Wow.
He’s carefully lining his clothes on the drying rack. I pick mine up and join him. I try to hide my underwear on the inner racks with my socks hanging over them to block them out. It’s dim enough in the room that I may succeed.
“Put your pants up here,” Peyton says. “They’re probably going to take longer to dry, so let’s get them closer to the heat source. We’ll put our shoes under the stove to dry. Short of putting them in the fire, that’s as close as we’re going to get. They’re going to take days to dry out.”
Especially my sneakers. I should have taken him up on the water shoes.
Finally, we’re done. Stripped of the wet clothes and in dry ones that have been here for fuck knows how long. I’m choosing not to think about that.
“Well, this isn’t quite what I had in mind,” Peyton says as he looks at the window.
The rain is pelting against it, nearly sideways. There’s just enough of a gap in the canopy that the rain has a clear shot at the cabin. Makes plenty of sense, really. Whoever built this place had to clear trees to make room for the cabin. It’s small enough that they’ve kept the footprint pretty small, so that’s good.
He looks at me. “How about we enjoy an indoor picnic?”
“Sounds good.”
“Did you find blankets, or are we spreading out towels?”
I look at the mattress. There’s nothing but a mattress pad covering it. But I see three totes lined up under the bed. “I didn’t check these out. I figured they were linens for the bed since they were with the bed.”
Together, we pull out the totes, and sure enough, we find sheets, pillows, and blankets. I chew the inside of my lip and glance at the window, where the storm is showing no signs of letting up. The sky is so damn dark.
“How long do you think the storm’s going to go on?”
Peyton sighs. “I don’t know, but unless it breaks within the next couple of hours, we should probably plan to hunker down for the night. I’m not familiar enough with the area to feel confident that I can get us back to the truck by moonlight.”
I nod. Oh, god, I’m going to be sharing a bed with this man! Unless he’d prefer one of us to sleep on the floor…
Peyton pulls out a blanket. “Want to grab a couple towels? We’ll put them down first since we’ve brought the rain inside.”
I do as he suggests and bring a few towels with me. “The rules say that we need to take what we use with us and return it clean if we can.”
He nods. “Yep. I’ll take care of that. I want us to be comfortable, so I’m not worried about what we use.”
Peyton hands me the blanket and takes the towels from me. I watch as he spreads them out long edges together, right in front of the fire. Then he lays the blanket over them. He gestures to our indoor picnic area for me to sit while he pulls over the tote we’d carried from the kayak.
He sits beside me, and my brain doesn’t know that we’re stuck in a storm. It refuses to acknowledge that this isn’t how the date was supposed to go—sitting in front of a fire in a tiny cabin with a single bed on a remote island caught in a lightning storm. All my heart and head and stomach think is holy hell, this is so fucking romantic.
“Let’s ration a little,” Peyton says. “Not that you can’t eat whatever if you’re hungry, but I’m not sure how long the storm will last. You didn’t sound thrilled with the MREs in the cabinet.”
“MREs?”
“Meals ready-to-eat. Or something like that. They’re meal boxes that the military ration when deployed or on missions or whatever. Honestly, they’re not as bad as they sound. They’ve come a long way over the last fifty years.”
“You’ve had them?” I ask.
He flashes me a grin as he pulls one item from the tote at a time to examine the contents. “Yeah. When I was a kid. There were times I’d spent the entire day on the water over the summer. My uncle and father were in the Marine Corps, so they decided it was best to send me with something that wouldn’t bake in the sun and make me sick. I’ve had probably every single meal option.”
“There are multiple meals?”
“Tons,” he answers, grinning. “Some better than others, but I think a lot of that has to do with your personal taste. I love spicy, but if you’re not into spicy, there’s a handful you won’t like. I don’t like beans or chili, so there are two that I don’t like.”
“Huh.”
Peyton replaces half a dozen items from the tote back inside, leaving us with four. “We’ll splurge a little right now,” he says, winking at me. “This is a date, after all.”
I try my hardest not to blush, but… yeah, it is. A date I bid on. Whatever. It’s still a date.
