Chapter Eight #4
She wiped her wet hands on her pants, feeling foolish for snapping at him after her rappelling fiasco.
“Sorry I went a little overboard with my reaction earlier.” Now that she had digested Ariana’s sensible advice and a belly full of garbanzo stew, the events of the day seemed less intense.
“It wasn’t your fault I slipped on the edge.
I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I…
guess I just needed a little extra support up there.
I saw you talking to the camera when I was about to do this really difficult thing and well, I…
” The end of her thought hung in the air.
I felt really unsupported, she wanted to say.
The group, engrossed, or at least pretending to be engrossed in washing up the dishes, patently paid no attention to their secluded conversation.
Tyler said, “Mm,” and scraped the last of the condensed milk off his plate. He toweled off his dish. “I’ve been an idiot,” he said.
That was unexpected. Even though it was true. She waited for him to go on.
“But you’ve been an idiot, too,” he said. At this her brows leapt like they were trying to touch her hairline.
“Excuse me?”
“Tell me what you want. I’m not a mind reader. If it’s important to you, then tell me you want me to watch when you do hard things. Now you’ve told me. So okay, next time, I’ll watch.”
It was a genuine offer, and she absorbed it. “Okay,” she agreed.
He chewed the inside of his cheek. Stared at her. “And I’ll tell you what I need, too. Okay?”
She scoffed. “Like when you’re afraid of rappelling down a waterfall?”
“No. I love that shit. But that’s not what I need. Maybe there are gonna be times when I need your support as well.”
She felt the click-click of her own empathy slipping into place, his words reminding her that this road went both ways. And when understanding spread across her cheeks in a smile, he smiled, too.
“Yeah. Okay,” she said, and they stood there. Smiling. Not budging. And not twelve inches apart.
And when her gaze connected to his, electricity sparked in her veins.
His eyes went on tour, visiting the popular attractions of her face, navigating the hotspots of her torso, and stopping for a coffee in an out-of-the-way, small-town café.
And everywhere his eyes lingered felt to her like the gentle pressure of fingers, his fingers, skimming her skin.
She felt the swoon roil through her hips and take a slow boat between her thighs.
Oh, hell no, Lulu. She sucked in her breath, mentally shaking off the fantasy. Back up the truck, girl. Lulu blinked hard, trying to camouflage the color that she knew was blooming on her cheeks. Clearing her throat, she took a step back.
“You two ready to join the tour?” Quique’s voice gave Lulu a start.
The pair followed behind their host. Quique gathered the group and gave each of them one of the inflatable camp lanterns before leading them beyond the waterfall.
“We compost all the food waste,” he said, indicating a barrel against the rock.
“Tomorrow, your group will carry out all of our garbage and recycling from your visit. It’s the ultimate way to be a perfect guest.”
Quique pointed out the compostable toilets and then led the group to a pair of stalls with plastic curtains. Showers! The water, he explained, was pumped from the waterfall and heated with propane gas. Genius, Lulu thought.
“Follow me,” Quique continued, striding back toward the opening to the cavern, where the eating area still glowed with the dimming light of the solar torches. They stepped beyond the circle of light, and Lulu waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark space.
Quique gestured. “Here’s where we’ll sleep.” The camp, which had been hidden beyond the kitchen, now grew visible when Quique turned on his solar lantern.
Silence. Tyler, Gwendy, Ariana, Lulu, and Bill gazed wordlessly at the sight.
Well. Bill’s reaction was expected, but the others were visibly shocked.
All the gains she had made in establishing her self-comfort drained away like shower water.
She stared into a very dank, tremendously dark, and profoundly deep cave.
Camp mattresses lay head to foot, lined up on the wide, stone shelf inside the cavern.
Overhead, limestone stalactites dipped toward the mattresses like reenactments of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum.
Lulu counted ten of them before her sense of them disappeared, obscured by the deepening pitch of the cavity.
Even thinking about that cavity, her teeth began to hurt.
She thought back to the Blue Seas Resort.
Was that just last night when she’d slept on an insanely comfortable mattress beneath bazillion-thread-count sheets?
A sleeping bag on a stone shelf seemed a distant second place.
