I had to perfect that fall. I knew where I’d made a mistake, and I wouldn’t panic next time.
“Magic fingers,” Marta teased, wiggling her eyebrows.
I grinned at her as I sat down next to Morgan, settling in comfortably next to him now, sharing the warmth of his body.
I could still remember the freezing water closing over my head, and the thought sent a shiver through me.
Morgan, without hesitating, grabbed the blanket he’d brought out with us and wrapped it around my shoulders.
Why couldn’t this be real? We were sogoodat faking it.
What if we could be good at justdoingit, too?
“They’re so adorable,” Julie said. I looked up at her, wondering if she was talking about me and Morgan.
“Alex and Chris, I mean,” she clarified. “That was so sweet.”
“I give it a week,” Brad spoke up, rubbing his hands together, sniffing, and then holding them out to the fire, warming them.
“Why would you say that?” I asked, sharper than I meant to. I was still basking in my friends’ happiness, and if Brad was about to piss all over that…
I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to believesomeonewas happy, that people really did meet their soulmates and get married and live happily ever after.
“Seriously?” Brad asked. “The only thing they have in common is sex. Alex barely knows how to put his skis on without killing himself, Chris wouldn’t get in a kayak if his life depended on it, Alex is a secret nerd, Chris struggles to read the instructions on a shampoo bottle…”
“That’s not fair,” Julie said, with more conviction than I usually expected from her. “They—”
“If you’re about to say some mystical bullshit about their auras or their palms or their fucking tea leaves—”
“What?” Marta interrupted him, in her dealing-with-unruly-children voice. She was a Girl Guide leader, so she’d perfected that voice over the years. “What’re you gonna do?”
Brad looked back and forth between Marta, Chris and Alex's cabin, andme.
If he thought I was going to defend him, he was wrong.
“I’m gonna take a walk,” he said, standing. It was about the smartest thing he could have done, and the air around the campfire relaxed as soon as he was out of earshot.
“Think he’ll have the courtesy to get eaten by something?” Marta asked.
“Not sure there’s anything out here that’d stoop to eating him,” Morgan said, adjusting my blanket around my shoulders, his warm fingers skimming over cold skin and threatening to make me shiver.
“That’s not nice,” I murmured, but it came out even more half-hearted than I meant it to.
“He was mean to Julie,” Morgan said. “I can’t believeanyonewould be mean to Julie.”
Marta smiled a grateful smile across at him and put an arm around Julie’s shoulders.
Morgan, after a moment, did the same for me, and it didn’t matter that he didn’t need to pretend right now at all.
* * *
“Can’t sleep?”
Anyone else would’ve made me jump, but Morgan’s voice was so familiar by now that I only glanced at him as he settled next to me.
I poked the embers of the fire again, holding out my blanket in offering, and smiled as he accepted and threw it around his own shoulders, sharing his warmth.
What I wanted most in the world right now was to curl up next to him and fall asleep, but he was right—I couldn’t.
