Cabin Fever | ✓

(47) Perfect

"She says you'll take over."

"Tell her I'll stay out of the way and keep my hands to myself."

Heavy pause.

"Okay, so I probably won't keep my hands to myself but I promise not to intervene."

Marley rolled her eyes with a scoff as she shut off the flame and shifted the pan of rice to the cold side of the stovetop, reaching for the glass bowl to deposit it in.

"Tell Aiden that he gets to see me in a dress if he stays away so that I can finish what I'm doing here." She suggested distractedly, too concentrated on hovering the pan and using the spatula to control the fall of the rice into the bowl.

"Marley says you get to see her in a dress if you stay away for another..."

"Twenty minutes."

"Twenty minutes."

"Garbage bag, Spitfire, remember?"

"Tell him it's a v-neck with cleavage."

"It's a v-neck with cleavage."

Brief, thoughtful silence. Soft murmuring. There was static as the phone was shifted back to Ian's ear.

"We'll be there in twenty," Ian told her, before he hung up while Marley rolled her eyes even harder this time.

Boys.

After the steaks were out of the oven, Marley covered everything with clean dish towels to keep it warm, striding to the back of one of the 'community room' cabins to quickly change into the promised v-neck with cleavage.

It was a light pink dress with a very generous v-line, and it was more revealing of an outfit than she's ever worn. It was skin tight until the waist, where it billowed out into a petal skirt that reached three inches above her knee.

This was a gesture for Aiden Matthews, after all.

The dress was Sarah's. She gave it to Marley with the tags on, because she didn't like the way it looked on her, but was too lazy to return it.

Marley slipped her converse back on her feet because no one, no one was going to convince her out of those.

Marley's coffee brown waves were in a ponytail that she let down. Her hair was wavy but didn't need any TLC thankfully, so she applied fresh deodorant and perfume before walking back out into the main room.

The cabin consisted of a kitchen, two single bathrooms, and a large open area for the tables folded on the rim of the room. Gabby helped Marley carry her grocery bags into the cabin, and Ian knows of its location so that he can tell Aiden where to go when they make it back to camp, but otherwise nobody would know they were here to disturb them.

Marley managed to find a square table that she had dragged across the floor with much elbow grease and embarrassing grunts. It now had two cloth place mats under round white plates, an array of silverware, tall glasses of water for Aiden, like always and lemonade for Marley.

She stood in front of it with her thumbnail between her teeth, narrowing her hazel eyes to scrutinize it carefully, be certain she hadn't missed anything. This was her first gesture as a girlfriend and she wanted it to be perfect.

After deciding it was acceptable, she lifted the hand towels off of the food and set the medium rare lean steaks in the middle of the plates, adding small scoops of the accents - the tomato-chickpea salad, and the rice and beans - to either side, adjusting and fixing them obsessively. She had done research too, looking into an 'Aiden' meal, considering she couldn't make him something ordinary with his long-withstanding athletes' diet.