast his friend was obsessed with, and was so excited to know something Gwen didn’t that he was practically glowing. She’d called him a smug bastard and slapped the back of his head, just hard enough to make him laugh, but the truth was she liked hearing him explain things; when he was teaching the campers, she always stopped to watch (and not just to get a break from doing her job), because he was so patient and enthusiastic it was like the air around him was suffused with a soft, warm light.

He was a good teacher. She’d learned a lot from him.

(another ping)

(louder, more like a tuning fork smacked against the inside of her skull)

Gwen sat up, nearly falling off the sagging couch as she scrambled to her feet. There was an idea — small, fluttering, and she was afraid to approach it head-on because it might dissolve like a barely-remembered dream, but it all came back to myopic , to forest survival, to every time he’d taught her something she hadn’t known before. And there was so much. She’d been the most hopeless city girl when she started at Camp Campbell; she’d barely known how to tie a decent knot, let alone lead the dozens of bizarre and complicated camps David juggled like it was nothing.

Gwen remembered the strings of origami animals that she’d made back in New York. How she hadn’t turned to her phone for a YouTube tutorial, but painstakingly tried to remember David’s instructions step-by-step.

A quick glance at the clock told her it was just past 2 a.m. She had a little more than four hours before he’d be back, probably. It didn’t feel like nearly enough time, but she’d do what she could.

David was so much more than she’d ever given him credit for.

David couldn’t go alone, obviously. Even if he wasn’t the most accident-prone person on the planet, Gwen had co-taught enough Wilderness Survival camps to know that letting someone go off on their own was a terrible idea. And after his nightmarish experience getting lost in the woods last summer, she wasn’t happy to let him explore this cave at all, let alone by himself. No matter how fine he said he was -- or maybe especially because he insisted he was fine.

Mr. Campbell was the obvious choice, considering his experience, but he was still very much on probation, and if the Millers showed up for one of their surprise inspections before he got back, Gwen would be the one who’d have to explain to angry secret agents why their top prisoner had fucked off into the wilderness.

(It was actually Mr. Campbell who came up with this objection. Even though it was clearly because he’d rather sit in the Mess Hall watching TV than trudging through a dark cave, his logic was totally sound; she suspected he actually got smarter when he was trying to weasel out of something.)

QM volunteered . . . and the less said about that, the better. The short version was a unanimous “No” at varying volumes and degrees of alarm.

Which left . . . Gwen.

Awesome.

“Isn’t this exciting?” David asked, adjusting his backpack as he bounded along at her side. A ceaseless fountain of exuberance, he had a simple pattern of keeping in step with his co-counselor: skipping ahead a few feet, hopping up onto the balls of his feet once or twice to shake out a bit of excess energy, then whirling around and making a quick lap around her before falling into step for half a second, then hurrying ahead again to repeat the entire routine.

It tired her out just looking at him. “David, it’s just looking at a cave. Shine a flashlight in there, make some noise to scare out anything dumb enough to live in there, and then board the damn thing up and never think about it again.”

“I don’t know, Gwen. It looked like it might go pretty deep!” He clasped his hands at his chest, his eyes practically sparkling. “This is a real, honest-to-goodness adventure!”

“Uh-huh.” She was allergic to adventures, unless they involved shirtless human-adjacent dudes. Not that it mattered.

Of course, David was carrying all of the exploring gear Gwen expected would be absolutely useless -- first aid kit, flashlight, food, a goddamn machete of all things -- leaving her to carry the actually important tools they’d be using to close off the cave to camper access. The boards weren’t all that heavy, really, but they were extremely awkward, and anything got uncomfortable to carry when you had to bring it half a mile in the blazing-hot sunlight. Plus she was pretty sure the damn things were giving her splinters, and her fingers were cramping from the uncomfortable and unsteady grip.

David noticed exactly none of this, either due to total obliviousness or a semi-conscious decision not to. “When was the last time you’ve had a chance to explore somewhere new?”

“Uh . . . never?” Okay, so she was obsessed with urban explorer Tumblr pages, but even though her neighborhood was full of abandoned buildings ripe for discovery, Gwen’s sense of self-preservation was way too high to actually check any of them out.

“Golly, really?” He beamed at her, skipping backwards a few feet so he could maintain eye contact. “I’m so honored to be your first!”

Did she want to tell him how that sounded? She deliberated for half a second before deciding god no, she wasn’t having that conversation again; instead she bit back a laugh and mumbled some bullshit about new experiences.

His enthusiasm was like a puppy, and on a good day she thought it was pretty adorable how he could bounce along from disaster to disaster without ever letting it wear him down.

But god, when she was already on her last nerve . . .

“There we are!” He leapt over the straggly line of mossy rocks and began hacking a path through the undergrowth with his machete (which, okay, was more useful than she’d assumed).

Gwen threw down her stack of boards -- they were damp and disturbingly spongy, which was neither improving her mood or her faith in this whole dumb enterprise. Shaking out her arms to try and get rid of the “I was just holding rotten wood” feeling, she then stepped back until she was in the full glare of the sun, closing her eyes, tilting her head back, and pretending she was lying on a lounger by the world’s nicest pool. (Her happy place was essentially the Love Island villa; it had all her favorite things -- beautiful morons, lots of alcohol, functional indoor plumbing, and no kids. A bit basic, but she’d made her peace with her own boringness a while ago.)

“Gwen! Let’s go!”

And there went her happy place. She groaned, opening her eyes. David was wrestling his backpack off, trying to simultaneously dig through it and mostly flailing like an idiot.

She sighed, unbuckling the toolbelt around her waist and letting it drop onto the pile of boards. “Remind me why we can’t just block the mouth of this cave off and get on with our very busy day?” she snapped.

“Because there might be something living in there,” he said, tilting his head to the side and crossing his arms -- his bag forgotten at his feet. “We don’t want to trap it inside!”

Even Gwen had to admit she felt a little squeamish about potentially leaving some cute little furry creature to starve to death in the darkness. But that didn’t mean she had to be happy about it. “God, fine. Let’s just get this over with and --”

As she crossed the beach toward David’s makeshift path, her foot landed on a patch of slick algae; her ankle buckled and she collapsed with a yelp, her knee scraping the side of the rock as she went down.

“Fuck,” she hissed, scrambling away from the stupid rocks and assessing the damage. Nothing dire -- her ankle was a little twingey but nothing was sprained or broken, and the scratch on her knee looked worse than it was thanks to the grimey green staining her skin from the algae -- but it was just painful enough to piss her off. “Great start.” She climbed to her feet and brushed herself off. “Super fucking -- what’s the word? Auspicious? Yeah, totally auspicious omen right there.”

“Gwen?” He was watching her anxiously, either because of the blood staining her sock or because she was muttering to herself like a crazy person. He fumbled in his bag and pulled out the cookie tin that housed one of their First Aid kits. “Gee, are you okay? That looked like a rough fall!”

