Chapter Eight
Everett
By the time we reach the Rockfish Gap Entrance, the sun’s already tilting lazily across the horizon.
I’ve never been here before, and despite all my misgivings about Maisie’s plan, a small ping of delight hits me as we pass the retro-woodsy Now Entering Shenandoah National Park On the Skyline Drive sign.
It quickly dissipates, though, as we approach the giant barricade across the entrance station and the orange sign screaming Road Closed.
Maisie parks the car and hops out. The lean muscles in her arms and back work seamlessly as she starts hauling a chunk of the traffic barrier off to make a space for us to enter.
She’s so strong and small and powerful, all at once, that feelings of safety and shame twirl around my chest. How did I end up in this nightmare with a total badass?
Chicken meows loudly from her carrier.
Ah. Right.
It takes me a full second to realize Maisie’s staring at me through the windshield.
“Well?” she calls. “You helping or what?”
“Right! Coming!” I save my work on my presentation, close my laptop, and nearly trip over my own feet exiting the vehicle. I grab the other side of a barrier segment she’s hauling, and together, we lift it to the side.
“Are you sure we should be doing this? The road’s, like, actually closed.”
“Yes, that’s what ‘closed’ means most of the time.” Maisie tilts her chin. “Do you always follow the rules?”
“Generally? Yes.”
She leans back, placing her hands on the curves of her hips. “Look around you, Everett. What ranger’s going to stop us?”
The station has the air of a ghost town. No tumbleweeds, but the wind lightly skittering through the ice-tipped trees gives the same effect. Maisie starts back for the car.
I rush to catch up with her. “What about driving on the ice? You don’t have snow chains on your tires. Don’t SUVs flip a lot? What are the statistics on that?”
“Only ten percent of weather-related car accidents are due to icy pavement. Most people don’t realize that driving in rain is much more dangerous.”
Of course she’d know that.
Maisie smirks as she puts on her seatbelt. “Nice try, Everett, but we’re going in, and we’re camping tonight.” She weaves through the gap we created and past the empty ranger booths. “Besides, the road being closed means no other campers.”
“How can you be so sure?”
She cuts her eyes to me. “Would you go camping in below-freezing temperatures with a debilitating GI virus in a closed national park?”
Okay, she has me there.
I can’t help but marvel at Maisie’s cool, confident demeanor as she expertly handles the SUV along the winding road with its thick, daunting layer of ice.
She’s completely unfazed, her entire posture at ease.
Where’s the anxious woman who scanned the vegan restaurant for threats during our date?
Whose pockets jingled with small weapons, who could barely speak when she first sat down?
This Maisie maneuvers us over a particularly slippery drift of iced-over snow with one hand on the wheel, the other idling through her platinum hair, and my dick moves of its own accord.
Concerning, really. I’ve spent half the day terrified of her, and the other half turned on.
Once we reach signs for a campsite, Maisie pulls into the parking lot, tucking the car out of sight behind a snowy bank of trees, but in full view of the sun.
She looks more than a little pleased to find a spot with an electric vehicle plug-in, which she inserts into her rig while making smug eye contact with me.
The rounded mountains are ruddy brown and gray and gleaming, glowing white, some so covered by snow they look like low-flying clouds against the brilliant blue sky beyond.
I get out of the car, Chicken’s carrier in one hand and my duffel in the other, and nearly jump out of my own skin at the loud crack of my boots against the slushy ice.
Maisie pauses her descent to the campsite to watch me.
“What is it, Professor? Not an outside boy?” Her lush lips twitch to the side, and she’s off again before I can deliver a devastatingly clever retort.
Not that I have one, but still. My dick moves again, as if in salute to its commanding officer.
She’s teasing me, but I like it a little too much when she calls me Professor.
True to Maisie’s word, the campsite is empty, and looks as if it has been for some time. The snow beneath the brittle, bare trees is undisturbed, the fire grates doused in white. Even frozen, the pit bathrooms reek, or else I’d have suggested we set up our sleeping bags in there.
“Can’t we just sleep in the car?” I eye the campsite with its still, unbroken blanket of white, nerves crawling with unease I can’t explain.
Maisie begins to unpack her gear. “Not if we want to be warm. I have a tent-safe propane heater, but it can’t be used in a car. Plus, the condensation from our breathing would accumulate in the closed car and dampen our clothes. We could legitimately freeze to death as a result.”
