t h i r t y - t w o

*

It's getting on by the time we eventually make it back to the campsite, after another twenty minutes of walking, then twenty minutes of waiting for the bus, and then fifteen minutes trundling from the Mirror Lake trailhead to our campsite. When we get off, I wrap myself around Arjun once more, and I'm aware that the moment someone spots us, there are going to be a lot of questions.

Most of them from Sam, probably, followed by Young-mi. And I'm sure I can count on Klara to make my splutter on her bluntness.

"Home sweet home," Arjun says when we make it to our cluster of tents. We're the last ones back this time. Everyone is here, sprawled out between the tents with playing cards and earphones, playing games and listening to music.

Young-mi spots us first. Her gasp alerts everyone to our presence, and Sam shoots to his feet with a cry when he sees Arjun carrying me. When I slip down to the floor and hold one foot off the ground, Sam rushes over and drops his shaking head into his hands.

"And here I was, thinking you'd managed a day in Yosemite without an injury," he says. "What happened?"

Arjun helps me over to my mat and I sit down with a huff, lifting my swollen ankle. It's throbbing, agony shooting in all directions, but I've had worse.

"It's just a sprain," I say. "I slipped in the lake."

"Mirror Lake?" Sam asks. I nod. He looks at Arjun. "You carried March back from Mirror Lake?"

"Mmhmm."

"You should have called me!" he cries out. "Arjun. You could have injured yourself, and then I'd have two broken campers." He tuts and unzips his bag, tipping it out to find an emergency medical kit at the bottom. "Are you sure it's just a sprain, March? Do I need to take you to the medical centre?"

"Yes I'm sure, and no you don't," I say. I explain my history of sprains and my certainty and my deep knowledge of what different injuries feel like, and I wince as Sam elevates my ankle and wraps a tight elastic bandage around it.

"What're you like," he mutters. "That really should have some ice on it but we're all out."

"It'll be fine," I assure him. "I promise. I am very used to sprains. I just need to rest."

"Me too," Arjun says. He collapses onto the mat next to me. I can feel Young-mi's probing eyes on me but I avoid her gaze for now. I tip my head back and lift my leg higher when Sam comes over with a camping chair to prop it up on, and I cross my hands over my stomach. My t-shirt didn't have much time to dry and it's still damp; all of me is a bit uncomfortably wet.

After he fusses for a couple more minutes, I insist that I just need to chill and I'll be ok, and Sam eventually backs down. He returns to his guitar, a wary eye on me, and Young-mi takes his place. She scrambles over to my side, looming over me with huge, curious eyes.

"You fell in the lake?" she asks, both of her hands wrapped around my forearm.

"Yup."

"That's why you're wet?"

"Correct."

"Oh, March." She sighs and her lips turn downwards, and she takes my hand. "You are disaster. Are you ok? You are hurt?"

"Yeah, it hurts, but it'll be fine," I say. I nudge Arjun with my other hand; he looks up at the contact. "Luckily I was rescued by a knight in shining armour."

Young-mi glances at Arjun. I can see her doing calculations in her head, trying to figure out what happened on the walk, but she doesn't say anything. She drops onto her knees and gives me a sad look. "That looks painful," she says, nodding at my ankle. She's not wrong. It looks like it feels: red and hot and swollen and angry and tender. "Good thing you were together, not me and March." She looks at Arjun. "I am weak; I can't carry him."

"He got lucky," Arjun says, flexing an arm. And it's no joke, because he has real, actual muscles. Not like all the times I flex and nothing changes, my arm as weedily skinny as before.

"Mmm." She nods slowly and squeezes my arm, ever so gently. "You are very lucky to have Arjun."

She'll find out soon enough. I can't keep it from her for long, but I don't want to tell her in front of everyone that Arjun and I made out in the middle of the forest, because she'll squeal and Sam will run over, and I can't lie.

