Chapter 3 – GLENNA
GLENNA
I wish I’d brought eye drops. The light is perfect up on the mountain, and it seems like every critter is active, but I’m having trouble getting decent shots because my eyes are bleary. I hardly slept at all last night.
I was actually dozing off when my phone rang. I’d gone to bed early for me—around eleven. The plan was to head up here around four in the morning so I could get some sunrise shots.
I answered before I checked who was calling. Of course, my first thought was something happened to Dad. He’s the only person in my life who calls instead of texts.
But it was Toby. He wanted to talk to me “in person” to let me know that he is in a relationship with Samantha Becker.
He doesn’t want it to be awkward. He wants me to know that he’ll always care about me as a friend and as a person and that he hopes I’ll be happy for him like he’ll be happy for me when I move on.
So then I was awake all night long, pissed off and trying not to be mad at myself for caring.
And then I ate a carton of Rocky Road that I had hidden in the back of the freezer—from Toby’s judgy eyes—for at least six months. I don’t think ice cream can go bad, but my stomach would disagree.
The mountain is my happy place, but my bad attitude is getting in the way.
Nature is doing its best. The sun is bright but not hot, the changing leaves are so vivid the red and orange look painted on, and I even caught sight of Phat Thom from a distance.
He waddled off into a thicket before I could center a shot.
I decided it’d be better if I picked a spot and stuck with it. I found a fallen log at the edge of a meadow high up past the Harrow Ridge. Behind me, pines rise up to the east summit, and below, the wind blows the tall grasses and wildflowers as if a hand is smoothing over them. It’s perfect.
I let it sink into my bones. It doesn’t matter what Toby thinks or does–or anyone else. Not up here. I’m a part of the scenery, taking it in, not good or bad. Or not good enough.
There’s a patch of sunshine on my cheek. A yellow and black bumblebee locomotes in slow motion through the air from bluebell to purple aster. I take a couple shots.
I’m just another living thing, existing. I’m not holding anything together. Everything unfolds the way it’s supposed to, and all I have to do is capture it exactly the way it is.
This is my preferred mode of existence. Observer.
A fox scampers into the meadow, freezing when it sees me, paw bent. I’m wearing a long-sleeved gray shirt and a patchwork skirt in green and brown and gold, but it’s hunting season, so I’ve also got a bright orange safety vest on. That’s probably what drew his attention.
I snap a few pics. He summons up his courage and books it.
A straggling goose honks. A cloud drifts across the sun. Everything is calm.
Then a twig snaps, a crack rings out, and all hell breaks loose.
My upper arm bursts into flame.
A man shouts.
There’s a hunter in the tree line with a rifle aimed at me.
A man in a baseball cap flings himself in front of the hunter, ducking and driving his shoulder up into the barrel of the gun, forcing it skyward. Another crack. Birds burst from the canopy, cawing and flapping as they beat wings out of here.
I drop my camera. It hits the log. The lens cracks. Shit. No.
On instinct, I grab for it, and my arm screams in pain. There’s blood on my sleeve.
Four men sprint toward me. One is faster than the others. He crosses the meadow in seconds, crickets, grasshoppers, and katydids exploding from his path. A frog leaps desperately, its thin green froggy legs flailing wildly, eyes bulging.
Why is the frog in slow motion?
A group of frogs is called an army.
Why am I thinking that?
Why is my arm on fire?
The fast man in the baseball cap slams to his knees in front of me. It’s Cash Wall.
Of course, it’s Cash Wall.
“You broke my camera.” It’s a Canon EOS. It cost a thousand dollars. Dad bought it for me for Christmas. He didn’t get the warranty. Warranties are for suckers.
Fuck.
My arm . It burns. Cash is messing with it, ripping my collar—what is he doing? I slap at him, and—holy hell—it hurts .
He shucks his orange vest and peels off his shirt, down to a skintight, army-green tank top. Oh, wow. Cash Wall has pecs. Fitness magazine pecs with abs like King’s Hawaiian rolls, but big , each section perfectly defined, even through the cotton.
He’s touching my arm again, wrapping his sweaty shirt around it tight, compressing my bicep with his huge mitts, saying over and over, “Shit, baby. Shit.”
Why is Cash Wall calling me baby?
I look down, and then I sway backwards. Now there’s blood on his camo T-shirt. Am I gonna puke?
Maybe?
No?
Cash grabs me, wrapping a sturdy arm around my waist to hold me upright. My stomach lurches and settles and lurches again.
“You shot me,” I say to his hot, sweaty, ripped chest.
“Wasn’t me, baby. But yeah, you got shot. You’re gonna be all right, okay? It’s a flesh wound. The bullet didn’t go in, baby, okay? So stay with me. Stay with me.”