The last thing she needed was David squawking around her like a mother hen. And for some reason, the thought of smoothing one of their cutesy bandaids over her stupid knee and spending the rest of the day looking down at Mikey Mouse’s dumb face (the ripoff bandaids were cheaper than the real Disney ones) irritated her more than just leaving it. “It’s fine,” she said, smearing away the worst of the blood and dirt with the heel of her hand and wiping it off on her already-stained sock. “It’ll stop in a minute anyway.”

He didn’t reply, but his face was like a neon billboard most of the time, and right then it was flashing the words, “I wish you wouldn’t do that, but you’re way too scary in this mood so I’m not going to say anything.” If her cut got infected, she’d be treated to the smuggest “I told you so” in history.

But that was a risk she was willing to take, because stopping and asking him for a band-aid now would be even worse. “Are we going spelunking or what?” she asked, forcing something resembling enthusiasm into her voice. Judging by the strange, slightly horrified look he gave her, she wasn’t pulling it off well, so she dropped the front with relief. “Let’s get it over with already.”

---

The mouth of the cave reminded Gwen of the hole the White Rabbit led Alice through, in that it was small, slippery, and way longer than she’d initially thought.

And that she fell down it.

It was only about ten feet, to be fair, but it was ten feet down a steep incline lined with muck (and one exposed root that she was positive left a bruise on her butt), and the bottom was just a big mud puddle, swarming with buzzing flying bugs. And she landed ass-first into the puddle, after sliding ass-first down into the cave, and in general neither she nor her ass were having a very good expedition so far.

“Be careful,” she called up, frowning at the hole ten feet up and wondering if she could possibly climb back the way she’d come. She didn’t have the survival skills to be a mole person, she just knew it. “It’s really sli --”

“Whoa!” David breezed past her, skidding down the incline with his arms out to the side like a surfer and coming to a graceful stop a few feet away, kicking up a small wave of puddle-water that somehow didn’t get splash back onto him. He turned back to her, beaming, and untied the end of a rope from his belt. “Thanks for the warning, Gwen!” he said, and she realized the rope led back up out of the cave. “Though I wish you’d waited until after I secured the rope to come down here -- but I guess you were just too excited to get adventuring, huh?” There wasn’t a trace of sarcasm in his face and voice.

That fucker.

“How . . .” She gestured at him; between the two of them, he should’ve been the one bleeding and covered in mud! He was the clumsiest person she’d ever met, and here he was looking like a Generic Hiking Magazine cover. “How?”

David didn’t seem to notice her question, looking around the cave with his hands on his hips. “This is even bigger than it looked from the surface,” he said admiringly, nodding to himself. “It looks like it keeps going that way! Here we go!” He took her hand and dragged her toward the back of the cave, each step sending water sloshing against her legs and soaking through her boots.

The mud made an obscene sucking sound as they walked through it, clinging to their boots like quicksand and only letting go reluctantly. It was damp and dark, the anemic yellow light of David’s flashlight flickery and unstable, darting around at a speed that made her feel kind of sick. Once she lifted her hand to brush some hair out of her face and touched something furry that was hopefully moss but probably a bat. And the ground kept sloping down, forcing them to lean back to keep their footing and creating the dizzying illusion that they were making their way deep into the center of the earth.

All in all, zero out of ten on the Camp Campbell Cave Tour, as far as she was concerned.

David, of course, was having a great time. “Isn’t this beautiful? We don’t usually get to experience nature like this, but life exists in so many different forms in the forest, even if it’s not green and sunny! It’s great to get a chance to see a new perspective, don’t you think?”

“Hnnh.” (She realized a few minutes in that he didn’t need encouragement to keep talking, and would carry on whether she was listening or not. Mostly the vaguely-affirmative noises were to make sure her voice muscles didn’t atrophy as they continued their eons-long underground journey.)

“I don’t think I’ve had a chance to explore a cave like this since Jas -- in a good long while! Not since I myself was a Camp Campbell camper.”

“Mmn.”

“You know, I sometimes wish --” He cut himself off with a gasp, the flashlight jerking in his hand before he steadied it. “Wow, a fork! That’s exciting. Which way do you want to check first?”

He had to be kidding. “‘Which way’?” she repeated, snatching the flashlight from him and angling it so they could see each other’s faces. “How about we don’t go wandering into a goddamn maze and get lost with -- oh, let me check --” She pulled her cellphone out of her damp, grimy pocket and waved it around above her head. “-- yep, no signal? Instead let’s just assume there’s nothing living here, because we’ve been walking for almost half an hour and seen literally zero signs of life, and go back to the real world, with sunshine and fresh air and a hundred percent less bat shit. Which fucking way, David? The only way that definitely won’t get us killed: the way back!”

He grinned, shaking his head; normally she thought he had a nice smile, but right then it made her skin crawl. “Now, Gwen, I don’t think you’re really embracing the Camp Campbell spirit of adventure.” He took her wrist and gently tugged her toward the fork. “How about we go left and --”

“Goddamn it, David!” She yanked her hand back, stepping out of his reach. “You’re not even listening toooaaaagh!”

The cave floor had firmed up as they walked, the mud replaced with uneven stone and stagnant pools they had to step or even jump over, and as she moved away she stepped into one of these pools, her foot gliding for half a second on the slimy edge before plunging into the water. The pool was surprisingly deep, freezing groundwater closing in up to her hip -- until she toppled over and skidded several inches down, her entire right side scraping against the rocky wall of the pool. At its deepest point the pool was too narrow for both feet, so Gwen found herself half-crouching in icy black water up to her chest, one leg touching the bottom and the other bent and braced against the wall like a flamingo; her arms were still above the water, holding onto the edge for dear life, and the splash from her fall had soaked her hair, several strands of which had escaped her ponytail and were dangling dripping in front of her face.

For a moment the only sound was her ragged breathing. Then she looked up at David, who was watching her in frozen shock, and jiggled her nearest arm as well as she could without losing her precarious balance. “A hand?”

“Oh!” He hurried over and took both her arms, hauling her out of the water like a ragdoll -- which would’ve been impressive if he hadn’t accidentally dragged her against the wall of the pool pulling her up. When she looked down, the front of her clothes were black with stringy slime. “Are you all right?”

“Peachy,” she snapped, twisting to see how badly she’d hurt herself. The entire outside of her leg was covered in slime as well, and when she wiped it away pain lanced through her like her fingertips were made of sparks. She recovered the flashlight from where it’d landed a few feet away and shone it on herself; her calf was mostly protected by her boots (which were basically ruined now), but from the knee up, her outer thigh was marked by a thick red streak of what looked like road rash, scraped bloody and raw. It stung when she extended or bent her knee, but she’d be able to walk. “Let’s just get the hell out of here and you can board this cave up while I take a nice long shower.”

He frowned. “What? But we haven’t finished exploring yet!”

She opened and shut her mouth a few times, but was struck speechless. “Come again?” she managed after a moment, her voice raspy from disbelief and exhaustion.

David gestured toward the left-hand fork. “What if I went this way and you --”

“Go back to camp? Because that’s the only thing I’m doing right now.” She turned to stomp back the way they came -- and promptly tripped over one of the buckles of her boots, which had come undone sometime between falling in the pool and being pulled out of it; she windmilled her arms desperately, but only served to smack her knuckles against the narrow cave walls before landing face-first on the ground.