I blink. Goddamn science.
Sighing, I set Chicken down and open the carrier. “You stay close to camp now, okay?”
Chicken bounds out with a rrreow, then trots off, leaving delightful little bean-prints in the snow.
“She’s okay loose like that?” Maisie asks, the first bit of worry I’ve heard in her voice since this morning, when she was cataloging all the ways I was doomed.
“Chicken is a modern woman and needs her freedom,” I respond. “She also stays within ten feet of me at all times.”
“Because she loves you?”
“Because she loves food.”
“Ah,” Maisie says, as if that makes more sense. “Okay, Professor. You pitch the tent, I’ll get the fire going.”
That should be easy enough. I know how to read instructions. But thirty minutes later, I am still wrestling the maze of poles and sockets while an incredulous Maisie sets up the rest of camp.
“I swear I’m an intelligent, capable person,” I grit out.
Maisie’s eyebrows rise, but she says nothing.
When I finally get the tent up, I give her a triumphant, if slightly winded, grin. She nods once, then beckons me over to the park-constructed fireplace.
“That’s all I get?” I lean back, cracking the knots in my spine as I go. “A nod?”
“What do you want, a medal?” she asks, squatting down on her haunches to cook the food and squinting up at me.
It goes on like this for the next hour—Maisie asking me to do basic, and I mean basic, camping tasks and watching on in stunned disbelief as I bumble my way through each one until she finally shows me how.
She’s a patient teacher, though, and mostly kind.
When she’s not laughing at my terrified face.
“Bears? We have to worry about bears, too?”
“No, not really. Black bears are responsible for one death about every three years, on average.” She tries to smother her laugh as she shows me how to make a bowline knot.
The firelight makes her glow vivid against the snowy forest, a lone firefly lost in winter.
“And it’s been a very cold season, so the bears should still be in hibernation right now, but we should still tie up our food, just to be safe. ”
I narrow my eyes at her just so. “You enjoy scaring me, don’t you.” She’s sitting close enough to me on this wooden bench that her warmth mingles with my own, and I want to scoot even closer. Unfortunately, Chicken is floofing between us, the little scamp.
“Maybe a little.” Maisie gives me a small half smile. “Now try again, Professor.”
So I do.
It’s after dinner when the real lessons begin.
“Since we’re traveling together for the next few days, I need to know you’ve got my back,” Maisie says as she strings up our remaining food high off the ground with a bowline knot so effortless it puts my earlier attempts to shame.
She turns to face me, placing her hands on her hips.
“And that means you need to learn how to fight.”
“I know how to fight,” I retort, but even Chicken looks skeptical. “In theory.”
I…do not know how to fight. I was a library kid who grew up into a library adult. Like the misunderstood tarantula, I depend on my intimidating physique to scare off any would-be predators, while in reality, I’m a fuzzy, gentle boy.
Maisie raises an eyebrow, and then I remember how just this morning she rescued me from a tree.
“Okay, I don’t know how to fight. Violence isn’t really my thing, and every time you kill a zombie, I feel like I’m going to faint.” I take a deep, calming breath. “But I will learn. Because I have to.”
Maisie guides me through the fundamentals of front kicks and push kicks until my thighs feel like achy rubber.
When we start to sweat, she removes her outer clothes, leaving on only her skintight base layers and boots, and makes me do the same.
Something about hypothermia and frozen sweat?
I don’t know. The supple curves of her small, round breasts under the thin layer of soft gray wool drown out everything else.
Each time she places her deft hands on my hips, guiding me through the right pivot for a roundhouse kick, or on the inside of my rotated thigh, urging me to aim higher, kick harder, a burst of resolve ignites inside me.
I want to be useful. I want to protect her.
But unfortunately, I’m me. Ungraceful, uncoordinated, hopeless me.
After I stumble through a push kick that sends me sprawling onto the ground, Maisie sighs.
“That’s enough for tonight,” she says, and I gratefully collapse on the bench by our fire, drinking purified snow and feeling embarrassed.
“Sorry. I’ve never been much good at physical combat maneuvers.” They were easily my worst grades in the military academy my parents forced me to go to for high school. “Or survival skills. Or”—I pause for another drink—“camping.”
“Aren’t you afraid of dying just, like, all the time?” Maisie regards me from behind her canteen before tipping it back for a long drink herself.
“Not until recently, no.”