In the background, the other men are freaking out.
There’s a man with silver Ken doll hair zigzagging across the meadow, this way and that, holding up his cell phone to get a signal. He’s not gonna get one. Sat phones only above Harrow Ridge.
A guy in wire-framed glasses rants hysterically as his buddy tries to get him to shut up. “I thought she was a deer, man. I mean, sitting on the log like that, wearing brown. Tell me you didn’t see it, too. That was a deer.”
He means me. The woman in the orange vest with blue hair.
My guts squeeze the contents of my stomach halfway up my esophagus. “Was he aiming for my head?”
He rubs my back hard, like he’s trying to get feeling back into it. I can feel my back fine.
“Am I in shock?” Everything is filtering in at half speed. Except the pain. The area between my shoulder and my elbow throbs like a son of a bitch.
“Yeah, baby. I think so.”
“You shot me?”
“Not me, baby, but it’s my fault. I let that fucking walking liability have a weapon. Safety course can’t teach common sense.” He glares over his shoulder, and for a second, I think he’s going to let me go and punch the guy, and I’m gonna topple backwards off the log. Just thwump.
Instead, he squeezes me tighter. I squeak in surprise.
He loosens his hold. “I’m so sorry, baby. Shit. Shit!”
His pupils are pinpricks. Is he panicking? Should I be panicking?
I did just get shot.
“Don’t panic,” I say.
“Okay, okay,” he mutters. He presses his sweaty forehead to mine and keeps vigorously rubbing my back. Now we’re gazing into each other’s eyes. His breath smells like beef jerky.
He’s squinting like he’s trying to see inside me, more serious than I’ve ever seen him before. My tummy flips. Is that a barf flip? No. Not quite.
“Is she all right?” the young guy who didn’t shoot me asks. “Does she need some water or something?”
“Oh, shit, yeah.” Cash breaks our staring competition and grabs a canteen from the pack he dropped when he fell to his knees. “Here, baby. Drink this.”
“My water bottle’s in my camera bag.”
He ignores me and holds his canteen to my mouth at an impossible angle. I wrangle it from him with my good arm and drink because it’s there and my brain is slow and wooly. The water’s lukewarm. I bet he backwashed in it.
My stomach heaves again. Yup. That’s a barf flip. I stop and breathe through it.
Cash props his butt on his heels, takes off his cap, and swipes his forehead. His hair is matted back with sweat, but it still looks pretty—caramel-brown streaked with surfer-blond. Even the curls at his neck look sexy and not classic redneck. Or not just classic redneck.
He’s unfairly attractive. Nice full lips, perfectly white teeth, the kind of brown eyes that people always call “cognac” or “chocolate” or “coffee.”
I mean, he got me shot, and I’m sitting here in terrible pain thinking, “This is one good-looking guy.”
Biology is an idiot.
“I can’t get a signal,” the older man says in the kind of tone that suggests someone needs to produce one for him toot sweet.
“We can’t get a signal this far up the mountain. We’re gonna have to get you down past the ridge to call for help.”
Huh? Oh. Cash is talking to me, not the helmet-haired douchebag over there.
“Okay.” My camera is lying in the grass. “Can you hand that to me?” I point to it. I don’t want to bend over because if I do, I’m going to puke and pass out, and I’m not sure in what order.
He picks it up gently and sets it on my lap. “I’ll buy you a new one.”
“Maybe it’s only the lens.” Hold up. He got me shot. And he’s Cash Wall, my arch-enemy. What am I saying? “Yes. You need to buy me a new one.”
“Okay,” he says it like it’s nothing as he examines his makeshift tourniquet. I guess to him, with his money, it is.
“I think we’ve staunched the bleeding.” He has the audacity to smile.
I’m not checking to confirm. I’m gonna choose to believe him.
“Drink more.” He urges the canteen back to my mouth, and then he strokes the tops of my thighs, again like he’s trying to get feeling back in them. Oh, they have feeling.
They feel that his touch is really firm.
Toby was really big into consent—which is great and important and I wouldn’t have had it any other way—but because of that, I guess, he was always a little tentative with touch.
He never hugged tight. Never applied anything that could be considered pressure.
And that’s what I’m into, of course. Intellectually. In principle.
Cash is rubbing my thighs red. At one point, he kind of shakes them, and they jiggle, and thank the Lord I’m wearing a skirt so he can’t tell.
Not that I care what Cash thinks of my thigh chub.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“Good.”
No, I don’t. My arm burns. I’m woozy. Sweating. And why the hell am I downplaying a bullet wound?
“Like shit,” I amend my answer.