Chapter 6 #2
I didn’t know what to say, should I offer to make him a peanut butter sandwich and toss a few more protein bars in my bag? Should I play into his feelings somehow?
God, I hoped at the very least he had a water bottle. Wasn’t he supposed to have some elite athletic prowess? His entire job was to look hot and kill CGI dragons, usually that came with some physical training. Physical training required hydration and so on and so forth.
“I could probably get some extra things from Sue and Randy—” I offered, my voice rushed.
“No, no I have it all, I spent a stupid amount of money at some outdoors store before coming here. I’ll be good. Seven fifteen. On it.”
He repeated the time almost as if to reassure himself that he’d make it by then.
He stood up and jogged back to his cabin.
His unfinished coffee sat on the table still.
I dumped the extra into the flower bed and returned the cup to the sink, not thinking about the fact that his pink, soft lips were just touching the rim of it.
This man was nothing if not absurdly punctual. I was zipping up my backpack when there was a light tapping at the door. The clock on the wall showed the hands at 7:15 on the dot.
I sighed deeply.
“Come in!” I shouted as I searched for matching socks and sneakers. Evan stepped inside and stood in the doorway, propping an arm up on the frame.
“We match,” Evan said with a twitch at the corner of his mouth.
He was wearing a variant of the outfit he had on the day prior, swapping the black shirt he had on yesterday for a white one and the red shorts for black.
His very obviously brand new backpack hung from one shoulder, the nylon still stiff and puckered in places.
I glanced down at my own outfit. White tank top.
Black shorts. His reaction was unreadable.
“Should I change?” I asked dumbly.
He laughed, loudly like I was being ridiculous. I was being ridiculous. “No, what? That would be absurd.”
I stood back up after tying my shoe. He was right, obviously. We wouldn’t see a single soul for roughly the entire day, who cared if we happened to wear the same colors?
Every interaction proved how horrible I was at playing it cool. If overthinking was an olympic sport I would be Simone Biles. My muscles were tense and I kept clenching my jaw to the point where I’d get a headache. One teased at the edges of my temples now.
“Okay,” I exhaled, “let’s go.”
The two of us walked back towards our parked cars in silence, I jogged up to Sue and Randy’s house and peeked my head in the door, “we’re heading out, send a search and rescue team if we aren’t back by five.”
I turned back to Evan, who was fiddling with the straps on his backpack. The left one was currently six inches longer than the right. I gestured with my thumb at our cars, “the trailhead is a bit of a drive. I can take us, I wouldn’t want you to get your rental all scratched up.”
“It’s my car,” he said as he took his keys out of his pocket. “I’m fine driving if you tell me where to go.”
So he did want some control, or he thought I’d kidnap him if we took my car.
I opened the back door of the expensive black truck to put my backpack in.
Defying my expectations, the car wasn’t pristine and untouched.
Instead it was slightly a mess with an empty soda bottle, a few folders, and scattered papers that were clearly tossed into the back seat.
It was another refreshing sight proving he was actually human.
The cab of the truck was a space far too intimate to occupy. It smelled like him, it had his discarded protein bar wrappers stuffed in a small trash bag hanging from the shifter. It had a leather cord with a pewter unicorn hanging from the rearview. This truck was an extension of Evan himself.
I shouldn’t be here.
I’m practically clawing at the door in my mind, but from his perspective I’m nervously sitting on my hands.
He had started the truck already when I got into the front seat. The pine scented soap and warm amber on his skin was almost suffocating. I’d caught a small hint of it last night when we were in the bathroom together.
It was enough for a tremble to creep its way up my torso. The subconscious reaction was mortifying.
“Cold?” he asked after seeing the shiver.
Fuck fuck fuck. I was doubly mortified that he’d noticed.
“Uh, yeah, a little.” Kill me now.
He turned on the heated seats before pulling off onto the long driveway that connected to the dirt road. Printed directions that guided him from town into camp sat crumpled at my feet.
It took a few bars to notice, but the first song playing was the same old Fall Out Boy song I had been singing in the shower the night prior.
A bizarre coincidence.
I wouldn’t acknowledge it. It would be for the best to not mention anything about last night and dredge up his memory of seeing me basically naked.
