One Tent My Forbidden Stepbrother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Tent
Dad's truck is missing the second tent and both sleeping bags, the road is washed out for three days, and Perry ends up sharing one bedroll with his stepbrother Blaine; at three in the morning he follows Blaine to the creek and kisses him, and Dad's headlamp finds them.
The truck bed was empty, and Dad was already laughing about it.
Perry stood at the tailgate with both hands on the steel and counted again.
One cooler.
One folded cot for Dad.
One rolled bedroll, thin, with a flat sheet tied inside it.
The tent Perry had carried up himself, and it was the only tent on the mountain.
"I packed them," Blaine said behind him. "Two sleeping bags and the green tent. I put them in last night, behind the cooler."
"They're not here," Perry said.
"Then someone took them out."
"Who, Blaine? The bears?"
Blaine gave him a flat look.
"You always do this." Blaine dragged a hand through his hair, which was already wrecked. "I said I packed them."
Perry turned around.
Blaine was six foot two and wide enough to block the afternoon sun.
When he lied he looked straight at you and never blinked, and he was doing it now.
Last Christmas he had sworn he'd packed the good knives too.
"You forget things," Perry said. "It's practically your personality."
"I forgot the knives once."
"And the cake. And my birthday, and the key to your own apartment."
"Boys." Dad came around the truck with a tent stake in each fist and the happiest face Perry had seen on him all year.
"Radio says the culvert on the logging road went out in that storm. County says three days for a grader."
"Three days," Perry said.
"The lower meadow has twenty-four students and twenty-four bags. I asked." Dad drove a stake in with the heel of his boot.
"So it's the one tent, and I get the cot, and you two get the bedroll."
"Dad," Perry said.
"It's July, Perry. You only need a sheet. Character building."
Dad had loaded the truck himself that morning, saying he wanted the exercise, and now he was humming.
Blaine said nothing at all, which was worse than anything he could have said.
By eleven the camp was dark except for the stars.
The creek had swollen after the storm, and it talked against its banks all night.
Dad slept on the cot with his mouth open.
His snoring came in long slow waves, with a whistle at the end of each one.
Perry lay on his back at the very edge of the bedroll with the sheet at his waist.
"You're on my side," Blaine said, very low.
"There's no side. It's a sheet," Perry whispered.
"There's a side. I'm a big man."
"You're a big man who forgot the sleeping bags," Perry said.
"I did not forget." A rustle, a long exhale, and then the sound of a shirt coming off over a head. "It's too hot for this."
Perry fixed his eyes on the roof of the tent and kept them there.
"Don't narrate my undressing, Per."
"I'm not saying a word," Perry said.
"You're breathing loud," Blaine said.
"It's a tent. I'm allowed to breathe."
Blaine laughed, one short breath through his nose.
Then he rolled onto his side, away from Perry, and the bedroll tipped them an inch closer.
Perry counted the tent poles, then the snores, and somewhere past four hundred he lost his place.
At midnight he opened his eyes because Blaine's breathing had changed.
Blaine had kicked the sheet to the bottom of the bedroll.
He lay on his back now with one arm over his head and nothing on him but his shorts, low on his hips.
His chest rose and fell, and the moon came through the canvas and laid a pale stripe from his ribs to his belt.
Perry had sat across from this man at eight years of Thanksgivings.
He knew what Blaine's face looked like asleep on a couch.
He did not know this.
He should have turned over.
Blaine shifted, one knee drawing up and one hand sliding down his own stomach to settle there.
Perry stopped breathing and let his eyes fall to slits, so that if Blaine woke he would look asleep.
He stayed that way for a very long time.
At three, Blaine sat up.
He did it slowly and without a sound.
He pulled on his shorts, found his boots by feel and unzipped the flap an inch at a time.
Dad's snore didn't change.
The flap closed, Perry counted to twenty, and then he put on his own boots and went after him.
The path down to the water was white with moonlight and loud with crickets.
He kept to the grass so his boots wouldn't crunch, and he stopped where the pines opened onto the creek.
Blaine sat on the flat rock at the bend with his feet in the current and his bare back to the trees.
His shoulders were up around his ears.
"You walk like a field biologist," he said, without turning around. "Everything in the forest knows you're coming."
Perry came out of the pines. "Go on, say it."
"Go back to bed, Per."
"That's what you said last time."
Blaine went still.
It was the first time in two years that either of them had come within a mile of the porch.
Perry stepped onto the rock and sat down beside him, close enough that their arms touched, and the cold current pulled at his boots.
"You weren't asleep," he said.
"No," Blaine said.
"You pushed the sheet off on purpose."
"I did not."
"You moved your hand," Perry said.
"It was hot!" Blaine said, too loud, and they both froze and listened to the dark.
Nothing came back but the water.
Blaine gave a quiet laugh. "You looked for a long time, Professor's boy."
"I looked once."
"You looked like you were taking inventory."
"I do that," Perry said. "It's what I'm for."
He turned his head.
Blaine was right there, a hand's width away, with two days of stubble on his jaw and his eyes black in the moonlight.
He smelled like river water and pine, and under that like warm skin.
"Careful," Blaine said softly. "You're about to fall in."
It was the old joke, the one he used every time they got too close, and Perry had spent two years letting it work.
"Don't call me that," he said.
"What? Professor's boy?"
"You only say it when you're scared."
Blaine's mouth opened, and nothing came out of it.
Perry took his face in one hand, the stubble rough under his thumb, and kissed him.
For one long second Blaine did nothing.
Then his hand came up behind Perry's neck and gripped hard, and he kissed him back with two years of saving it.
The rock was cold under Perry's knees and Blaine's mouth was hot, and every other thought went out of Perry's head.
A light swept through the pines above them.
"Boys?" Dad called from the path. "Is that you down there?"
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