I know this is the easy part.Being alone together for a night, with nothing and no one else to complicate things?It’s a piece of fucking cake.
It’s when we get back, to Clementine’s divorcing parents and me fighting fires for weeks on end, to the real world where shit happens.That’s the hard part.
Everything she said in that bathroom was true.I was flirting with Mandy, not because I particularly like her, but because it’s habit.Two days after asking Clementine if she wanted to try again, I had another girl on my shoulders, giggling.
I’m also afraid I know how this ends.And I don’t want to be stupid, but when I’m with Clementine — when we’re hiking nine miles or, hell, when I’m talking to a group of old ladies and trying to get out of it — it feelsright, like there’s no other way I could imagine being.Like puzzle pieces that fit together.
I hear Clementine coming up the stairs in her heavy hiking boots, and then the door opens.
“Bleh,” she says, and goes to the basin to wash her hands.
“Isn’t this your job?”I ask.
“Peeing in outhouses?”she says.
“Peeing outdoors.”
She shakes her hands, looks around, then finds her shirt and dries them there.
“My job is actually trail marking, trail maintenance, setting up wildlife cameras, surveying, and that sort of thing,” she says, and walks over to me, flopping next to me on the cot.“The peeing outdoors is incidental.Scoot over.”
“I can’t,” I say.“I’m already up against the glass.”
Clementine solves the problem by getting half on top of me, her right arm flopped over my chest, her head on my shoulder.
“These things are too small,” she says sleepily.
I stroke my fingers up and down her back.Her body against mine like this makes my dick twitch, but I hiked nine miles with seventy pounds on my back.I don’t think I can move anythingelse.Round two is gonna have to wait.
“It’s almost like they’re not made for two people,” I say.
“Smartass,” she mutters.
“You wouldn’t like me if I wasn’t.”
“You mean if you were a nice person who didn’t tease me all the time?”she asks, tilting her face up.
I grin, looking down at her.
“If I were a nice guy who didn’t challenge you sometimes you’d get bored and eat mealive,” I say.
She taps her fingers on my chest, like she’s thinking.
“I like nice guys,” she says after a while, though she doesn’t sound like she believes it.
“I’m nice,” I say.“I wasrealnice earlier.”
She laughs, then snuggles against me a little more.We both look out the window, at the horizon.I’m starting to doze off when she speaks.
“That’s Saturn again,” she says, pointing.
I follow her finger, remembering the directions from the other night: Mars, over to Antares, up to Saturn.
“Can you see the rings with binoculars?”I ask.
“You could barely see them with a big-ass telescope,” she says.
Right.
