Chapter 7 #2
“Well, that’s awesome. I am looking forward to… getting back out there.” Except she felt a little bit of trepidation, and she wasn’t sure if looking forward to it was the appropriate term.
Not when she actually felt a little bit dented still.
She had been so looking forward to this, hoping that it would fix the fact that she was feeling kind of sad about everything, and now she felt like she was getting in her own head. But she wasn’t going to let herself do that. She wasn’t.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said.
She looked away, and then he reached out and gripped her chin. Turned her face toward him. She was in shock, she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. All she could do was stare at him.
At those forest green eyes.
Then her eyes dipped down to his mouth.
And it was like that galvanized him, made him realize what he had done. He jerked his hand away.
“You look upset,” he said.
Her skin still burned where he had touched her.
“I’m not upset,” she said. “I’m just feeling a little bit rattled still. That a little hike has turned into such a big deal.”
“Hey, it’s the kind of thing that happens. More often than you would think. That’s why I’m actually such a proponent of being prepared. When I got back from serving overseas, I started doing some search and rescue work. Volunteer.”
“Oh,” she said. The idea of being able to do that, of having that kind of capability, that kind of… Determination, bravery, and a set of skills made her somewhat envious.
There was no reason she couldn’t learn something like that. She was twenty-four. She had her whole life ahead of her. She could learn all kinds of skills. Do all kinds of things.
This was why this was supposed to be the beginning. The open door.
She didn’t need to envy somebody like Zane, who was so confident and competent at what they did. She needed to get more confident in herself. Competent at whatever it was she wanted to do. It wasn’t like she didn’t know how to do things.
But a lot of things for her were like that horse bite. She hadn’t fully realized that until now.
The wilderness had bitten her on the shoulder, and now she felt wary of it.
“So you saw a lot of people end up in situations like mine?”
“And a lot worse. The wilderness is unpredictable. Things happen. Trees fall, unexpected storms come up, trails erode.”
“So, why go out in nature?”
“Because things can happen anywhere. They can happen in the wilderness, they can happen when you’re driving down the highway, they can happen when you’re walking down a city street, they can happen when you’re on a military operation overseas. They can happen in your own home.”
“Okay, you’re giving me anxiety now.”
“No. It shouldn’t give you anxiety. But it should make you understand that life is going to come at you no matter where you are. So you can be hiding away from it, or you can be out in it.”
It was such a strange philosophy, coming from a man that she found to be a hermit.
But then, she supposed he wasn’t talking about social things.
He was talking about doing things. About hiking and wilderness adventuring, and the lake.
She could give that to him. He did much more of that than she did, since she did none of it.
He was right, also.
Anything could happen to you anywhere. Her mom had been homebound for the last couple of years of her life.
She blinked back tears, suddenly overcome by emotion.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I think… I think I was hoping I would get out here and outrun a lot of my grief. But it followed me. Goddammit.”
“Grief is a bitch like that,” he said.
She stared at him for a moment. She wanted to know what he meant by that. She wanted to know what his experience was with grief.
Except, she also felt like she didn’t have the right to ask about it.
Because he wasn’t offering up any information.
Maybe he had lost his mom or dad. Or both.
He was older than she was, though her parents had been older parents for her age.
So it was definitely possible that his parents were younger than hers.
Nobody had ever mentioned Zane’s family, though, and that made her curious.
“I guess maybe it’s like healing your ankle.”
“Something like that,” he said. “You have to give it time. I don’t think you can rush through it, and I don’t think you can get mad at yourself when it comes up.”
“Well, don’t be nice to me. That’s weird.”
“I wasn’t being nice to you when I rescued you from your fate?”
“I guess that was nice. But I was thinking it was more heroic.”
He grimaced. “Lila said it was heroic.”
“You don’t like that?”
“Not especially. No. I get it a lot, being a veteran. But I don’t like it, because I am not sure that I’m more heroic than anybody else.
In fact, I know I’m not. Most people, I think, rise to the occasion when they’re put in difficult situations.
