Camp Boyfriend (25 page)

He held my gaze for a long moment before looking down at the compass.

“We went too far west.” He peered around the woods as fog started to roll in. “When did we start drifting off course?”

Annoyed that he’d avoided my question, I yanked the compass away and chucked it into the mist. “I’ll tell you when we started drifting.”

“What are you doing?” he demanded. “I needed that.”

“Well, I needed you. But we got off-course when you stopped caring about me. How did that happen?”

Thunder rolled in the background, the deep bass startling a brown rabbit. It flew into the brush, its white tail bobbing.

“I’ve never stopped caring.” Seth gazed after the animal. “I’d better get you back before things get nasty.”

My blood simmered at the double meaning behind his words. Once again, Seth was avoiding a serious talk about our relationship. So much for thinking he was opening up. I could ask him about the life cycle of a fruit fly and he’d speak for an hour, but one question about where we stood and he ran for the hills—or straight to another girl. Suddenly I saw Breyanna for what she was. Not competition. She was a distraction. To avoid dealing with missing me, he spent time with her. It was another way for him to escape his problems.

“Lauren, we need to keep moving if we want to get back before dark,” he urged, then headed downhill.

I stomped after him, swiping rain off my cheeks as the wind picked up.

“I’ll tell you where we got off-track,” I fumed, shivering despite the anger that fired me up inside. “How dare you tell my friends you helped us get back into camp because you didn’t want me to leave. What a joke. You’ve spent half the summer either hanging out with Miss Headband, avoiding me, or accusing me of stuff I didn’t do.”

“Are they really your friends, Lauren?” Although his voice was steady, his tone sounded grim. “They’re encouraging you to sneak out at night and betray your old friends.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“Are you going to deny that you let them into your cabin and gave them Trinity’s stuff?” He paused to squint through the rain as if trying to get his bearings.

“I didn’t give them anything! They stole it.”

“Yet now they’re your friends.” Seth brushed back his dripping curls and looked at me, his golden eyes moving down my face from nose to mouth to chin. “Come on, Lauren. Does any of that make sense?”

I strained to hear Seth’s voice in the howling wind. Rain lashed my face, ran down my neck and pooled at my clavicle.

“I’ll admit Hannah’s a bitch.” I raised my voice over the intensifying gusts. “But the rest of the girls are really nice. Besides, the Munchies
wanted
me to leave. They didn’t want to hear my side.”

Something inside me deflated like an untied balloon. I’d never imagined all my old relationships would fall apart so fast.

“Right now we’ve got a bigger problem.” The anger drained out of his expression. “We’re lost.”

“Excuse me?” I pivoted on one heel to survey our surroundings, argument forgotten. “You know this area backward and forward. How can we be lost?”

“I can’t see.” He swiped a hand through the mist. “Between the rain and this fog, I have no idea where we’re going anymore.”

“Then let’s backtrack.” I turned around again to check where we’d come from and saw lightning fork on a distant mountain. I shivered. “They’ve probably called off the scavenger hunt anyway.”

“We could if we knew which way we came from.” His amber eyes were filled with concern.

He had me seriously worried. If Seth didn’t know where we were, how would I ever know? I picked a direction and pointed. “That way.”

“But how long can we walk ‘that way’ without a compass or being able to see anything?”

I looked down and noticed my knees disappeared in the mist.

“Oh. My. God.” With a sinking feeling, I began to understand why he looked so concerned. “I’m sorry I threw the compass. I had no idea—”

He waved away my panicked apology. “I could probably find our way back by following lichen growth.” His face creased in concentration, then lifted as another lightning bolt streaked across the sky. “But that would take too long. We need to get out of this weather now.”

He looped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. Cold and scared, I didn’t protest. The fog transformed the woods into a shrouded, eerie place.

“How will we get back?” We couldn’t walk all that way in this weather. For that matter, it felt weird to even put my foot down when I couldn’t see the ground in front of me. I could twist an ankle or step off a cliff.

With the pelting rain in our ears, would we even hear the river when we got near it? I tucked my head against his shoulder, comforted by his warmth.

“We won’t make it until the fog lifts.” He held a tree branch up so we could duck under it. “We’ll be lucky if we can find our way back to the hermit’s hut.”

