Chapter 23
I
FELT STUPID.
I lay on Ben’s living room floor with the top of my head touching his as he stretched out in the opposite direction, both of us staring at the ceiling.
“I—”
“Shh,” he hushed me.
“But—”
He shushed me even louder.
“You—”
He groaned and rolled over to his elbows to glare at me, but our positions put his gaze upside down.
“Are you giving my chin the evil eye?” I asked.
“You are hopeless at doing nothing,” he announced.
“I don’t get the point. What are we supposed to be doing?”
He growled. “Nothing. We are lying here, staring at the ceiling, doing nothing.”
I sat up and turned around. “I didn’t think you actually meant nothing at all. Why would we do that?”
“To see if we can. The answer is, you can’t.”
“It’s hard,” I said.
“Only if you’re Jessie Wiggle Bum Taylor,” he said.
“Wiggle bum?” I asked.
“It sounded marginally better than ‘ants in your pants’ in my head. I was wrong,” he conceded.
“So, so wrong,” I agreed.
“We’re going to have to go to plan B,” he decided.
“Oh good. What’s that?”
“Plan B is doing something.”
“I like it already,” I said. “Tell me more.”
“How about that hike I mentioned?” he asked. “There are two good ones within a ten minute drive.”
“Sounds good. Race you to the car,” I said and jumped up to run for it. I made it as far as the front door when he grabbed me around the waist and swung me away from the handle.
“That’s cheating!” I complained.
“No, this is called honoring my father and mother.”
“How do you figure?”
“I only manhandled you so I could get to the door first and open it for you,” he explained.
“I don’t believe you.”
“How sad. And here I thought we were building a relationship of trust,” he said. A mischievous undertone laced his words, but I followed him out onto the front porch anyway. As soon as he locked the door, he bounded over the three concrete steps leading to the lawn and sprinted for the car, not looking back until he was leaning against it. He had covered half the lawn before I figured out what he was up to, and when I reached him a moment later, he made a big production of stretching and saying, “I won.”
“Cheaters never prosper,” I retorted.
“Don’t be mad. I had to win so I could pick my prize,” he explained.
“Let me guess. A kiss?”
“Good guess, but no.”
Really? Bummer. “Then what?” I asked.
“I get a weeknight next week.”
I eyed him. “How do you mean?”
“I mean, instead of waiting until next weekend to see you, I get to see you one night during the week.”
He held up his hand when he could see me forming a protest. “Pick any night you want, a two hour window that coincides with dinner, and I’ll come eat with you and then get out of your hair.”
Instant quandary. Yearning and panic wrestled inside me; he was breaching my boundaries! Yearning pinned panic down and held a pillow over its face, allowing me to say calmly, “Okay. Wednesday. And I’ll call you to tell you when and where.” I felt better for yanking back control and setting the terms. But the tiny voice of panic taunted,
Yes, but he still carved out more of your time
.
I ignored it, glad when he grinned and said, “Good.”
He walked around to open my side of the car. I liked that. I felt dumb waiting for him to help me out of the car, but I liked the chivalry of him helping me into the car. Modern women are studies in contradiction, I guess.
Within ten minutes, we stood at the foot of a hike at the High Point Trailhead. Despite an overcast sky and a January chill permeating the air, it didn’t look like it would actually rain, and the midafternoon sun shone weakly enough to make it tolerable. I knew if Ben set the pace, I’d work up a sweat soon anyway.
He headed down the trail at a brisk pace. I liked a good hike, but the last one I took had been the previous summer, and all my exercise since had come from the gym. When I could fit it in. Hustling behind him reminded me that selecting the hill course on the elliptical machine was nothing like being on an actual hill. Within minutes, my calves burned in protest, and I fought to keep my breathing even. Ben had picked the easy trail, and I could barely keep up. How embarrassing! Pride prevented me from begging him to stop after five minutes, but when he turned around to point out something in a nearby tree, he took one look at my face and dug into his backpack for bottled water.
“Drink this,” he urged me, concern drawing his eyebrows together over worried eyes.
“I’m fine,” I gasped.
“Sounds like it. Drink it anyway,” he insisted, wrapping my gloved fingers around the bottle.
“Well, if it’ll make you feel better . . .” I said.
“Tons better.”