She’d barely pushed herself to her knees when David chuckled. “Wow, Gwen, it really hasn’t been your lucky day, has it?”

“That’s IT!” She scrambled to her feet, ignoring the pain singing down her thigh and blooming, deep and throbbing, where her cheekbone had smacked against the floor. She whirled on him, feeling a vindictive sense of satisfaction as his eyes widened and he took a step back. “We are getting the fuck out of here before anything else goes wrong. No, no -- you know what?” she snapped, cutting him off as he opened his mouth to argue, “Shut the goddamn hell up, David, you’re the entire reason we’re in this stupid mess, so I hope you’ve enjoyed reliving your childhood and this stupid quarter-life crisis is completely fucking out of your system, because today is over, okay?! I’m bleeding, and cold, and wet, and I think I touched a bat earlier and any one of those should’ve been enough for us to go back because a good friend wouldn’t have been so self-absorbed to keep dragging their supposed C-B-F-L --” (she clapped for each letter, raising her voice to speak over the echoes each slap of her wet palms made bounce off the walls) “-- deeper into the pits of hell! But you didn’t notice, because you didn’t care, because you were having too damn good a time pretending to be six years old again -- but you know what? You’re a fucking adult, and you wouldn’t know how to be responsible if your fucking LIFE depended on it --”

“Gwen --” he began, eyes darting around with alarm, but she ignored him. Her throat was starting to hurt from yelling, but it felt good, too, the kind of pleasurable burn that came from a killer workout, and goddamn if her voice didn’t deserve a workout right now.

“You are the WORST camp counselor I’ve EVER seen, and the WORST friend I’ve EVER HAD, and I am SO! DONE! Dealing with your complete and utter -- childish -- stupid -- selfish -- BULLSHIT!”

The last word came out as a scream, possibly the loudest she’d ever given, tearing her vocal cords bloody and making her ears ring. As the sound ricocheted around the cave, the walls seeming to shake and groan with the force of it, she slumped her shoulders and dropped her chin, taking a full breath for the first time since before she fell in the water.

And it was a good thing she took that breath, because she had exactly one second before David lunged forward, grabbing her hand with a shout and yanking her toward him.

“Gwen!”

There was a massive crack, and then the sky fell down around them.

---

For a few minutes all she could do was curl up on the ground and cough, the air so thick with dust it felt like a pillow filled with ashes pressed against her face. When it had settled enough that she could inhale without choking, she pushed herself to her knees, ignoring the way both of them shrieked in pain from her half-dozen various falls, and tried to look around.

“David?” she said, rubbing dust out of her eyelashes and tearing up from the sting. The flashlight had gone out, and she was in complete darkness. “David?!”

“Over here.” His voice came from her left, faint and trembling. “The flashlight isn’t working.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured.” She crawled over in his direction, sucking in pained breaths with each movement. “Are you okay?”

There was a slight rustling, very close. “I think I dinged my wrist a little bit,” he said, a weak echo of his usual brightness but still a valiant effort, “but otherwise no worse for the wear!”

Her hand hit canvas, and after a few seconds of sightless probing she realized it was his backpack. “Is there a spare flashlight in here?” she asked, already fumbling with the zipper.

“Front pocket. No -- that’s my front. When I’m wearing it. It’s actually the back pocket.”

Eventually she found it, and the sudden brilliance was almost painful. The first thing the light fell on was their path back.

Or more specifically, not their path back. “Oh my god.”

The way they’d come was completely caved in.

She flicked her light all over the wall of boulders, trying to see a crack that might be a way out, but there was nothing. “Oh no, oh god -- no, no, no . . .”

“Gwen,” David said softly.

She tossed the flashlight to the ground and drew her knees to her chest, putting her head between them and trying to breathe. “Oh my god, we’re gonna die here. We’re trapped and we’re gonna die and it’s my fault, I always thought I’d kill myself but never on accident -- ”

“Gwen,” he snapped, louder and stern like she was a disobedient camper. “That’s not funny.”

She lifted her head to stare at him incredulously, because of course it wasn’t funny, nothing was funny because they were dying. But her eyes landed on his wrist, cradled against his chest with his other arm. It was purplish-brown almost all the way down to his elbow, and starting to swell badly enough that he couldn’t bend it. “Oh my god, David!”

“It’s fine,” he said defensively, pulling it closer and then letting out a little shriek of pain. “I landed on it funny, that’s all.”

“We’ve gotta wrap that up.” She grabbed the flashlight and dug through their backpack until she found the cookie tin, popping it open with one hand and reaching for his wrist with the other. “Here, give me --”

“No, I’m --” He tried to wriggle away, but he was sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him so his mobility was limited.

She grabbed his good arm and scooted closer, balancing the first aid tin on his lap. “Stop being stupid and hold this.”

He acquiesced with a huff, turning his face away as she wrapped the sprain. The only splints they had were for fingers, but she taped a few together and declared it good enough, at least for starving to death in a cave. “I wish we had some ice,” she said once it was done, popping out a couple painkillers and holding them out to him. “Can you swallow these dry?”

“There’s water in the middle pocket,” he said, still not looking at her, and she handed him the water bottle and the pills. After an uncomfortable moment of silence he added, “How’s your leg?”

She shrugged, suddenly tired. “Does it matter?” She pulled out her phone to check again for a signal, but apparently it’d had just as bad a day as her because it was completely dead. Hopefully David would let her look up how to undo water, mud, and impact damage on his phone when they got back to camp. Slumping down next to him with a sigh, she tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and prepared for the sweet release of death.

The sweet release of death was interrupted by a loud metal clattering, and she opened her eyes to see David scooching on his knees to her other side, then trying to pry open the first aid kit one-handed.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to be a good friend,” he muttered, jumping as the lid suddenly popped open. “Lay down on your side, please.”

Gwen lowered herself to the ground, shivering as the cold stone pressed her wet clothes against her skin. A moment later there was a soft thump as he draped a sweatshirt over her like a blanket. “Thanks.” His only response was a quiet huff, the fingers of his good hand deftly cleaning her wounds, and all of the anger building up that day collapsed in on itself. “I’m sorry I said all that stuff.”

He shrugged, and she couldn’t tell if he was deliberately avoiding eye contact or if he was just intently focused on patching her up. (It was more her area of expertise, thanks to half a nursing degree she’d acquired in 2014. Plus he only had 50% of his usual hands.) “Why? You meant it.”

“Hey, take the apology and don’t be a brat about it.” Which was probably the worst way to conclude an apology, but she figured she deserved extra leeway on the grounds that she was buried alive.

Sighing, he sat back on his heels and snagged the gauze. “You’re right, Gwen,” he said, winding it around her knee; she held out her hand and let him position it so he could continue wrapping up her leg. “I should’ve had us turn back sooner. I’m sorry I haven’t been a very good friend to you today.”

“I’m used to it.” He flinched and she realized how that sounded. “I mean, you’re really passionate about stuff. That’s a good thing.”

“And it always ends so well for everyone,” he replied with uncharacteristic sarcasm, gesturing to their surroundings.

