Ryder and I swim back to the campground just before sunset, the sky a mix of purples and pinks and orange. By nightfall, beers are opened, s’mores are melting, and tents are pitched. “I’d offer to let you bunk with me,” Shelby says, “but it looks like you’ve got your sleeping arrangements all figured out. Well,” she says, her mouth stretching into a grin, “probably not so much sleeping.”
I look over my shoulder at Ryder, who lounges on a blanket by the bonfire, leaning back on his tatted arms. In the light of the flames, he almost glows, like some kind of sexy, beautiful, otherworldly being.
I smile at Shelby and nod. “Probably not so much sleeping,” I say.
“You know, I haven’t seen Ryder this relaxed in a while,” Shelby says. “Years, maybe.”
“Being in nature can have that effect, I guess.”
“No, you have that effect. We all think so,” Shelby says. “So keep it up. We like happy Ryder.” Shelby leans into me and whispers in my ear, “And he likes you.”
Eventually we all end up around the fire. Ryder and I sit on the blanket, him behind me, his legs stretched out around mine. His chest moves in and out on my back as he breathes, the regular rhythm of it like the soothing, familiar beat of a favorite song.
Cash breaks out the guitar and regales us with his original songs, mostly about how good-looking he is, how good-looking someone he wants to have sex with is, or the Atlanta Braves. They’re hilarious, and actually, musically pretty good. “Cash, I had no idea you played guitar,” I say.
“These fingers have surprised a lot of women, Cass,” he says, wiggling them at me.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Ryder says, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me into him. “Save your little finger talents for someone else.”
“Finger talents,” Avery says. “There’s your band name, Cash.”
The rest of the night, Ryder holds me like that, tight and close, like I belong to him, like I belong here, around this fire, with these people, in his arms that are strong enough to keep anything bad out and everything good in. All my problems feel a million miles away; I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as safe as I do curled up in Ryder’s arms tonight. It’s a feeling that I want to last.
CASSIE
CH. 20
Although I spent much of the weekend not wearing clothes, by Tuesday night I need to do laundry in a major way. I toss a load in the washer, and head downstairs to tackle the dishes in the kitchen before going to bed. I ended up staying with Ryder again Monday night after we came home from the lake in the afternoon. “It’s late,” he’d said, crawling up from where he’d been kneeling between my bare legs to put his head on my naked chest. We were on the long black couch in his den on the bottom floor of his condo. Across from us, the evening sun shone brightly through the floor-to-ceiling windows. “You don’t want to drive home at this hour.”
I tufted his soft hair with my fingers, weak and happy from the orgasm he’d just given me. “It’s only six o’clock, Grandpa,” I said, chuckling. “And my car’s not even here. You just don’t want to drive me back to my house at rush hour.”
“I do hate rush hour traffic,” he said. He kissed my ribcage. “And I kind of like having you here.”
Me, too jumped into my throat but I swallowed it whole. It seemed risky to say out loud. Mostly because it was true.
Now at my house, I put on music as I load the dishwasher to break up the silence of being here alone. When I lived here with Jamie before I moved to England, it seemed like he always had friends over, and growing up, the kitchen was the center of our family life, the one place we would all be together at least once a day. Our dad would cook dinner nearly every night after he got home from work while I did my homework at the table, and our mom would “supervise,” as she liked to say, with a glass of wine, the two of them chatting about what seemed like such grown-up things to a kid: local politics, neighborhood gossip, how best to cultivate the tomato plants they’d planted in our backyard.
All that life and activity, the voices of people who love each other blending together into this unique melody—it was something I missed terribly living with Sebastian. Our apartment, actually, was quite lovely, tall ceilings and lots of windows that filled the rooms with natural light. But it so often felt dark there to me, like a cave or a bottomless black pit where a raised voice would echo and a soft, pleading one could barely be heard.
Aretha Franklin is spelling out Respect as I scrub pots and pans when I hear the loud groan of weight against wood, like someone pushing a closed door.
Like someone trying to open it.