Chapter 6 #7
I pushed myself up, waiting for pain to set in and the shock to wear off. There wasn’t a horrific popping or ripping sound accompanying the thud, so at a minimum it wasn’t broken or torn.
Without speaking Evan grabbed me from under my shoulders and pulled me up. I certainly wasn’t waifish, but he wasn’t straining, not even a bit.
Unfortunately the action was incredibly hot. Maybe I liked being a little bit of a damsel in distress.
I assessed the damage. Aside from scratches on my knees and hands and a dull pain in my ankle I was fine, mortified maybe, but physically fine.
“Are you ok?” Evan asked, helping brush debris off. His hand lingered a little long on my hip before stepping backwards.
“I’m good,” I exhaled in a huff, “ego might be bruised, sorry I’m not the rugged guide you might have signed up for.” I attempted to cover the embarrassment with a halfhearted smile.
“You might have some battle scars now, so if anything you earned the rugged title.”
I finished brushing off my legs and kicking the dirt off my sneakers. The scrapes on my hands weren’t all that bad, and dirt had managed to avoid the broken skin.
Evan was looking at me, almost like I was a baby deer who needed to take its first steps before he’d be assured that I was stable enough.
My ankle definitely didn’t feel good, but it was only about two miles to the car.
We were making good time, and the pain would be manageable.
I took a few cautious steps and reassessed the situation.
It was fine, and even if it started to become not fine I certainly wasn’t going to force Evan to play the hero and carry me back.
“I’m good, seriously. We can keep walking.” I needed to reassure him.
His eyes had grown so big, and so hypnotically blue. He still looked concerned as I kept walking.
I felt obligated to change the subject out of concern that the next forty five minutes would consist of “are you okay?” every quarter mile.
I thought back to his comment on my shower singing and the song playing in the truck. Maybe I could gain more intel about how his brain was working. “Do you consider yourself a Fall Out Boy fan?”
“As much as a person who was conscious in 2007 could be,” he laughed a bit.
“You guys listened to them over in Scotland?”
“What, do you assume we only listen to The Proclaimers and bagpipes?”
“It certainly wouldn’t be the worst option.”
“I, like many others in our general age range, had a non-insignificant emo phase in my younger years.”
I pictured a young Evan with straightened black hair covering the top third of his face paired with a studded belt and bit my tongue to keep myself from laughing.
“I don’t fully believe that,” I joked, “because I also had one, but I’ve been told I seem like the ‘type’.”
Of course I had an emo phase, I was fully obsessed with anyone signed to Fueled By Ramen, the Twilight books and movies, and spent the majority of my allowance at Hot Topic.
My middle school years were probably my first introduction to the concept of fandom before fandom was a part of the world’s lexicon.
I spent most of my teenagedom playing the “not like other girls” card, and it took until I was eighteen—when I met Andrea and her bubblegum pink personality—to realize it was fun to be like other girls.
As we continued walking I wondered what Evan thought about things like pop music and Twilight. I wanted to ask him all of it. I wanted to learn about his childhood and gangly teenage years and how he got swept away from his small Scottish town all the way to Hollywood.
The trail back felt longer than the journey there, likely due to the fact that my ankle definitely did hurt.
It was so stupid of me to stop paying attention like that, of course I got in my head too much and was now facing the consequences.
And now I had the added bonus of falling flat on my face in front of Evan McLeod, though I was trying to forget that detail entirely.
“Why did you ask?” he snapped me out of my head again.
“Ask what?”
“The Fall Out Boy question?”
It certainly wasn’t because I was trying to see if there was any reasoning behind it being the first song playing in his car when we got in it this morning.
I worked my jaw as I thought of a correct answer, “I’m trying to see if you’re a regular person or you only listen to some weird new age underground stuff.”
“Right,” he lowered his voice slightly, “Hollywood asshole behavior. You’d be pleased to know that the majority of my playlist consists of the same music I was obsessed with as a teenager. I’m sure you can relate.”
One mile left.
The ankle wasn’t throbbing per se but there was a dull pulse that seemed to get ever so slightly worse with each step we took.
I could stop and take a break, but it felt like a sign of weakness.
Like I had to power through it for some strange psychological reason that even I myself didn’t understand.
It was fine. Once I got back to my cabin I could ice it in solitude and Mr. McLeod would be none the wiser.
As we approached the parking lot there were two voices chatting in the distance.
“Shit,” Evan muttered under his breath.
“Do you want me to go out first so you can, I don’t know, cover yourself a bit?” I looked at Evan’s still shirtless torso. Even if the fellow hikers didn’t recognize Evan on sight, his abs and shoulders may be…a distraction.
They’d been distracting me this entire hike.
He was already pulling a baseball cap from his bag and trying to tuck his hair up underneath it.
I wordlessly pulled a hair tie from a pocket on my pack and handed it to him. He grabbed it with a grin.
I walked about twenty feet in front of him and entered the clearing to see two young U.S. Forest Service workers preparing for a land survey of sorts.
“How’s it going guys?” I said warmly. “Little late to be starting the hike, no?”
The workers looked up, cheery and eager as I had been in my early twenties. They had begun to answer when Evan made a beeline behind me to his truck, hopping in silently.
“Is that…?” asked one of them, a young Black man clearly fresh out of college, tilting his head curiously and fiddling with his glasses.
I limped a few feet in front of him, obscuring the view. “The falls are seriously gorgeous right now, I don’t know if you know this but they look best at golden hour. If you want to make it in time you should get going!” I turned back and walked to the truck.
“I swear to God that was Evan McLeod,” the government worker said to his partner, a perky brunette woman with a bob.
“The main guy from that sword show?” she retorted dismissively, “no way. What the hell would he be doing out here?”
As I jumped in and shut the door they were still going back and forth on who the man they caught a glimpse of was.
“That’s so embarrassing,” Evan dropped his head onto the steering wheel.
“What, them possibly recognizing you?” I looked back at the workers who were already starting off on the trail.
“Yeah, I mean what if they take a picture and send it to people and then somehow somebody finds out where I’m staying,” he took a few breaths.
“And you think hoards of screaming fans are going to manage to drive up this far and magically find the camp without a map?”
“When you put it that way…” he trailed off and smiled a bit at me.
Clearly Sue wasn’t kidding about how badly he had wanted to escape to solitude.
Evan pulled his ball cap further down and started the truck. A techno-pop song that I had heard at every one of my middle school dances started playing. I laughed, Evan playfully scowled as he drove up the driveway.
“So, no new age underground stuff, huh?”
“Not even a little bit.”