Page 84 of Past Tents

“Ha. Still not going to happen, at least not in the places where I’m planning on taking you camping.”

“Oh, so you have more camping plans for me, do you?”

“I have a lot more plans for nights inside a tent. Can you blame me?”

God, I loved this man.

Nudging him with my elbow, I pointed to a pristine stretch of grass next to a picnic area. “Let’s sit over there. That way we can still watch these guys while we have lunch.”

He carried the backpack over to the grass and we unpacked the wooly plaid picnic blanket, the thermos of lemonade, various cups, plates, and utensils, and the mammoth sandwiches I’d picked up at Daisy’s early this morning. “And also, there’s pie.”

He grimaced. “Pie kind of makes me think of that awful dinner at my parents’ house.”

“That’s why I brought it. Figured we needed to reimagine pie.”

Clay liked that idea, but even more, he liked the idea of lying down on the blanket with me curled up by his side. As he held one of my hands against his heart, he ran his other hand through my hair. I tipped my head against his shoulder and closed my eyes against the sun, but every time I opened them, Clay looked content.

“This is good, Alexandra. Perfect day.”

“Hey, I’ve always meant to ask you, why do you call me Alexandra?”

“It’s your name.”

“Yes, but everyone calls me Ally.”

He shrugged. “I’ve always preferred Alexandra.”

That made me smile. “She prefers you too.”

We stayed like that for half the day, eventually digging into the picnic, but mostly content to lie around lazily and talk. About our parents and the way they’d done a number on us in their own ways. About our students who we’d miss next year when they all scattered for college. About us—hopes and plans, dreams for a future neither one of us had imagined when we first met as teenagers.

Well, maybe we each had hoped for it a little bit.

“This is what we should have done from the beginning, instead of breaking up,” Clay said, gesturing around us.

“What, having a picnic with bears?”

“No, talking. And I take full responsibility for that. I panicked and I left the table. That’s on me.”

I hated that he continued beating himself up over it. “Bygones,” I said. When he opened his mouth to argue, I covered it with mine. He didn’t resist, instead gripping my shoulders and gently pulling me down onto the blanket. I curled up on my side and wrapped my arms around his neck, giving myself just enough distance so I could look at him but not an inch more.

Our bodies connected in so many places—my knees curled in against his stomach, his hand on my cheek, mine behind his neck, one of his legs draped lazily over mine. Our hearts intertwined. Like they were meant to be.

Like they called the shots and we just needed to wake up and realize it.

EPILOGUE

ALLY

Three Months Later

The bright yellow glare of sun glinting off of Bandit Lake hurt my eyes but I couldn’t stop staring in the direction of where Clay was rigging up a rowboat. He’d given me a sincere, well-reasoned speech about why I’d love fishing, soft-pedaling the part about rigging up a fishing pole with worms or chunks of raw fish and sitting in a cold boat for hours waiting for something to bite.

The hopeful glint in his eyes was tempered by the hesitancy in his voice while he waited for me to object. I did not. Yet.

“You know, fishing should’ve been an early part of your plan,” Clay called from the boat, a dozen yards away. As though he could read my mind. “If you wanted to be sure you could survive on your own, finding a food source was probably more important than learning to put a tourniquet around a tree,” he observed. Even though his face was lost to the glare of sunlight, I knew he was smiling.

“Maybe I never really wanted to be the kind of self-sufficient that involves worms,” I called back, a smile equally evident in myvoice. There were still a few things he didn’t know about me, my ability to catch a fish being one of them.

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