My parents joke that I'm terminally honest. Not only am I a terrible liar, and lying makes me uncomfortable to the point of physical pain, but I tend to overshare the truth too. Like when Lily broke my nose. I could have just told Dad that Lily headbutted me by mistake – still the truth. But no. I awkwardly fumbled my way through the whole truth, from skipping school to getting the bus to her house; from ending up in her bed to bleeding on her sheets.

So I'll tell her later, when everyone isn't crowded around within a few metres, and I'll make her promise to be quiet before I admit that she was right – Arjun definitely likes me.

"Right, attention, folks," Sam says, playing a loud and tuneless chord on his guitar. Everyone looks up for his announcement. "Y'all are in charge of your own food today, so if you haven't had any dinner, I recommend you head to one of the cafes and grab something. We're gonna have a campfire in a couple hours, so it'd be great if everyone's here, but you're free to do whatever you want for the next fifteen hours."

I don't think I'll be going anywhere in a hurry. Walking is out of the question today, and tomorrow it'll be hard. Usually, after a couple of nights' rest, I'm back on my feet – still in pain, but manageable.

"You have food?" Young-mi asks me, opening up the question to Arjun when she nods at him too.

"No," I say. He shakes his head.

"I can go and grab us something to bring back here," Arjun says, but Young-mi puts a hand on his shoulder and stops him from getting up.

"You two stay," she says. "I will get you food. I want to go to village anyway."

That's a lie. I know she'd very happily hang out here for the rest of the evening, but we share a look and I hope she can see how grateful I am. I know she's giving us time to be alone, and I hope she knows that my eyes are telling her that I'll share details later.

"You like everything," she says, pointing and me, and when she points at Arjun, she says, "You are vegetarian. Yes?"

"You know it. I'm not fussy. As long as it doesn't have any meat or fish, I don't care," he says. He pulls over his bag and rustles through his wallet, passing a couple of bills to Young-mi. But she refuses to take it.

"No, no. My treat," she says.

"Young-mi."

"Don't say my name like that." She wags her finger at him and pushes his hand away. "You are my friends. March is hurt and you helped him, and I will buy your food. Ok?"

Her tone is authoritative enough that Arjun shrinks back and returns his money to his wallet.

"Ok. Thank you," he says.

"This is what friends do," she says. "You want your drinks soft or hard?"

"Soft, for me," I say. "Coke, if they have it. Or Pepsi."

Arjun thinks about it, mulling over whether or not he wants alcohol, before he acquiesces and says, "Same here."

We're going to be sober tonight.

We've kissed; we've shared our feelings; we'll be sharing a tent once more. And we're going to be sober tonight. I try not to let that rattle around in my head too much, but I can't help but think what if. Nothing that would require Young-mi's gift, but ... I want to kiss again; I want to cuddle. I want to wrap my arms around him and spoon in the secrecy of our tent, though I'm not sure my ankle will allow it.

Arjun shifts closer to me, lying on his front with barely a couple of inches between us, and he holds himself up on his elbows. "How're you feeling?" he asks, his voice low. "I know you hate that question, but it's been a dramatic day."

"I'm feeling ... very conflicted," I say. "A mixture of relief and excitement, and discomfort and pain."

"I'm hoping I didn't contribute to the latter two."

"Only indirectly," I say, turning my cheek against the mat. He's so close, I can feel his breath when he talks. "I need some painkillers, and I'd quite like to get changed out of my lake clothes. I feel very grimy right now."

"Need a hand?" He pushes himself onto his knees and when I sit, he pulls my arm around his shoulders to help me up, and we awkwardly hobble over to our tent. It's a struggle to duck through the flap on one foot, but I manage it with zero grace and a lot of help from Arjun. Every movement's an effort when I have to be so wary of my ankle.

"Right. Direct me," he says, my bag in front of him. "What d'you need?"

