“Oh yeah. I can’t wait to get these bad boys developed.” Pulling out the disposable from my pocket, I sat down next to her rock and leaned back, getting her in the shot before snapping a picture. “Gotta get some keepsakes for my scrapbook.”
“Oh, yeah! That’s so right.” She grabbed hers from her lap, turning it to me. “Say cheese!”
I threw up a peace sign, grinning wide enough to make my cheeks hurt. “Cheese!”
Her flash went off, and then she lowered it. “Excellent. Say, Marlow, we should totally exchange numbers when we get back to base camp. In case you want a copy of any of my photos for your scrapbook.”
“I’ll do you one better.” Shoving my hand into my pocket, I fished out my phone and turned it on. “Give me your number and I’ll text you. That way in case I die on the way back, you’ll have a space to send things to me in the afterlife.”
Her brow shot up. “Do ghosts have access to their texts in the afterlife?”
“Guess we’ll find out.”
I hardly slept at all,too excited for lunchtime to roll around and for Blake to join us up on the summit.
There wasn’t exactly much I wanted to show him up here that he hadn’t already seen a million times. Nevertheless, that wasn’t going to stop me from putting on my best tour guide persona and doing it anyway.
Thinking about being able to bask in his attention was substituting what little energy I’d gotten from my restless sleep. We weren’t going to be doing much hiking today outside of traveling down to some of the lower shelves on the mountain face for better vantage points, so I wasn’t in danger of my low energy levels affecting me too badly.
Plus, bothering Talos about the time every nine minutes was the only other thing keeping me going at the moment. “Hey, what’s the time again?”
His shoulders rolled back slowly, a gesture I was becoming intimately familiar with as his way of trying to mitigate whatever agitation was currently trying to make its way to the surface over his very carefully crafted facade of indifference.
Funny how it was so easy to rile him. “Like I said thelasttime you asked, it’s not even eleven yet.”
“Right, right. But how closearewe to eleven? Actually, how close are we to say... one o’clock?”
He slowly looked up from his notebook full of detailed records he’d been keeping the entire way up here. Line by line in very fine and straight-aligned print were notes about all of us and how we were doing—most likely to report back to Blake once we got back.
I had half a mind to tell him not to bother since the man of the hour would be here—hopefully—soon. Then again, I was trying not to assume Talos had overheard our conversation on the radio and was choosing to believe he was just as ignorant as the rest of our little party.
“At least three hours.”
I fought myself with deflating over the information.
Damn it, still so far away.
And that was with the caveat that Blake was traveling as fast as he thought he could.Orthat he was even making his way up here at all.
The chances of him having been caught up with someone down at base camp were staggering—too much for me to really make any sort of bets either way. I had hope he would’ve radioed up to me to let me know by now if that were the case, however, it wasn’t like he owed me an explanation in general.
He wasn’t my boyfriend. He didn’t have to answer to me.
I chewed my bottom lip.
“Is there some reason you keep asking me about the time and why noon is so important to you?” he asked.
“Nah, just wondering. Heard one o’clock is the best time to get a good tan up here.”
He fitted me with a look of disbelief. “Right. Well, we’ll be heading down to the second point in five minutes. Make sure whatever you’re bringing with you is packed.”
Fuck, how was Blake supposed to know where we went when he got here and no one was around?
“How long are we going to be down there? Are there going to be people staying up here?”
He popped a brow. “Why?”
I gestured to our tents. “Hello, what if someone comes up to steal all our shit?”
