Page 23 of Past Tents

My mother thought men were unreliable, and she’d done her best to warn me. Eventually, I started to believe she was right and decided I’d never fall for that kind of man again because it wasn’t good for me. There was no point in chasing after a greyhound and having him chase me back because we both knew that there was a finish line in sight.

That was why I could look at Clay with his sculpted arms, pretty face, and melted-chocolate eyes and feel like I knew something important about him. Clay screamed greyhound, and that simple fact made it easy to convince myself to feel nothing.

The past couple of days were a weird blip. I’d chalked it up to concussion brain and the seductive properties of good coffee. Nothing more. And certainly nothing that meant I’d mistake spending a night in his yard pitching a tent for anything more.

“I know. I’ve been immune to him for years, and then he had to go and be uncharacteristically sweet. It just...threw me off.” I explained my crash and burn on the track, and Lucy nodded sympathetically until I got to the part about spending a night faux-camping in Clay’s backyard. Then she practically knocked the drink out of my hand.

“No, that’s simply not going to work.”

“Because...?” I knew why it wasn’t going to work for me—bugs, flimsy tents, woodland creatures—but I remained confounded as to why Lucy thought it sounded so awful.

“Because it’s way too much time to spend alone with that perfectly shaped hunk of Clay. If you’re feeling things now, hoo-boy, you’re going to be feeling things after that.”

She wasn’t wrong. That was my other concern. Maybe the bigger concern.

“I don’t think I can get out of chaperoning the retreat, so I do need some help if I’m going to be at one with the woods. What do you suggest?”

Lucy tapped a finger against her pink-lipped smile, and I watched her eyes dart about as though looking for a place to land on an answer. Her mouth popped open, and she clapped her hands. “I’m cock-blocking you.” Her voice was so sugary sweet as she smiled at me in her knowing way that I felt certain I’d misheard her.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m going to make it impossible for you to notice Clay because you’ll be pining over someone else. There’s a guy.” Lucy’s eyes gleamed with a mad scientist’s glee, and I wondered what kind of Frankenstein she had in mind.

“What kind of guy?”

“Louie. He’s an architect.”

Lucy had never once brought up Louis the architect before, and I wondered why. “Does Louis actually exist, or are you making up a fictitious perfect guy to keep me in rapt anticipation through the weekend and therefore distracted from Clay’s biceps? Then you’ll tell me Louie was all a lie?”

Her eyes went wide. Then she took a sip of her beer. Then another. I felt certain I’d nailed it until she started shaking her head slowly. Very slowly.

“Nooo...” She drew the word out so long it seemed to have three syllables. “But that’s a great idea and I will be stashing it in my bag of wing-woman tricks for later. Louie is real.”

I studied Lucy. The way she met my eyes made her look serious and truthful, but there was something she wasn’t saying.

“But . . . ,” I prompted.

Lucy took two more sips from her glass before slamming it on the table so hard that the liquid sloshed over the side. She mopped the beer up with a red bar napkin and pushed the glass away. “Fine. He’s maybe a tiny bit boring. But not in a bad way.”

I couldn’t suppress a laugh. “How is boring ever good?”

“When it’s a relief, that’s when. What you see is what you get with Louie. He’s not sarcastic or jokey.”

“So, no sense of humor.”

She made a face of distaste. “He’s straightforward. Has a stable career. He’ll pay for your dinner and engage you in tasteful conversation about uncontroversial subjects.”

“How do you know this man?” I found it hard to believe he and Lucy were good friends, partly because I’d never heard of him and partly because this was Lucy, just about the farthest thing from boring I’d ever known—she’d been brave enough to leave Green Valley for a big city and become a physician’s assistant when no one we knew had heard of that job. She was ahead of her time, and she did not do boring.

“We were standing in the checkout line at the library and apparently he was a former student of my mom’s.” Lucy’s mother, Frieda, was a Green Valley institution, a grammar school teacher who remembered every former student’s name, even a dozen or more years after she had them in class.

“Say no more.”

She nodded. “He was nice enough. Gave me his card because I told him I was looking for volunteers for the church yard sale, and he said he’s free most weekends. Made a point of telling me he doesn’t have anyone in his life to take care of, definitely no animals. He emphasized that.”

“What does he have against animals?” I almost wanted to meet this Louie just to confirm that such a person actually existed.

And more than that, maybe Lucy had a point. If I kept my mind busy thinking about a future date with a kind, boring architect, then maybe it would distract me enough that I could be in close quarters with Clay and feel nothing.

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