“They were right here!” He’s about to have a panic attack.
“Wait, what’s this?” I pull something out from under my back.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he murmurs.
“Hurry.”
“No, don’t say that. Believe me, I’m hanging on by a thread here.”
“Please?” I whisper.
“You’re killing me, Zorie.”
Every time he says my name in that rumbling voice of his, I think I might die myself. I’m in pleasure overload, here, on the verge of something great, and I really, really don’t want him to stop. But then . . . it’s happening. It’s actually happening. It’s good, and a little awkward, and sometimes funny, because wow, human bodies are weird. But it’s also more than I expected—than I even hoped.
It’s all of him and all of me, and most of all, it’s us, it’s us, it’s us.
24
* * *
“Told you I’d solve that mystery,” Lennon says after we’ve been tangled up in each other’s arms for a while, listening to the slowing rain outside. “Twice.”
I smile against his chest. “I never doubted. You’re Nancy goddamn Drew, after all.”
“And you’re Sherlock fucking Holmes.”
“If we start our own detective agency, I want both of those names painted on the door, just like that.”
“My parents should have named their shop ‘The Detective Agency.’ ”
I chuckle and he pretends to bite my neck, and that makes me squeal. He just holds me tighter. Fine by me, because I can’t stop touching him. The stubble on his jaw. His heavy eyebrows. The curving ridge of muscle above his hips. I’ve never been so close to him, and there’s so much begging to be explored.
But when my stomach growls, we both realize how late it is. Not exactly how late, because both our phones are dead, and Lennon’s fancy compass—our only source of time—is currently sitting inside the pocket of his jeans, buried in mud outside the tent. But we’ve been at this detectiving for a while now, and I’m in need of things that are stashed in the other tent. Like food. Wet wipes. Dry clothes. Okay, maybe I’m not in a hurry for those, but when Lennon volunteers to crawl beneath the canopy to the smaller tent, I add that to the list, and he bravely extricates himself from our sleeping bag.
The other tent is only a few feet away, and it’s silly, but I hate for him to go that far. As I tie back the mesh flaps of our door to open it up, the sight of him crawling naked into the second tent’s entrance has my complete attention. “That’s an interesting view,” I tell him from the open door of our tent.
“I aim to please,” he calls back.
He has to make two trips, and between them, ducks outside into the rain for a couple of minutes. Naked Lennon in the woods. Now would be a good time for a photo. But when he comes back, he has one of our water bottles, which he hands to me through the door, shivering, and dives back into the other tent. This time, he emerges wearing boxers and tosses me a T-shirt. He’s also raided our food stash, hallelujah!
Lying on our stomachs with our heads sticking outside the door flap, we set up the one-burner camping stove under the canopy. The stove is just a tiny bottle of fuel with four prongs that unfold above it to hold a pan. We heat up water for hot cocoa, which is inside two brown packs of military MREs that Lennon brought. There are also a million other things in each ration bag: a pastry bar, crackers, dried fruit, and holiest of holies, a packet of peanut butter.
“I thought you might like that,” Lennon says with a smile as we look through the contents of the meal packs. There are spoons, napkins, matches, and even a tiny bottle of Tabasco and some candy. The entrée gets heated up inside a flameless heater bag that needs to be filled with a little water to activate the heating element. It doesn’t taste quite as good as Reagan’s gourmet freeze-dried camp meals, but I’m starving, and the peanut butter and crackers make up for everything.
After we’ve eaten and cleaned up, Lennon breaks out his journal and maps, and I lie on my side, watching him recalculate the last leg of our trip to Condor Peak. “Six hours of walking,” he says. “Maybe seven with long breaks.”
“That’s not too bad.”
“Nope.”
“Huh. I thought it would be farther.” We both look at the map that’s unfolded atop his journal. “You sure you want to go to the star party with me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“It’ll be a lot of people I don’t know, and some people I see at club meetings every month.”
“And Avani.”
“I’ll need to use her telescope to take decent photos, and setting them up takes a lot of time. It could be boring for you, just standing around while the rest of us star nerds look through lenses and try to get face time with Sandra Faber.”
“I don’t know who that is, but I’m assuming from that quiver in your voice that she’s someone important.”
“She only has an astronomical law named after her and figured out how to estimate the distance between galaxies. No big deal.”
He grins. “Impressive.”
“Anyway, I’m just saying that you might hate the star party.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t be bored. I’ll be with you. Besides, I’m interested in whatever you like.”
“Yeah?”
“Meteor showers are cool. You can take lots of cool pictures and talk galaxies,” he says. “And whenever you’re ready to leave, we head back to civilization. Avani’s not our only option for transportation.”
“A regular bus runs up there several times a day,” I confirm. “I know from my research.”
“I’ve got a park bus schedule in here somewhere,” he says, rummaging through a pile of papers stuck between the pages of his journal. “It’s from last year, but I doubt much has changed.”
As he’s looking for it, something catches my eye in his journal, and I stick my fingers on the corner of the page to stop him from flipping. “What’s this?”
“Ugh, don’t look,” he says, covering it with his hand.
“Why?”
“Because it’s embarrassing.”
“Well, now I’m going to just forget it,” I tease, tugging his fingertips. “Show me.”
He groans, but releases the page. I peer over his arm and see drawings of people. They look like anime characters, a bit stylized, with simple, clean lines and big eyes. It takes me a moment to realize they’re all girls. The same girl. Repeated over and over, from different viewpoints. Sitting at a desk, bent over schoolwork. Eating at a picnic table. Reading on the stairs. Drinking coffee at a café. They’re mostly drawn from behind her, so there’s only a partial view of her face, but . . .
But . . .
She has dark, curly hair and glasses, and she’s wearing plaid.
I slowly turn the page to find more drawings. The same girl, drawn dozens of times. Each one is dated in Lennon’s careful, neat handwriting. They go back to last fall. Last spring. Early this summer.
The newest one is from last week. The girl is standing on a balcony, looking down with a telescope.
The drawings are flattering. The drawings are sad. The drawings are filled with longing. Lennon’s heart on the page.