She rolled her eyes and waited as he finished, sitting back up. “For what it’s worth,” she said, feeling stupid even as the words left her mouth, “I wouldn’t pick anyone else to die in a cave with.”

David frowned. “Are you saying you want me to die?”

She rolled her eyes. “Okay, I changed my mind. I wanna trade you out for David Boreanaz.”

“You want to spend your last hours on earth being rejected by the guy from Buffy?”

That startled her into laughing, and she pawed at the air with a meow. “Does imminent death always make you this catty?”

“Only when my wrist hurts,” he muttered, digging through the backpack, but a little smile played at the corner of his lips.

Gwen figured if there was any time for an olive branch, this was it. “How about this: if I ever had to spend my last hours being rejected by a guy named David while we died together in a cave, I’m glad it’s you.” It seemed to take him a second to parse that sentence, but she chose to blame it on him being delirious from pain and not because she worded it badly. (She was great at wording things, and there were tens of readers on Ao3 to prove it.)

“What makes you think I’d reject you?”

He said it quickly, absently, and in the moment it took her to absorb what he said he seemed to hear it himself, looking up at her with something like horror in his expression.

“That -- I didn’t -- !”

She tried to muster up an appropriate response and came up short. “Huh?”

“I don’t know why I said that,” he said quickly, holding up his hands like she was brandishing a weapon at him. “It was a joke, I’m sorry.”

“Those two sentences don’t work together.”

“Say, did you know we have three different kinds of granola bars?” He pulled them out of the backpack and waved them like a magic trick. “Which flavor is your favorite?”

There was no way she was letting him get away with that, especially when her waterlogged brain was still struggling to connect the dots. “Were you saying you want me to hit on you?”

“I think I like peanut butter best, but it sure does make you thirsty so it’s not good unless you have something to drink with it!”

“David.” She leaned forward, trying to catch his gaze (and nearly getting hit in the nose with a granola bar as he inelegantly threw it toward her).

“I do enjoy mixed berry, though . . .”

She didn’t know what to do, so she relied on a trope all her favorite romances used and pulled him into a kiss. He squeaked against her mouth, going still and unyielding, but after a moment his mouth softened against hers -- not really kissing her back, but enough of a relaxation to send a shiver through her.

When she pulled back he was staring at her with big eyes, deathly pale and streaked with dust and sweat. (And really, she should’ve known she was screwed every single time he looked like total shit and she was still attracted to him.) “W-hy did you do that?” he asked, his voice wobbling like he was going to cry.

She shrugged, trying not to look like her heart had just dropped into her stomach from that heartbreaking little wobble. “Maybe because I felt like seizing the day, if this is gonna be one of the last ones I get,” she said as lightly as possible. “Or maybe it’s because I’ve wanted to do that for longer than I realized and finally got the balls to go for it.”

(It was the second one, but she didn’t wanna make it too easy for him.)

He swallowed hard, looking down at the ground before hesitatingly, flinchingly meeting her eyes. “But you were so mad at me,” he said, then gestured toward her leg with his good hand. “And I’m the reason you’re hurt. Why would you want . . .”

“I got you back,” Gwen replied. “And then some, so I think we’re pretty even.” He just stared at her, doubt etched into every line of his face, and she wanted to kiss him so she did. And this time he sighed, a little dreamy one she’d never heard before instead of his usual “I’m irritated but trying very hard not to show it” sigh, and forgiving him was instantly, impossibly easy. “But seriously,” she said, pulling away just enough to talk, “you’re gonna have to do some serious groveling if we get out of this alive.”

David’s smile caught the light, warm and sparkling like his eyes. “I can do that!”

“You were a dick today.”

He pressed his lips together, looking torn between smiling and giving her a disapproving frown. “I wasn’t as considerate as I should’ve been.”

“Close enough.” She started to stand up -- might as well make an effort to survive; her monkey ancestors were probably watching her and yelling -- but he put his hand on her arm.

“I really am sorry, Gwen.” He caught his bottom lip between his teeth, worrying it absently as he looked away from her. “I don’t want to be that kind of person. And I don’t want you to have to spend time with that kind of person. So I’ll do my best to be more . . . thoughtful. And observant. Of your needs.”

Less of a dick, you mean. He didn’t quite stick the landing, but it was still one of the sweetest things anyone had ever said to her -- in no small part because she could count on one hand the number of times David had willingly admitted being wrong about something. “I’ll hold you to it,” she said, covering his fingers with her own. “Every time you’re a dick I won’t kiss you, how’s that sound?”

“And when I’m not . . . um, so unpleasant to be around?”

There was only one way to answer that, so she did. “How do you feel about cave sex?” she asked as she broke the kiss, enjoying the way he jumped like she’d poked him with a cattle prod. “Because if my last time is faking an orgasm in the bathroom of a Chipotle -- that’s depressing even for me.”

David climbed to his feet, holding out his hand to help her up. “It’s not going to be,” he said, the sudden bright determination in his voice jarring in their little rock prison. Just as she was trying to figure out how she felt about having injured cave sex with Camp Counselor David at his most camp-counselor-est (surprisingly okay with it), he added, “We’re getting out of here.”

---

It took three hours to find another way out of the cave, according to David’s phone. That was too damn long for Gwen and her abused legs, but he cheerfully reminded her how fortunate they were not to have to stay in there overnight, as well as to have emerged in a part of the forest he recognized, and that things could’ve been much worse if they’d taken the right fork instead of the left.

(He was very proud of himself for having picked the correct path on the first try. He insisted it had to do with wind currents and the slope of the cave floor, but she thought it was just a lucky guess.)

“Thank god,” Gwen said as they approached the shore of Lake Lilac. “I never thought I’d be so happy to see a pile of crappy boards in my entire life.”

David was already heading down the beach when he realized she wasn’t beside him and turned back. “What’re you doing?” he asked, watching her bend down and loop the toolbelt around her waist.

“You go ahead,” she replied, grunting as she hoisted a board across the mouth of the cave. “I plan on never coming back here for the rest of my life, and there’s no way in hell I’m risking any of our brats getting stuck in the hell-cave.”

He returned anyway, and there wasn’t much he could do with only one arm but he helped her as best as he could. And those quiet minutes of everyday, boring camp-counselor duties convinced Gwen that this -- whatever this was -- it was worth trying to make work.

“You do know we’ll have to block off the other entrance, right?”

The voice makes him jump, but a second later he smiles. “Good morning, Gwen!” he calls, splashing back to shore and subtly kicking away the letters. “It’s nice to see you up so early on such an important day!”

His co-counselor doesn’t look like it’s nice to be up, but aside from a baleful glare she shoots at the sunrise she doesn’t respond. She’s still groggy, dressed in her pajamas with her hair a messy tangle of knots that blend the two tones into a single warm burgundy. The sun makes her glow where it hits her face, warm and lit from the inside like a jack-o-lantern . . . only that sounds a lot less pretty than he intended, so he’s relieved that’s one of the thoughts he didn’t share out loud.