Discomfort was the third passenger in the car, nudged between us in the front seat, making the air thick and heavy. There wasn’t much to say other than “look at that tree, and that one, and that one.”
And over my dead body would I bring up anything related to Thorndown.
We hit a split in the road and I told him to hang left. His brows raised in surprise that I spoke at all. Music continued to play quietly, I picked up familiar notes and choruses. It was the only thing breaking the silence.
If only I brought headphones, I could have spent the entire hike a few steps ahead of him, he could’ve followed in silence using my green backpack as a homing beacon.
Seven more minutes further down the road, another turn.
“Take a right,” I directed him. Tension was building and building. Would there would be an inflection point where something exploded to the surface?
The entry point to the trailhead was at the end of an even more narrow dirt road, so scarcely used it was practically overgrown. As we grew closer I sat up in my seat, scanning the gaps in the trees for the large boulder that would serve as our landmark to turn.
“At that huge rock up there take another right,” I gestured to a small opening in the woods a ways up. Evan turned to me and gave me a questioning look. I was about to make him drive straight into the forest.
“It’s not going to look like a road but, I promise, it is one,” I offered a weak smile.
“I guess I have to trust your judgment here,” he stiffly laughed.
He slowed the truck down and twisted the steering wheel, the road was invisible to anyone passing by, and his truck quickly disappeared into the brush as we ambled down it. Relief settled into his features.
If the forty mile drive on a dirt road wasn’t enough to confirm that we were in the middle of nowhere, this path certainly was.
A mile down, it opened up into a modest clearing that acted as a makeshift parking lot.
The sign for the trailhead was worn and bleached from the sun; we could barely make out the “Horseshoe Falls: 3.8 miles” written on it. His car was the only one parked.
Small streams of sunlight trickled through openings in the thick tree cover, but did little to let in the already warm sun. A breeze blew through that spread goosebumps across my skin.
I watched Evan from the trailhead as he stood still, gaze turned upward, astounded by the old growth trees that had been seemingly untouched for decades. After realizing I had been waiting for him he shook his head and did a slight jog towards me.
“Marvelous,” he said quietly when he came into earshot.
I wordlessly led him onto the trail, my backpack jostled up and down with each step. Evan was too awestruck to care about the silence. Unspoiled moments in untouched nature were a finite commodity, and I welcomed any opportunity to not force conversation between us.
I kept my eyes dialed in straight ahead, trying to forget about the fact that Evan McLeod— Sir Erwyn Nightengale of Rospice himself—was following me on this wooded path.
We weren’t going to be anything more to each other than a hiker and his guide the next six days.
It would be for the best that I don’t get to know him any more than that.
Our interactions had already been far too close for comfort.
He wouldn’t think of me as anything but a nice stranger upon leaving the camp, and I would try not to think of him at all.
“Dani, wait.” I whipped around to see Evan propping his foot up on a rock. “Sorry, my shoe came untied.”
“Oh, you’re good.” I rocked back and forth uneasily on the balls of my feet. If my body was moving my brain would stop spinning.
He ran a hand through his hair and stood back up. I only realized I had been staring when he flashed me a quick smile and said, “all set.”
My cheeks heated, I turned around and kept walking. We were hardly over a mile into the hike, and I was already scared to so much as look at him.
Around mile two, whistling permeated the quiet. A trilling chorus of mostly off-key notes.
I knew that song, but why? What was the connection? Evan was whistling whatever song it was on a loop, but each repetition of the cycle didn’t provide more clarity.
It was yet another anecdote that I could bring back to Andrea and Caroline when I got back to society, “I managed to get annoyed by Evan McLeod whistling for an hour.”
To the benefit of my knees, the trail was relatively flat, but long. With each mile deeper into the woods, we came across more brush that had been lying in wait since last summer.
I remained deep in thought, trying to place the song, thinking of new ways I could avoid Evan, when suddenly I almost walked straight into the trunk of a felled oak tree.
I skidded to a stop and Evan nearly collided into me.
“Shit, sorry,” I muttered.
Evan peered over my shoulder at the blockade and joined beside me. We both stood with our hands on our hips, assessing the obstacle.
We had two choices, either climb over it or slide under. The trunk was a hair too big for me to successfully climb over without a slight struggle, and slithering under seemed degrading.