“Aw, look.” Gwendy pointed toward the nearest sleeping mat. “Look at that cutie.” A frog, as colorless as raw egg whites, perched on the pillow.
Lulu didn’t like the heavy smell of the place.
She was not a fan of the claustrophobic depths.
But if she could commandeer the sleeping pad nearest the entrance, she would take her chances with the bloodless toad and the killer stalactites.
She tossed her pack on the mattress before anyone else could grab it.
One by one, the travelers placed their belongings on bunks and went about their business: finding a good spit spot for toothbrushing, discreetly changing out of sweaty underthings, and generally pretending not to be as freaked out as Lulu was certain they all were.
Around her, she heard the rustlings of the others getting into their beds, saying their goodnights.
Lulu tucked herself into her sleeping bag.
She turned off her lantern to find the sliver of moon illuminating the evening, and her eyes adjusted to the icicle-dripped shapes of the stalactites above her.
She stared up at the darkness, wondering how long her nerves would keep her awake before exhaustion overtook her.
Something whizzed right above her head and her chest tightened.
Maybe, Lulu told herself, it had been a shadow of the breeze.
Maybe she had imagined it. After brushing her hair off her neck and twisting it into a spiral, she resettled herself more compactly against her pillow.
She did not dare close her eyes. Instead, she counted her breaths, willing herself to chillax as she listened to the soft snores of the others.
Again, something the size of her palm whistled past her ear, doubled back, and disappeared into a crevice over her head.
Okay. Not good. Lulu’s heart pounded in her ears. She did not want to be a wimp, didn’t want the others to wake up because she was freaking out over nothing. So, she lay there, homesick, lonely, petrified, and with a really annoying earworm of the song “Thriller” amping up in her brain.
Overhead, there was more movement. She froze, staring up into the black crevices of the wrinkled limestone ceiling. Slowly her brain put together what she was seeing. Directly above her pillow, in a shadowy nook between the stalactites, a thick throng of rustling creatures twitched and squirmed.
Bats!
“Bluh! Blech! Ich-ghk!” she blurted, trying but failing to stifle the volume of her reaction.
Around the cavern, her tourmates readjusted in their beds, but still Lulu could not quell her nerves.
Throwing her arms over her head, she tried to fling herself to her feet, realizing mid-lunge that her legs were still twisted inside the sleeping bag.
She pitched sideways off the stone shelf.
“Oof,” she grunted.
Lulu’s sleeping-bag-cocooned body had landed hard, and she wriggled like a larva on the stone floor of the dust-coated cavern. On second thought, she realized, that was not dust. That was bat crap.
Even in her competitive tennis days, Lulu had never moved so fast. Wiggling out of her sack, she grabbed her things and, shivering with the heebie-jeebies, she ran…
like a bat out of hell, or like she was flippin’ batty, or bat-shit crazy, or any number of flying rodent euphemisms that flew through her head while her feet pounded away from the cave.
The instant her feet touched the rough grass outside the cavern, she shuddered and gave her body a shake like she was a wet dog. With trembling fingers, she searched the lantern’s base and managed to find the on switch.
In the small comfort of the dim light, Lulu weighed her options. Sleep in the open air on the hard ground away from the safety of the group or bed with a horde of vicious vampire vermin perched not six feet overhead.
Or option three. Time travel back to her pullout sofa at Blue Seas. Or, better still, while she was considering fantasy options, teleport back to her bed in Seattle.
Lulu sighed. She treaded to the flat, grassy patch near the boulders where the sound of the falls soothed her.
Lulu dumped her sleeping bag and pack unceremoniously onto the ground.
Better than the bat cave, she decided. At least she could see the open sky, and she was near enough to the cave’s entrance that they could hear her if she screamed.
At that thought, Lulu cringed. She longed to hug her daughter, to stroll the moonlit beach after dinner with her family. The creature comforts, was that so much to ask for? On second thought, forget the creatures. Just the comforts.
She pulled her phone from her pack and waited for it to turn on.
It was late, but Rooster and Laverne were night owls, and just hearing her aunt’s voice would calm her.
And she could give her aunt a heads-up that she would be heading back to the resort tomorrow.
Again, she couldn’t get a connection, so she flipped her data off and on, thinking that repetition might manifest a signal.