David wonders if people enjoy looking at their best friends this much, or if it means something potentially dangerous. The way he always does when this question occurs, he quickly banishes it from his mind. “How are you settling in?” he asks, fully aware of the answer. They share a cabin, after all, and Gwen’s spent enough years at Camp Campbell to have the routine down to a science; within minutes of hopping off the bus QM rented for the summer, she’s mostly unpacked, changed into her counselors’ uniform, and begun a critical sweep of the camp’s supplies and paperwork.

She makes a noncommittal noise, rubbing the sleep from one eye with the heel of her hand and trying to shield herself from the sun with the other. “Are you ready? The stores are gonna be full of families getting shit for the summer -- it’ll be like Black Friday, so we’ve gotta be in and out as soon as the Tradin’ Post opens unless you’re prepared to deck some soccer moms.”

He resists the urge to smile; she might not believe in the power of the beginning-of-summer rituals, but this optimistic plan for their camping supply trip is as much a staple of every summer as David’s sand writing. “Sounds like a swell plan, Gwen.”

“Yeah, whatever,” she mutters, but he catches a half-smile before she turns her back on the lake. “Come on, get dressed and meet me in the Mess Hall. I’ll start inventory.” As he falls into step beside her, she glances over at him, raising her eyebrows. “Morning swim?”

He shrugs, turning to survey the empty campground. “Basically!”

“Sure. Seems like something you’d do.” She dismisses him with a wave of her hand, already fixated on the task at hand. “Just hurry up so we can get out of here. If you think you’re gonna make me do all the hard jobs by myself, I’ve got a guitar with your face written all over it.”

David laughs before he can stop himself. “There it is,” he murmurs, causing her to glance over curiously.

“Huh?”

“Nothing! I’ll meet you in the kitchen. Might as well start by seeing what food we have, right?” As he ducks into the counselor’s cabin, he catches a glimpse of her hair, glinting like copper in the early-morning light, and his heart lifts.

There it is.

Writing the camp’s motto in the sand and water is important to him, a silly little consecration ritual that marks the line between his life outside of Camp Campbell and the endless, magical months of summer. He’s done it ever since he was a junior counselor; it feels like staking a claim on the only perfect place that’s ever existed, like writing his name on the heart of the earth. Even if he technically owns the camp now -- something that felt too bizarre and wonderful to make sense last summer and if anything is only more strange after an entire year -- no amount of signatures or invoices capture the simple power of the words “campe diem” on Lake Lilac.

But for David, the summer doesn’t really begin until Gwen tells him she needs him. Never in those exact words, of course . . . but he’s gotten pretty good at reading between her lines, and she’s never exactly been subtle.

He tightens his bandanna around his neck, smiling at his reflection. Get out there and help your CBFL, David. Campe diem.

The wheels that help spring become summer begin turning.

---

“Okay.” Gwen groans, rolling her shoulders; there are some ominous pops and cracks, but she doesn’t look like she’s dislocated anything so David assumes everything’s fine. “I’ll “Okay. This is okay.” Gwen runs a hand through her hair, grimacing as her fingers get caught in tangles. She’s still in her pajamas, a smear of dirt along her thigh from crawling around the supply shed, but she’s so single-minded David isn’t sure she’s even aware of what she’s wearing. (He makes a quick mental note to remind her to change before they leave, because when she gets hyperfocused like this, it’s easy to see her blasting down the shelves of the Sleepy Peak Tradin’ Post in bare feet and oversized paisley boxer shorts.) “We can’t afford literally anything we need. Just like every summer. This is gonna be a disaster, but that’s okay.”

He puts his hand on her shoulder, figuring now isn’t a good time for a hug. “It’ll be fine,” he tries. He scans over their shopping list and tries to imagine a way they can stretch their budget to cover it all; then he remembers that he doesn’t know what their budget is, because Gwen takes care of that, and feels a faint spike of panic jam itself between his ribs. “Let’s ask Mr. Campbell if --”

“Don’t even think about it, kiddo. The government already cleaned me out.” Mr. Campbell slouches into the room, tugging at the trapdoor in the Mess Hall ceiling that leads to the attic. “Those brothers found every last hiding place I had. Apparently it’s being used to repay my ‘debts to society,’ if you can believe it.”

“I can,” Gwen mutters, gaze darting around the Mess Hall as though hoping a sign saying “Free Money Here” will appear out of the blue. She hurries into the back room, where they’ve managed to convert a closet into something resembling an office.

David’s distracted by something else, though. “Brothers?” he repeats, hurrying to help Mr. Campbell lower the spring-down ladder from the ceiling.

“Yeah, those suits from Washington. You’ve met them a hundred times -- sunglasses, terrible fashion sense. The secret agent guys.”

“Um, sir --” he’s not supposed to call Mr. Campbell “sir” anymore, since he’s technically the boss now, but it’s a surprisingly tough habit to kick, “-- if you mean Agent and Agent Miller . . . they’re not brothers.”

He frowns down at David, frozen halfway up to the attic like he’s scaling a mountain. “Of course they are! Or are you going to tell me it’s a coincidence that they have the same last name?”

David shrugs awkwardly, kind of wishing he hadn’t said anything. “They’re married, sir.”

“Really?” His brows furrow. “And that’s legal here now?” David nods. “Go figure. Well, good for them.”

Gwen bursts back into the Mess Hall with a scrap of paper, snatching her phone off one of the tables. “Agent Miller?” she says after a moment, and her tone abruptly melts into honey. “It’s Gwen Santos! You know, from Camp Campbell? Yeah, it’s great to hear from you, too! How’s the weather over there?”

The rattling sound of the ladder being drawn back up into the attic startles David, making him jump and glance away from the conversation. He frowns up at the closed trapdoor -- he’s pretty sure Mr. Campbell is telling the truth about his stashes of money, but it’d be nice if he at least tried to help -- then crosses over to the safe in the corner. (It’s empty, of course, but he wants to feel like he’s doing something useful.)

Meanwhile, Gwen’s voice still sounds like it’s made of spun sugar: “Things are wonderful over here! We’re taking good care of everything. Actually, that’s part of why I was calling . . . I noticed Ered’s coming back this summer?” A moment of silence, then a bubbly laugh. “Well, we’re certainly excited to have her here! The thing is . . .”

A few minutes later she ends the call, immediately jumping into the air and spiking her phone into the couch. “That’s how it’s done!” she crows, dancing in a circle. “I -- am -- the -- best!” Each word is punctuated by punching the air, and then she twirls around again.

Her eyes land on David as she finishes spinning. It’s like a bucket of water was dumped on her head -- her shoulders slump, her arms fall to her sides, and it even seems like the brilliant violet of her eyes turns duller. 

“Oh. Hey, David.”

He forces a smile, rising to his feet and wincing as his knees crack. “That sounds like good news!” he says, wondering if there’s a way to tell her he doesn’t mind seeing her happy without it making everything awkward and weird.

She brightens a bit, rescuing her phone from where it lodged itself between the couch cushions. “Yeah. Turns out the Millers are really happy with you for taking care of Campbell all year. They’re Venmo-ing the camp some cash. Probably not enough for most of the stuff we need, but we can cut it down to the essentials.”

“That’s amazing!” He doesn’t entirely know what she accomplished, but it sounds encouraging. “Gwen, you’re incredible!”

