With This Heart(18)

“ Are you okay, Abby?” Beck yelled when he realized I wasn’t swimming any closer.

My breathing was still uneven, so I just gave him a feeble thumbs up. He didn’t buy it. He dipped under the water and I assumed he was bee lining for me. I tried to recover quickly. He’d think I was a wimp if I was this tired before even making it to the halfway point. Maybe I could say that I was attacked by a group of lake monsters and had to fight them off. I’d faced Loch Ness and lived to tell the tale.

A second later, his brown hair popped out of the water a few feet away from me.

“ Not a swimmer?” he asked, inching closer. If his plan had been to kill me on this camping trip, he should have done it then. I didn’t feel like swimming back to shore and treading water was becoming harder by the second.

“ Guess not,” I mustered shallowly.

His brows furrowed and, without my permission, he swam up to me and wrapped an arm around my waist. I would have been angry, but the moment he lifted some of my weight off of my arms, I wanted to cling to him for eternity.

“ To hell with feminism, please just carry me back to shore.” I wrapped an arm around his broad shoulders, feeling his muscles move and flex under my touch.

A rumble of laughter moved through him in response to my request. “Could you wrap your arms around my neck as if I was giving you a piggy-back ride? That’s probably the easiest way.”

I shifted behind him and then instinctively wrapped my legs around his waist as well. It hit me like a meteor: I was barely clothed with my legs wrapped around a really, really hot guy. My boobs were pressed against his toned back. I looked up to the sky and mouthed ‘thank you’ to whoever might have been watching.

“— legs,” he said.

Oh, God. “What?” I mumbled, realizing I’d missed whatever he had just said.

“ Unwrap your legs,” he repeated. My face turned ten shades past crimson. I had been clinging to him like a baby monkey. “You can kick with your legs or just lay there,” he added, “but I can’t really move my hips with you gripping them that tightly.”

“ Yeah, okay. It wasn’t that tight,” I grumbled, letting my legs fall back.

He laughed and started to swim us back to shore. “I probably lost circulation down there .”

I smiled at the thought. “Oh please, the water is cold. I’m sure there wasn’t much circulating going on anyway...”

He grinned back at me and shook his head. The water reflected back at me from his hazel eyes. My heart pounded against my chest so hard that I’m sure he felt it as well. His pace picked up while I tried to ignore the shifting of his back muscles against my chest. Let me tell you, it was not an easy task.

The second we got back to shore, I grabbed my pajamas, my cell phone, and the black urn, and bolted from the campsite. I told Beck I was going to change and use the restroom before it got too late. In reality, I just needed a moment to collect myself. Clinging to him like that had felt amazing, and there was no denying how turned on I was. But I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to feel like that considering he hadn’t made a move on me or anything.

As I walked through the woods, I realized that I was just like my Aunt Dana’s shih tzu that always humped my leg when I went to her house. Poor dog. I knew what it felt like to derive your pleasure from an unassuming patron.

When I found the restroom, I changed into my sleeping shorts and a tank top, but even that still seemed like too many layers. My fear that the temperature wouldn’t drop at sundown was realized. It was somehow even hotter, and the air was stale and static. I pulled my hair into a messy bun and then threw my stuff back into my backpack.

There was one last thing I needed to do before I headed back to the campsite. I walked further into the woods, untaped the black urn, and then texted Caroline.



Abby : Short version: We’re camping. Went swimming. I was a pathetic wuss and Beck had to carry me back to shore. Bonus: I felt his body and it was probably the best moment of my life.



Yes, you can relax. I checked like ten times to ensure that I had Caroline’s name at the top of the text screen and not Beck’s. I’ve seen enough sitcoms to know that I couldn’t fall for that mistake.

After the text had sent, I put my phone down and twisted the lid off of the urn. I took a deep breath in preparation for the next moment, but nothing happened. The contents of the urn didn’t budge. There was no wind, remember? Just static air. I looked down into the basin and waited for something profound, but instead I just stood in the forest, in my pajamas, holding an urn, and looking like a weirdo. I sighed and tipped the urn over a little bit, letting the top of the ashes spill out onto the ground. It was the definition of anti-climactic. The light gray ashes just fell to a pile on top of the dirt. There was a reason people called it scattering ashes and not dumping ashes. No one wants to dump ashes.

I tried really hard to have a spiritual or thoughtful moment, but I ended up just thinking that it was getting darker and that I didn’t want to be eaten by a bear. My phone buzzed next to me on the ground. Caroline’s face appeared and any hope of having a magical moment was lost.

I snatched the phone and clicked ‘answer’.

“ Hey. You just ruined what was supposed to be one of the most moving moments of my life,” I proclaimed.

“ Were you about to have sex with Beck?”