“We can just do that?” I ask. “Stop by?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Until curfew anyway. After that … well, you gotta sneak, so the counselors don’t catch you. There’s a window at the very back of the cabin, opens onto my bed.”
“Top or bottom?” I ask, blushing the moment it comes out and happy that the dark hides it. “I mean—sorry, I don’t mean—”
“Vers,” he says before I can go on, and winks at me. “Bottom bunk, though. I like being able to just collapse into bed at the end of the day.”
“Me too,” I say, which is like half true, because who doesn’t like that, but also the first year I took the top bunk and Ashleigh was under me and then I was painting my nails and some dripped on her, so we switched.
“So you can just knock on the window, you know, and I can climb out of it. If there’s any reason for that,” he says.
I laugh. These are totally the lines he uses every year. I can tell, they’re so practiced. But he’s using them on me. And it doesn’t mean he’s still a playboy. He might just know how they work and he wants to connect with me. Ashleigh was being unromantic, is all. I look up again, at the stars.
“Okay,” I say. “All good information to have … potentially. But not much of a tour thus far.” There. That cooled it down.
“Thus?” he says.
“Thus,” I say adamantly.
“Okay, well, thusly, let us commence to the next stop wheretofore is the infirmary,” he says, in a terrible British accent.
“Wheretofore,” I say.
“Absolutely,” he says, walking toward the stairs. The stairs are carved wood stuck into the ground, and they curve up, like mushrooms on a tree. In some places they’re narrow, and some wide, and in the dark, they’re a little hard to navigate.
“Careful,” he says. “These stairs are tricky in the dark. Want to hold my hand for support?”
I take a deep breath before I say, “Sure,” and reach out. His hand takes mine and I feel my dick get hard almost immediately. His hand is warm and a little rough—like maybe I should lend him some moisturizer—but also soft, and when he tightens it around my hand, it’s just the right amount of squeeze.
“Didn’t think you’d go for that,” he says as we walk up the stairs.
“I was trying to call your bluff.”
“Well, we definitely just skipped ahead, date-wise. Now we’re hand holders,” he says. “We’re the guys who hold hands within the first five minutes of their first date.”
“Only because of these very dangerous steps, though,” I say.
“Right,” he says, and I can hear how happy he is. “Only ’cause of that.”
We reach the top of the stairs and neither of us lets go, even when a mosquito lands on my wrist and starts sucking. Hudson looks at it and swats it away for me. I almost expect him to make a joke about how he’s the only one who’ll be sucking on me tonight, but if he did I would probably burst into a fit of uncomfortable giggles and run away.
We walk down the path a little to a small clearing where he uses his free hand to point at the three buildings. “So, that’s the infirmary,” he says. “Cosmo is kind of weird, but also really cool, too. You can go there whenever, and you can just lie down, or he can give you aspirin or Band-Aids if you hurt yourself. Nurse stuff. But he’s also just cool to talk to, and he has great stories about Stonewall—he was actually there. I mean, if you care about that stuff. I know not all of us do. My mom says it’s not important, but it’s still like … cool to hear about, y’know? He also has bowls of condoms, and lube, just sort of on the desk for anyone to take.”
“Just on the desk?” I ask, like I haven’t taken some before.
“He says trying to act like no one is going to screw is the dumbest thing he’s ever heard, so he wants to make sure we do it safely.”
“So people have sex here?” I ask. “In the cabins with people watching?” If I turn the conversation to sex, then I can scale it back, too. If he is just being a playboy like Ashleigh said—and I don’t think he is—then I just have to tease and pull back, tease and pull back, until he knows me and we fall in love, and then tease and NOT pull back. Del is a tease.
“No!” Hudson says, then laughs. “I’ve heard some people have tried—real quiet, under the covers, people sleeping—but they always get caught. And then made fun of for the rest of the summer.”
“Do people come here just to hang out—no romance?” I ask, pulling it back.
“Oh, sure. It’s camp. Tennis, swimming, waterskiing … but that’s all down the hill. So let me finish up here. I take my tour guide responsibilities seriously.”
“Okay,” I say, laughing.
“Here’s the office.” He points at the small white building that I’ve seen every summer, more like a house than a cabin. I nod as though I’m seeing it for the first time. “Joan is there most of the time. She and her wife live there all year, but her wife is a lawyer, so she’s not around the camp much, except for dinner, sometimes.”
“Okay,” I say, getting a little bored with all the stuff I know already. But I gotta play the part.
“Oh, and this.” He runs for the meeting hall, dropping my hand. I frown a little, but I guess we had to stop at some point. “This is the meeting hall.” I follow him, trying to act impressed.
“What’s it for?”
“Rainy days—movie nights, any outdoor electives that can’t meet in the rain might use it, and sometimes …” He swings open the screen door, then tries the heavy wood door behind it. “Oh well. Sometimes they leave it open. This cabin people have definitely had sex in.” He grins at me. I grin back, then turn away. Remember, Del is a tease, I tell myself. No pushing him against the cabin and kissing his very soft-looking lips. Not yet.
“But they have to be quiet,” he says, “’cause Joan is right there. Last year, these two girls moaned so loud, she heard them and they got kicked out that night.”
“For sex?” I ask.
“For being out of their cabins after curfew,” he says, closing the screen door and leaning against the cabin wall. It’s dark now and the few electric lights have turned on, but most of the light is coming from Joan’s place and the infirmary. “It’s a queer camp, so they want to stay sex positive, like not shaming anyone for wanting sex, you know? But the rules are meant to make it difficult to find alone time. But the difficulty is half the fun.” He does that smile again where his tongue finds the upper corner of his mouth and presses against the gap between his teeth there.
He takes my hand again and for a moment I think he’s going to pull me in for a kiss, but instead he leads me back to the stairs, and down them, back to the cabins and flagpole, where some folks are trying to start a bonfire, and then to the other set of steps, down to the main part of camp.
“So let’s see,” he says as we walk. He drops my hand when we see some other people on the tennis courts. It makes me a little sad, but I get it—we don’t want to look too ridiculous on day one. A slow burn is always more respectable. “So those are the tennis courts,” he says. “Do you play tennis?”