I’ve been giving Lucy a hard time, but the truth is, she’s doing great. She’s a fish out of water, but she never balks at anything that needs to be done, in or out of the woods.
Right now, she’s doing her damnedest to start a fire using flint and steel, and even though she’s probably struck them together a hundred times without success, she’s still doggedly trying. Everyone else has a passable fire going, even the ironically bearded Iggy.
I kneel beside her and hold out my hands.
“I will never live this down, will I?” she asks.
“Probably not.”
Clark calls from the other side of the clearing. “Luce. You want to try one of the drills?”
Clark fashioned two drills, a hand-drill and a bow drill, to demonstrate how rubbing wood inside a groove can start a fire. He brings them over to where Lucy is crouched, shoulders slumped, and offers them to her.
“You want me to demonstrate again?” he asks.
“I got this,” I tell him.
He cocks his head, considering me. I give him a shut the hell up brotherly look. He retreats, smirking.
Yeah, I know. I don’t usually act this way around women. Any women. And I know I’m going to hear about it later.
But I can’t stay away from Lucy. Like earlier, when I saw her struggling with the water collecting. I’m a fixer—it’s who I am. And those knots needed fixing.
It was a bonus that I got to wrap my body around hers.
Double bonus that she wriggled herself back against me, just a little bit. Like we were both trying to pretend it wasn’t happening.
She got away with the pretending a hell of a lot better than I did.
Here I am again, Mr. Fixer, with the fire-starter.
I still have ulterior motives, too. Not gonna lie. I like being her hero—I have since that first day with the ducks. Sometimes, like when I was cooking fish the other night, or when I was building my shelter earlier, I catch her watching me. With wonder in her eyes.
I’ve had women look at me that way before. But it’s different with her. Having someone I admire so much look at me like that cracks me open.
I feel like I’d do almost anything for that look in her eyes.
Plus, I like to mess with her.
“So, look, you want to put the drill rod in the opening, here—” I murmur. “And then apply just the right amount of pressure.”
I meet her eyes. They’re wide. Her cheeks are pink, too.
“You’re doing that on purpose.”
“Of course I’m doing it on purpose. I’m making a point. It’s all about the friction. And the technique.”
“Gabe,” she grumbles, but she traps her soft lower lip between her teeth, and her breath is quick.
“All that rubbing,” I murmur.
I watch the flush cover her throat, and hope the way I’m squatting conceals my raging erection.
“What’s basically happening here is that the two pieces of wood stop knowing where one ends and the other starts. Their molecules mix. And that’s combustion. Heat. Flame.”
On that note, the wood smolders and I tease it to life with my breath, adding tinder, fanning the flames.
Of course, I narrate what I’m doing, too, checking to make sure she’s with me.
The flush, and the way she’s torturing that soft lip, tells me she is.
“What did I say?” I tell her. “Stick with me, and you’ll be just fine.”
“Or dead from sexual frustration,” she mutters.
I grin. “Stay patient, baby.”
“You know I only brought one change of underpants, right?”
“I can’t help it if you underestimated me,” I tell her.
She turns a shade pinker, and I get to test out how hard it’s possible to become without being touched.
Clark has demonstrated a variety of open-fire cooking techniques. Because this is a short trip and there isn’t enough time to cover everything, he packs in food, so dinner is way more satisfying than on most camping trips. We’ve stuffed ourselves on meat, rice and beans, and vegetables, and people are relaxing around the fire, two of the guys swigging from flasks they’ve brought with them, against Clark’s explicit instructions.
Alcohol is an enemy to wilderness survival. But on the short trips Clark doesn’t make a big deal about it, because no one is going to die of dehydration or heat loss from enjoying a nip around the campfire. He does give them a lecture though, and one of the guys tucks the flask away. The other one shrugs and keeps drinking.
After a while Iggy goes and stows himself away in the shelter he built. It’s more of a bird’s nest than a shelter, and he almost knocks it down getting into it, but it’s not a huge deal on a warm, dry night like tonight, so Clark and I give each other an eyebrow and let it go.
Not too long after that, the drinkers retire to their respective A-frames.
Clark gets up and goes to his shelter. To challenge himself, he made a circular shelter, which is a little more advanced than the campers’ set-ups. He disappears into it, and I have Lucy to myself.
She gets up and walks toward her pack.
“Where are you going?”
“I brought a surprise.”
“What kind of surprise?”
She pulls s’mores fixings from her pack. Half a chocolate bar, a handful of graham crackers protected by a small, square Tupperware box, and a Ziploc bag with some pretty seriously squished marshmallows. My first impulse is to chastise her for wasting space. My second is to start hunting for sticks.
“I brought cocoa, too, for tomorrow morning,” she says. “S’mores and cocoa are about to become an integral part of your marketing.”
I roll my eyes. “Does this look like a s’mores and cocoa kind of trip?”
“It does now,” she says, watching as I sharpen a stick and hand it to her. I like the way her eyes follow my hands and then flash to my forearms, my upper arms, and my shoulders, trailing down my torso. I like her looking at me. “Are you good at everything?” she demands.
“No,” I say. “Just the things I need to be good at for my job.”
“And rescuing ducks. And running a company. And kissing.”
“Mmm,” I say, leaning over and obliging her.
A throat clears behind us.
“Hi, Clark,” Lucy says.
His eyebrows are in his hairline.
“Forgot my fleece,” he says with a smirk, retrieving his shirt. “All makes sense now, though. Why you had to be on all the trips. Why Easton says you’ve been jumping down his throat.”
“Shut it, Clark.”
Clark’s grin gets even bigger. “Just sayin’.”
When he leaves us alone again, I give Lucy a sheepish look. “Sorry. Brothers. He’s giving me shit because—” I stop myself. I don’t need to get all confessional about this.
But she’s waiting for me to finish now, and I discover I want to. “He’s giving me shit because I don’t usually get like this. Possessive.”
“You don’t?”
I shake my head. “Nope. I want you all to myself. Long as I can have you.”
Her expression gets soft. “You’ve got me,” she says. “For the next two weeks.” She wrinkles her nose. “Week and a half.”
Suddenly, that feels like not enough time.
I set the marshmallow sticks down and use a couple of shovels full of dirt to put out the fire.
“What are you—?”
I swoop her up and carry her back to my shelter.
“Cave man!” she accuses in a whisper.
“Guilty as charged.”
Anticipating this moment, I laid out my sleeping bag earlier. I slide her onto it and lower myself over her. She opens her thighs and I settle myself between them, feeling the heat and softness of her through the thin hiking pants.
“These are the clean underpants,” she whisper-wails.
“Not anymore.”