Chapter 12
It’s not even dawn the next morning when I’m awakened by a deafening crack.
It’s so loud and so unexpected—waking me out of deep sleep and followed closely by a howl from Molly—that I launch abruptly into a sitting position with my heart racing and my eyes wide.
“What the hell?” Micah moves even faster than I do, swinging his legs over the side of the table-bed and grabbing for his rifle as he stuffs his feet into his shoes.
I do the same, and we’re both stepping out of the camper less than thirty seconds after the sound, a fully alert Molly at our heels.
The situation becomes clear immediately despite the darkness of the surrounding woods.
One of the dying white pines close to my camp has fallen.
These woods are doing the best they can, given the dramatic changes to the climate these past few years. Most of the trees are still hanging on to life, but there are always some who give up the fight, still standing as dead monuments to a world that used to be.
Every once in a while, a tree will surrender completely and fall.
I know exactly which tree this is. I know every single tree on the perimeter of this clearing.
It crashed down close enough to block the main trailhead and take out some large branches from the nearest trees to my camper.
“Fuck,” Micah breathes out, standing beside me with his rifle and staring at the carnage.
I’m doing the same. It’s strangely devastating. A large section of my camp, my home, has been damaged. If the tree had been angled just a little differently, it would have taken out the camper with us inside.
I’ve felt safe here these past years, but I’m not. Not really.
Random chance could still take away everything that’s mine in only an instant.
“Fuck, Kat,” Micah says, lowering his rifle and turning to me. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I manage to say. I know all the right things to say in these situations. Everyone does. “No one was hurt. It could have been so much worse.”
“But this is bad enough. I thought that big fella had a chance of coming back to life.”
I thought so too.
“Do you want to start clearing this out now or wait until it’s light?”
I’m still standing. Still staring at the wreckage. My eyes are burning now, and my throat aching. And, as silly as it is, it’s the fact that Micah called the tree big fella that pushed me this close to tears.
When I don’t answer, Micah steps closer. Puts one hand on my back. He doesn’t say anything.
After several seconds, I suck in a forced breath. “Let’s start clearing it now. It can’t be too long before sunrise.”
It takes hours.
Hours and hours.
Even with two of us working straight through, it’s well after noon before we get the branches collected, the tree trunk chopped into usable chunks, and the worst of the cascade of pine needles raked into the underbrush of the woods.
I’m dripping with sweat and covered in tree sap. My back and arms are aching. The entire world smells strongly like pine and probably always will.
Micah looks just as bad as I must, perspiration streaming down the sides of his face and soaking his shirt. His hair is standing up on end, and his beard is clumped from sap that came from his hands.
But the thing that makes me jerk is the blood on the side of his shirt.
“Shit! I shouldn’t have let you do all that. You’re injured.”
“I’m fine. It’s healin’ good.”
“It was until this. You’re bleeding again!”
He glances down, surprised by this fact. Then he shrugs. “Doesn’t look too bad.”
“Hopefully not. But after we clean up, let me look at it and change the bandages.”
He doesn’t object to this plan. Because we’re in such bad condition, we don’t try to make do with the rain barrels. After collecting towels and scavenged soap and shampoo, we head down to the creek to wash up there.
I usually keep to the edge within easy reach of my gun, but because there are two of us, we can take turns. Micah insists he stand watch first, keeping his back toward me as I peel off my clothes and get into the creek naked, wading out to where it’s deeper so I can fully submerge.
I keep my eye on the far bank as I soap up, scrub every inch of my body, rinse off, and then shampoo my hair. It’s full of sap, so it’s not an easy process, but eventually I get myself clean.
After I dry off, I pull on an old knit dress and pick up my rifle. “Okay. Your turn.” My hair is still dripping. I need to comb, towel dry, and braid it. But Micah has been waiting there, hot and dirty and uncomfortable.
I can work on my hair after he cleans himself up.
He gives me a quick, heated look but almost immediately drags his eyes away as I turn my back the way he did.
“You don’t gotta look away,” he says. “You’ve already seen everythin’ I got.”
With a choked laugh, I turn back toward him. He’s wincing as he pulls off his jeans. “You’ve seen everything I have too, but you still didn’t look.”
“It’s different. You got every reason to keep me at a distance. I’m the one who hurt you.”
His wording bothers me a little. I’d rather he said he lied to me or kept secrets.
His hurting me makes me vulnerable, and I don’t like feeling that way.
I also don’t like that it’s only now that I’m remembering everything that happened yesterday. It barely even crossed my mind since I woke up to the fall of that tree.
My chest aches as I make myself process what happened yesterday.
Micah is right. I was hurt. It still hurts.
But it doesn’t feel as important as it did yesterday. I don’t even know why.
Because my emotions are in a turmoil and the exhaustion of so much manual labor this morning has only stretched them further, I don’t respond to Micah’s comment. I scan our surroundings with my weapon at the ready as Micah gets naked and wades into the creek.
My eyes do occasionally land on him in their rotations.
Despite his injury, his body is very good to look at. But I don’t linger or leer, except to check the condition of his wound.
He’s definitely bled through his bandages.
It takes him almost as long to wash his beard as it took me to do my hair. It must have been full of pine sap. I hear him muttering about “damn sap” multiple times as he works on it.
For some reason, it makes me want to giggle.
When he’s stepped back onto the bank and grabbed his towel, I say, “After you get your underwear on, let’s go back so I can work on your bandage.”
So he’s wearing his shoes and boxers and I’m wearing the slightly baggy dress and Molly is carrying a nice piece of branch she snatched from the tree debris as we three traipse back to the camper.
“Do you mind if we stay out here?” Micah asks, gesturing toward the bench. “That breeze feels good right now.”
It does feel good, and the camper is often stuffy. I go in to grab the first aid supplies and return to sit on the bench beside him.
His big body and bare skin make me want to touch them. Not as much in a sexy way as in a tender way.
I really don’t like that.
It’s not like me at all.
I’ve got to stop.
“I’ll leave as soon as you fix me up,” Micah says hoarsely. He’s staring straight ahead at the pile of pine branches. He’s tense in a way he rarely is.
“What?”
“I’ll leave. I was supposed to leave this morning. I was supposed to leave weeks ago. You’re obviously uncomfortable around me now. I can feel it coming off you in waves.”
“I’m not uncomfortable!” The objection is ridiculous. Nonsense. Of course I’m uncomfortable, and it’s no surprise that Micah sensed it.
But this is the thing—I’m not uncomfortable for the reasons he believes.
“I told you last night that I’d let you know if you need to leave in the morning,” I say at last. “Did I tell you to leave?”
“No. But there was a crisis, and the crisis is over now.”
I’ve finally pulled off the old wet and bloodied bandages, and I’m relieved to see that, though a piece of the scab has broken open, the wound is still healing clean. “Yeah, but it’s already midafternoon, and you really need to take it easy on this wound. You can stay for today.”
“And leave tomorrow?”
I have absolutely no idea how to answer that.
I don’t want him to leave, but it feels like I should.
“I’ll tell you in the morning.”