She shrugs, her cheeks flushing pink. “Whatever,” she mumbles, then raises her voice almost to a shout. “It’s crazy what great things can happen when you’re not breaking the law all the time!”

Mr. Campbell’s voice is muffled by the closed door: “Give it a rest, Gina!”

Gwen rolls her eyes, but her attempt to look annoyed is dampened slightly by the smile that keeps tugging at the corner of her mouth. “What a dick. Come on, David, let’s get out of here.”

When she emerges from the cabin, dressed like a Camp Campbell counselor for the first time this summer, he looks up from his phone with a smile. “Campe diem, Gwen!” he says, giving her the Camp Campbell salute. Her response is just to shake her head, which is about all he expected. “You look great!”

She gives him a strange look as she slides into the driver’s side of the campmobile. “I look like this all the time, David.”

And she looks great all the time, but he knows better than to say that out loud. “Camp Campbell has a Venmo?” he asks instead (he looked it up while she was getting changed).

“Yes, Brother David. It’s one of those boring grown-up things I did while you were playing in the dirt last summer. No need to thank me.”

Well, she said he doesn’t need to thank her, so he chooses not to. That’s just the kind of thing Gwen does, after all, and once again he wonders how they’d get by if she was able to find a better job.

We’d figure it out, he tells himself, looking out the window as the camp falls behind them. But not this summer.

He has one more year of grace, anyway. 

She’s here, and he might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

---

Even though Gwen says she doesn’t have any rituals, there are a few things that they have to do every summer, the day before all the campers arrive. Inventory coupled with a panicked last-minute shopping trip is one of them. Listening to strange music at earth-shaking volumes on the drive to and from town is another.

“Yeah, girl, it's true, I'm into you, but these benzos, they got me feeling loose --”

David’s tempted to cover his ears -- it cannot be good for his eardrums; he didn’t even know the volume knob went this high! -- but if he does that, he might block out Gwen’s voice. There are very few situations where she’s willing to sing with an audience, and the car ride into town is one of those rare occasions.

He sits back, watching her shimmy her shoulders in time to the music, painting the air with the hand not on the steering wheel in strange gestures that are half conducting and half gang signs --

“Why don't you come through, before I Goku -- fuck this white pill and go super xan!”

-- and decides, like he does every year, that this is worth the risk of moderate hearing loss.

As they pull up in front of the store (despite Gwen’s dire warnings, the street is as empty always), she switches the music off. David tries to convince himself the ringing in his ears is all in his head, and that he isn’t going to suddenly wake up deaf. He mostly succeeds.

“Okay, David.” Gwen stops directly in front of him, putting her hands on his shoulders. It suddenly feels like there’s a snake constricting around his chest, and his next breath stutters and doesn’t seem to pull in enough air. She doesn’t notice, narrowing her eyes at him as though he was one of their poorly-behaved campers. “We have a list.” She waves it between their faces for emphasis.

He swallows, nodding. “We do.”

“We’re sticking to the list.” 

David nods, resisting the urge to laugh. “Of course we are,” he says; he hadn’t intended for his remark to sound sarcastic but can’t be entirely disappointed that it does.

“We’re not buying anything unless it’s on this list, got it?”

“Got it, Gwen!”

“Good.” She takes a step back and punches his arm lightly. “Let’s go, CBFL.”

As he follows her into the store, he couldn’t keep from smiling if he tried.

---

“Wasn’t that fun?”

Gwen groans, shoving the last of the bags into the car (David reminds himself yet again to put his reusable shopping bags in the campmobile so they don’t spend another summer gathering dust under his bed) and slamming the door shut. “Swear to god I’m gonna get a leash for you,” she grumbles, putting her forehead on the steering wheel for a moment before starting the car. “I’ll order one from a kink website or something and you’ll only have yourself to blame.”

He doesn’t roll his eyes, but it’s a close thing. “I don’t think that’s necessary . . .”

“Oh, yeah?” She lifts her head to give him a sideways glare. “How many knives did we buy?”

“Two.”

“And how many knives were on the list?”

Okay, she’s made her point. “But Gwen, one of them is specially engineered for whittling!” He digs through the bags until he recovers it, holding it up to her. “I’ve always wanted to try whittling!”

“‘Specially engineered’ is a bullshit term used to sell stuff to idiots, David. And the other one . . .”

“Is . . . well . . .” Okay, so he doesn’t have an exact use for it yet. But he likes being prepared, and it’s important to have tools on-hand. “The box says you could shave with it! Isn’t that cool?”

She taps on the steering wheel impatiently. “Are you planning on shaving with it?” she asks, deadpan.

“No.” But he could.

Gwen snorts, starting the car. “Well, you’re gonna have to explain to the campers why we’re using the same old watered-down paint as last year.” She pulls an imitation of him that’s disturbingly accurate. “‘Golly gee, sorry about that, kids! But look at this cool knife I got instead!’”

That hardly seems fair, but he doesn’t have a good comeback. Knives aren’t cheap, it’s true, and he hates the thought that the camp will suffer because of him. “I mean, when you put it like that . . .” he mutters, looking out the window to avoid her accusing gaze.

There’s a moment of silence. Then her arm lands heavily around his shoulders, pulling him into a sudden half-hug. By the time he’s registered what’s happening, she’s taken her arm back and gently shoved him back to his side of the car. “It’s fine, David,” she says with a sigh, her face slightly pink. “I didn’t have to buy Nights with the Wolf Queen, either.”

He doesn’t point out that a grocery-store paperback is hardly as much of an expense as two wilderness knives, mostly because he doesn’t want her to realize it herself. So he takes the olive branch and smiles at her before reaching to the dashboard and turning the music back on.

Noise explodes through the car, making both of them jump even though they knew it was going to happen. Gwen’s surprise immediately dissolves into delight, and even though she doesn’t thank him outright, she bobs her head and drums on the steering wheel to the beat, and that feels like thanks enough.

“Robbing banks, knock it off! Not saying thanks, knock it off!”

David perks up, tilting his head to hear better (not that he needs to, since the music is currently drilling its way into his skull). “Hey, I like this one!” he says. Why didn’t they start with this song?

Gwen glances at him for a second before returning her eyes to the road, clearly trying not to smile. “Would it even matter if I tell you this is sarcastic?”

It wouldn’t, and they both know it.

---

David takes a step back, holding up his phone and fiddling with the zoom. This is another important part of beginning the season; the supply room will never be this full or tidy for the rest of the summer, and their hard work deserves to be documented before it all gets undone. “Looks perfect!” 

So perfect, in fact, that it needs to be uploaded to Instagram. Right now!

“Yeah?” Gwen huffs, slumping against a pile of unmade tents nearly as tall as they are. She must’ve dragged it out of the shed while he was sharing his photo. “I’m so glad you’re doing the important stuff while I slack off.”

If that’s sarcasm, he chooses to ignore it. “Don’t say that! You’ve done a great job today!” She groans loudly -- so it was sarcasm, good to know -- but takes the other end of the tarp holding all the tents and helps him drag it out to the field. The sun hovers just above the trees, golden-yellow and almost thick enough to touch, and his stomach grumbles as they survey the campgrounds. “Do you want to have dinner first, or . . .”

