“Oh. My. God,” she said, still cackling while lying on the ground, her arms splayed and her chili bowl safely tucked between her feet.
“What just happened?” Josh said.
Delilah locked eyes with Claire, her own laugh bubbling onto her tongue.
“Well, Josh,” she said, “let’s just say we owe you some cayenne pepper.”
* * *
DELILAH COULDN’T SLEEP.
It was too damn quiet, too hot in this tent, and her mind was too damn busy. Claire was next to her, completely conked out and snoring softly, Iris on her other side. Earlier, after it became clear that Astrid and Spencer were not going to emerge from their tent for the rest of the night—and Iris stopped laughing like a villain in a Disney movie—they’d all settled down around the fire as the sun slipped behind the evergreens. They spent the next couple of hours drinking the beer Josh had brought in one of the huge coolers and listening as Josh spun campy ghost stories for Ruby, who didn’t seem the least bit freaked out about a girl who found a spider bite on her cheek after a camping trip and then watched in her mirror at home as the boil burst and a million baby spiders spilled out.
“Josh,” Claire had said at the story’s conclusion, rubbing her cheek absently.
“What?” He smiled, then nudged Ruby, who couldn’t stop laughing and babbling about what an amazing photograph that would’ve made.
“Wouldn’t it, Delilah?” she asked.
“It totally would,” she said, winking at the girl.
Claire shook her head, but her gaze kept drifting toward Astrid’s tent, concern creasing her brow. Iris told her over and over not to worry, that they’d talk to Astrid tomorrow when they all got back to Bright Falls. She nodded, but Delilah could almost feel her stress on her own shoulders, which was a preposterous idea.
Delilah didn’t care if Astrid was pissed about the pepper. And she certainly didn’t care if Spencer was sporting a rather large rash on his crotch. She didn’t care that Iris had sat next to her near the fire and leaned her cheek on Delilah’s shoulder, still hiccupping from laughing so hard, and just . . . stayed like that. Delilah kept expecting her to say something about the pepper, but she didn’t. Iris Kelly simply sat there for a good ten minutes, snuggling with the Ghoul of Wisteria House while she sipped her beer.
Delilah proceeded to chug her own drink, hoping the alcohol would calm her down and give her the courage to shrug Iris’s face away, but it didn’t. If anything, it made her more maudlin, and the word friends kept lighting up in her brain like June fireflies.
Once they all settled into their tents at the ungodly hour of nine thirty and Iris went to pee in the woods, Claire had curled toward her in her sleeping bag, stolen a kiss, and whispered in her ear about sneaking off to the soaking tubs once Iris was asleep.
“She’s impossible to wake up once she’s out,” Claire had said.
Delilah had agreed, eager for . . . something. She felt unsettled and anxious, so maybe an hour with Claire’s skin under her hands and mouth would do the trick. But Claire, exhausted after getting next to no sleep the night before, was completely unconscious within thirty minutes of announcing her midnight hookup plan.
So now here Delilah was, wide awake despite her own lack of sleep, staring at the tent’s roof and nearly suffocating with the heat of three bodies under a June sky. Claire mumbled something and then flopped an arm over Delilah’s stomach, pushing closer to her until her mouth was pressed right up against Delilah’s neck. She was still asleep, her limbs heavy, but Delilah couldn’t stop the slow spread of comfort that wound its way through her veins as she drifted her fingers over Claire’s soft arm.
Finally, she sat up, her heart pumping too fast to sleep now. She wiggled out from under Claire, shucking her sleeping bag off her bare legs, and unzipped the tent. Cool night air flowed in, and she sat there on her knees in the entrance for a second, waiting for her heart to go back to normal.
About twenty feet away, remnants from the fire still glowed. Delilah crawled from the tent, heading toward Josh’s coolers for another beer, but found them locked tight with a complicated mechanism she couldn’t half see in the darkness.
“What the fuck?” she said quietly, squatting down to squint at the lock.
“It’s so the bears don’t get into it.”
“Jesus Christ!” Delilah tumbled backward onto her ass, heart rate definitely pumping at full speed now.
“Nope, just me,” Astrid said languidly, tipping her own beer can at Delilah from where she sat on a log by the fire. “Though that was worth it to see you fall on your butt and screech like a little kid.”