“Are we late?” asked Marston.
“No, you’re just in time,” said Gabe. “We were having trouble with the wood being a little damp, but evidently we have enough pyromaniacs around to overcome that little issue.”
He smiled at his own humor, then gestured at the pile of sticks and metal skewers laid close by two bags of marshmallows, a box of graham crackers, and enough chocolate bars to cause cavities just by looking at them.
Marston walked up to the fire with a general wave at everybody, then went to sit down in one of the Adirondack chairs on the far side of the fire.
There was another chair, equidistant on the opposite side of the cheery flames, and he’d totally expected that either Kell would sit there, or stand with the others. Instead, as Royce handed Marston a skewer, Kell was right there, settling cross-legged next to the chair where Marston was.
As Royce handed him a skewer, Kell looked up and thanked him, then looked up at Marston with wide eyes.
“This is just like summer camp,” he said.
“You ever been?” asked Marston, idly taking a packet of graham crackers and chocolate bars that Royce was handing around, placing them on the flat arm of his chair.
“Sure,” said Kell, so utterly confident in the memory, that his voice was strong, his shoulders back, such a contrast to everything else he’d said and done all week. “Every summer since I was ten up till the time I left home,” he said. “We had horseback riding, archery, swimming.” He gestured at the bonfire, his face aglow in the golden light, his eyes shining like green jewels. “This.”
The memories seemed like they were good ones, though it occurred to Marston that a kid lucky enough to go to summer camp every year was also a kid who’d probably had a pretty good home life.
Which begged the question: why had he left and taken on the rigors of being on his own at such a young age? Only Gabe knew for sure, as Gabe had Kell’s file.
To ask Kell to dig so hard into his past would probably be out of line, so Marston focused on roasting two marshmallows at the same time, two because he was a pig about it, and two because that meant the chocolate would melt faster, which was his entire goal.
He liked his marshmallows to be singed to a dark golden brown, crisp on the edges but not burnt, a fact he’d learned through trial and error when he’d worked the previous summer at the guest ranch just up the hill. And he didn’t regret following Gabe into the valley to work with parolees, no sir. Not when there were nights like this to enjoy.
By the time his marshmallows were roasted just right, he hurried to assemble his s’more with the exact right amount of chocolate till the graham cracker sandwich was bursting.
But then he saw that Kell’s single marshmallow was burnt to a sad crisp, mangled and black and sliding down his skewer.
“Sad,” Marston said with a private little laugh to himself. Then he broke his s’more in half and handed it to Kell. Who took it with an expression on his face as if Marston had handed him a bar of gold. “If you want to get anywhere in this world, kid,” he said, putting on an accent that was meant to echo the grizzly old miner character in just about every western movie ever. “You need to learn how to roast a marshmallow.”
Kell laughed, and some of the men around the campfire chuckled, and the evening felt friendlier than it had even moments ago, the highlight of which was watching Kell demolish his half of a s’more with great relish.
A bit of silence fell around the campfire as they all inhaled their s’mores. Marston quickly roasted another pair of marshmallows and shared his s’more with Kell. Who smiled up at Marston as he licked a dark smear of chocolate from his lower lip, and Marston looked the other way on instinct.
Someone, Jonah maybe, threw another log on the fire and argued good-naturedly with Royce as to whether or not the placement of the log would affect the draw of oxygen, and if indeed they wanted the fire to burst skyward and block the shine of the stars coming down from the night sky.
Eventually, they put another smaller log on the fire, and arranged it so the flames flickered halfway up, gold and blue and orange, warming Marston’s knees and his hands when he held them out. Summer days might be warm, but in Wyoming, at this altitude, it got cold mighty fast when the sun went down.
“You warm enough, Kell?” he asked, tucking his chin to his chest, speaking only to Kell. Kell nodded, shrugging his jacket forward so it covered him entirely, and then he tucked his chin to his chest, in echo of Marston. His bright eyed smile was for Marston alone, and seemed, for the first time since his arrival, well pleased and content. And if that wasn’t the best accomplishment, Marston didn’t know what was.
Gabe pulled out his book of ghost stories, and they all settled in while he told a spooky tale about a couple who were driving on a dirt road and got stuck in the mud, and who took shelter in a nearby abandoned cabin, only to find there was an ax murderer inside.
It was eerie more than scary, then Gabe followed by telling from memory the one about the weeping woman, which Marston had heard before, last season, but which never failed to make a shiver crawl across his skin.
Next to him, Kell scooted closer until he was sitting right up against Marston’s knees, his back plastered against the front of the Adirondack chair. He was so close Marston could have placed his palm on the top of Kell’s dark head, and he imagined that, freshly washed, Kell’s hair would be silky and cool between his fingers.
Gabe launched into another ghost story, this one about a Native American myth where a woman could shift into a deer, and who lived in forestsLike the one we are in right now, Gabe intoned, his voice suitably low,who lures promiscuous men into the woods and then stamp them to death with her hooves.
As the story continued, in a perfectly creepy way, Kell looked back at Marston, the profile of his face white against the darkness beyond, tinged with gold from the fire. It was as if he was checking in. To share the scariness, to make sure it was okay that he was sitting so close, close enough that the warmth of his body through his denim jacket was soaking into Marston’s knee.
Marston nodded with a jerk of his chin, letting a sudden-held breath go as Kell looked away, his gaze focused across the fire at Gabe, who’d raised his arms as the Deer Woman would just before trampling her victims to death.
Kell shifted, his arm looping around the back of Marston’s calf, like he was propping himself up on his hands for a second before settling back down again. Only the arm didn’t go away. It stayed where it was like a half caress, half-confident gesture of trust and camaraderie. Which wasn’t something that usually happened to Marston.
He just about froze, not sure if he wanted to twitch his leg to signal Kell to move away, or to just, quite simply, let Kell be. Let the sensations be, just as they were, a ribbon of warmth on his leg, his heart expanding to gather to itself just how much trust seemed to be in that gesture.
Maybe Kell didn’t know the effect the small weight of his arm was having, or maybe Marston was blowing this all out of proportion. But he was just about gutted when Gabe pressed his hands together, a signal that the evening was over.