“Fuck that.” She grabs a tent and slings it over her shoulder. Her face and neck glisten with sweat, and she impatiently brushes the strands of hair that’ve escaped her ponytail out of her face. She looks unkempt and beautiful, like a lumberjack, or a viking. “If I sit down, I won’t be able to get back up. Let’s just finish this shit.”

Her language leaves a little to be desired, but her logic is sound. The tents are meant to be put up by and for children, so they aren’t too difficult to set up, but most of them have taken damage between the last summer and storage, so the process keeps stalling to fix broken rods and quick-sew patches over holes in the fabric (David’s job, mostly; Gwen isn’t much of a seamstress). The air is a gloomy indigo by the time they finish, cooling down just enough to make their sweat-damp clothes miserable. “Why don’t you take the first shower?” he offers as they walk back. “I’ll start dinner.”

“My hero,” she quips, veering off toward the counselors’ cabin. David shrugs off his discomfort and exhaustion, forcing a skip into his step as he heads into the Mess Hall.

This is their final ritual before the campers arrive tomorrow, and he wants everything to be perfect.

---

“Okay.” Gwen groans, rolling her shoulders; there are some ominous pops and cracks, but she doesn’t look like she’s dislocated anything so David assumes everything’s fine. “I’ll admit, this is exactly what I needed.”

“Hmm?” He cups his free hand around his ear, gently twirling his stick over the fire. As much as he wants to look over at Gwen, he has to keep his attention on roasting his hot dog. The last thing he wants is to deal with another exploded dinner. “I’m sorry, what was that?”

She snorts and throws a marshmallow at his head. “Oh, fuck off.”

“No, I’m just not sure I heard you correctly! Because it sounded like maybe you were saying you were wrong about something --”

“Very cute,” she mutters, rolling her eyes.

“-- and that, consequently, I was right!” He grins at her, removing his (cooked to perfection) hot dog from the fire and transferring it to a bun.

“Sounds like you’re saying you wanna be hit in the face with a flaming hot dog, Greenwood.”

He leans forward and gently takes the stick from her hand, saving her food from its fiery doom. “I just think it’s swell that you’re willing to admit when you’re wrong, Gwen.”

“Give that back! It’s not done cooking.”

“It’s overcooking!”

“And that’s how I like it!” She snatches back her stick and holds it to the center of the flames, shooting him a defiant glare. A moment later there’s a loud pop; they throw themselves to the ground to avoid the burning shrapnel of the exploded hot dog, which light up the air like fireworks before sizzling harmlessly out in the dirt.

They both sit up, brushing themselves off, and take their seats around the campfire again. David waits a minute before saying, “This might be another good opportunity to practice owning up to your mistakes.”

She shoves his shoulder, laughing. “Let’s see you do it better.”

He does, knowing and not caring that she’s gotten him to do all the work for her. The fire is a lovely contrast to the chilly night, and he feels warm and glowing all over.

After dinner they crowd themselves into one of the campers’ tents, rolling out sleeping bags on the floor next to the child-sized cots. Gwen sprawls out across hers, stretching like a cat. “Hell of a last supper.”

He knows what she means, but he isn’t comfortable sharing her dread over three months of meals cooked by the Quartermaster. At least, not out loud. Instead he crawls back outside, recovering the two steaming mugs he pilfered from the Mess Hall and bringing them into the tent. “Here you go!”

She sits up and takes the hot chocolate, curling both hands around it despite the heat. “Well, since I’m apparently on a roll here,” she says, taking a sip and sighing happily, “I guess I have to admit that this is a really good way to start the summer.”

David quickly takes a drink as well, hiding his smile behind the mug. “So I was right about that as well?”

“Okay, don’t milk it,” she snaps, but there’s no real malice in her voice. She leans back against one of the cots, wincing at the screech of metal shifting, and tilts her head up to the ceiling, as though she can see through the fabric to the stars beyond. “I had a lot of fun today,” she says after a moment. Setting her drink to the side, she tugs the elastic out of her ponytail; in the white light of their lantern, with her hair falling in loose, fluffy waves down to her shoulders, she looks soft and almost ethereal, like a princess in a fairy tale. “Thanks, David.”

She meets his eyes, the light turning them a silvery lavender, and looking at her is suddenly too much so he turns his attention to his drink. “No problem, CBFL,” he says, taking a deep breath and wishing his heart wasn’t beating so fast. He opens his mouth to say something else but it turns out there’s nothing else he has to say so he shuts it again, feeling stupid.

For a few minutes they’re quiet, drinking their hot chocolate in companionable silence. At least, David hopes it’s companionable -- he’s not exactly sure how to measure companionableness, but it seems friendly enough so he’s going to do his best not to overthink it. That’s what Gwen would tell him, he knows, and she has a degree in psychology so she definitely knows what she’s talking about more than he does.

Thank goodness he’s not talking out loud; it’s embarrassing enough that he’s babbling in his own mind . . . oh no, what if he has been talking out loud this entire time? What has he said?!

“David?” His gaze snaps up to her, but she doesn’t look annoyed or creeped out so he probably hasn’t been saying anything too weird, at least, and probably hasn’t been talking out loud at all so that’s good but her expression is alarmingly serious and she hasn’t said anything else and it’s been at least ten seconds that they’ve just been looking at each other but he’s not sure what she wants so -- “Let me know if I’m reading this wrong.”

“Reading?” he manages weakly. He feels strangely disconnected from his body as he watches her set her mug aside and cross the small space to kneel in front of him. Her hand alights on his shoulder, fluttery and weightless as a hummingbird, and she seems a little close and a lot beautiful and if he’s not extremely careful she’s going to figure out all the things he’s put so much work into not letting her figure out -- try not to feel at all, but it’s hard to keep his composure and not look at her mouth when it’s so close and there’s no camp activities or pre-camp activities or post-camp activities to distract them both with, just quiet and breathing and soft white lantern light and her hand on his shoulder, and he’s always considered himself able to multitask pretty well but this feels like too much so he squeezes his eyes shut . . .

The kiss takes him entirely by surprise. One moment he’s bracing himself for a confrontation, questions he doesn’t know how to answer, and the next moment is filled with Gwen -- her lips soft and slightly chapped against his and her fingers tightening on his shoulder and the coconutty smell of her shampoo all around him and he’s a little worried that he’s having a heart attack but gosh, jeez, fuck it, he kisses her back.

And she doesn’t shove him away or demand to know what in the name of fun he thinks he’s doing; she lets out a weak little huff of air that lands somewhere between a laugh and a sigh, her mouth opens just slightly, and she shifts forward, her arms twining over his shoulders. One hand slides into his hair, the gentle scrape of her fingernails shivering from his scalp down his spine, and it occurs to him that he can touch her as well, that he’s not only apparently allowed but actually probably should. Slowly, both so she has plenty of him to stop him and in a futile attempt to stop his fingers from shaking, he lifts his hand to her neck, gingerly cupping around the base of her head and running his thumb along the space behind her ear. She gasps against his lips, but she doesn’t pull away so he assumes it’s a good gasp and repeats the motion, and when her tongue flicks against his bottom lip like a question he opens his mouth, because he’s never been very good at saying no to her for anything and he sure as sugar has no intention of starting now.

