Chapter 11 #2
“All right. So the first thing I’m going to do is actually build my fire.” That meant that she needed to collect fuel.
She found the sticks that she wanted fairly quickly, but all the moss and other brushy-type things were damp. She didn’t want to tear anything off her clothes, but she was afraid she might have to.
She decided to make a ring of rocks around it, mainly because that just seemed nicer, and then she built her little wood pyramid at the center, putting what she had been able to find of the tinder there.
Then she took the lighter out of her fanny pack.
Zane reached over and grabbed it. Plucked it right out of her fingers. “You lost your lighter.”
“Hey!”
“Sorry. The lighter is gone. That means you have to use alternative methods of starting the fire. But luckily, you have trained in those methods.”
“Except that I have a lighter,” she said.
“Except that you don’t,” he said.
“This is cruel and unusual.”
“It isn’t. The whole point of this exercise is to put you in situations I hope you don’t find yourself in, while you actually have a safety net.”
“But it rained.” She gestured toward her fire ring. “And the odds are I’m going to have trouble getting this going. So why make it any harder?”
“Because sometimes things are hard. Sometimes things are hard, and that’s just how they are.”
“Well, I didn’t know you were going to make it this difficult for me.”
“I didn’t make it rain.”
She hushed and took the ferro rod out of her bag. Then she grabbed hold of her knife and didn’t look at him as she set herself up to start the fire.
She wasn’t incapable. She knew how to do this.
She had spent years of her life helping others, and this was something she could do to help herself.
This was her, engaging in her life.
This was her being courageous.
Being competent.
She ran the edge of the knife down the side of the ferro rod, and she felt that same sensation that she’d had the other day when she had done it just right to make sparks. There were sparks, but her tinder was so damp she was having a difficult time getting it to catch.
She tried again. And again.
She opened up her bag and looked around inside it.
She couldn’t find anything in there that might help her. Except…
The bag had a lining.
She picked at the edge, picked and picked until it came up. Then she tore a strip out of the liner in her bag.
She balled it up and placed it in the fire ring, just underneath the sticks, before she began to use the rod again, this time the sparks catching on the lining.
She just hoped that it wasn’t something synthetic that would go up so quickly, it didn’t have time to dry out everything else and help it catch.
But it made a big enough flame, a big enough flame that the wood began to catch, and then eventually, even the damp moss began to catch.
She stood up and threw her hands in the air. “I did it! I have created fire!”
To her surprise, Zane was grinning, and when she spun in a circle, he reached out and grabbed her around the waist and spun her the rest of the way.
She was dizzy, breathless, and when they stopped spinning, their noses were close together.
Her heart began to beat harder, more insistent. Like it was demanding she do something reckless. He was so solid. Like clinging to a mountainside. But he was hot too. She wanted to run her hands over his body.
The thought sent a rush of blood to her head, and to other places too. Her breasts suddenly ached. Felt heavy. Her body tingling in new and fascinating ways.
She wanted…
“Good job,” he said, releasing his hold on her and taking a step away, as though it hadn’t really happened.
She hadn’t had a chance to be reckless, because he had taken it out of her hands.
Maybe that was part of the survival lesson.
Or maybe he hadn’t felt anything at all, that was entirely possible.
“Well. I have a fire.”
“Do you want a shelter?”
“Yeah. Why not? Let’s make a shelter.”
That was when she figured out what the rope in her kit was for.
They worked at tying together branches for a lean-to, cutting the rope into different lengths as they pieced together a pretty competent shelter that was braced against the rock wall that she had liked because it provided shelter and privacy.
And now, it provided even more effective shelter.
She was also starving.
“Well, I guess I should’ve worked a little bit harder at foraging berries, because now I am ravenous.”
“I brought Meals Ready to Eat,” he said.
“What?”
“MREs.”
“Really?” She had a vague concept of what those were. Meals that were common in the military that could be reconstituted. They were used in the military, a reminder of where he’d come from.
It was hard to imagine him out there, all that violence swirling around him.
She didn’t want to think of it at all.
“Yeah. But… I also brought a line and a hook. So I figured I might try to catch a couple of fish.”
She spent the next hour, as the light waned completely, avidly watching him stand on the shore of the river and catch two large rainbow trout.
