“Fine,” he finally decided after a moment’s thought. “You can call him Jack…Jack Hammer.”
Her hand flew to her mouth as a peal of laughter escaped before she could stop it. She folded an arm over her stomach and bent double as helpless paroxysms of laughter took her.
When she was finally able to breathe again, she straightened to finding him watching her with a bemused smile on his face.
“I-I think we have a winner,” she told him hoarsely, swiping tears from her eyes.
“Yeah?”
“Absolutely.”
He gave her a quick hug and a kiss. The affectionate gestures came so easily to him. But she was becoming a lotbetter at the casual touches and impulsive kisses. Yesterday, she’d happily held his hand in front of his sister and friends, and she hadn’t felt so much as a twinge of self-consciousness.
“What should we have for breakfast?” he asked.
“I think it’s closer to lunch time. I can’t believe we spent most of the day lounging around in bed. I don’t think I’ve ever been this…lazy.”
“To be fair, we were burning quite a lot of calories,” Smith said and she smiled.
“We could go to MJ’s for lunch?”
“I say we avoid MJ’s for a few days. Just about every single person in town was at that game the other night, and those who weren’t were probably live streaming it.”
Kenny winced at the reminder.
“I have an idea,” he murmured and she tilted her head curiously. She wasn’t sure she liked that gleam in his eye.
“Oh?”
“Ithinkif you give it a chance, you might enjoy it. But just sit with the suggestion for a bit before you decide, okay?”
“O-kay?”
“I think it would do us good to get away from town and civilization for a bit. Just give ourselves room to breathe and time for the next thing to go viral on TikTok or whatever.”
“How do you propose we do that?”
“‘Go camping,’ he said.‘It’ll be fun’, he said.”Kenny was huddled in the freezing tent, her puffer jacket hood up over her head, as she stared at the four women looking back at her with varying degrees of amusement, sympathy, and dismay on their faces.
She was just grateful that he’d at least chosen a spot with decent mobile coverage. On day one she’d snuck behind a treeto FaceTime Tina and her sister-in-law had added Beth and Libby to the call. Beth had quickly brought Fern in as well.
A month ago, Kenny would never have believed that she would be speaking like this to these four women. That they’d be her tribe; the women she went to when she needed a sympathetic ear. But this was the third call in as many days and she was beginning to depend on them to keep her sane.
“Justtellmy idiot brother that you want to come home,” Tina advised.
“I agree,” Beth said. “Your nose is pink with cold. Why is it so cold there? It’s summer, for God’s sake!”
“Normal for the Outeniqua mountains, apparently. It drops to like eleven degrees at night. And it’s always misty and drizzly,” Kenny said with a shudder.
Smith had rhapsodized about his second-favorite camping spot on the drive up the mountain pass, and Kenny had been excited to see this natural paradise that he couldn’t stop raving about.
But by the time they’d reached the campsite, the temperature had plummeted and it had begun to drizzle. The campsite was a short distance away from where he left the Land Rover, which meant that, because of her injured foot, he’d had to piggyback Kenny to the spot and leave her there while he loped back and forth for supplies.
Waiting for him to return every time after he’d left her in that creepy clearing had been a little terrifying. And she’d been relieved when he’d finally returned a third and final time.
It hadn’t been too bad once he’d set up their campsite and got a fire going.
She’d enjoyed cuddling up next to him, enjoyed the warmth of the blaze. She’d even decided that maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. Until she needed the bathroom and Smith handed over a roll of toilet paper and a headlamp and directed her to a nearby bush.
