“I’m fine with bathing in the river,” I retorted with a blank stare, and she just scoffed at me.
“It’s freezing.”
“I’ll take you. We can bathe together,” Nathan offered with a heated stare as he dropped his gaze down my body and back with a smirk.
“You two don’t pay enough attention to your surroundings when you’re alone, so I’ll come too,” Micah said gruffly.
Calix snorted. “I might as well come too.”
“You? Bathing in the river?” Nathan gaped at him before sliding his gaze to me. “You’re already pushing yourself out of your comfort zone for her. I’m impressed.”
“I can’t have you three getting distracted. It’s kill or be killed out here,” he reasoned, and I giggled.
“I’m also fine with waiting for the shower. If that’ll ease Calix’s mind.” I gripped my hand tightly to avoid reaching out and touching his shoulder like I wanted to do.
He tilted his head, and the tension behind his eyes eased. “Thanks, honey.”
“Tori, wanna help prep the deer?” Dad called over.
“Sure!” I called back.
We dispersed from the fire, going to do small duties to keep the Oasis going. It was different from the duties we did every day at the ranch, and it lacked small luxury items we were used to, but somehow, it was even better.
15
CALIX
My gaze followed Tori as she glided around the clearing, interacting with Nathan, Micah, and her family. She got along well with everyone—well, everyone but Daisy. Even Jay had been respectful, but it was obvious that Daisy and Jay didn’t fit in the way Tori and her family did here.
But what they did to Tori wasn’t something that was forgiven easily.
Tori was different than anyone I had ever met. She had sparkling sapphire eyes that lit up when I talked to her. Nobody’s eyes ever lit up the way hers did when I spoke, and they’d done it since the first moment I met her, even though I was rude.
My mother hadn’t looked at me with anything except guarded eyes, but that was because of her phobia of germs. I grew up on avoiding germs like the plague—because germswere the plague.
I understood her fear, but getting to know the survivors in the Oasis and getting to know Tori had taught me that I didn’t want to isolate myself the way I’d been doing my entire life. I just had to break the mindset…but I reacted without thinking most of the time. It was a gut-reaction for me to avoid most living andnon-living things, but it was also unrealistic the way we lived now.
Tori made mewantto change the way I saw things, but doing it was more than difficult. She was stunning, that was a given, but she was also intelligent and capable. I didn’t even mind the fact that she’d helped skin and debone a deer.
I wanted to touch her anyway.
After she washed off, of course, but that fact was still insane to me.
The cold around us tried permeating the warmth the bonfire gave off, and we’d all begun to stand closer.
Ava and I were cooking the meat on two large rock slabs over the fire, and the sound of the meat searing made my stomach rumble.
It’d been so long since we’d had fresh meat.
“So, Tori,” Ava started, glancing over to where she stood talking with her dad. “She’s sweet.”
“I like her. A lot.” I shrugged, grabbing a pair of tongs and flipping the piece over. “I don’t mind that Micah and Nathan are dating her too. We brought the idea up to her, and I was just happy she felt the same way we did.”
She grinned wildly, grabbing the cooked meat to put on the plate and placing a new strip of meat on the slab. “It’s so good to see you show interest in getting to know someone.”
“It feels good,” I admitted. My gaze wandered back to her, and I smiled behind my mask. “She’s perfect for us.”
We finished cooking the meat, and Tori, Nathan, and their dads went to wash up after cleaning up the mess of the deer prep and setting some meat aside to be frozen in the freezer that ran off the generator.
