CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“OH MY GOD,” HE says, and I swear it sounds almost sexual.
“Thank fuck,” I say. “Thank fuck for hunters, oh my god oh my god.”
Jonah powers toward the structure so fast that he’s moving at just this side of a run, and so am I. We reach the base of the tree and I shake out my hands to release the nervous energy, which is pretty stupid, I guess—conserving energy is the thing to do right now. But it’s instinct. I’m so freaking excited.
The blind is constructed in a tree, and there are haphazard steps nailed up the trunk. They lead to a box big enough for a person and a half, but the important thing is that it’s wooden and it’s enclosed, and the only windows are closed up with a tarp.
Oh my gosh, it’s like a five-star hotel.
I clasp one of the steps and that’s it, now I’m crying.
Jonah says, “Pull it together, man.”
“I can’t.”
“I know,” he says. “Goddamn, it’s beautiful.”
I pull myself up the treehouse ladder step by step. It wasn’t clear to me until this moment just how weak I’d gotten over the last couple days, but thank god I lift heavy. Thank god I’ve been training to firefight for two years and these guns absolutely do not lie.
Because those, even weakened, are what allow me to make it to the top.
Jonah is struggling just a little, and he scoffs at first when I offer him a hand to pull him into the place, but not for so long that he doesn’t eventually suck it up and accept my help.
We hoist him into the blind and he shuts the door behind him.
The instant temperature change is incredible. It’s just a couple degrees, probably, but it means everything.
“Jesus,” he says, “you’re absolutely jacked.”
I grin and strip off my coat, because it’s way too close in here for us to both be done up like marshmallows, and the shield the wood provides has raised the temperature so much that I’m actually surprised that I’m a little uncomfortable.
I’m sure I won’t be in a minute.
But I do strip off my coat, and then I flex.
Jonah rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling.
“Impressive,” he says.
“Oh, I know.”
“And cocky.”
I shrug, lit up from the discovery, and the compliment, and . . . and the fact that we are two not-entirely-small people in a blind built for a person and a half.
I sink to the floor and Jonah sinks with me, but we can’t do that without tangling our legs together.
I try not to look at his face, to keep from acknowledging that my thighs are draped over his, that every time he shifts his foot, his shin brushes my calf.
“So, okay,” he says. “I’m not—trying to be weird about this, but I’m going to take off my coat.”
I do look at him then. “Join the club,” I say. Mine is balled up behind me, giving me something to lean up against.
“Yeah,” he says. He laughs and it’s nervous. He sheds his coat, bumping my chest with his arms and who knows what other parts of him on the way out of it. Then he sets it behind him like I’ve done and shudders.
With both of us out of our massive layers, suddenly it seems so clear, so overwhelming how close we are to each other in this dark little box.
There is a wall at my back and side, and only a couple inches between my left and the door.
Jonah has even less space.
I can’t move without every surface of my leg running over his calves, his torso, his thighs.
I blow out a breath and grab for the backpack I brought, shoved uncomfortably into the corner of the blind. I have a toothbrush, and I just yank it out of the bag with no fanfare, for something to do with my hands.
I brush my teeth, right there in the blind, like an absolute weirdo.
Then I open the door and spit.
Jonah looks at me like I’m a complete freak and says, “Are you serious?”
I shrug. “If no one thought that bringing a toothbrush to an event where drinking was going to occur, to freshen breath before going home to our parents, that’s their fault.”
He snorts. “You’re something.”
“Do you . . . want to use it?”
He wrinkles his nose. “Your toothbrush? I’m good. Give me some of that toothpaste, though, I guess.”
He wets a little corner of a blanket in some snow that’s stuck to the outside of the blind, squeezes on some toothpaste, and scours his teeth with the fabric. Then he spits out the door.
It’s a flash of freezing cold, then warmth again, and we are left with quiet.
“Shit, that’s so much better,” he says.
And then we are here with nothing to do but breathe and acknowledge the absolute lack of space between us.
The dark, which makes it hard to see your hand in front of your face, let alone the other person. Makes everything feel even closer.
He shifts on his butt and his leg runs over mine.
I swallow hard, breathing in the scent of mint and old wood and the clean fury of the snow outside.
Jonah runs his thumb over his lower lip and says, quiet, “Again, not trying to be weird.”
I raise an eyebrow, hoping that masks the nerves, the height in my pulse, the quick shallowness in my breathing.
“But you should like . . . shove up against me. I’m not trying to come onto you; it’s just that—”
My stomach swoops and twists. I don’t know if I’m relieved he’s not trying to come onto me or disappointed, and that’s so confusing that I don’t even want to begin to deal with it, so I just cut him off and slide over to him. My knees press into his thighs and I turn around and lean so my back pushes into his chest, and I am sitting between his legs.
He blows out a shaky breath.
It’s . . . well, it’s cold. Of course he’s shaking a little.
He pulls his legs in tight to me so that his inner thighs overtake my outer thighs, and his arms curl around my chest.
My head relaxes against the curve of his throat and I can feel his heart beat into my back.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Nature, I did not order this. I ordered two hunting blinds, there seems to have been a mistake; this forest only has one.
He exhales and it lifts the hairs on the top of my head.
I don’t just hear it when he clears his throat; I feel it.
“Wish we had a fire,” I say. I whisper it. Talking feels too loud.
He moves his jaw, but I don’t know what his face looks like. I just feel the hard slant against my head. He moves, and something rustles, and the entire expanse of his chest draws fire over my back. That’s one way to do it.
He comes back out of the bag he was evidently rummaging in with a little candle, and lights it with the lighter he keeps in his back pocket after pulling it a full five times.
“Cool,” he says, late night scratch in his voice. “It would be good if the lighter I’d brought hadn’t been fucking empty.”
I actually laugh.
At a certain point, every absurd problem becomes legitimately funny.
As long as you don’t think about it too hard.
Jonah pulls me in closer to him, and I grab my big, fluffy blanket from the other side of the blind to drape over us.
I can feel his muscles relax—strand by strand.