I took a few deep swallows and tried to regulate my breaths, hoping he wouldn’t notice, but they betrayed me, emerging in uneven puffs of steam. He had the good sense not to comment. Instead, he pointed again at the tree he had stopped for in the first place, angling his gaze away and wandering off a few feet so I could suck down more air without worrying that I looked like a wide-mouth bass out of water.
“I think there’s a flamingo up there,” he said, pointing to the top of an evergreen.
That distracted me from gulping down my next mouthful of precious, delicious air.
“Yeah right. Where?”
“Okay, it might be a cardinal.” He grinned.
“I am cursed with funny friends,” I muttered.
He took a couple steps back toward me. Cocking his head to the side, he asked, “Are we friends?”
“Sure,” I said, too out of breath to say more without wheezing.
He narrowed his eyes and nodded. I didn’t know what that meant. Maybe narrowed eyes meant, “I don’t want to be friends,” or the nod said, “Cool, we’re friends.” But since he didn’t use any words, I couldn’t tell for sure. I didn’t have the energy to follow up on it, but I filed his reaction to “friends” away for further study. I’d get to it when I could breathe.
He didn’t say anything else, only crossed his arms and slowly rotated in a circle, taking in the surrounding forest. We stood at its edges, and the faint winter sunlight still penetrated the leaf canopy. Not much moved or rustled. Even the usual sounds of skittering squirrels didn’t disturb the peace. I guess the little guys were hibernating with their acorns, it being winter and all. Wait a minute . . .
“Cardinals don’t hang out in the Northwest during January,” I accused.
“Your point?” he asked politely.
“So why did we stop? You think I can’t keep up?” The assumption irritated me. Even though it was true.
“Nope. I mean, yes, I think you can keep up, so no, that’s not why we stopped.”
“Well, for sure, it wasn’t for flamingo watching,” I said.
“It’s that tree,” he said, pointing to the evergreen tree.
“The one where the imaginary flamingos and cardinals live?” I asked.
“That one,” he confirmed. “Do you see the vine-looking thing growing all over it?” When I squinted and nodded, he asked, “Do you recognize it?”
“Uh, no. What is it?”
“Mistletoe.” He grinned.
My jaw dropped slightly as I stared at him. “That’s a pretty roundabout way to ask for a kiss,” I said. “Is that why you picked this hike?”
“No. This is dumb luck,” he admitted.
“Hmm. Not that dumb,” I said.
He grinned again and pressed a light kiss on my lips then settled back on his heels. “Today I love forests, hikes, and mistletoe,” he announced.
After he urged me to take another swig of water, we took off up the trail again, this time side by side. It meandered through the copse of trees that grew thicker the farther in we hiked. Neither of us said much. I couldn’t talk, and I could tell Ben enjoyed the quiet.
I’m not a chatterer. I listen a bit more than I talk. Dates are different though. Awkward pauses make me feel bad, like I am guilty of breaching good etiquette or something, so I often grope for ways to fill in the silences. Being with Ben felt easy though, like when Sandy and I hung out.
After several minutes on the winding path, he stopped again and pointed to another tree.
I smiled. “More mistletoe?”
“I wish,” he said. “There’s a woodpecker. It’s the first one I’ve seen since I moved back.”
Sure enough, I could see a large black and white bird with a red crested head clinging to the bark about midway up the tree. He dug into the trunk with a cheerful rat-a-tat-tat, looking for grubs to eat.
“That’s the good life,” I said.
“Eating worms?”
“Yep.”
“Do I hear jealousy of the woodpecker?” Ben asked.
“It’s easy out here, you know? You pick a nice tree and build a nest with your sticks and raise your baby chicks, and no one ever bugs you. Not a bad life,” I said.
I expected Ben to crack a joke, but when he didn’t, I glanced over to see if he’d heard me. I found him studying me with a curious expression.
“What?” I asked, feeling self-conscious. “Did that sound too cheesy?”
“Not at all. I’m just surprised,” he said.
“Because I want to be a woodpecker?”
“No, that you want a quiet life with babies.”
Oh no. Did he think I was sending out marriage hints? Embarrassed, I backtracked. “I’m probably more of a bee than a bird,” I said. “Busy in my honeycomb of office cubicles, working like crazy to make the hive run. That’s more my thing.”