I happened to put myself in a difficult situation, but I had my reasons, and I wouldn’t say they were benevolent.
So no, I don’t like the label of hero. I think it gets overused.
Especially here. I didn’t risk anything to save you. ”
“But I appreciated it all the same.”
Their eyes locked together, and she took a deep breath, trying to quell some of the tension in her chest.
“So. When’s your next day off?”
She laughed. “I just got back.”
“Liar. You had sweet rolls for the barbecue the other day.”
“I made them at home!”
“It was still baking, and I want to know when we get to start this.”
“I…” She wanted to ask him why he was doing this. But she was afraid the answer was that she was just so pathetic he didn’t have a choice. That finding her as he had, such a hideous creature, curled up and helpless against the elements, had ignited sorrow even in Zane.
That made her feel particularly tragic, and she actually didn’t want to hear that.
At all.
“I’m usually off Monday and Tuesday, but I decided not to take any days off this week.”
“That’s silly,” he said.
She planted her hands on the table and squinted, looking at him. “Did you just call me silly?”
“I did. Because I didn’t want to say the word I was thinking in this family establishment.”
“And now, Zane Barton, did you just exercise social restraint?”
“What does this have to do with anything?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to establish a basic set of facts. One of them being that your behavior is just a little bit unusual.”
“You don’t know me well enough to have established whether or not my behavior is unusual.”
“False. I do.”
“My point is, you gave yourself some time to rest, now you’re going to punish yourself for it?”
“Why do I get the feeling that everything you’re saying is one of those whole do as I say, not as I do things?”
“It might be. You’ll never know.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
She couldn’t tell if he was kidding. Maybe more accurately, she couldn’t tell if he was teasing. She had a feeling he was being honest. But to the point of giving her a hard time, or to the point of giving her a warning, she didn’t know.
That was something she had a feeling she would always have a hard time figuring out with him.
That was by design, she was almost certain.
If anyone was enigmatic on purpose, it was Zane.
Like now, he wasn’t being aloof. He was offering to help her. And that right there was mysterious. Because he just didn’t seem the kind of man who could be induced to care about much of anything.
But that couldn’t be true. Because here he was with Cody. It couldn’t be true because all of his actions seemed to indicate that he actually was devoted to the people he devoted himself to.
He was a massive contradiction, was what he was.
“Fine. We can do it on Monday.”
He grinned, and she felt it all the way down low in her stomach. A smile from him must be one of the rarest things in existence. And she had one.
She was too smart to let him know that she felt like she had just won an impossible game. So she would keep that sense of triumph to herself.
“So, where do you want to meet? What will we be doing? Do I need to bring a sword and shield?”
“It’s wilderness survival skills, not LARPING.”
“It feels a little bit like LARPING.”
“You of all people should know that it’s not. Because it’s way too easy to find yourself in an actual survival situation, without the skills or the tools to help yourself.”
She bristled at that, but what was there to say?
He was right. She absolutely knew what that was like now, and she had no desire to experience it again. Agreeing to do this was like getting back on the horse, which she had never done. Because she had never even gotten on a horse to begin with.
Agreeing to do this was taking control of a situation that could just as easily have taken control of her. She was going to grab onto it, and she wasn’t going to be insubordinate.
She did her best not to think of the alternative, which had to do with obeying his every command. It brought her into a fantasy realm that she simply didn’t need to be in.
She wasn’t one for fantasy, anyway.
It was Zane, and this terrible fascination. That was the problem.
Agreeing to do this wasn’t going to help with her problem.
But it was going to help with her fear that she was developing of the outdoors, and that was going to take precedence.
She was a woman with too many fears and not enough triumph.
So she was going to grab hold of whatever triumph she thought she might be able to find.
“My place will be the starting point,” he said. “I have a few different ideas for what we can focus on. I’ll see you Monday at noon. Noon.”
He got up and walked out of the bakery without even giving her a farewell glance.
She was committed.
She just hoped that by the end, she wouldn’t need to be committed.