“You insult me, sir. I don’t use my telescope like some peeping Tom.” Usually.
“And I’m supposed to take your word on that? For all I know, you’ve already secretly photographed me with your spy lens,” he says near my lips. “Should I be worried?”
“From what I saw, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“You shock me, miss. Have you been watching me do bad things in my room?”
“You always shut the blinds. Spoilsport.”
He chuckles in that deep voice of his, and the sound vibrates through his chest and into mine. “Zorie?”
“Yes?”
“God, I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too.”
“I’m going to accidentally kiss you now.”
“Okay.”
Softly, slowly, his lips graze over mine. His mouth is soft, and his hand is roaming up my back. I exhale a shaky breath, and he kisses me:
Once, briefly.
Warmth flickers in my chest.
A second time, longer.
Melting heat, uncurling low in my belly.
Three times, and . . .
I’m lost.
Drowning in him. Nothing but goose bumps and buzzing endorphins and pleasure rushing over my skin. Nothing but his mouth, connecting us, and my fingertips slipping up his shirt to dance over the hard planes of his back. Nothing but his arms wrapped around me like a warm blanket.
Nothing but us and the stars above.
It’s perfect. As though we’ve been doing this for years. As if he knows exactly how to make me shiver, and I know exactly how to make him groan. We’re brave explorers. The best explorers. Lewis and Clark. Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake. Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride.
Zorie and Lennon.
We are so good at this.
And before I know it, we’re rolling around, a tangle of arms and legs, half on the nylon rainfly, half in the night grass. Like we used to do, back during the Great Experiment. My glasses are somewhere, and his hand is up my shirt, and he’s saying all these insanely shocking and intimate things he wants to do to me, which should be making my ears turn pink, but right now it all sounds like poetry. And my fingers are headed for his belt buckle, and—
A scream.
Not me. And not Lennon. It’s in the woods.
It sounds like a woman. In trouble.
22
* * *
Another scream follows. It’s from a different location. An answering scream.
Not a human scream. An animal?
“What the shit is that?” I whisper, hand stilling on the hard muscles of his bare stomach. Someone’s lifted up his shirt in a completely indecent manner. Oh, that was me.
“It’s fine. Just a little mountain lion. No danger,” Lennon whispers, guiding my hand lower.
Oh.
Wow.
He’s definitely excited about the mountain lion.
This makes me extra excited in return.
Wait. Mountain lion?
“Mountain lion?” I whisper hotly.
“Caterwauling. Probably trying to find a mate,” Lennon confirms in a drugged voice. “God, your hand feels good.”
“Are we about to get attacked?” My voice sounds drugged too. I know I should move my hand away from his jeans, but I’m having trouble relaying the message to my fingers, which really want to linger and continue with exploration. My body is saying: Ahoy! I sailed on a deserted sea for months and have finally spotted land. Fertile land. Land better than I remembered. No way am I turning this ship around now.
“What?” he whispers.
“Did I say that out loud?”
“Is this some dirty pirate routine? Because I’ve really got a thing for Anne Bonny.”
Another scream rips through the night air.
“Jesus!” I say, heart racing, and not in the good way. “That sounds like a human being.”
“It also sounds really, really close,” he says, voice sobering up. “As much as I would like you to never, ever, ever, ever stop . . . I think we should—”
More screaming. Okay, talk about a bucket of ice water. I’m genuinely scared now, imagining something jumping out of the darkness and clawing my face to shreds. Nature is a horror movie. And we’re out here in the middle of a field, being stalked by killer animals.
I panic, unable to find my glasses or my headlamp, but Lennon spots them. We can’t gather up our stuff fast enough. Then we’re jogging back up the hill as the horny wildcats scream behind our backs.
By the time we get up to the camp, several other campers are standing around in long underwear, warily listening to the caterwauling. All eyes turn to us, and—terrific—I’m flushing like a guilty person. Well, technically, I am guilty, but now I’m also the camp hussy, so yay?
Lennon, on the other hand, acts calm and collected, breezily talking to the other campers as he lugs the rainfly around, reporting that, yes, it’s probably two mountain lions down in the tree line at the bottom of the hill, but no, they likely won’t come up here. Someone else, a middle-aged man with a Jamaican accent who introduces himself as Gordon, says he’s encountered several mountain lions in this park over the years, and agrees with Lennon. He’s telling other campers to make sure their kids aren’t wandering around alone, and to be cautious.
Since the camp ranger has left for the night, several people, including Lennon, volunteer to keep an eye out for a little while. And after we get our stuff put away, he digs out an extra camp light from his pack—another one of those palm-size ones—and puts that on our picnic table.
For a while, the camp is buzzing with murmured conversations, and a few campsites are lighting fires in their pits. We eat some of Lennon’s M&M stash in a late-night anxiety binge, and when I’m on my second handful, his eyes go big.
“Oh, shit.”
“What?” I say, frantically looking around for a wildcat.
“No, no,” he says, turning me back around. “Hives.”
I look down where he’s gently tugging down the collar of my T-shirt. Pink welts all over my neck and chest. I pull up my shirt. They’re on my stomach and arms, too.
My first thought is: I’m somehow now allergic to Lennon. And of course the universe would punish me for all that rolling around in the proverbial hay with him. Camp hussy, after all. I’m cursed. But Lennon’s analysis is slightly less paranoid.
“All the long grass on the hill. Whatever kind it is, your hives don’t like it.” He inspects my body and asks me if I’m having trouble breathing. I’m not. No loss of vision. No throat swelling up. None of the urgent 911 symptoms.
“You have an EpiPen?” he asks.
“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s that bad. This has happened before, remember?”
“That day we were hunting for metal out by the abandoned warehouse,” he murmurs.
We were fourteen, and someone had given his dad a used metal detector, which he’d passed along to Lennon. We were so positive we were going to get rich, finding hidden pirate gold. Our booty ended up being one vintage metal name tag that looked like it belonged to a waitress, an old quarter with a hole drilled in the middle, and a bent-up veterinarian syringe. All worthless. Lennon kept the name tag—the engraved name on it was “Dorothy”—and I kept the quarter.
Oh yeah, and I developed a superfast case of hives from overgrown dandelions.
“What about Benadryl?” he asks.
I nod. “Got plenty of that.”