Page 92 of Happiness for Beginners

It sparked me to action. We were losing the light. “I’m going to find them.” I pointed at him. “Stay here.” Then I shifted back to my hands and knees to start crawling again, and right as I did, we both heard a snap. I looked down. I’d been kneeling over them the whole time.

“Found ’em,” I said.

“For real?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, picking up the two pieces.

“Did they snap in half?” he asked, peering for the answer.

“No, actually,” I said. “One of the arms just came off. Is that what they’re called? Arms?”

“But the lenses are okay?”

I put the lenses in his hand, and he wiped them with his shirt and popped them right up onto his face. “Oh, God, there you are,” he said, and he clamped me into another full-body hug.

I hugged back.

Then, without warning, he pulled back just a little, brushed that glossy beard past my cheek, and without asking or even thinking about asking, he shifted that hug into a kiss.

The kissing we’d done in the motel was like a peck on the cheek compared to this. This was like nothing else—a driven, anxious, ravenous kiss, and he brought his hands up into my hair to keep me close. It felt like a last kiss, somehow. Like a farewell kiss. One that eclipsed everything around it. Some kisses are dares—and some are just truth.

I don’t know how he could press so much longing and so much determination into one stolen moment, but there, on our knees, in the rain, the two of us possibly the dirtiest people to kiss since caveman times, he did. It was like nobody else even existed. I couldn’t have pulled away if I’d wanted to. By the way, I didn’t want to. His mouth was warm, and his arms were absolutely clutching me to him. It was utterly different now. Because now I knew him. He wasn’t a stranger, or just some friend of my brother’s. He was Jake. Jake, who had a hundred nicknames. Jake, who made everything funnier. Jake, who found something to like in everybody.

Jake, who was dating Windy.

As I remembered that, I pushed back. “That’s not a great idea,” I said.

He looked away. “I’m sorry.”

I was still a little breathless. “Don’t be.”

“I shouldn’t have done that.”

He shouldn’t have. Not cool.Not cool.But I wasn’t mad. How could I be? Even the best of us could have a flash of stupidity in a moment of sorrow. No matter how much I didn’t want to be the kind of girl who would do something like that to a friend, I cut myself some slack, because I truly hadn’t seen it coming. I cut Jake some slack, too.

“That never happened,” I said then. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. Then he added, “We do a lot of things that never happened.”

I thought about Windy. Were they together? Was she his girlfriend? Had we just cheated on the nicest person ever? For all our sakes, I hoped not. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask.

“You know what?” I said. “You’ve had a tough day. I won’t tell if you won’t.”

Jake gave me a sad smile. “I won’t.”

“Done, then,” I said. “Easy. It’s erased.” Even though, of course, it wasn’t.

We helped each other up, and then gathered up the water bottles.

“Sorry I broke your glasses,” I said, as we started across the rocks to the path.

“Nah,” Jake said, sliding the broken glasses arm into his pocket. “It’s nothing a little duct tape can’t fix.”

***

That night, after a terrible dinner of rehydrated vegetables, boiled water, flour, and salt, we went wordlessly to bed and slept as if the world didn’t even exist.

For a few hours. Until we were awakened by some rutting elk. Some very loud, very nearby, very randy elk. Or so we figured out later—right about the time I learned that elk are not exactly Bambi. Elk are like the buffalo of the deer world. Some of them weigh nine hundred pounds. Of course, I didn’t know anything about elk at the time. All I knew was that something incomprehensibly large—and obscenely close—was making huge, insistent, otherworldly noises in the darkness. And when I say “close,” I mean five feet away. Possibly four.

---