Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 63174 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 316(@200wpm)___ 253(@250wpm)___ 211(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63174 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 316(@200wpm)___ 253(@250wpm)___ 211(@300wpm)
He smiled as he drew me into his arms. “I’m so excited that you get to experience camping for the first time. I want to make sure we hit all the highlights, including cooking over an open fire, toasting marshmallows, and making s’mores.”
“So, the best part of camping is the food.”
He chuckled and said, “Pretty much. But there’s other great stuff too, like nature walks, and songs around the campfire, and stargazing. I don’t want to leave anything out.”
“What do we do first?”
“We set up camp. Since we’re sleeping in the van, we get to skip the step of setting up a tent, and yay to that. It’s always a pain in the ass.”
We unpacked our new canvas folding chairs and placed them beside the fire pit, along with a bundle of firewood. Then Devon spread a red-and-white checked tablecloth over the picnic table and began pulling things out of the cooler. Our haul from the grocery store had seemed pretty random, but now I realized he’d actually gone in with a plan in mind.
After he got a fire going, I acted like his sous chef and helped him prepare some chiles, onions, and tomatoes, which he turned into a batch of fire-roasted salsa. He served it with thick, melty quesadillas that he cooked over the coals in a wire basket with a long handle.
I took a bite and exclaimed, “This is amazing! How can it be this good?”
Instead of taking any credit, he explained it away with, “Everything tastes better when it’s cooked over a campfire.”
He started on dessert by placing pieces of Hershey bars on top of graham cracker halves that he’d arranged on a paper plate. He grinned when I kept stealing the pieces of chocolate, replacing them repeatedly as he told me, “It’s even better when you have it all together.”
He distracted me from swiping more chocolate by handing me a marshmallow on the end of a long skewer. “There’s an art to toasting marshmallows,” he said, as he prepared a second skewer for himself. “Some people catch them on fire and turn them into charcoal. I’m not going to tell you that’s wrong.” He paused for a beat before saying, “Okay, yes I am. Don’t do that.”
When he turned back to me, my skewer was empty and my mouth was full. He chuckled and stuck another marshmallow on the end of my stick. Then he made the mistake of looking away again. He turned back to two empty sticks and me trying to chew through a huge mouthful of pillowy sweetness.
He burst out laughing and exclaimed, “You have a raging sweet tooth! How did I not know this about you?”
Devon made a big show of reaching for the bag of marshmallows and impaling two more on the ends of our skewers without ever taking his eyes off of me. Then he demonstrated his technique for patiently holding his marshmallow over some glowing embers until it turned a nice golden brown.
When I tried to cook mine, it immediately went up in flames. I shrieked and tried to put it out by waving it around, which resulted in flinging the flaming marshmallow into the fire pit. I frowned and muttered, “Aw, I killed it.”
He used his perfectly cooked marshmallow to assemble a s’more for me, and I thanked him and said, “You’re good at everything.”
“That’s not true.”
“Name one thing you’re bad at.”
“Designing dresses. If I tried to do what you do, everything would end up looking like a poncho with a belt around it.” I chuckled and took a bite of the treat before feeding him the rest of it.
It was getting cold now that the sun had gone down. He put some more wood on the fire, and I asked, “Do you think one of these chairs with its spindly little legs can hold both of us?”
He said, “Let’s find out,” so I climbed onto his lap and kissed him.
I marveled at how peaceful this was as we snuggled together and watched the fire. Since we had the entire campground to ourselves, the only sound was the wood crackling as it burned.
After a while, I said, “Turns out I love camping, but I suspect ninety percent of that is because I’m with you.”
“Is the other ten percent the chocolate bar?”
“That and the marshmallows.”
He grinned and nodded. “Thought so.”
“Seriously, this is wonderful. However, I do believe I was promised some campfire songs.”
Devon instantly got excited. “Yes! I didn’t actually grow up camping, so I don’t know what most people would traditionally choose here. I guess we can just pick a song that both of us know.”
“I doubt we know many of the same songs.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you’ve got this retro rocker vibe going on,” I explained, “while I pretty much only know songs a drag queen would perform as a lip sync.” I made two circles with my thumbs and index fingers and held them side by side. “In the Venn diagram of your musical taste and mine, there are probably two or three songs that fit in both categories, but I can’t think of them right now.”