Something Wilder(60)

“You liar.” She couldn’t resist him, though, and opened the sleeping bag, holding her breath as he settled beside her. Warm like the sun, smooth and solid. Lily couldn’t help it—she leaned into him, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

Leo’s voice was a soft hum. “Mmm. This is better.” He rested his chin on the top of her head. “You feeling okay?”

She nodded, pinning her lips together with her teeth. She hadn’t felt this kind of sweet, physical ache in forever. Deflecting, she said, “These boxers you gave me have little pizza slices all over them. Are you twelve?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, would you prefer to wear my other pair?” he asked. “The invisible ones?”

Lily laughed, looking up at him, and the instinct to prolong the joke disappeared as a bulb burst somewhere and their smiles straightened. Oh no, they were thinking the same thing. Specifically: how weird it was that they were here, huddled together under a sleeping bag, on this insane adventure, all alone.

She reached out, brushing his hair off his forehead. “Thanks for saving my ass in the river.”

“Thanks for kicking my ass earlier when I fell,” he said, and then smiled down at her, eyes on her mouth.

Grinning, Lily asked him, “Are you perhaps suggesting I was too hard on you?”

He nodded, leaning forward, and she met him halfway, pressing their foreheads together. Lily lifted her hand to the side of his face; his stubble was soft, and she loved the gentle scratch of it. He reached up, cupping her jaw and sending his fingers into her hair. The simple touch on the nape of her neck sent a drugged, ravenous sensation across the surface of her skin. Her lips hovered barely an inch away from his.

“Don’t do this if you’ll feel shitty tomorrow,” he said.

The request sent a cooling realization through her. Tonight-Lily wanted those full lips on hers. But Tomorrow-Lily might wake up feeling unsteady and unsettled all over again. In her experience, nighttime hunger had never been a good mix with daylight rational thinking.

She turned away. “Okay. Sorry.”

Beside her, his disappointment manifested in a quiet stillness, a held breath, and then Leo shrugged out of the sleeping bag. “I should get camp ready.”

She knew she should help, but the sunset was a streak of pastel orange and purple, the fire was crackling away peacefully, and Leo was practically in the buff—the view was now firmly planted in Fantasies She Never Knew She Had.

As soon as Leo had the tent set up and his bedroll and sleeping bag laid out inside, Lily’s body sagged. Her bones felt like they were softening inside her; all she wanted was to crawl into an actual bed and lose herself to oblivion. They went about the quiet normalcy of preparing for sleep: brushing teeth, refilling canteens with water and treating it with tablets. He checked their clothes and assured her everything would be dry in the morning. And as the sun gave its final wink over the rim of the canyon, the temperature seemed to drop immediately. Leo opened the flap to the small tent and gestured for her to lead the way.

She climbed in and pulled up short when faced with the reality of the sleeping bag situation. It was a one-person bag, in every dimension. They’d both fit, but barely.

“Could we unzip it and use it like a blanket?” she asked.

He reached up, scratching the back of his neck. “We could try. I just worry that it won’t keep us warm. Especially if it drops into the forties again.” Leo paused, attempting to read her silence. “I won’t try anything.”

A weight rolling over inside left her mute for a second. She wanted him to try something. If she was being honest, she wanted every moment of downtime they had to be spent touching. But that was the infatuation talking, and Leo was right—she shouldn’t do anything if she didn’t know what it meant. Because what could it mean? What was he going to do? Turn down a promotion, leave New York, and move here? How would she even adapt to that? The idea of having him in her life every day, of growing dependent on that connection, made her pulse rocket, her body instinctively rebelling.

“I’m not worried about that,” she said. “I’ll, um…” She gestured to her body, in his clothes. The jeans were baggy, and she was sure with both of them in there, it would be too warm in them anyway.

She slipped them off and he busied himself with climbing into the bag first, shoving his body as far to the side as he could and holding it open for her.

Was there a word that meant both perfect and terrible? It was this moment. Leo in nothing but black boxers. Lily in a T-shirt and his boxers with little slices of pizza all over them. She wiggled down into the bag beside him and the reality of just how close they’d be all night hit them both, as it essentially meant she was sliding across his naked torso. She couldn’t help the laugh that tore from her, and Leo’s eyes were squeezed shut, his lips trapped between his teeth. “Great,” he said, and laughed. “This is fine.”

She tried to work out which would be worse: facing him, or pressing her ass up against him? They both seemed to agree without discussion that facing each other was better; that way, at least they could keep a few inches of space between their hips. While she tucked her arms between them, Leo worked to maneuver his around her. His left arm became her pillow, the other looped around her torso, and then the terrible dissolved and it was… only perfect.

She wondered if he was remembering, too, how this was the way they used to sleep—by choice. How his tendency to roll away to the cool section of sheets was slowly eroded by her sleep-clinging tendencies and he eventually relented and held her in the tight cage of his arms.