One Tent My Forbidden Stepbrother novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Ten Days

In daylight Blaine is cold and funny, Perry sets terms, and in the sample trailer Blaine answers a student's question about faults in front of him in a way only Perry understands; Dad sends them down the road alone.

Perry woke alone, with the sheet over his legs and sun on the canvas.

The tent smelled of sweat and canvas and, faintly, of Blaine.

He lay still and counted what had happened, and it all held up.

Dad's cot was empty and made.

Outside, somebody was clanking a pot.

Blaine stood at the cook shelter in yesterday's shirt, wrestling a camp stove.

He had two tins of coffee lined up on the table, and he was smelling one and then the other with his eyes closed.

"Morning, Professor's boy," he said, without turning.

Perry stopped in the middle of the clearing.

"Dad's at the latrine," Blaine said. "Nobody heard."

"I heard."

"You're allowed to hear it," Blaine said. "Just don't make that face about it."

"What face?"

"That one. The one you do when you've decided something."

Perry walked up beside him and took the lid off the second tin. "That's not the good coffee."

"That's the only coffee."

"Then why are you smelling them both?"

"Because I'm picky." Blaine finally looked at him, and there was no joke in it. "I told you last night. Not here."

"You told me ten minutes after you'd had your hand in my shorts."

Blaine's eyes dropped to Perry's mouth and came back up.

"Don't," he said. "He's thirty feet away."

"Then we make rules. Now, while there's coffee and no audience."

Blaine went quiet. He put the lid back on the tin, set it down very exactly, and nodded.

"Ten days," he said. "The course is ten days. Then we drive home and it's Sunday dinner at Dad's and nothing changes."

"That's your rule," Perry said.

"That's the only rule. And never in the tent."

"You did it in the tent."

"I did it in the tent once, and look how I'm taking it." Blaine's jaw worked. "Ten days, Per. Nobody gets hurt."

Perry looked at him for a long moment.

"Then I have two," he said. "You don't lie to me, not once, not even as a joke. And the ten days are mine."

"Yours."

"Not Dad's. Not the course's. Yours and mine."

Something went over Blaine's face that Perry could not read.

"Mine," Blaine said slowly. "Yeah. All right."

"And if I want more than ten?"

"You won't."

"You don't get to know that," Perry said.

Dad came up the path whistling, and Blaine turned back to the stove and lit it with a hand that was not quite steady.

By ten the field school was in full swing.

Twenty-four students came up from the lower meadow in boots and hats, and the sample trailer filled with the smell of damp rock and sunscreen.

Blaine stood at the head of the long bench with a core tray in front of him.

He talked with his hands, and the students leaned in.

He was good at it, and loud, and plainly not trying to be.

Perry stood at the end of the bench, labelling bags, with a clipboard he did not need.

He was aware of everything.

He was aware of the square of sun on Blaine's forearm.

He was aware of the shirt pulled tight across Blaine's back, and of the fact that Blaine had not looked at him once.

A girl with a braid raised her hand. "How do you know where a fault is going to slip?"

"You don't," Blaine said.

Perry's pen stopped.

"What you do is find where the stress has been building for a long time and nobody's looking." Blaine turned a rock over in his fingers. "Years, usually. It holds. Everyone walks over it."

"And then?"

"Then something small moves, something stupid, and it all goes at once."

His eyes came up and met Perry's across the length of the trailer, and stayed there.

Perry set down his pen.

"What happens after?" the girl asked.

"Everybody says it was sudden." Blaine's voice dropped, just slightly. "It never is."

He held Perry's gaze longer than anyone in the room could have explained.

Then he put the rock back in the tray and went on to the next one.

Perry realized he had stopped breathing, and made himself start.

At the other end of the trailer, one of the boys was looking at Blaine, and then at Perry, and then at the floor.

Nobody said anything.

At six, with the sun going orange behind the ridge, Dad stuck his head in with his binoculars around his neck.

"Blaine. Take the truck down to the washout and tell me how the cut looks. Take Perry, he's got the clipboard."

"We've got to start dinner," Blaine said.

"I'll do dinner. The county won't wait, and I want to know whether they can get a grader through." Dad held out the keys. "Take your time."

Blaine took the keys.

"Take your time," Dad said again, and went away whistling.

Nobody spoke in the truck for a mile.

The logging road ran along the ridge through the dry grass, and the dust came up through the floor in the last of the light.

Blaine drove with both hands on the wheel and his eyes straight ahead.

Perry looked out of the window and counted fence posts, because he had to count something.

At the washout the road simply ended in a raw brown cut where the culvert had been.

The creek ran fast and low through the gap.

Blaine stopped the truck at the edge, and the engine ticked.

He killed it.

The silence was enormous, and it smelled of dust and hot metal.

Blaine took the keys out of the ignition and held them in a fist.

"Per."

"Yes," Perry said.

"Get in the back."

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