Serena
Milo was right (he usually was, which pissed me off). Soon the river had narrowed so much we couldn’t go on. I could feel the kayak not so much scraping as sinking into the swamp of the riverbed.
‘Guess this is the end of the line.’ Milo grinned.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We’d best stop before we get wedged.’
‘So,’ I said. ‘How far to Harold’s cabin from here?’
Milo took out his map and flashlight, squinting at it. ‘I reckon we head east and it should be a couple of miles, maybe.’
Maybe.
‘Okay, you’ve got the compass?’
‘Of course.’
I gave him a look. ‘We walk for half an hour. If we haven’t found it by then, we turn back.’
‘Promise.’
‘And we need to leave ourselves some kind of bread trail so we don’t—’
‘Got it covered.’
He produced a piece of chalk, which he handed to me. ‘I’m in charge of the compass. You’re in charge of the chalk trail. Mark every other tree.’
‘Right.’
We stood, shrugged on our backpacks, pointed our flashlights ahead and started off into the woods.
Milo led the way, holding out his compass and flashlight, batting aside creepers and stomping through the undergrowth. He had tied his blond hair back in a ponytail. His legs beneath long shorts were pale but more muscular than I remembered, and he was taller than me by almost two heads now.
Something hooted from my left, and I jumped. ‘Shit!’
‘Just an owl,’ Miles said over his shoulder.
‘I know,’ I said kind of irritably. ‘It just made me jump.’
‘It’s the things that don’t make a noise you should be worried about. The things that sneak up on you silently.’
‘Comforting.’
‘Yeah, that’s why I make a noise stomping through the woods. Make myself sound bigger and scarier than anything else in here.’
‘That work?’
‘It’s a theory. I’ve never had to test it until now.’
‘Again, comforting.’
He grinned back at me. ‘We having fun?’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘If tramping through the woods in the dead of night surrounded by things that want to eat us is fun, then yeah, having a ball.’
He chuckled, and then his face grew more serious. ‘I’m glad we’re doing this.’
And in a weird way, so was I. It was scary. I was hot and tired, and all of this was insane, but an odd kind of exhilaration had seized me. We were doing this shit. Actually doing it. Just me and Milo, and fuck everyone else.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Me too.’
He hesitated, then said, ‘No, I mean I’m glad we’re doing this. Me and you.’
I stared at him. I could only see shadows of his face because we were both holding flashlights and the moonlight barely penetrated here, but something made me pause.
A feeling, a strange fluttering in my stomach, a heat that had nothing to do with the close and muggy air.
A feeling that if I stepped forward, close enough, that he might just …
Then Milo turned and the moment was gone.
I adjusted my backpack and we trekked on.
Sometimes, I wished that we had stopped right then.
Called it quits, close but no cigar, gone home and got on with our lives.
But I guess if we had, then everything else wouldn’t have happened and, whatever the bad, I could never unwish the good.
The half-hour was almost up, and the chalk was shrinking in my hand when Milo suddenly stopped and I ploughed into the back of him.
‘Jesus!’
‘I see something.’
‘What? Where?’
He moved the flashlight around. ‘Ahead. I think there’s something there.’
He picked up his pace, and I scrambled to keep up. My heart was thudding. The trees started to thin out, and we emerged into a small clearing. I looked around. All I could see was more trees.
‘See?’ Miles pointed ahead.
I thought he might be screwing with me, and I was about to say so when, suddenly, I saw it. Sunken deep into the woods, half covered with ivy and moss. A ramshackle wooden structure, so well camouflaged you could almost walk right past it.
Harold’s cabin.
We’d found it.