Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 99399 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 497(@200wpm)___ 398(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99399 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 497(@200wpm)___ 398(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
“You don’t sing?” Lena eventually asked as the final note of Noah Kahan’s “Strawberry Wine” faded into the dark night. She’d done a good job of recognizing many of the songs and singing along, often being accompanied by a few others around the fire.
I shook my head. “I mean, I do. But not in company,” I said with a laugh. “Nobody wants to hear me sing.”
Thierry caught my eye from a few chairs over and winked. There was no doubt he and his husband had been close enough at the Palm Springs campground to hear me singing through my open windows while working on my songs, but I appreciated him not calling me out about it in front of a group of strangers. I sang enough during the day when working on my songs; I had no need to sing in the evenings around the campfire.
Besides, it was true that I no longer sang in public. Wolfe Marian didn’t, anyway. I’d stopped when I’d dropped out of Thornton. When music had become uncomfortable because it carried such weight of comparison with my famous father that I hadn’t been able to sing around him anymore.
“That’s a shame,” she said. “I love to sing.”
Imani said something to her too low to hear, and then Lena turned to me. “Maybe when we move on, you can come with us, Will.”
I shrugged. “Depends where you’re going, I guess.” I looked around at the star-filled sky. A sky huge and vast, with only the soft bumps of the Pinto Mountains breaking up the edge of the distant horizon.
I could be happy here for a while.
“We’re not in a hurry,” she said. “We usually stay until we need to dump our tanks and load up on groceries.”
As the night wore on and the temperature lowered outside the small ring of warmth from the fire, Lena kept up the chatter, sometimes with me, sometimes with others. I didn’t think much of it until she asked if I wanted company in my van.
I blinked at her. Maybe some of the secondhand weed smoke from Imani and the guys on the other side of her had made my reaction time too slow.
“Oh,” I said. “Um, no, thank you. But… thanks?”
Her forehead crinkled. “Er. Yeah, no. Like… cool.”
I leaned closer and smiled. “If I was into women, I’d probably be very tempted.” Which was a lie. My sexuality had nothing to do with why I didn’t want someone else in my bed tonight.
Her expression cleared, and she seemed relieved. “Ohh. Okay. Yeah. Sorry.”
I winked at her. “No worries. I’m flattered.”
She blushed and looked back at the fire for a few minutes before turning to me. “Friends, then?”
I nodded and held out my beer bottle to clink against hers. While I wasn’t particularly in the mood to make new friends, it seemed like the polite thing to do. “Sure.”
“Come hiking with us tomorrow! There’s a trail that goes from right over there.” She pointed with the lip of her almost-empty beer bottle.
If there was one thing I’d already learned about life on the road, it was that I felt better if I spent time outdoors. And being around other people gave my brain a break from all the fucking thinking I’d been doing.
“Sounds good. I’d like that, thanks.”
She grinned and took a final sip of beer before calling across the fire to the guy with the cooler to pass over another.
I stared into the flames and let the chatter around me fade. Trace would probably like this. Chilling around a campfire under the huge desert sky seemed like his kind of vibe. Memories of a childhood camping trip made me stifle a chuckle.
Papa wasn’t a great camper. Dad teased him for preferring indoor rock climbing to the real thing. So when we camped growing up, it was usually Dad and Trace who’d taken us, not Dad and Papa.
Dad mostly took us because it was something he’d enjoyed growing up with his dad and brother and thought it was some kind of rite of passage for a parent to do with their kids.
But for Trace… the outdoors was where he belonged. He would come with us to Montana in the summers, and a switch would flip. Suddenly, he’d seem more relaxed. Happier. More himself. It was one of the reasons I’d let him go without a fight six years ago. He’d needed to leave San Francisco. It had never made sense why he was there in the first place, other than his job with On Your Six.
My memory was a photo album fat with Polaroids of him. Fly fishing, grinning by a campfire, setting rope at the bottom of a rock climb, carrying Rosie on his shoulders with warm columns of sunlight drifting over them both through the trees. His wavy brown hair lifting in the breeze. His bare shoulders and arms honey-gold from the summer sun. His calves tight and flexing as he hiked in front of me.