Then she watched as he cleaned them efficiently and expertly, and she had the sudden sense that there was so much she had left to learn.
Not that she particularly wanted to learn this skill, but there was something so… Compelling about it.
About the way that he had been able to make sustenance for himself, for them, about the ways that he knew to make a situation like this more comfortable.
She purified their water using the droplets, and he cooked the fish using some tinfoil that he’d also stuffed into his bag.
She watched in deep fascination as he fashioned a bag out of the foil for the fish to be tucked inside, and then put it on the coals.
“Dinner will be ready soon.”
“I’m just sorry that we don’t have any mashed potatoes.”
“Well, you’re welcome to go and forage if you want.”
“No. I’m exhausted. All of the berries that we ate on the trail on the way here have long since evaporated, and I am sleepy. I just need to eat my fish and go to bed. And when we get back to civilization, we can raid the day-old pastries at the bakery.”
He groaned. “Now that sounds good.”
He gingerly pulled the tinfoil pouch out of the fire and opened it up. The fish inside was perfectly cooked.
Then he put one fish in half of the tinfoil, and the other in the second half, and handed it to her.
They sat there and ate in companionable silence, and she thought to herself what she would be adding to her pack when she got back home.
“It’s cloudy,” she said, looking up at the sky and seeing nothing but the impression of the moon against the clouds.
“We’ll have to take a rain check on our astronomy lesson,” he said. “I’ll buy you a new fanny pack. That was pretty clever, you tearing the lining out.”
“I don’t need a new fanny pack.”
“Sure you do. Because you need that whole liner. Now you know it’s a good resource.”
“True. That is true. I’m also going to have to bring tinfoil and a fishhook.”
“Fishing like that might be a little bit more of an acquired skill.”
“Maybe you could help me acquire it.”
They looked at each other, the flames from the fire rising up between them, orange glimmering in his gaze.
No. This was it. They were about done. She knew that. This couldn’t go on forever. There was no way. But she wanted it too. That was the problem. She found that she really, really wanted it to.
“You can get your space blanket out,” he said.
“Okay.”
She had no idea what she was expecting a space blanket to be, but this looked like the tinfoil they had cooked the fish in. Except it was thinner.
“How is this going to keep me warm?”
“It does. Promise. That’s its entire feature. That it’s capable of being this compact, but also warm.”
She felt a little bit grim when she climbed into the lean-to that they made, not because it wasn’t a good shelter, it was. But she was cosplaying survival, and she was kind of ready to take the costume off.
They didn’t need to be out here, and so when she had to wrap herself like a baked potato and slip inside that shelter, with no pillow for her head, she felt a little bit tragic.
She decided to use her fanny pack to keep her head off the dirt and then tried to figure out what she could bring in the future to make it so that she never had to do it quite like this again.
She could hear him moving around outside the lean-to.
“Are you going to… Sleep out there?”
She shivered just slightly. It was a pretty warm blanket, but it was very thin, and she was directly on that cold ground.
“I was going to,” he said.
“I’m cold,” she said.
Slowly, very slowly, she saw his head come around the corner and look into the shelter. “Is that an invitation?”
He regarded her for a long moment, and she had a feeling there was another question he was asking.
She nodded very slowly.
He nodded back.
Then he disappeared again, and a moment later, he was crawling into the lean-to alongside her, his own blanket around his shoulders.
“Turn over,” he said.
His breath mingled with hers, and her lungs almost gave out.
But she obeyed him.
He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her up against his body, her breathing fast for a while, but then slowing to regulate to the speed of his.
He was only holding her. Nothing else.
And it felt amazing.
She wasn’t just warm, she was hot all the way down to her toes.
Her shoulder blades were connecting with his hard chest, his large, warm hand pressed against her stomach.
His lower body was moved away from hers, and she didn’t like that.
She wanted to nest right up against him, and she had a feeling that he wasn’t near her for a reason.
Either to avoid it being too intimate or because he didn’t want… He just didn’t want it to be.
But she felt safe, so safe with his body around hers.
“I don’t feel so afraid of bears now.”
“Do you think I’m going to fight a bear for you, Cara Logan?”
His breath was warm on her neck. “I was kind of hoping you would. I mean, don’t go pick a fight with a bear, but if one tries to pick one with me, I thought you might protect me.”
“You know I would,” he said.