"There's a t-shirt there"—I nod at a clean, rolled-up top closer to Arjun's side of the tent—"and there's a pair of khaki shorts in my bag, and boxers probably stuffed down in the bottom somewhere. And painkillers are in the outside pocket."

I switch t-shirts while he's looking for my shorts, and I pray that he doesn't come across a holey pair of boxers. When I packed for this trip, I threw in clothes I didn't care much about, which meant underwear I'd happily throw out to make packing space.

"Will these do?" He holds up a pair, thankfully plain and hole-free, and throws them to me with the shorts when I nod.

Now comes the awkward part. He's busy searching for paracetamol and ibuprofen, whatever will take the edge off my sprain, and I need to carefully shimmy out of my shorts and pants without flashing him. Not that that would be so bad now that everything's out in the open, but some things don't need to be quite so open yet.

"Can you manage?" he asks, and when I nod, he gives me a thumbs up and he steps out of the tent. That makes it a lot easier, though it still takes me a few minutes to change. By the time my damp clothes are discarded to dry before I throw them into my laundry bag, I'm out of breath purely from the exertion of changing while lying down. I could fall asleep again, right here. The thought of a nap before the campfire is tempting.

"Are you done?" comes Arjun's voice from outside the tent.

"Yup – I'm decent," I call, my words strained as I lug over my bag to rest my foot on, and I collapse onto my back when I'm done. Arjun comes back into the tent and half zips it, shut enough to give us privacy and open enough for a through breeze.

"Hey." He sits down next to me, legs crossed and his hands hanging loosely between his knees. He looks down at me through freshly cleaned glasses, his eyebrows thick and dark above inquisitive irises.

"Hey there, stranger." I bunch up a pillow under my head so I'm not stretching my neck quite so much.

"So, I've been trying to think of what I wanted to say," he says, twisting his fingers and those bands around his wrists. "There are a lot of things I've wanted to say over the past few days, most of which I was too scared to say."

"Like?"

"Like ... I really fucking like you but I don't know if I should say anything because you've just got out of a big relationship, but I don't know how long I can not say anything when all I can think about is how much I want to kiss you. Like, I can't bear the thought of this trip ending and not seeing you again, and I don't want to rush into an ill-advised holiday romance but I don't want to not shoot my shot." His eyes are on me as he speaks, never leaving mine, and I'm entranced by his words.

"I really fucking like you too," I say.

"I think that's about the crux of it." He runs a hand through his hair and knocks his glasses off kilter, and he scratches the back of his neck with an idle hand. "Yeah, you've got right inside my head. You're all I can think about and I get jealous when you talk about George, because he has treated you like shit and you don't deserve that and ... you know what, I don't want to get all cheesy."

He stops talking, and he leans over his knees to close the gap between us and kiss me again. I wrap my arms around his neck to hold him down, lifting myself up to meet him as much as I can, but it isn't much.

When we part, which I'd much rather not do, I roll my lips together to savour the moment and I fill my lungs. After a long, long sigh, I ask, "Do you mind if the others know, or would you rather they didn't?"

"No. I don't care." He shakes his head and moves some of my stuff out of the way so he can lie down next to me, one knee up and his ankle across it. Hands crossed over his stomach; eyes on the top of the tent. "I was driving myself crazy and I was texting my sister about the trip, and I just blurted it out. I told her I had feelings for a guy – we've never talked about that stuff before, and I've never felt this before – and she told me to just go with it."

My heart stops, and then seems to triple in size when it starts beating again. "When did you text her?"

He tears his eyes from the tent wall when he says, "After the Colorado River."

I try to do the maths in the head but I can't distinguish the days. They all blend together and yet that feels like forever ago. "That was..."

"Six days ago," he fills in.

"Fuck. Could've saved me a week of self-doubt and second guessing every single thing," I say with a laugh, but he shakes his head, as though to himself.

"I needed time to figure it out," he says quietly. "I have virtually no experience with any of this. I needed some time to, I don't know, just work out what was going on in my head."