I missed a step, and it didn’t have anything to do with the weather.

Seth squeezed my shoulders, holding me steady.

“The hermit’s hut?” It shouldn’t matter that kids went there to make out and…much more. We were lost and needed shelter. It was a practical solution. So why did it feel like we were doing something wrong?

“Safety first.” He sounded as concerned as I felt. Rumors were going to fly if we were stuck out there for long. “Let’s hope the weather clears soon and we’ll make it back before dark.”

Something sharp pinged against my head as a small building came into view ahead of us.

“Hail!” Seth shouted, grabbing my hand and racing us to the shadowy outline of the hut. Lightning crackled and thunder boomed as we pulled open the door and ducked inside. I turned to survey the nightmarish scene before shutting it. Fifty-foot trees bent like saplings in the moaning wind. Smaller branches flew by like a scene from the Wizard of Oz. I half-expected to see Hannah ride by on a bicycle wearing a witch hat.

I shut the door and leaned against it. If there was a chance we’d make it back to camp before nightfall, it was a slim one.

* * *

Night came early in this kind of weather.

By the time the mist started to lift and the hailstorm ended, it was too dark to try making it back to camp.

Luckily, Seth hadn’t waited to make preparations. He’d unearthed abandoned cabin loot like candles, blankets and those chemical fireplace logs that burned with just one touch of a match.

Knowing I hated thunderstorms, Seth distracted me. He found all the hiding spots where various visitors had stashed their supplies and piled them in the center of the planked floor. He made up a game to guess who’d left which items. It was so fun I barely flinched when thunder shook the hut or hail drummed so hard on the tin roof that I thought it’d break through. So far we’d speculated that the Army-issue utility knife was Bam-Bam’s and the gold glitter comb belonged to Emily. We laughed imagining Rob’s reaction if he’d discovered the two. It’d been fun watching the super-confident hunk crash and burn attempting to seduce Emily. Neither of us mentioned our own relationship woes. We were finally having a good time together.

A Yankees baseball hat could belong to most anyone. I pulled on the hat, attempting to hide my humidity-expanded hair. If only someone had left behind a hair straightener… The pink satin sleeping bag monogrammed with a capital M was no challenge, given Madison’s reputation. No doubt I’d have one as well after spending the night here with Seth.

“I know you didn’t steal the diary,” Seth said out of the blue as we huddled on the sleeping bag before the crackling fire.

“Finally.” My breath rushed out. “What made you realize that now?”

Seth’s amber eyes darted to mine. “Deep down, I always knew. I was frustrated about the way things were between us. That you couldn’t make up your mind between Matt and me.”

Seth took my hand and ran one of his fingertips down my palm. My throat tightened. I tried to ignore the nervous electricity that pulsed through me at his touch.

Even though I was determined to keep things platonic between Seth and me, I could imagine what it would be like to sit in front of this fire with the right guy. Making out. Seeing what else happened…

“Are you cold?” he asked me suddenly, rubbing my arm with warm fingers.

I couldn’t stop the small thrill that shot through me. “I’m fine,” I insisted, though my voice sounded tight.

“I know you’re worried about what will happen when we go back tomorrow.” He rested his hand on the side of my face, his thumb skimming my cheek.

I frowned and pulled back.

“Tomorrow?” I’d been holding out hope we’d still go back to camp soon. “But kids come out here all the time in the dark. Can’t we at least try?”

“Kids who plan to come up here bring flashlights.” Seth shook his head. “The river will be dangerously high anyway. It’s not safe tonight, even if we could see.”

Was I crazy to trust the judgment of a seventeen-year-old boy so much? All I knew was that Seth had hiked and climbed all over these mountains; if he said it wasn’t safe, I wasn’t going to risk it. Gollum could toss me out if he wanted. But I really hoped he didn’t. I wanted to perform in the talent show and spring my last surprise on my cabin mates—new and old.

“Even if Gollum believes that, you know the other kids won’t. They’ll think we hooked up.” An image of Matt’s livid face, Hannah whispering in his ear, came to mind. “We’ll get all the blame and none of the fun.”

“I’m having fun.” He pressed his forehead to mine and flattened his palm against my back.

