“Girl,” he breathes, pulling me close so that I can smell pine resin on him. “You are absolute shit at seduction.”
“We’re here, bitches!” Stephanie yells two hours later, Natalie trailing behind her.
“You’ve got the geography part right, anyway,” I hear Kavita mutter under her breath. Steph and Kavita have never exactly been close, but in a school as small as ours your friends are limited to people you can stand for small amounts of time. Affection is secondary.
“Hey,” Jason says, standing up awkwardly to greet the two girls. He’s unsteady on his feet, and I wonder why he made the effort until I get a good look at Natalie. She graduated last year and went off to cosmetology school, leaving Duke in the dust—but adding about fifteen pounds, most of it in her bra. Natalie had always been pretty, but right now she’s hot in a way we don’t usually see in our corner of the woods, and that extends past the actual limits of the state forest.
Most people here are run-down by thirty, shitty food and cheap beer sagging on their faces and adding to their bellies. The prom kings marry the homecoming queens and age together, telling each other they’re still the hottest thing going while checking out the younger generation to see what they’ve got to offer.
But it’s all the same faces in the end, old genes recycled into new skin. We’re used to looking at each other and spotting which side of the family your nose came from, or whose eyes you’ve got. Sometimes a family trait that isn’t technically in your tree pops up, and we all politely ignore it.
The weight she’s put on hasn’t only gone into her chest. Natalie’s got curves she didn’t have before, and damn if they don’t look good on her. She’s always had cheekbones you could cut yourself on, but somebody taught her how to use eyeliner, and it’s only made her genetic gifts more obvious. Her wide-set eyes always made her look innocent—and while that might have been true at one time, I can tell it’s not anymore. She wastes no time giving Duke the once-over, holding his gaze a second longer than she should.
In nature it’s the male that does the mating dances, but we somehow got that all backward; it’s us girls that learn to do the preening and positioning. And I can tell right off that Natalie’s learned more than how to do hair in the year since she left. I can see it in the way she tilts her body the second she spots Duke, a casual dip of her hip and twist of her shoulders, displaying what she’s got, bold as daylight.
I don’t like it, but I like less that he responds. It’s not something I could call him out on without looking like a total bitch, but it’s there. He keeps it cool, a nod and a wave that’s just two fingers lifted up, nothing more. But something primal inside of him is reaching out in response, and I can feel it, sure as shit, because it’s supposed to be directed at me.
And while I’ve got plenty of self-respect, the pie chart of my personality traits has a huge chunk marked logical, and I would never argue that I’m better-looking than Natalie. But there’s a large area of that chart marked hot-tempered, which is probably why Duke keeps his reaction under control.
“Took your time, coz,” one of Stephanie’s cousins says. I don’t know if it’s Tom or Cory, because I didn’t bother to sort out who was who when I got here and have put away a few beers since then.
“Doesn’t look like we missed much,” she shoots back, eyeing a pile of empty beer cans next to the fire that I finally got started after disentangling myself from Duke.
“You all know Natalie, right?” Stephanie says.
“Nat—a—lie!” Jason says, and Kavita promptly punches him in the back of the knee, which sends him sprawling. It’s the most interaction they’ve ever had, so he seems to take it as the compliment it’s meant to be.
“Natalie . . . that’s perfect,” Kavita says to me. On my other side, Meredith remains quiet, her eyes roaming up and down the intruder in her area. My friend is used to being the prettiest girl in the room, and I know what she’s doing as she dissects Natalie, trying to assess if her new curves are better than Meredith’s, if her skin is smoother now, or her hair glossier since she’s got 24/7 salon access. Whatever element Meredith finds herself the winner of, she’ll accentuate for the night.
Not that she’s got a lot of competition. Tom and Cory have been panting after her all night, but I know Meredith. She doesn’t care if all the boys think she’s the better catch or not—she wants Natalie to know it too. And because of that electrical line of attraction still hanging in the air between Duke and Natalie, I feel the same way.
“What’s going on?” Stephanie asks, plopping into an empty chair.
“Drinking,” Jason says, pulling himself up from the ground, where a mixture of beer and Kavita had landed him.
“That’s it?” Steph surveys our faces like it’s our duty to supply something better.
“What’d you expect?” Meredith bites back, her words slightly slurred. “A dance party? We’re in the woods.”
“Which was your idea,” Steph answers, cracking a beer despite her disappointment in it being the only entertainment.
“Wow, glad I made it,” Natalie says, taking the last seat. “You guys are a good time.”
“You almost didn’t,” either Tom or Cory says, motioning toward the horizon and the dying light there. “Sun goes down on you on this trail, you’re done.”
“It’s marked, dummy,” she says, tipping back her beer.
She’s right about that much. Though the trail out here is thin, there are white blazes painted on trees every few hundred feet. More than once on the way up I’d had to look for a blaze in the distance, the trail itself lost under new spring growth.
“How you gonna see if there’s no sun, genius?” Steph’s other cousin shoots back, but she lifts her phone and turns on the flashlight app, right into his eyes.
“And when the battery dies?”
It’s my voice, dead solemn. Duke’s hand is on my knee, and it flexes just a bit, whether in agreement or warning, I don’t know.
“I guess someone would have to come find me.” She shrugs, eyes gliding not so stealthily to my boyfriend.
“Vomit,” Meredith says.
“Twice,” Kavita agrees.
I don’t say anything, just open another beer and hope that insipid answer was enough to deter any interest Duke might have had. Then I notice his hand isn’t on my leg anymore, and I think maybe a girl’s survival skills aren’t that big of a deal when all you want to do is screw her anyway.
One of the brothers—I think it’s Tom—clears his throat and turns to Kavita. “So where you from?”
“Uh, what?”
If he was looking to break the palpable tension that had spread over the group he picked the wrong person and the worst question. Kavita might not look like the rest of us, but she’s as Tennessee as we are, and is damn sick of any implication otherwise.
“Where you from?” he repeats.
“Here,” Kavita replies stonily, her beer can audibly crumpling in her hand.
“No, I mean originally.”
“She was born in Knoxville, asshole,” Jason says, something that takes everyone who knows him by surprise, since it’s a complete sentence.