Page 28 of Off the Trail

Shawn’s mouth is slightly parted. His top lip is a little chapped, as if he’s been licking it. Barreling into my mind is an intrusive thought so powerful I wonder if it has formed an actual thought bubble over my head—I should reach out with my tongue and lick his top lip, feel it for myself.

Two things happen simultaneously—Shawn’s gaze drops to somewhere near my mouth and my tongue peeks out from between my lips. If I rocked forward just a little, we’d practically be kissing.

I push off from the couch so fast I ram my shin into the coffee table and knock the chip bowl onto the ancient rug. Crumbs spill all over. Misty executes her main passion in life, eating people food spilled by her idiotic humans, and vacuums them up before I can scold her away.

I pick up the bowl and head to the kitchen without looking at Shawn or acknowledging my clumsiness—or the fact that I was actively fantasizing about him while he was inches away on my couch.

“Maybe I should go,” he says as I blurt, “We could go out.”

“What?” we say at the same time.

“I should—wait, you want to go out?” he asks, joining me in the kitchen carrying our empty beer cans. I motion toward the returnables bin, and he chucks them inside.

It makes sense he’d want to go back to the retreat, do his own thing away from my awkward self. But I find myself offering something else. “We could go to town. I could text Brooke, and we could meet her there for dinner. What do you say?”

He folds his arms over his chest. His sweater’s seams are tested and found sturdy enough to contain his flexing muscles. “An encounter with the outside world,” he muses. “Think I’m ready?”

“I don’t know,” I answer seriously. “Are you? Because if you aren’t, we can ask Brooke to get takeout, put on that second movie.”

It’s not weird. Two friends doing a double feature. I’m not angling for anything except to spend more time with him.

“Honestly, I think it would be good for me to interact with civilization,” he says. “If you don’t mind the company.”

“Great,” I say, instead of something cheesy like, I don’t mind the company as long as it’s you. “Just let me feed Misty an early dinner.”

I prep Misty’s meal while Shawn looks at the framed photos on the fireplace mantel.

“Are those your parents?” He points to a picture of Mom and Dad when they were first married and building this house in the woods. They look impossibly young, and very happy.

“Yeah.”

“Brooke looks like your mom.”

“Yeah, she does.” I smile because it’s a nice thing to notice.

“And you look like your dad. But no beard.” He motions to my facial hair.

“He grew one later, when I was, oh, eight or so?”

“Sometimes I wish I could grow one,” he says, stroking his clean-shaven chin.

“You can’t?” I ask, surprised.

“It comes in patchy as hell,” he admits.

I squint, attempting to picture him with facial hair, but come up empty. “You don’t need it.”

He lifts his eyebrows, and I realize how that could sound. “I mean, you’ve got a strong, uh, jaw.” I feel my face heating up because I’m making it worse, though I stand by the comment. His jaw is firm, perfectly proportional, and offsets the prettiness of his eyes.

He doesn’t say anything, just smiles a little, and points to another picture on the mantel.

“Who’s that?” he asks.

“Oh, uh.” I hesitate. It’s me and the only guy I could technically call my boyfriend. We met during my first and only year of college. I never even introduced Michael to my parents, though they knew I was gay. He calls from time to time to check in. I always liked that picture of us, posing in front of the student center. “Michael. College friend. Boyfriend,” I amend, because even though it was a short relationship, it counts.

“University of Southern Maine,” he reads off the sign in the background. “What was your major?” he asks, not commenting on the boyfriend thing. Why should he?

“I don’t know—would have been environmental science, probably.”