"When'd you work it out?"

He links his hands behind his head and a slow smile grows when he says, "Vegas. Just hanging out with you all day, talking and just being, and then that night. I don't know. Something clicked."

"No wonder you were extra touchy the next day."

He laughs and nudges my thigh with his knee. "Genuine migraine treatments, a la Saanvi Sharma. But ... yeah."

"Yeah."

I don't know how long we lie there, not saying much and not needing to say much, and there's so much going on in my head right now that I have no awareness of anything but him lying next to me. He's breathing quietly, a steady rhythm that I try to match to bring down my heart rate. In, out. In, out. In, out.

He rolls over and I try to, as much as I can without angering my ankle, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world to kiss him. Slow and steady. I balance myself on my forearm; my other hand cups his cheek and I inhale his scent. When I graze his lip with my teeth and sigh against his tongue, he lets out a quiet groan and his hand slips from my neck to my hair.

A quiet cough interrupts us, a surreptitious throat clearing. I don't want to pull away but I spy Young-mi's legs through the gap in the tent flap and I'm pretty sure I won't need to fill her in.

"I have your food," she says. "I won't come in – I don't want to interrupt. You ... stay."

Arjun smiles. We share a silent laugh; he rolls his eyes and sits up. "You can come in," he says, reaching out to unzip the tent flap. She pokes her head in, and even in the dim light I can see her analysing our faces and our positions; our lips and our eyes; the slightest redness where Arjun's stubble scratched my jaw.

"You were right," I say, my hand finding Arjun's. I don't know how I'll be able to keep my hands off him now. Sam might have to enforce DJ duty.

Young-mi touches her nose. "I know these things," she says. "I have food, but ... it can wait."

It can, but it won't. Arjun helps me out of the tent, my arm hooked around his neck and his arm locked around my waist, just in time for the campfire, which Sam has just lit. The sun's just setting, the air a little cooler and the sky a little hazy as the colours of the day fade away. Already the reds and oranges are fading to dazed purple, the sun invisible beyond the trees and mountains of the valley we're in.

Young-mi was right about a lot, and especially the romance of Yosemite. My first kiss with Arjun may not have gone how I hoped it would, but somehow I can't imagine it having worked any better than it did. I screwed it up, but that gave him an in.

When she spots us, Young-mi pulls over a mat close to the fire, though not so close that the heat is unbearable, and we sit. I'm clumsy and awkward about it, as though I've forgotten how to sit down, and Arjun drags over the camping chair so I can prop up my foot.

It's not the most comfortable position. With my ankle elevated, it's almost impossible to sit up when my body wants to lie back, but I don't want to lie down when everyone else is sitting and engaging. I want to take part, even if Carrie reels us into another game of Never Have I Ever, or Klara ropes us into a card game I don't understand.

"Here, how's this," Arjun says. He sits down behind me and scoots closer, so I'm sitting between his legs, leaning back against his chest. The top of my head is just under his chin and when there's a moment of quiet, I can hear his heartbeat in my left ear.

"That can't be comfortable for you," I say, though being able to lie back against him takes the pressure off my non-existent core muscles.

"I'm very comfortable." He rests his chin on my head and I feel his breaths ruffle my hair and I glance at the faces around the campfire. No-one seems to have even noticed. Carrie is too engrossed in Ade to notice us, and Brannan is chatting to Kristin, but Klara's eyes travel over us and she gives me a subtle thumbs up.

Sam nods at me. Or us. I'm not sure. He pulls out his guitar, which seems like an extra limb, and he slips into a gentle tune. He looks from my ankle to me and asks, "You good, March?"

There's a residue of pain, a dull throbbing that painkillers can't quite mask, but I nod and smile, because I have Arjun's legs around me and his hand on my waist and I feel fine. I may be injured six thousand miles from home, but right now, as the sun disappears and bids farewell to another day on this trip, I've never been better. 

*

i hope you enjoyed this!