Reaching out, I traced the outline of the moon. This tattoo was a piece of Carrie, a shard of memory he’d carried through her loss, and he had shared it with me. “Thank you for inviting me in on the secret,” I whispered.
“You’re the only person I want to carry that secret with me.”
The words were a soft blow, both innocent and perilous, leaving me winded. Was this truly the language of friendship, or something that reached beyond it? The damn treacherous, pitiable, hope-drunk part of me whispered it had to mean more.
Don’t do this. Don’t turn his sharing into a confession. Don’t stain the purity of what he offered because you want it to mean something more.
I reminded myself that Luke valued connection differently. He held friendship like other people held love—openly, fiercely, wholly, without reserve. He’d said that first night at Ezra and Micah’s that not all intimacy had to be romantic, that friendship could carry the same depth and devotion. I saw proof of that in his relationship with Ezra, through their easy affection, unspoken shorthand. To anyone steeped in a world that assumed closeness equated to romance, their purely platonic bond might easily be mistaken for romance.
Luke and I had gotten close enough that he extended me the same treatment, but nowItranslated his tenderness through a distorted lens, trying to fit it into the frameworks I’d inherited, mistaking intensity for desire and devotion for want. What we shared was connection without category, intimacy without condition. I knew better than to question what we were to each other. Couldn’t it be enough that he wanted to share something so personal with me?
But it didn’t matter how I tried to intellectualize it. The words had branded themselves into me as surely as that moon into his skin, and I’d spend the rest of the night trying to breathe around what they might mean.
“It only seems fair,” I said at last. “That I give you my own round of Two Truths and a Lie.”
“Only if you want to. No pressure.”
“I know, and I want to.”
“Alright then, hit me. Whatcha got?”
“In my teens I dyed my hair blue, I took ballet classes while attending college, my two front teeth are artificial.”
“Okay, I got this. I’m a master at this game.”
“Alright, master Walker, call your lie.”
“You’re too graceful for the ballet one to be a lie, and you’ve got style so I could see you dying your hair. Which means your front teeth are real?”
“Nope, they’re crowns.” Following a particularly brutal fist, courtesy of my father, but I didn’t need to share that detail. “The blue hair’s the lie. I’ve never dyed it. I didn’t want that kind of attention.”
“I don’t think it would have mattered. It wouldn’t take blue hair for you to attract attention, you do that all on your own,” Luke said.
Statements like that didn’t help my need to read meaning into every touch, every glance, every offhand remark that sounded and looked too much like the love I’d always wanted.
“I think I’m tired,” I blurted, needing an exit before I did something irredeemably stupid. “Unlike some people, I’m not a seasoned child of the wilderness. I require my full allotment of beauty sleep.”
“Fair enough. I usually end up turning in earlier than usual when I’m camping. I’ll douse the fire and clean up if you want to get settled?”
“I can help,” I offered.
“Sure.” He nodded toward the paper towels. “Since we’re only out for one night, I’ll give the cookware a proper wash when we’re home. For now, if you’d give everything a wipe down?”
We made quick work of it. Luke smothered the coals while I wiped down the dishes and utensils with damp paper towels. With the fire extinguished and everything packed away, we entered the tent.
It was a large tent, meant to accommodate Luke’s height, but it might as well have been a shoebox for all the space it offered me emotionally. Silly me, for not thinking through the logistics of this trip. I hadn’t considered what it would be like to lie mere feet from Luke in the dark.
Every rustle of his sleeping bag and every exhale from his lungs became too intimate. He occupied every thought in my head, his proximity the only thing I could breathe.
After endless minutes of sleep evading me, a twig snapped right outside the tent, followed by shuffling.
“Did you hear that?” I whispered, my voice tight with panic.
Luke stirred beside me. “Hear what?” He sounded a little groggy. Had he already managed to fall asleep while I marinated in his besotting closeness?
“A sound. Outside.”
“What kind of sound?”
