Page 3 of Be Not Far From Me

“Packed?” I raise my eyebrow, and Duke huffs a small laugh.

“I know, right? Everybody’s acting like we’re going hard-core or something, not spending one night in the woods. Shit, I bet your pack weighs eight pounds.”

“Five,” I correct him. “And half that is tampons.”

He squeezes his eyes shut against that. “Nice, babe.”

“Hey, man, everybody menstruates.”

“Not me,” he says.

“But I bet I can make you bleed,” I tell him, getting a real smile.

“Definitely,” he agrees, and reaches out to rub the back of my neck.

It’s been like this our whole lives, a little push and pull for sure, but somewhere in between there’s a point where we meet, a place no one else is invited. We both grew up in the woods, aware that our friends had other toys like dolls and cars, video games and traveling sports teams our families couldn’t afford. We had rocks and sticks, patches of mud and vernal pools where long lines of mosquito larvae hatched.

We discovered this about each other not long after we started dating three months ago, and while it’s true we don’t always talk a lot, I feel the same way about Duke as I do about the woods. You don’t have to be making sounds to communicate, and there’s a lot that has passed between us under the stars and leaves that I would never say to anyone else, in words or otherwise.

Duke’s mind is following the same track because his hand trails down the edge of my arm to rub the inside of my wrist, the work-worn tips of his fingers leaving a tingling there I’m more than familiar with.

“So you’re . . .” He trails off, leaving an edge of disappointment in the air.

“Yeah, I’m bleeding,” I tell him. Growing up with just my dad taught me a long time ago that I’ve got to be blunt about that kind of stuff if I want tampons added to the grocery list.

“Sucks,” Duke says. “I kind of wanted to . . .”

“You only kind of wanted to?” I tease. “I’m not doing anything with a boy who only kind of—”

He cuts me off with a kiss, letting me know that he is more than a little interested in being alone with me, and I’m pretty invested in it too, if it weren’t for my current situation, the fact that somebody needs to start the fire, and that we have an audience.

“Ash—ley!” Jason yells at us from his rock perch overlooking the ridge, a fresh beer raised in toast to me. I push Duke back and flip Jason double birds.

“Later,” I tell Duke, to which he looks dubious. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” I remind him.

“Girl,” he breathes, pulling me close so that I can smell pine resin on him. “You are absolute shit at seduction.”

“We’re here, bitches!” Stephanie yells two hours later, Natalie trailing behind her.

“You’ve got the geography part right, anyway,” I hear Kavita mutter under her breath. Steph and Kavita have never exactly been close, but in a school as small as ours your friends are limited to people you can stand for small amounts of time. Affection is secondary.

“Hey,” Jason says, standing up awkwardly to greet the two girls. He’s unsteady on his feet, and I wonder why he made the effort until I get a good look at Natalie. She graduated last year and went off to cosmetology school, leaving Duke in the dust—but adding about fifteen pounds, most of it in her bra. Natalie had always been pretty, but right now she’s hot in a way we don’t usually see in our corner of the woods, and that extends past the actual limits of the state forest.

Most people here are run-down by thirty, shitty food and cheap beer sagging on their faces and adding to their bellies. The prom kings marry the homecoming queens and age together, telling each other they’re still the hottest thing going while checking out the younger generation to see what they’ve got to offer.

But it’s all the same faces in the end, old genes recycled into new skin. We’re used to looking at each other and spotting which side of the family your nose came from, or whose eyes you’ve got. Sometimes a family trait that isn’t technically in your tree pops up, and we all politely ignore it.

The weight she’s put on hasn’t only gone into her chest. Natalie’s got curves she didn’t have before, and damn if they don’t look good on her. She’s always had cheekbones you could cut yourself on, but somebody taught her how to use eyeliner, and it’s only made her genetic gifts more obvious. Her wide-set eyes always made her look innocent—and while that might have been true at one time, I can tell it’s not anymore. She wastes no time giving Duke the once-over, holding his gaze a second longer than she should.

In nature it’s the male that does the mating dances, but we somehow got that all backward; it’s us girls that learn to do the preening and positioning. And I can tell right off that Natalie’s learned more than how to do hair in the year since she left. I can see it in the way she tilts her body the second she spots Duke, a casual dip of her hip and twist of her shoulders, displaying what she’s got, bold as daylight.

I don’t like it, but I like less that he responds. It’s not something I could call him out on without looking like a total bitch, but it’s there. He keeps it cool, a nod and a wave that’s just two fingers lifted up, nothing more. But something primal inside of him is reaching out in response, and I can feel it, sure as shit, because it’s supposed to be directed at me.

And while I’ve got plenty of self-respect, the pie chart of my personality traits has a huge chunk marked logical, and I would never argue that I’m better-looking than Natalie. But there’s a large area of that chart marked hot-tempered, which is probably why Duke keeps his reaction under control.

“Took your time, coz,” one of Stephanie’s cousins says. I don’t know if it’s Tom or Cory, because I didn’t bother to sort out who was who when I got here and have put away a few beers since then.

“Doesn’t look like we missed much,” she shoots back, eyeing a pile of empty beer cans next to the fire that I finally got started after disentangling myself from Duke.