Chapter Twenty-FourTHEN
“Help me,” I whined, holding my hand out to Hannah, even though I should’ve been using it to brace myself.
Hannah turned around from the perch, having already gracefully reached the top, as I began sliding down the rock that we were climbing over. She crouched down, both arms outstretched to me, and grabbed my free hand.
“Babe, your other hand,” she said.
I was holding on to a root next to the rock, both of which were in a wall of dirt ascending to the peak we were trying to reach. Hannah used the Wi-Fi in the camp’s administrative office to quickly search what kind of landmarks there might be around the campgrounds, and this week’s mission was to try to reach all of them under the cover of our nightly excursions.
In these last few moments, this tree root had become my lifeline. Letting go was not an option.
Until she called me babe.
Hannah pulled me up and purposefully collapsed onto her back before I could get my footing, making me fall on top of her.
“Subtle.”
She purred. “I wasn’t trying to be.”
She pushed her head up slightly, sending her lips closer to mine. I pecked her, quickly rolling off and standing up. I figured that the overlook where we were heading would make a much better make-out spot than a patch of gravelly dirt.
We pressed on, sometimes holding hands and sometimes pulling apart so that we could use small trees to haul ourselves up particularly steep portions of the climb—all of which I hoped would be easier on the way down. Thankfully, there was a path. Neither of us had good enough reception to use Google Maps, but the path ensured that we wouldn’t get lost. Not having to worry about directions left time and space to think about other things.
Like the way Hannah’s hips swayed when she walked uphill. Alongside her, I could see the definition in her quads and calves. I noticed the thin layer of sweat glistening on her skin whenever there was a clearing in the trees overhead and moonlight spilled onto us from the cloudless sky. It was a perfect night. A soft, comfortable breeze found us as we emerged from the woods onto a flat boulder jutting out from the hillside, stars blinking overhead, and a full moon permeated the darkness the way creamer seeps into coffee.
Below, the lake shimmered, and something about seeing it but not being able to hear the gentle lapping of the water against the dock posts, the sound of fish rippling across the surface, was mystical. Looking at the camp from the outlook made me realizehow close we still were, but also how far we’d managed to walk.
“I want to go night swimming,” Hannah said, sitting down on the edge of the rock, her feet dangling over.
I sat down next to her, both petrified and exhilarated. We’d made it pretty high up.
“At the lake?” I asked, reaching into the small bag we brought with us for a water.
“God, no.” She didn’t look at me.
Her gaze focused and faded out to something in the distance, her chin high enough that I could tell she wasn’t looking at the lake. Maybe the trees on the other side, the mountainous horizon, or the seemingly endless sky that had become a comfort—making me feel like I was small, and all my problems were shrunken proportionally with me, making them minuscule.
“That’s too out in the open,” she said.
“We could go down to the ravine.”
“We can’t.”
“That’s where everyone else night swims,” I pointed out. Yes, even though we technically weren’t supposed to swim outside the lake, and definitely not outside designated daylight hours, night swimming for the counselors was a not-secret that the adults let slide, as long as they never caught us.
“That’s exactly why we can’t swim there, at least not the way I want to,” she said, plucking a blade of grass from a weed growing out of a crack in the rock.
“Well, however you want to swim, I’m sure it can’t be thatbad,” I said, naively thinking she had poor form on her butterfly stroke or something.
“Clarity—” She laughed, though it was bitter and dejected instead of funny. She couldn’t continue before sighing, like the weight of what she was about to say wasthatheavy.
Which made me realize what it was, why we couldn’t swim at the ravine with the other counselors, not even with the possibility of the other counselors being around. The last time we went night swimming, which was the only time we wentafterour first kiss, after discovering that our feelings were reciprocated, it was different. Yes, the first time was stressful because of the bikini and because of Jameson and his six-pack and his bare arm wrapped around my bare waist.
But the second time was just off. We hung out, kind of melding Hannah’s recreation friends with mine and Yasmin’s friends, some of whom were other girls I knew from Bible study at church. The girls who were hooking up with guy counselors sat next to them along the banks, leaning into them, holding hands, stealing kisses when the conversation didn’t require their attention.
But I felt frozen. I kept looking at Hannah and looking away, talking to her, but also not talkingtoher. She wasn’tmyHannah that night.
Instead of joining the counselors again the next night, we just snuck off… and that’s when I told her that I was in the closet and things wouldn’t be different when we came home. We ended up focusing more on the positive side of that conversation, thefact that there was something special enough between us to continue, even after camp ended.