In a friendly, reassuring way? Or a way that meant he was hitting on me? I had no radar with him anymore. Seth had surprised me at every turn this year.

My heartbeat picked up. The warmth of the fire sent a pleasurable heat through me. Or was it Seth’s touch?

Boy-free summer
. I repeated it like a mantra.

“Can I ask you a question?” I’d been dying to ask him this for years, but the old me had been too afraid.

“Shoot.” He wrapped his arms around his knees and locked a hand around his other wrist.

I gathered my courage. “Why did you want to break up every year after camp?”

In the quiet that followed, I traced the white stitching on the embroidery that outlined Madison’s initial.

When Seth finally answered, his voice was low.

“It’s easier to end things on good terms than risk something going wrong during the school year.”

“Why assume the worst?” I’d never given him reason to doubt me.

“I saw what my dad went through after my mom left us.” He reached for a stick to shove the logs around in the dusty fireplace as I marveled that he’d finally admitted what I’d suspected. When Seth’s mom abandoned him, she’d left a huge hole. No wonder he had trust issues. Still, we could have worked through that if he’d given me a chance. Opened up to me like this before.

“I always figured I’d wait to get serious with anyone until I was…really sure,” he continued.

“And you were never sure of me?”

His crooked grin made a surprise appearance, but his tone was dry. “I was hoping this would be the year we’d be ready to take that step.”

Something inside me collapsed. My chest felt so tight that for a minute I couldn’t breathe. We’d been so close to developing something amazing.

“Instead, I showed up with someone else.”

Outside, the wind rubbed tree limbs against the cabin, making a squeaking scrape.

“It wasn’t just that.” He put the stick down and looked at me. Really looked me. “You showed up
as
someone else. Someone I didn’t recognize with a new look, new clothes, new interests.”

I opened my mouth to protest but stayed silent when I followed his gaze to my trendy sandals.

“I didn’t know who you were anymore,” Seth went on. “Since when did you prefer dancing to stargazing, tanning to pursuing your Aerospace Scholar dreams? That wasn’t the Lauren I knew. The Lauren I loved.”

I flinched. Who knew a verb tense could cut as deep as a knife? Seth no longer loved me because I’d changed.

How ironic that I’d come back to camp to get back to the things I’d loved, especially Seth. But Matt had stopped that chance and, suddenly, I was glad he had. What was so wrong with liking dance
and
astronomy? Cheering and the science club? The popular and the outsider cliques? The problem was, I hadn’t realized I could do both,
be
both. If I’d gone back to Seth, I would never have learned that.

I looked over at my drying wedge sandals by the fireplace. They were awesome, even if they had slowed us down. And yeah, I was the girl who worried about weather-induced hair frizz.

So maybe I had changed. And Seth had a point about letting my dreams lapse. But why couldn’t he see through the make-up and clothes to the person who still thrilled at the site of a meteor shower and drew constellations on her notebook covers?

I laid back, tired of justifying myself. “That girl’s gone, Seth. I’m different now.”

Seth stretched beside me. His amber eyes searched mine in the dim light, a wistful smile lifting the corners of his mouth.

“It’s not a bad thing,” he agreed, his fingers toying with my curls. “I just miss the old you sometimes.”

I closed my eyes and enjoyed his touch, knowing it wasn’t going any further. After all, he cared about someone else, someone I’d never be again.

“Sometimes…” I edged a little closer to ease the empty ache inside. “…so do I.”

Chapter Twenty

I wrung my dishrag over a bucket of soapy water and draped it across the handle. Back aching, I stretched and surveyed the sparkling mess hall tables. Seth’s mop clattered in its holder nearby. Our eyes met in weary satisfaction. After two hours, our breakfast cleanup—punishment for straying off the scavenger hunt trail—was over.

“Finally!” Seth whooped, then skidded across the slick floor, losing his footing as he reached me. I caught him at the last minute, my arms gripping his to keep us both upright.

Laughter erupted outside the screened windows. Hannah pointed at the two of us as we broke apart. “
Boy-free summer
, my ass,” I heard her say. “Wait till Matt hears about this.” As they moved past the building, Kayla and Brittany looked back, their faces a matched set of betrayed expressions.