She faced him, now as baffled as he had seemed a second ago.
“So I can make a much warmer place to snooze on the grass?”
“You’re not gonna have to snooze on the grass, all right.”
“Oh, then we’re building a small fort out of twigs and leaves.”
He rolled his eyes. “No, smart-ass. I have a tent you can use.”
“That you just happen to have with you.”
“Of course. Who leaves home without one?”
Normal people, she wanted to yell. But before she could have a meltdown over the idea of them crammed in a tent together, he started toward the truck bed. “Now get your stuff while I get it ready for you,” he said, and that was when she heard it. The problem that was slightly more pressing than being horned up all night next to a man she shouldn’t be horned up about.
“I can’t help noticing you keep not sayingwe. Justme, singular.”
“Well, I’m not likely to get in with you, am I? It’s the size of a phone booth.”
“Yeah, but the other option is apparently an icebox that will fucking kill you.”
She demonstrated his untimely death with her hands.
And maybe also with a tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth.
It made no difference, however.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ve done it before.”
“And how many toes did you lose?”
“Barely the end of one of them. And it’s the one I don’t even use.”
He made a scoffing sort of face. As if it were that little of a problem.
Instead of something that made her strangle the air with her hands.
“Oh my god, I wasjoking. I was joking, I didn’t think you really had—” she said furiously, and to her relief he looked a little uneasier about the idea. Or maybe just confused as to why she cared so much. It was kind of hard to tell with his face half striped by gloom, half by the headlights from the truck.
Plus he was rambling now.
Protesting more, like a dipshit.
“It’s not a big deal, all right. Better that than me and you all… wedged against each other all night long. I mean, that’s the worst kind ofonly one bedI can think of. It’s concentrated. Like a brussels sprout.”
“How is a brussels sprout concentrated?”
“Well, it’s basically a really intense cabbage.”
“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“Said the woman who thinks we should jam ourselves into a shoebox together,” he said, then just as she was about to call him on the ever-shrinking descriptions of his tent, he kept going. “You really think you can stand that? You think you can bear to have my big, bulky body pressing into you for eight hours? Rubbing into things you don’t want rubbed, sliding over parts I shouldn’t be sliding over. Probably at some point I’ll accidentally—”
But before he could finish that thought, she put up a hand.
She had to. She was already thoroughly stunned over the idea of him saying the bit about his bulky body. If he went any further, if he started talking about where his hands might end up or his mouth might go, she was liable to lose it.
“Stop it,” she said. “Stop. Enough.”