David’s not sure how much time passes before she pulls back, but even though he feels cold and bereft everywhere they’re no longer touching it’s probably for the best, because he doesn’t realize how lightheaded he is until he opens his eyes and has to wait for the world to shudder into place. She sits on her heels, biting her lower lip; he lets his hand fall away from her, and in a second they’re disconnected, apart.

“Well.” She chuckles weakly, tucking her hair behind her ears. “That was . . .”

A mistake, his brain finishes, and his stomach drops in miserable anticipation.

In fact, he’s so prepared for those devastating words that he almost misses what she actually says: “unexpected, huh?”

It takes him a moment to register that, to recalibrate, so his response is a bit too late, just a little bit awkward: “I -- definitely didn’t see it coming.”

“That’s because your eyes were closed,” she says with a grimace, like she regrets the lame joke even before she’s finished saying it; but it melts so seamlessly into a smile, small and self-conscious and unexpected and perfect, that he forgets what words are, let alone that he’s supposed to say some to continue the conversation.

With a nervous glance at him, Gwen scuttles back to her side of the tent, picking up her mug of hot chocolate. 

“Sorry, was that totally inappropriate?” she asks, responding before he can. “I mean, of course it was, you’re technically my boss, I don’t know what -- I just thought I was -- there were some signals -- weren’t there? Was that . . . okay?”

The enormous stupidity of the question finally surprises him into speaking. “Okay? That was . . .” the best thing that’s ever happened in my life. “Very. Okay -- it was completely okay. Better than okay, it was . . . you know, good. Nice. I’m going to stop talking now.”

Her smile widens, visible even as she covers her mouth with one hand. “Really?” she says, suddenly like she’s blurting it out. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” He’s so sure that he shuffles forward on his knees, most likely looking like a total idiot, until he’s in front of her again. He doesn’t have the courage to kiss her so he takes one of her hands, turning it over and examining how beautiful it is, how lovely it looks contrasted with his pale fingers. He strokes the backs of her knuckles, marveling at how soft her skin is even after a day of hard work, and tries to remember how to breathe.

Gwen puts her other hand under his chin, forcing him to look up, and kisses him again.

It’s a bit less gentle than the first time, both her mouth and her fingers hot and insistent as they press against him, and he loses his balance, falling onto his back with a small yelp of surprise. She follows him down without breaking the kiss, lowering herself to her elbows and covering his body with hers. He’s distantly aware of a dull ceramic clunk, but he doesn’t really take notice of what it means until a few moments later, when something lukewarm and wet seeps into the hem of his pajama pants.

“Shit!” She rolls off of him, righting the mug of no-longer-hot chocolate and scrambling for the napkins left over from dinner. “Fuck, it’s everywhere.”

He tugs her sleeping bag away from the spill, but it’s already soaked. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to knock it over!”

She shakes her head, sitting back and surveying the damage. “No, I think I did it. It’s fine, the dirt’ll soak it up. But it’s gonna bring ants, so we’re going to have to give this tent to the campers we hate the most. I vote Max.”

“Gwen!” He can’t quite make that sound as disapproving as he should. He scoops up the wet napkins and drags her wet sleeping bag outside. “I’ll go put this in the wash right now.”

She glances at her watch, then back up at him. “It’s almost midnight, David. I’m not staying up until that’s clean, it’ll take all night.”

He knows she’s right -- the machine they rely on for the camp’s laundry is the same one they’ve had since he was a junior counselor, and runs extremely slowly -- and disappointment makes his shoulders slump. “We can sleep in the cabin, then. That’s no problem.”

When he returns from the laundry, yawning, Gwen isn’t in the counselors’ cabin like he expected. She’s not by the dying embers of the campfire, or in the tent. The sleeping bag, it turns out, isn’t in there either, nor are the lantern and the mugs of hot chocolate. He opens his mouth to whisper-call her name (it’s spooky with the fire out) --

“David!”

He jumps, covering his mouth to muffle a noise that was definitely not a scream, and turns to see Gwen leaning out of one of the other campers’ tents, half-hidden by shadows. She gestures him over and disappears back into the tent.

Shaking off his alarm, he ducks inside to see Gwen bundled up in the sleeping bag on the ground, with the other supplies well out of reach. “Oh,” he says, not sure exactly what he’s looking at. “Um, should I . . . sleep on one of the cots?” It’d be uncomfortable, but he’d rather shiver through a night curled up on a too-small bed than go back to the cabin alone.

She rolls her eyes at him and wriggles to the side, unzipping the bag halfway. “Get in before you let all the warm out.”

Oh. His face flushes hot and he has to look down at his feet for a moment to compose himself.

Well, he’s hardly going to refuse, is he?

It’s a bit of a close fit, but he manages to slide in alongside her. She turns onto her side, slinging one arm over his waist and resting her cheek on his shoulder. “Is this okay?” she mumbles, already sounding like she’s halfway to falling asleep.

He has to swallow twice before he can answer. “Y-yes. This is fine.” He can already tell that it’ll get unbearably warm soon -- Gwen’s pressed against his side and radiating heat like a furnace -- but her weight on his chest is solid and comforting and he knows he won’t be moving an inch until the sun rises, not unless she tells him to.

She’s quiet for long enough that he thinks she’s fallen asleep.

“Sorry.”

It’s so soft he freezes in the darkness, trying to figure out if that was his imagination or not. When she lifts her head, nothing more than a black vaguely-Gwen-shaped blob, he recovers and says, “Why?”

“I know this whole pre-summer hot chocolate thing is really important to you. It kinda sucks that I ruined it.”

“You didn’t ruin anything!” He sits up on his elbows, tentatively reaching out to stroke her hair. His fingertips brush against her forehead and she ducks slightly, letting him pet her hair without poking an eye out. “I know it hasn’t exactly started yet,” he says, flopping back down so she can rest her head on his shoulder again, “but I think this might be the best summer ever.”

“You say that every summer.”

He smiles up at nothing. “And I mean it every summer.”

There’s silence for a moment, then he feels her press a light kiss against his neck. “Call me optimistic, but you might be onto something this year, anyway.”

“Wow,” he says, blowing out a huff of air. “Admitting I’m right three times in one day. I hope it doesn’t keep up like this or I’ll get a swelled head!”

He doesn’t have to see her face to know she’s glaring at him, and that small knowledge makes him indescribably happy. “No danger of that happening.”

“I know.” It’s one of his favorite things about her.

Her breathing evens out as she falls asleep, soft and slightly nasal. It’s another sound he associates with his time spent at Camp Campbell, although never so close, never with her hair tickling his cheek and her hand splayed over his heart like she’s protecting it. He’s used to letting her breathing lull him to sleep from across the room -- but he thinks he could get used to this, if he has the chance.

(He’d like the chance to get used to this.)

David closes his eyes and enjoys the last moments of peace they have, before the kids arrive and the camp explodes into a delightful frenzy of sound and chaos.