Ben didn’t smile. Puzzlement flickered over his face, but he turned and gestured down the trail. “We’ve got about a half mile to go before the trail turns and winds back. You up for it?” he asked.
“Sure, of course,” I answered with forced cheerfulness, and I hoped Ben didn’t sense it. I couldn’t pinpoint what had changed, but in a few short moments, the vibe between us had morphed from easy to awkward. I pushed the feeling to the side for the moment. Obsessing now would only make me feel more uptight when I wanted to relax back into the comfortable rapport we’d had moments before.
I took a deep breath, both because I needed the oxygen and to help me let go of the slight tension settling in my shoulders. Ben cruised nearly even with me on the path, a few scant inches away. Deciding to treat those inches as an opportunity instead of a gulf between us, I edged close enough to bump him gently with my hip. He glanced down, startled, then bumped back. He slung his arm around my shoulders and pulled me to his side. “Get over here, Queen Bee.”
I liked the solid, reassuring weight of his arm across the back of my neck. The awkwardness evaporated, and the next hour passed in companionable silence with occasional pauses to “identify” increasingly outrageous wildlife in the forest. When we rounded one curve and Ben claimed to have seen the back end of a baby Yeti disappear into the brush, I threw up my hands in surrender.
“I give up,” I said. “You are the King of the Forest. I don’t know why I tried to compete. My albino fox is nothing compared to a baby Yeti. You’re in the wrong field, by the way. You should quit computers and get an Animal Planet show where you wrestle bears on the slopes of Mt. Rainier.”
He looked disturbed. “I think I’ve falsely misled you into believing I have, you know . . . muscles.” He flexed and stared at his biceps in mock frustration. “I’ll have to outrun the bear because I’m pretty sure I can’t wrestle it.”
I laughed. Ben definitely tended toward the lean side, but I knew from his hugs that he wasn’t at all scrawny. “Okay, so you’re no wrestler. Your neck is visible so that rules out football. Let me guess,” I said, poking his bicep. “I’m betting on swim team in high school.” He had the perfect frame for it. Not that I was looking. Much.
He smiled. “Good guess.”
We walked again, comparing notes on high school activities. Me: volleyball, school paper, honor society, and orchestra for two years. I play a mediocre violin. Ben: swim team, water polo, chess club, and cheer squad.
Wait, what?
“
Cheer
squad?” I choked out.
“Yep,” he said, his grin growing wider. “On swim team, all the girls are in bathing suits, and cheer squad—”
“—they’re all in short skirts,” I finished for him. “Genius.”
“It’s a Bratton thing,” he said. “Two of my older brothers did it too.”
“What about the one who didn’t?” I asked.
“Dean? He didn’t need an inside edge. He’s the good-looking one, so he joined the football team and got girls anyway.”
“Somehow, I doubt you needed extracurricular activities to get girls.”
“You’d be surprised. When you have good-looking older brothers, the girls don’t tend to look at you. I had to think of creative ways to compensate. Didn’t you have the same problem with older sisters?” he asked.
“They always dated guys older than them, so the ones my age never really tried to get their attention. Besides—”
But I stopped, weirded out by the idea of bringing up Jason. I’d never needed to explain him to anyone before.
Ben looked at me.“Besides, what?”
I swallowed. “I always had a boyfriend.”
This didn’t seem to alarm him. “No surprise. I can see guys lining up to date you the second you were available.”
“It was the same boyfriend the whole time, actually. In high school, I mean. And also in college.”
Now he looked interested. The concerned kind of interested. “How long were you together?”
“Four years.”
His eyebrows shot up. “What happened?”
“He met someone else. And married her.”
“Idiot.”
I smiled. “Maybe. Unfortunately, I hear they’re happy so it turns out I just wasn’t the right girl for the job.”
“Unfortunately? No way. Super lucky break for me,” he said. He pulled me in for a hug, and I soaked up his warmth. After several long moments, he leaned his head back and studied the tree canopy. More light streamed through, meaning the trees had thinned and we were near the end of the trail. “Excuse me for being nosy, but I gotta ask, are you done with that? Like, over it done?”
I pictured the Jason box disappearing in the flames of my fireplace. I was trying my hardest to be done. I hated the idea that Jason still had any kind of hold on me, but it scared the heck out of me to feel so strongly for someone again. So I told the truth I wanted to believe. “I’m so done,” I said.