Page 29 of Tourist Season
“Bugfucker.”
I snort a laugh. Her lips don’t even twitch as she mists a cloud of spray around her head. A mosquito lands on my neck long enough to pierce my skin and I slap it. “Seriously?”
She shrugs. “Maya likes to get creative with her names. But she has a PhD in chemistry from MIT, for fucksakes. Everything she makes is fucking incredible. This is the good shit.” Harper mists her arms, her eyes never leaving mine, as though she’s ready to turn the nozzle on me if I so much as twitch in a way she doesn’t like. I’m pretty sure she would flay the skin right off my face with her fingernails if she could, judging by the merciless glare she pins on me. It’s murderously adorable.
No, it’s fucking not. What the actual fuck?
I shake my head, maybe hoping to clear my wayward thoughts, maybe hoping some of the cloud of citronella-scented droplets might drift closer to cover my skin in the light breeze.
“I’d like some,” I say.
Harper’s eyes narrow to thin slits of malice. “Where’s yours?”
“At the inn.”
“You’re telling me you do Search and Rescuefor a living, and you come to a nighttime body removal party at a body of water without bug spray?”
I swat at another mosquito, but two more land on my body in the time it takes to kill just one. “First of all, you’re playing fast and loose with the word ‘party.’ Second, when you said, ‘Pick me up at ten o’clock and help me with something for Arthur,’ you left out the part about digging up dead bodies by a fucking river. So.Can I have some?”
A snide little smirk flickers across her lips. “Not so good with manners, are you? Maybe if you’d said ‘please’ in the first place, I would have given your book back when you asked for it.”
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
“You’re right. And I’m not feeling so inclined to give this to you either,” she says as she sprays down the front of her body, her eyes still locked to mine. Blood roars in my ears. I don’t know if it’s rage, or the enticing boldness of her challenge, or the way the mist coats the exposed skin of her chest to shimmer on her collarbones. Maybe it’s all three that set me aflame.
My jaw presses tight as I take a step closer. “I could take it.”
She’s mere inches away, staring up at me with total defiance, her full lips set in a determined line. “And I could spray you in the face. That worked so well for you the last time.”
I inch closer. She still doesn’t shrink from me. Instead, she slides the spray behind her back in a way that almost dares me to take it. To reach around and fold her in an embrace and pull it from her hands. No matter how hard I try not to, I imagine the feel of her against me. Her warmth. The rise and fall of her chest against mine. The cadence of her heartbeat.
Her hard stare bores right into me, digging through every layer until it feels like she’s embedded herself into my heart, piercing me from the inside out. “Please, Harper,” I finally say, not missing the way her gaze finally drops to my lips and lingers there when Ilet her name slowly roll from my tongue, “can I have the bug spray?”
Her words come out a little breathless when she says, “Will you complain less if I give it to you?”
“I’m sure I’ll find something else to complain about, don’t worry.”
One hand slowly comes from behind her back to lift the bottle into my peripheral view. “I can’t wait to find out what joys you’ll bring next.”
Our fingers graze as I take the bottle from her. An electric hum sizzles in my skin even after that momentary touch has passed. And I wonder if she felt it too. If she did, she gives nothing away. As soon as she releases the bottle, she’s bending to grab the lantern and tape measure with one hand, the shovel with the other. “Follow me,” is all she says.
I pick up the duffel and my shovel, covering myself in the Bugfucker mist as Harper leads the way toward the boulders that sit on the rise at the end of the plain. When we arrive there, she sets her shovel and lantern down, then passes me the end of the tape, keeping the wheel in her hand.
“Do you have a map?” I ask.
She slices me with a glare. “Iamthe map. Six meters from the middle of the biggest rock. There should be a little line,” she says, running her finger over the surface of the boulder. “It’s here.”
I lean close to where her fingers rest, and sure enough, there’s a small notch in the stone made by a human hand. When I straighten, we both turn to evaluate the floodplain. “But how do you know you’re going straight? It could be there,” I say, pointing to a spot on the ground close to the shore, “or there.” I shift in an arc and point again. “Or it could be somewhere in between.Unless you have a second point to anchor from, it could be anywhere around there.”
Harper’s focus tracks across the wide, slow-moving river, locking onto another set of boulders on the opposite shore. Her shoulders fall a fraction, enough for me to notice. “There is another anchor point. The rock closest to the water.”
“Okay … well … that’s helpful, I guess. Except for the fact that it’s on the other side of the river.”
“Yeah.” There’s a long, silent pause. I would have expected her to march right up to the riverbank and dive in with the tape measure and probably a knife between her teeth. But she offers nothing. She just gnaws at her lip before lifting a shoulder as though she can hide her concerns beneath a nonplussed gesture. “I think it will be fine if we just measure from this rock,” she says as she motions for me to hold the end of the tape against the notch in the boulder. “As long as I go straight-ish—”
I let out an audible sigh and stop her with a touch to her arm that makes her jolt. “You said yourself, we don’t have much time. We’d better save ourselves the trouble of digging all over the place. Do you have another tape measure in here?” I squat down to start rummaging through the contents of the bag, glancing up to catch Harper shaking her head. She might not have more than one measuring tape, but she does have a brand-new, sixty-meter-long nylon cord rolled up in the bag, and I’m hoping that might do the trick. “What’s the distance on your map from the boulder across the river to the first body?”
“Forty-four meters.”
