Page 25 of Only in Your Dreams

Melody sets her gaze on me again, and for a while, that’s all we do. Stare at each other in the bluish light coming from the lantern in the middle of the tent.

She looks grim and skeptical, and I lie here both withering under the weight of her distrust and wondering how it is she’s even more beautiful than she was back then. How I had the stomach to walk away from her that night. Whether she’ll ever forgive me, and if I’ll ever manage to forgive myself.

“We weren’t anything that night.”

Each of her words deliver a sharp blow right to my chest.

We lie in silence so that all that’s left is the sound of pummeling rain and earth-shuddering thunder. Finally, I drag the cooler across the tent, setting it right in the middle between my sleeping bag and her mattress.

After a beat, and without another look at me, she helps herself to Brooks’s box of cookies.

Chapter 7

Melody

Iguess this is actually happening.

I am actually stranded in the woods with the man who broke my heart the last time I saw him.

I must be a terrible person.

Maybe I’ve been unwittingly messing up over the years. Maybe every time I’ve aimed for a trash bin, my coffee cups have bounced off the rim and onto the street. Maybe I’m secretly a litterer and this is my comeuppance, come to get me at last.

I wake up to the bright morning light diffused by the thick PVC tent material, our salvation against yesterday’s onslaught of rain. The bright dot I can see through the top tells me the sun is out, and I stare at it resentfully, as though it personally came out to mock me and my circumstances. It’s eerily quiet after last night’s storm. The wind has stopped, and all that cuts the silence is the chirping of birds overhead, and lake water hitting the shore in the distance.

I don’t know whether I really believed I could go through the rest of my existence avoiding Zac. Presumably there would have been something, at some point, that would have thrown us together. Maybe Parker gets married one day, and I’d have to force my gaze away from the other side of the aisle, where he’d be flanking my twin. But until that day, I was happy to hide behind the hurt of the last time we saw each other.

I was happy pretending he didn’t exist.

I peek over the sleeping bag up high around my head. Zac is still sound asleep, breathing softly, face buried in his pillow so that his cheek smushes underneath him, brown hair flopping across the pillowcase. His brow is crinkled like he’s thinking very hard, and the sleeping bag he’s using is pulled up to his nose.

I shuffle off my bed, get the tent half-open before throwing a glance over my shoulder.

The other side of the tent—Zac’s side—has a visible layer of moisture pooling over the ground, seeping in through a small tear in the corner of the PVC. The bottom of his sleeping bag is wet, several shades darker than the part covering his body.

Shit. He slept in a puddle of water. Why didn’t he say something?

Very careful not to wake him, I lay one of the sleeping bags I’d been using on top of him. I may resent having to spend the next couple of days at his side, but nothing feels good about seeing him cold and wet like this. Hopefully, the sleeping bag still has enough of my body heat to help.

Outside, our campsite is a wreck.

I stand ankle-deep in thick, wet mud. Massive tree branches litter the ground. The shore is closer to camp than I remember it being yesterday, helped along by the rain, and Brooks’s tent has completely collapsed overnight. Gingerly, I pick my way across the mud, back down the path where the cars had been parked yesterday, like I expect a vehicle to appear at my side via light beam. But I don’t have that kind of luck.

Deciding I might as well follow this path up to the road, I walk the flooded tire tracks through the trees. Every so often, I get pummeled by a stream of rainwater trickling off high branches as the wind picks up. But otherwise, the forest is eerily quiet.

It’s the kind of quiet you’d only see at the climax of a horror movie. When the beaten and bloodied heroine limps through the dark woods, frantically trying to escape her would-be killer.

I’m so focused on my feet and trying not to slip through this mud that when something shifts in my peripheral vision, it catches me off guard.

I hit the brakes. Shriek loudly as a bush to my right bursts open with the force of the world’s smallest chipmunk darting out toward me.

Melody Woods versus chipmunk.

It’s bound to forever go down as the most humiliating moment of my life. I already know it.

Because I end up in a frantic standoff with that chipmunk as it tries to dodge around me. And before I can understand what’s happening, it decides that the best way to go isthroughand darts between my legs so quickly I trip over my own feet, trying to move out of its path.

With a hard grunt, I land in a muddy heap. And it is indeed the most humiliating moment of my life, because I fall on my ankle completely wrong. The searing pain shooting up my leg is immediate.

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