Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Skylar
Turned out, mountain biking on dust and gravel trails was not like that class at the gym on the stationary bike, even though I stood up and sat down just as much. My ass usually liked being split open by something hard, but this was not the good kind of getting fucked.
But I was determined to get the hang of it… and right now there was no one on this trail to laugh at me or yell at me as they rode around me because I was going too slow.
Grunting and gasping a little, I jerked to a stop to chug more water.
“Holy sweaty balls,” I yelled, “I’m so out of shape.”
The land judged me. It looked kind of like a desert in old Western movies, like a lot of orange-y dirt with bushes and grass growing in clumps, but I didn’t think it was really desert. It looked like I was in the warm-up hills to the mountains, but space was so vast out here, I could have been a day’s bike ride from reaching the actual mountains, who knew.
It made my throat dry and my lungs shrivel up, but it was fucking beautiful.
Sure, Florida had the ocean, but it had alligators and spray tans, too.
Cracking my neck, I put my water away and hopped back onto the evil bike seat. I was on a loop trail, because I was a total newbie and didn’t want to get lost and wind up a “yet another inexperienced hiker/biker was found dead of exposure today” story on the news.
I huffed and puffed until the last mile, where I got to chill out and coast downhill, wondering idly how badly I’d hurt myself if I hit a rock and got catapulted off the bike.
Just when I thought I’d done it, I swerved to avoid a fucking squirrel and hit something else . I crashed over sideways like a drunk guy thinking he’d made it to bed, only to bounce off the corner and flop uselessly like a beached whale on the floor instead.
Stunned, I lay there, one foot and leg kind of pinned under the bike. I took stock: My junk was bruised, but it already had been. One pedal had scraped my knee, but there was no blood. My palms burned, but I squirted water on them and they felt better right away.
It was only as I struggled to my feet that I saw the turtle.
I yelped, “Turtle?”
Okay, it was definitely a turtle. Mostly brown with some green, hiding in its shell except for one leg sticking out. And it looked… not right.
“Shit, fuck! I hurt a turtle!”
After looking around wildly for help, I shook my head. “You’re going to have to save it,” I declared. “There’s no ambulances for turtles. Or convenient park rangers.”
Did turtles bite? Were there park rangers out here?
I dusted myself off and considered the logistics.
Finally I moved things around in my backpack so the big pouch was empty, then carefully edged closer to the turtle, who didn’t move at all, poor little thing. I had no idea how to pick it up. If I grabbed only the shell and lifted, would that hurt, like trying to pick a person up using their hair? Or was it like picking up a tiny dog by one of those body harness things, where the weight was evenly distributed so it was fine?
Nope, I didn’t want to risk hurting the turtle more.
Bending over, I laid the backpack on the ground, lifted up the top, and then sort of… pushed the turtle from what I thought was its back end. Its other legs shot out and scrambled, but it wasn’t like it was a crab or something fast , so I got it in there okay.
I zipped up the pouch halfway, glad it had two zippers, and slipped it on over my torso so it was a messed up version of a baby carrier. The turtle moving around in there against my stomach was the weirdest thing ever, but at least it wasn’t wailing like a baby.
Not wanting to shake it too much or get thrown off the bike again, I walked my bike the rest of the way to the parking lot, which luckily only took fifteen minutes.
I unzipped the backpack more and set it on the floor in the backseat, then brilliantly searched for the nearest vet’s office. Because I let the internet overlords spy on me, it organized my results based on my GPS location and I tapped the first one so my directions app would tell me where to go. I drove about four miles an hour since the road was empty and it only took another ten minutes to pull into the parking lot of Peak Veterinary Clinic.
I parked, then went around to get the turtle, who hadn’t moved.
I decided to take it as a sign that this was a very smart turtle, not a very dead or maimed turtle. I took my backpack in my hands like it was a box with a cake in it, closed the car door with my foot, and burst into the vet’s office ass-first like I was on fire.
“Uhh,” said a very nice male-sounding voice behind me.
Whirling, I held out the backpack like an offering. Or… a bomb.
“What do you have there?” the voice asked in mild amusement.
I looked up and… Well, hello there, handsome . He was older than me, wiry underneath his tee shirt and khakis, with a deep tan and dark hair and eyes, his mouth quirked.
No, focus, this is an emergency! I scolded myself and then blurted out, “It’s a turtle?”
“Is that a question?” he asked, and in any other moment, I would’ve swooned at the slightly judgy way he’d called me out for my incorrect intonation.
The other person behind the desk tried to smother her snort.
“It is a turtle, or maybe it only was a turtle.”
Humming, the man came over to take the backpack from me gently. “Let’s find out what’s going on,” he said, moving smoothly and gently , somehow, but not slow, and turned into an exam room that looked almost exactly like a people doctor’s exam room.
After he set down the backpack, he snapped on plastic gloves and extricated the turtle, setting it down on the shiny metal exam table more suited to a large dog than a tiny turtle.
“Did I—is it dead?” I asked with a crack in my voice, wringing my hands like some old maid about to go into hysterics. “Because I was biking and I hit it! Why was a turtle on a hiking trail?” I asked, my voice rising in panic. “I was out there trying to get closer to nature, you know, not… not murder a poor hapless turtle just inching along its long life.”