“Those people were freaks,” he crowed gleefully. “They were shady as fuck.”
“Could you be any more annoying?” Rose asked him with a glare.
Archie hooted. “Oh, don’t get your pretty head ruffled just because your boyfriend was down there trying to bang some old lady.”
“You’re going to get your pretty head ruffled when I smack you.”
Archie ignored her. “Church group, my ass. Those people were hiding something back there. I know they were.”
“Enough,” Mr. Howe warned. “Whatever they were doing, it’s none of your business.”
This was true, but it also didn’t mean Archie was wrong. But at least he shut up about it for the time being.
We reached the camp, at last—a shaded grove. I collapsed in the pine needles beside Rose and put my head in her lap. She draped a T-shirt over my face to block the light, then a hat. She also asked Mr. Howe for a Tylenol 3 and a Zofran. Saying nothing about the Percocet, I swallowed both pills and hoped I wouldn’t OD. When I was done, Rose kissed my hand. Stroked my back.
She let me sleep.
19.
I WOKE TO hazy warmth and an even hazier mind. I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but when I looked around, I was relieved to see I wasn’t the only one who’d dozed off. Archie and Dunc were both crashed out. Shelby’s eyes were open, but she lay curled in the shade in a tank top with her shoulders bare and pink from the sun. She was staring at the trees, which seemed fairly pointless, although for all I knew, she was counting alpacas in the clouds. Avery wasn’t anywhere in sight and I was grateful for that. Rose was the loyal one, the one I needed; she remained sitting beside me, and she was reading a book. I twisted my neck trying to see what it was but couldn’t make out the title.
“Any good?” I asked.
Rose peered down at me. “You’re awake.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“I will be.”
“You’re not going to barf, are you?”
I scowled but shook my head. Rose had a thing about barfing. Only when I did it, though. Not her. I mean, not that I was a fan, but feeling bad about getting sick didn’t exactly do a lot to make me feel better. But there was no cause for alarm; both the Zofran and the inhaler had worked, aborting the migraine while I slept, leaving behind only trace amounts of tenderness. My brain remained cottony from the Percocet, but cottony was fine. I reached to pry Rose’s book from her hands, realizing that the reason I hadn’t been able to read the title was because the cover had been torn off it. In fact, a huge chunk of the entire book was missing.
“What happened here?” I asked.
“You said to pack light.”
“So you tore the pages out?”
She shrugged. “I read the first half yesterday, while you were talking to Howe, so it made sense to only bring the second. ‘Weight matters on the mountain,’ you said. Oh, and you were right, by the way. It’s a decent book.”
I turned to look at the spine. Rose’s preference was for old crime novels, books no one else bothered to read, but this was Into Thin Air. “Wait a minute. Is this my copy?”
Rose nodded.
“That you ripped in half?”
“You already read it.”
I bristled. That wasn’t the point and she damn well knew it. I also hadn’t paid for the book—it was from the FREE shelf at the library—but that didn’t mean I could afford to replace it.
But I swallowed my ire. After what I’d done, I owed Rose that. I owed her more.
“So you really like it?” I ventured.
She leaned back on her elbows. “I don’t know if I like it. Do you like reading about people dying doing something useless?”
“I guess I don’t think what they were doing was useless,” I said.
“Well, I do.”
“Then maybe what we’re doing right now is useless. Maybe everything we do is useless, all the time, so none of it matters anyway.”
Rose touched her nose, gave a faint smile. “Ding. Ding. Ding.”
I felt exhausted. I laid my head in her lap again with a sigh.
She played with my hair, wrapping it around her finger and unwrapping it. “So are you ever going tell me about this old lady? The one Archie says you were trying to bang?”
“There’s nothing to tell, Rose.”
“You sure about that?”
I rolled on my back. I looked her in the eye.
“Absolutely,” I said.
—
Perhaps it should’ve followed naturally that if I felt guilty for cheating on Rose with Avery, then the obvious and just thing for me to do would’ve been to confess. To ask for forgiveness and apologize for my sins.
I thought about doing that. I really did. I thought about a lot of things as I took Rose’s hand and we headed off on the second leg of our hike, heading up the mountain and leaving behind the Preacher and Maggie and whoever else they might’ve been with, as well as the sunlit spot where Avery and I had feverishly torn off our clothes to screw in the dirt like dogs. Truth be told, it made total sense that I should want to clear my conscience and make things right between us.
But I didn’t.
Looking back, the only way I can explain it is this: I didn’t want to lose Rose. I knew I would someday, but someday wasn’t yet. Plus, my guilt was worthless. It always had been. That was the way it was with my mother, whose misery reminded me every minute of every day of what I’d done to her. Not that I didn’t deserve my guilt. I mean, when you shoot your mother’s born-again asshole of a husband after years of watching him try to beat the devil out of her for her sins, which include your very existence, and then she goes and tries to kill you for the trouble—well, there isn’t any easy answer for that other than maybe you should’ve let her continue to suffer.
So, yes, I felt bad for sleeping with Avery. I felt bad for liking it as much as I did and for not being able to control myself and for really not even trying. I also felt bad that Avery had let me do those things to her in the first place, which I know isn’t fair and was the exact douchey logic she’d warned me against earlier in the day. But I loved Rose and loving her meant not doing anything that would push her away. So to atone for my cowardice, I resolved to hold her closer, as close as I could. That was the kinder choice, I told myself, because changing the past wasn’t in my control.
But Rose not knowing what I’d done to hurt her, well, that was the one thing that was.
20.
THERE WAS SOMEONE, however, that I did intend to apologize to. I could see no downside to that; he already knew what I’d done.