Shaw drew back the curtain more and pointed. “Hey, look. There’s a pond.” He glanced back at North, grinning a huge, doofus grin. “We can go skinny dipping. And then, when we pull ourselves out and we’re drying on the dock, I’ll ask you to put sunscreen on my back, only—only then I’ll get brave and I’ll say something like, ‘You don’t have to stop with just my back.’”

“Ok,” North said, tossing his duffel on the other bed. “I get it.”

“And it won’t stop there. Then maybe it’ll start raining. And we’ll get soaking wet. And we’ll be giggling as we run to the house—we’ll have to ditch our clothes because it’s coming down so hard.”

“I’ve never giggled in my entire life.”

“And then we’ll get inside—maybe one of the other people staying here, a real blue hair, will see us, and she’ll be shocked, but she’ll also be titillated, and somehow we’ll get past her, and we’ll get into the room.” Shaw let the curtain drop back into place; he stood in front of the bed and fell back, arms spread, bouncing once on the mattress. Staring up at the ceiling, he said, “I’ll be like this. Naked. Waiting for you when you come out of the bathroom. And you’ll try to say something, but your throat will dry up, and so I’ll say, ‘I lied to myself about this for so long, and I can’t lie about it anymore. Not tonight. Not when we’re two grown-ass men sharing a room with two beds like two grown-ass adults who can be responsible for themselves. Take me.’ And then you’ll—”

North’s throat, as a matter of fact, was drying up, but Shaw’s last words landed like a slap, shaking him out of the fantasy. “Point made, ok? You were just really quiet, so I thought you were worried.”

“I think you’re worried.”

“I’m only worried because you have obviously put way too much time into scripting your own personal porn. That little fantasy you just wrote sounded rehearsed.”

“Is Tuck going to be mad if we share a room?”

“Tuck’s the one who insisted we go on this trip.” And that, North knew, wasn’t an answer to the question.

“Are you going to get weird?”

“I’ve seen your bony ass plenty of times. If it was going to freak me out, then it would have happened already.”

“Then we should be fine.”

North rolled his eyes and went into the bathroom and finally found a mirror, and he looked exactly like how he felt: a lying, guilty, fucking horndog wreck.

It was going to be a long two days.

3

THE GOATS WERE GONE.