Page 33 of The Woods

“Just fraternizing with the guests. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do at your own party?” He remembers why he came out here in the first place and steps off the back deck to cross the lawn to his writing shed.

“Where are you going?” Alice asks, following right behind.

“We’re out of bourbon. I think I have a bottle in my writing studio.”

She puts a hand on his arm to stop him. “I think you’ve had enough, Geoff.”

He pulls his arm free of her grasp. “It’s not for me. It’s for that banker guy I was talking to. I promised him a glass.” He starts walking again and she keeps right on his heels.

“Did you also promise to grab his wife’s ass?”

Her words are a paper cut. He didn’t want her to see that. He loves Alice. He really, really does. She just doesn’t love him back. She thinks he doesn’t notice, or maybe that he doesn’t care, but he does. Every time he lets her down, every day that he’s not a successfully published author, or a better dad, or better in any way, he feels like he loses pieces of her. One day he knows she’ll be gone entirely and that will break him. He just has no idea how to fix it and ends up getting drunk and grabbing asses that he shouldn’t. It’s never ever been more than that, but it still makes him an asshole.

“Oh my God, Alice,” he says with practiced contempt, “I was standing close to her because we were sharing a cigarette. There was no ass-grabbing. My only offense was smoking.”

“That’s far from your only offense,” she hisses back.

He spins around to face her, trying not to wobble. “Okay, here we go. Tell me, Alice, what are today’s capital offenses?”

“I’m not doing this with you right now, Geoff. Just lay off the bourbon for once. Drink some fucking water and sober up. Maybe then your hand won’t accidentally land on another woman’s ass.” She turns to go.

“Any other orders, Captain?”

“Just be…” She pauses, searching for the right word as she keeps walking. “Just be better,” she calls out as she moves away from him. “For fuck’s sake, be better.” Her final words echo around the yard, bouncing off the trees and landing hard against his body.

He watches her go, and even though it was he who grabbed another woman’s ass, it’s he who’s drunk, and it’s he who just gaslit her, the walking-away feels like an unforgivable offense. Why doesn’t she want to stay and fight to the resolution? They are in a constant state of unfinished arguments, and he’s not sure how much longer he can live like that.

Before they got married and had kids they had epic fights. Fights that would rip their hearts out because they cared so bloody much. Fights that they’d spend hours resolving and then have the kind of sex that made him feel like a rock star. Back when she used to look at him like he was the smartest, funniest, most handsome man on the planet. What happened to that? he wonders.

Just be better. Her words ring in his ears. He wants to be but is just too tired and too sad to do anything differently. He has to pee. He thinks he might have to throw up as well. Smoking that cigarette was not a good idea. He passes his writing studio and takes the path into the woods. He walks in only a few feet. It’s dark, the kind of dark that makes you feel like if you move even just slightly, you’re going to bump into something. And it’s too quiet. He can’t even hear the music from his house. He’s sure that it was still discernible just a few feet away.

“Be better,” he mumbles, because it’s still going through his head, and because his own voice is comforting in that kind of deep quiet.

He’s just unzipped his pants when, even over the pounding of his hot piss on the ground, he hears the crack of a branch breaking behind him. “Hello?” he calls out. There’s the rustling of leaves, but he can’t turn to look while he’s peeing. “Who’s there?” His voice bounces against the trees all around him and echoes through the darkness.

Something approaches.

Polly

She figures the party is probably what kept Gray away. Maybe because his parents were there, or there were just too many people. She can tell he’s an introvert. Earlier in the night she’d gone out to the kitchen under the guise of being social with all the stuck-up neighbors. She was only out there to steal a bottle of wine from the stash her mom had bought for the party. She was hoping to share it with Gray later.

While she was out there, she scanned the room looking for adults who bore any kind of resemblance to him. Only one woman who could have possibly passed for his mother with her dark hair and fine features. Even then, it was a stretch. Still, Polly made a point of talking to her, asking questions as though she were actually interested in getting to know her neighbors, only to find out that the woman had three daughters, all under the age of twelve.

After that she’d ended up outside her bedroom window, alone, drinking the bottle of wine and smoking a joint, accidentally overhearing her parents’ fight in the backyard, which is why she’s now drunk and stoned lying on her bed, staring at her phone. They had no idea she was out there, or how much voices carry across open lawn. Adults are so fucked. She’s never getting married or having kids.

She chucks her phone away and rolls over to put her face in the pillow. She feels like she might cry. Gray is the only thing she has to look forward to in life right now and she’d really wanted him to come tonight. She squeezes her eyes shut tight. She doesn’t want to cry. She’s so sick of crying.

Now that her sister’s gone, she has nobody. Maybe that’s why she’s falling so hard and fast for Gray—desperation and loneliness. Why else, she asks herself, would she care so much about some guy who, under any other circumstances, she would consider fucking weird? He’s hot, sure, and smart and funny, but he sneaks off to smoke weed on his own instead of with friends, and he has no cell phone or social media. Not to mention the fact that she never knows when he’s coming until he randomly shows up at her window, and the last time he was there she asked if he wanted to come inside her room and he said he had to go.

He’s different.

“Good different or bad different?” Polly whispers into the darkness of her room.

Her sister sings the childhood song that used to play when they opened a picture book called The Teddy Bears’ Picnic. The one about going into the woods and finding a big surprise—creepy as hell.

“I don’t understand,” Polly whispers again, her words slurring slightly. While she waits for the answer, the song plays in her head. Without meaning to, she drifts off to sleep. Dreaming of a starry sky above dark woods where bears watch and wait. Gray ducks in and out of the trees like a shifting shadow.

The room is dark, and the noises of the party are gone. Her mother stands at the end of her bed in shadow. Polly is groggy. She reaches for her phone to look at the time—12:30 a.m.