Page 27 of Letting Go

She says nothing.

I start to let go and take a step back. Warm water swirls around my waist. Does she feel this electricity? It can't just be one-sided. It's got to be a circuit and that means it's got to be running through her too. There's a lot of worry in the current for sure. A lot of unknowns and a lot of questions. And they all point to me. Can’t have that.

So instead, another question forms.

"Chloe. Can I kiss you?"

"What?"

"Can I kiss you?" I don't think I've ever asked permission to kiss a woman before. Usually, they just let me know when they're ready, it's like an invitation, but with Chloe, I'm always lost. I don't know how to read her signs. In the looming silence is an answer I don’t like.

And then, "Yes."

I bend my head down and she tips up on her toes, her skin is so warm and her mouth is sweet, wet, and soft. We breathe together for a moment and she relaxes against my chest.

It's a chaste kiss. I feel it's all she will allow.

My heart steadies to a normal speed and my groin relaxes. She touches a hand to my cheek.

"Come with me?" she asks.

I follow her unconditionally, hell, I'd follow her over a cliff and into a ring of fire. We hike up the hill and retrieve our clothes and the pack.

"I want to show you something, there's this little house here. This little cabin. It's kind of like my project."

As we walk along, she's in front pointing stuff out.

"Look. See those little notches in the birches? I told Travis to notch them so he could keep track of the trees because at night they got up and walked around." As we broke through some brush there were a series of small mounds of rock, lichens, and old sea glass.

"These are dilapidated fairy houses," she explained.

As we round a boulder, about half the size of a house, the trail widened into a little patch of meadow. There, at the far end sits a cabin, a little bungalow.

"Come on," Chloe says, grabbing my hand.

A minute later we're standing in front of a tiny, five hundred square foot house, so weather-beaten I’m not too sure why it’s still standing. The metal roof is completely rusted and either needs to be redone or coated a million times with aluminum paint.

The outside is a mess, and the wood is rotted through in more than a handful of places.

But there's a cheerful little bouquet of sunflowers sitting on an apple crate.

With a wide front porch nearly half the width of the entire structure, and broken shutters, the place has seen better days. She squeezes my hand and then drops it. I follow her up the stone pathway.

"Who does this belong to?"

She shrugs. "It's been empty since we were kids."

I start to notice little things, like how straight the roofline is: that meant no rot in the eaves or roof—a good thing—the rest of the cabin was probably in manageable shape. Someone had swept the pathway and pulled weeds. There's even fresh salt sprinkled everywhere to keep weeds from reappearing from between the stones in the path.

"You would all come here? Your parents just let you loose?"

"We had free run of any place we could hike, swim or bike to," she says. The porch steps also need to be repaired. There are two wooden folding chairs set out next to the little vase of sunflowers.

"I'm not too sure when this place was built, but it's adorable and we'd all come here and play house."

Now I laughed. "Your house wasn't big enough?"

She makes a face. "It was too big and it never felt like my place, like it was just for us. We always had to share with guests. So," she says one hand on the doorknob, "we'd pretend we were the Boxcar Kids or runaways or Jews escaping WWII." She pushes the door open and the hinges complain.