Total pages in book: 65
Estimated words: 59489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 297(@200wpm)___ 238(@250wpm)___ 198(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 297(@200wpm)___ 238(@250wpm)___ 198(@300wpm)
“Not a bad idea,” I half whispered to Camden as our lips parted.
“You don’t want to get your chance to sing?” he asked.
“I didn’t put in a song,” I said.
He grinned wide, and my face dropped.
“You didn’t,” I said.
His smile got wider, and I sat back in my chair, shaking my head.
“And up next is… Kristen Smith!” the DJ called.
In spite of how upset and confused I was, a warm feeling settled over me at hearing my name called out like that. It was still so new to hear his last name after my first, and a little part of me giggled like a schoolgirl about it. The rest of me waffled between standing up and going toward the stage and shaking my head and refusing to acknowledge that it was now my turn.
I got up anyway.
I was on my honeymoon, I thought. If there was ever a time that I could make a fool of myself and no one would judge, it was now. Besides, I didn’t know these people. Only Camden would ever see me after we left this place, and I had watched his repeatedly hilarious attempts at winter sports. Now he would see my most likely hilarious attempt at singing.
The song’s name came up on the screen as I reached the stage, and I smiled. It was an old Madonna song that I had sung in the car with him a bunch of times. As the music swelled and the lyrics began to scroll, I took a deep breath and tried to find the note. It turned out all I needed to do was look at Camden’s open, happy face and the music poured right out of me.
As we walked back through the snow-covered grounds toward our cabin, our hands clenched together as tightly as they ever had. We were in love. Madly, deeply in love. It was a feeling that I had never experienced, and suddenly the lyrics of a thousand songs, including the infamous Madonna one I had just belted out in public, made sense. I understood them, not just from a place of knowing the emotions existed, but from feeling them myself.
We laughed and chatted as we braced ourselves against each other and against the cold. Somewhere in Texas, it was a warm eighty degrees at night, and people went home in shorts and skirts and turned up the air conditioning to go to bed. But high in the mountains of Colorado, we pulled our coats tighter, thankful for the alcohol that currently coursed through our veins, warming us up artificially, and made our way back to a cabin where we would start a roaring fire.
It hit me that I could live like this forever. Even in the cold, which I normally hated, I was at home, at peace, with Camden at my side. Sure, I would want to see my mother and my friends. I would miss the warmth and the wide-open space of Texas, the smell of the ranch and the farm that surrounded it. I would miss the Texas-ness of Texas. But if I had to stay in Colorado, stay in those cabins, for the rest of my life, well, I figured I would be just fine doing that too.
As long as Camden was there with me, I could probably live just about anywhere.
We had been having a blast being silly together, enjoying poking fun at ourselves and being embarrassed in front of each other. It was so freeing to not have to pretend in front of him. I could be goofy and childish around him, and he accepted it, reveled in it even, and never once made me feel less sexy, less desirable. Nor I to him, either. In fact, the more I laughed with him, the more I found myself pulled to him, sewn up in him in such a way that to make us separate would take cutting us apart.
And how easy it was to go from laughing to serious and back to laughing again. We laughed at nothingness, we laughed at television. We laughed at goofy faces we could make and words that we said. We laughed when we were rolled up in each other, naked, playful and amorous. And never once was our love a joke.
Then, sometimes, our eyes would meet, and the laughter would fade away, in its place a feeling of intense desire. Of longing for each other, a need to make up for time lost. Like our souls had been separated at birth and were finally joined together. Touching him, even something as simple as to trace my finger down his arm, was to drink from the cup of wholeness. To smother myself with him was to rejoice in an ecstasy of oneness.
As we made it into the cabin, that laughter had faded, replaced by the sounds of our mumbling voices as we tried to make as little noise as possible until we were inside. There was plenty of space between the cabins, but we were both aware how loud we could be inside. At least we should keep it down when we weren’t.