“That feels healthy and definitely not like it’ll backfire on you in the future.”
She expertly dodges my elbow when I try to poke her in the ribs. “I’m going to delete my spam account and lock my cellphone in my suitcase. If I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”
“I support it. I’ve said it before, nothing good can come from putting your faith in a man. Let Chuck and Norah play happy families online and you concentrate on you.”
“Jesus, it was like being with my mom for a second,” I tease.
Tired of dodging her, Emilia bends to pick Salmon up, tucking the puppy under her arm. “You’re so annoying,” Emilia groans.
The dog’s tongue lolls out of her mouth as Emilia struggles with the deceptively heavy golden retriever. I reach over to scratch behind Salmon’s ears as we continue toward the activity. “Aw, she’s not annoying. She’s a baby.”
Emilia’s brows pinch together as she looks over at me. “I was talking to you.”
We finally reach the rest of the counselors standing around several planks of wood and platforms arranged in groups of four. “I don’t know what the hell we’re going to have to do,” Maya says.
I’ve seen this activity before, but I’ve never done it. “You have to get your entire team from the first platform to the one at the end, but it gets harder to move between them because the gaps gets bigger and the platforms get smaller. Nobody can touch the floor.”
“Bedlam then,” she smiles. “I’m going to say hi to my friends, I’ll be back in a sec.”
“I wonder if you’d annoy me less if you still had a British accent,” Emilia says quietly, watching Maya as she walks away from us.
“I never sounded like Maya. I still sounded mostly American. It got stronger depending on how much time I spent hanging around at Dad’s work.”
Xander, Russ and Clay finally stop whispering with each other, turning to face Emilia and me. “Okay, game plan,” Xander says seriously. “We’re going to jump between the platforms.”
Emilia bursts out laughing and I immediately shake my head. “No, we’re not.”
“Why not? It’ll be the easiest way,” he immediately counters.
Emilia is still laughing at the idea of us trying to make those jumps. Xander looks genuinely surprised, while Clay is trying to fight a laugh too. Russ is . . . observing. “Maybe for you Mr. NBA hopeful, but for the rest of us mere mortals, jumping that far isn’t possible.”
“We’ll help you. You’ll be fine.”
Xander’s mouth doesn’t move and that’s when I realize the person talking to me is Russ.
“Oh.” Say something, Aurora. “Cool.”
I hate myself.
Russ does that nod thing guys do, without saying anything more. It was nice to hear him speak, so now I know he is real and he’s not just a figment of my imagination haunting me like the ghost of hook-ups past.
“Is this thing on?”
We all turn our attention to Orla standing at the end of the challenge with a megaphone. She’s had that megaphone for as long as I’ve known her and every time it breaks, she gets the maintenance team to fix it for her instead of investing in one from this century.
I stole it once. Used it to scare the shit out of Jenna when she was flirting with one of the other counselors and ended up in a time out for the rest of the afternoon, but it was worth it.
Orla goes over the rules, explaining that you can’t start moving to the next platform until your entire team is together. If anyone in your team falls off, your team has to start again from the beginning and whoever makes it to the end, managing to stay on the platform for thirty seconds without falling is the winner.
Maya wanders back to our group and Xander immediately turns to her. “We’re jumping.”
“No, we’re not,” Emilia and I say in unison.
“You’re tall—” Maya says, looking him up and down.
“Thank you for noticing . . .”
“—if you’re so confident, why don’t you just lie down between them and we can all walk you like a plank?”
“Yeah, Xan,” Russ says, grinning. “Why don’t we just walk you like a plank?”
“I don’t think I’d like being crushed by a hockey player, funnily enough.”
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” I say quietly, without thinking.
Thankfully, most of the group didn’t hear my little admission, but Russ and Xander did and Russ’s cheeks flush pink.