“Long as they save some for me,” Meredith says, coming to her feet with a rush of energy at the promise of beer. She gives me a smile, and I know I’m forgiven for being . . . myself.
“They’ll save some,” I assure her, knowing it’s true. If not, one of them will probably find a way to brew it on the spot. People like to keep Meredith happy, especially boys. It doesn’t matter if her hair looks perfect or not.
She just prefers it that way.
Meredith might not be on my apocalypse-survival team, but I’m probably not on her beauty-pageant roster either, so I guess we’ve all got our weapons. I might weigh mine before I head out on the trail so that I’m not carrying an ounce more than necessary, and she might keep hers in her bra, but we each get by, in our own way.
“Last leg,” I reassure her as she winces, the blister she was nursing not twenty yards into the hike undoubtedly like a hot needle at her heel.
“I’m fine,” she says, wiping the sweat from her brow.
And I think maybe I might put her on my apocalypse team as an alternate.
The boys are already lit when we get there, which is more than I can say for the fire. Their priorities definitely went in this order—beer, weed, boobs, fire, tent. The first two they supplied, we’ve brought the third, and I’m responsible for everything else. It doesn’t look like they went fishing yesterday, or did much of anything other than get high and pass out in sleeping bags under the open sky.
“Ka—vit—a!” Jason lifts a bottle in her direction when we break into the clearing. He’s been shouting her name in public since she moved here as a freshman, something Meredith and I have both tried to tell her means he’s interested.
Her response is always, “Ja—son!” with the same tone he uses. He’s never known what to do with that, so they haven’t gone past introductions in two years.
“Hey,” Duke says when he spots me, adding an up-nod that must single me out as his girl to the other two guys with them, because they immediately gravitate to Meredith, but they probably would anyway.
She’s relieved of the burden of her backpack, given a chair, and manages to initiate the beginnings of the tents going up with a few words and a sly smile. I thank her silently and take a lawn chair next to Duke. At our feet is a pile of sticks they had half-heartedly tossed together, skipping the part where it turns into an actual fire.
“Who’re they?” I ask, taking a beer that he pulls from the cooler in between us.
“Couple of brothers. Stephanie’s cousins, I guess,” he says, pushing back his baseball hat to hold a cold can next to his forehead. “They’re visiting, and her mom said to bring them along.”
“They cool?” I ask, watching them struggle with a pup tent.
“Seem okay.” He shrugs, pausing a second before dropping something on me. “Natalie’s coming in later, with Steph.”
“Natalie,” I repeat, my mouth getting tight. I try to force it back into relaxation.
“That okay?” he asks.
“I don’t know, is it?” I shoot back. It doesn’t matter how I feel about his ex-girlfriend being here; it’s how he feels that I’m going to react to.
“Just don’t punch her, or anything,” Duke says. “I know that’s kind of your go-to.”
“Once,” I tell him, raising a finger. “Once, I punched someone on the basketball court. She’d been over my back all night, and they weren’t calling it.”
“Probably better your dad said no more contact sports,” Duke says, eyeing me over the top of his beer, a sly smile showing his crooked incisor. “Cross-country is a good fit for those legs, anyway.”
“Truth,” I agree, unable to stop my answering smile. “And a scholarship rolled up in it, so . . . cheers.”
“Cheers,” he says, touching his can to mine, but we don’t say much past that. The fact that my legs are taking me to college and his wallet won’t let him follow is something that we both know but haven’t talked about yet.
Duke is like this, a lifelong friend that suddenly became something else and knows how to call up that shared history while still making me a little loose in the knees. Meredith could say the same words to me, but she doesn’t have that dimple in her left check, or the glint in his eyes that’s entirely concentrated on me, making me care much less about the imminent arrival of his ex.
“When’s she coming?” I ask, leaning back in my chair.
“They weren’t even packed when we left, so Tom and Cory asked to come with me and Jason.”
“Packed?” I raise my eyebrow, and Duke huffs a small laugh.
“I know, right? Everybody’s acting like we’re going hard-core or something, not spending one night in the woods. Shit, I bet your pack weighs eight pounds.”
“Five,” I correct him. “And half that is tampons.”
He squeezes his eyes shut against that. “Nice, babe.”
“Hey, man, everybody menstruates.”
“Not me,” he says.
“But I bet I can make you bleed,” I tell him, getting a real smile.
“Definitely,” he agrees, and reaches out to rub the back of my neck.
It’s been like this our whole lives, a little push and pull for sure, but somewhere in between there’s a point where we meet, a place no one else is invited. We both grew up in the woods, aware that our friends had other toys like dolls and cars, video games and traveling sports teams our families couldn’t afford. We had rocks and sticks, patches of mud and vernal pools where long lines of mosquito larvae hatched.
We discovered this about each other not long after we started dating three months ago, and while it’s true we don’t always talk a lot, I feel the same way about Duke as I do about the woods. You don’t have to be making sounds to communicate, and there’s a lot that has passed between us under the stars and leaves that I would never say to anyone else, in words or otherwise.
Duke’s mind is following the same track because his hand trails down the edge of my arm to rub the inside of my wrist, the work-worn tips of his fingers leaving a tingling there I’m more than familiar with.
“So you’re . . .” He trails off, leaving an edge of disappointment in the air.
“Yeah, I’m bleeding,” I tell him. Growing up with just my dad taught me a long time ago that I’ve got to be blunt about that kind of stuff if I want tampons added to the grocery list.
“Sucks,” Duke says. “I kind of wanted to . . .”
“You only kind of wanted to?” I tease. “I’m not doing anything with a boy who only kind of—”
He cuts me off with a kiss, letting me know that he is more than a little interested in being alone with me, and I’m pretty invested in it too, if it weren’t for my current situation, the fact that somebody needs to start the fire, and that we have an audience.
“Ash—ley!” Jason yells at us from his rock perch overlooking the ridge, a fresh beer raised in toast to me. I push Duke back and flip Jason double birds.
“Later,” I tell Duke, to which he looks dubious. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” I remind him.