That gave me the clear all next week to do whatever I wanted without accidentally having to have that awkward shuffle while he tried his best to avoid eye contact with me as much as possible and I tried to not grab him by the back of the shirt and haul him to the nearest secluded corner to shake the truth out of him.
Neither of us would get what we needed out of a confrontation like that, so things were best left as they were for now until I could actually cool the anger inside of me.
Perhaps by the end of this program, I’d be ready to have a civil conversation with him, but for now, I needed to avoid him at all costs.
Or else I was likely to do something way more stupid than I wanted to. The man deserved to run this camp in peace and without me barking up his tree demanding answers he probably didn’t even have.
Avoid. Forget about it. Move on.
That was what needed to happen.
That was what I needed to keep reminding myself.
CHAPTER 14
Blake
Two and a half days.
For two entire days, I’d avoided the main camp like the plague and only took the back routes to get to and from where I needed to go.
Two days of jumping at every person walking by, every call that came over the radio, and every single tall, tanned man with reddish brown hair that I happened to see out of the corner of my eye that soon turned out to be just another stranger.
God, I was losing my fucking mind.
I was stupid to think this thing was never going to affect me. That I could fool around with Marlow and purge myself from the desperation to have him and work it out of my system like a bad cold, never to be infected again.
I was so wrong. So dead fucking wrong it was painful.
Waking up in his bed, tucked against his side like I was a long time lover was the most unnerving situation I’d ever woken up in and had freaked me out into high-tailing it the fuck out of there the second I could.
I was well aware of how much of a coward I was, particularly when Marlow had done nothing wrong and it was allme.
Leaving him without an explanation was probably the only way to go, though, considering all I had in terms of explaining myself was ‘I’m fucked up in the head’.
There was no good reason for me to feel some sort of attachment to him now that we’d fooled around. We were dating and we certainly weren’t making anything exclusive. He was a flirtatious playboy at heart and I was a workaholic loner who was only supposed to be focusing on the rest of the camp’s season and not letting himself get tangled up in a fucking torrid love affair.
Marlow and I were in two completely different classes of life. Not compatible in the slightest and with no way to actually workout, even if there was actually some semblance of a budding relationship between us.
I was never leaving Wakefield and he was going back to Ellington Heights soon to live among the ritzy upper class he’d grown up with.
And that was that.
Getting upset about it was stupid. It wasn’t worth my time.
No matter how often I caught my attention drifting out the windows of my office and down to the camp below looking for a familiar head of hair, or found my hand wandering over to the walkie settled on its cradle on my desk to check in on Marlow’s assigned group for the day, I quickly stopped myself from escalating any further.
I had a full day before my youth groups were here and I’d be swamped with making sure they were being kept from the adult section of the property as well as behaving amongst themselves. This was going to be the first time I had so many kids staying on the property and so far, all was going according to plan.
Hopefully, it stayed that way.
My walkie’s shrill alert sound had me jumping a mile off my chair.
“Blake, can you come down to registration?”Talos’s voice came through the speaker of the communication device.
Wasn’t he supposed to be with Marlow’s group again today?
Anxiety hit me instantly. There was no way another white water rafting incident was occurring so soon after the first one. Marlow seemed to be a magnet for getting into interesting situations, and so far, he’d made it out alive and without a single scratch.
