Free Still Waters by Rebecca Addison

can’t look at Jake without thinking of her, and that night, and
everything that happened because of it.
    “I
think we’re stuck here for a bit, kid,” I whisper into her hair.   I feel her sigh into my chest. Her breath seeps
through my t-shirt, sending shivers over my skin. “Want to make a fort?”
    She
pulls away from me and looks up, laughing.
    “Did
you just say you wanted to make a fort? As in a cubby house?”
    “Why
not?” I shrug as I unfold my arms from around her back and take her hand. She
doesn’t pull it away. “I used to do it when I was a kid when the power went
out. Come on, it will take your mind off it. There’s some old blankets in the
store room.”
    I
pull her behind me across the shop, behind the counter and into the storeroom.
It’s even darker in here, and I forgot to bring a candle with me.
    “Here
you go,” Hartley says as the room suddenly goes bright. She’s holding her phone
up in the air and even in the dim light I can see that she’s got about a
million unheard voicemails on that thing.
    “Thanks.”
    I
quickly grab a couple of blankets, a few chocolate bars and a bottle of water
then we head back out into the shop. Jake and Eleanor have moved to the booth
seats on the other side of The Sea Shack. They’ve set up some candles so they
can do a crossword in an old newspaper they’ve found somewhere. Even from here
I can see that Jake’s as into her as she’s into him.
    “We
should build it here,” Hartley says as she leads me around the corner to the
part of The Sea Shack that’s only open in summer for take away ice creams. In
the winter they keep extra chairs and tables stacked up here, and it’s
completely hidden from view. I try not to get my hopes up that Hartley picked
this spot on purpose because we could be doing just about anything around here,
and no one would see.
    “So
how do we do this?”
    She’s
looking at the piles of chairs, then down at the blankets in my arms.
    “Haven’t
you ever built a fort before?”
    “Nope,”
she smiles. “I kind of missed fort building and went straight to you know,
building robots.”
    I
look into her eyes to see if she’s serious. She is.
    “Well
smarty pants, tonight you are about to have your first lesson in fort
construction. And no,” I add when I see the look on her face, “you can’t take
notes.”
    She
pouts a bit, playing along, then meets my eyes.
    “So
you’d be my teacher? And I’d be your student?”
    God,
she’s killing me. “That’s right,” I manage.
    She
smiles mischievously then looks over her shoulder at the dark little corner
where we’ll build our fort.
    “Well
let’s get started then.”
    Twenty
minutes, two chocolate bars and one small argument later and we are sitting
side by side on an inflatable beach mattress in a little house made of blankets
and chairs. I play with my phone for a bit then place it down in front of us.
Hartley looks at the image of a fireplace flickering on the screen and laughs.
    “Nice
touch.”
    I’m
too big for the fort and my knees are up somewhere around my chin, but I don’t
care. I made it small on purpose. Hartley is squashed in next to me and I lift
my arm so that she can move closer. She hesitates for the briefest of moments and
then leans in.
    “Do
you want to tell me why you don’t like being locked in?” I say, as I pull her
closer. “Because I was planning on locking you in the trunk of my car later,
and now I’m not so sure that you’ll like it.”
    She
laughs softly into my chest then goes quiet.
    “It’s
dumb. When I was six I was at this gifted kids summer camp. It was where I met
Eleanor actually. It was really pretentious and ridiculous and more for the
parents than the kids. We just wanted to swim in the lake and climb trees but
they had all of these ‘educational’ activities for us to do, mostly so they
could show the parents how brilliant we all were at the end of the summer.
Anyway, I didn’t want to join in one day, so I