Chapter Five
Morning on the Pendle River is so beautiful I can almost forget my launch day nerves.
A gold rush of sun sparkles off the water where the barest morning breeze strokes it to life. A stone’s throw from shore, a pair of loons dive for fish, their sleek bodies curling under the surface, then popping up in unpredictable places a minute later.
The air is hypersaturated with scents and sounds, so full it can hardly hold them all: cedar, damp earth, liquid birdsong.
Every winged dinosaur in the valley is staking out a musical claim to a mate and a nest, the trees full of flashing wings in black and brown and white, green and violet and red.
I’m no expert, but I can identify chickadee calls and the gurgle of baby crows hidden high in a cedar treetop.
And Steller’s jays of course—everyone points those out when you’re named Stellar J Byrd.
Bold and pretty with their stiff black crest and lightning-blue plumage, they’re smart enough to steal a chunk of your sandwich if you’re not careful.
Unless you’re McHuge, in which case you would give the birds your lunch and go without.
As if to prove my point, McHuge leans to his right, reaching out one long arm with a handful of apple slices.
He spends some time arranging them on the stool two seats away from where he’s sitting.
When he’s satisfied, he turns back to his breakfast bites—hammy, eggy, creamy little mouthfuls wrapped in golden pastry that I can’t get enough of.
It’s been a while since I’ve had an obsession with a new food—the kind where every time I taste it, it’s just as good as the first crispy, buttery, shockingly satisfying bite. I’ve got a huge crush on these things.
I’ve long since polished off mine, but McHuge still has two left. I’d steal them if Jasvinder didn’t make McHuge’s with mushrooms.
“Did you make a happy face with your—”
He only has to look my way, grinning, and I fall silent.
He doesn’t smile much, I realize with a burst of surprise.
Or maybe he doesn’t smile this way. Like he’s truly happy, instead of trying to give you something.
The microcurl at one corner of his lips holds a hint of mischief and excitement that’s almost boyish, despite the fact that he’s six feet one million with a beard straight out of Game of Thrones .
Sure enough, thirty seconds later, the raven he’s been befriending drops down at the edge of the clearing, tilting its head before cockily hopping closer. The dog raises one eyebrow, then the other, but her chin stays on the ground.
McHuge sits still, body loose, stealing sideways glances from under his lashes. He could physically take anything from anyone in this clearing, but what he wants is to style fruit into an emoji this bird can’t even read.
I check my own posture: hunched, my arms wrapped protectively around the plate balanced on my knees. The sheer volume of physical work at camp has me painfully ravenous. I’m desperate to take another bite, jam in as much as my mouth can hold, guard it from any creature who would steal from me.
But I have to stay still while the bird hops sideways with its shiny black eye pointed at us, its neck dipping toward the freshly sliced honeycrisps.
McHuge tames things like the fox teaches the boy to tame things in The Little Prince , which I sneaked a look at yesterday when McHuge left it open in the pavilion.
He sits a little closer every day, coaxing, making everyone want to come to him.
Except me, with my thorns.
The raven’s wings beat an abrupt staccato. It alights on the stool, drops a shred of red fabric from its beak, then snatches as many apple slices as it can hold and takes off.
“Did you see that? It’s trading for the food.
” McHuge grins down at his meal with open-faced delight.
A smile like that is wasted on a three-sectioned tin camping plate, but I guess he’d rather put it there than give it to the person who takes cheap shots at his food art instead of being curious about what he’s doing.
It’s sad, actually. Not pathetic or uncool or any other meaning of the word. Just plain sad—a slow rain that doesn’t come with any anger to keep me dry and hot.
The great thing about having been so damn broke for the last twelve months was that I didn’t have space to think about what I wanted beyond a bank balance without a minus sign in front of it.
I didn’t have to worry about what kind of person I was becoming, or who I might like to be for the rest of my life.
It was a relief, after losing the career I’d grown to love, not to have to look for the next thing.
Not to have to search for myself.
But the past week of working here, and especially the last two days of staying near enough to McHuge to cram for our en gagement exam, might be bringing feeling back into my soul.
It’s no rosy burst of undiluted joy, either.
I feel like a cramped, frozen limb, with the deadened sensation giving way to pinpricks that promise a world of pain before I’ll be able to bear any weight.
This is my company now, my new chance. Do I want anything beyond money and security and guarding what’s mine? And if I do, will the same hurts happen to me all over again?
I blink when a breakfast bite lands on my plate.
“Hey,” I blurt, dismayed at how my mouth waters. “This is yours. Besides, I don’t like mushrooms.”
“I asked Jasvinder to make them all without mushrooms.”
“Why?!” The breakfast bites are good, but they don’t warrant the cry in my voice.
“Because fungi aren’t your jam,” he says slowly, like it’s obvious. “Eat it. I had plenty.”
I hold out my plate. “Take it back.”
“No. It’s for you.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Yes, you do. I saw you looking at it. If you’re not hungry, just compost it.”
I can’t compost perfectly good food—not after the way I grew up. I can’t leave it here for animals to find. And he won’t take it back.
I stare at the breakfast bite, flooded with agony where there used to be numbness. He’s kind and I’m not. He gave me the thing I wanted most, and I have nothing to give back. No scrap of red fabric, not even a slice of apple. I would never have thought to give him something just to be nice.
I feel terrible. Everything around camp suddenly looks like it could be better. Especially me.
“I’m going to finish redoing the ropes.” I talked him into letting me do fancy, aspirational knotwork around camp, but it isn’t as easy as it looks, and I’ve been struggling to get it done. In the face of his generosity, the least I can do is get working.
I stuff the breakfast bite in my mouth and stand up fast, as McHuge does the same. Next thing I know, my feet are tangled with his and my plate is on the ground. He pins me to his chest with a palm between my shoulder blades, one hand still gripping his own plate.
My first thought is At least I didn’t jump back this time .
My second is that it’s not how he smells—like canoe repair compound, Earl Grey, and mountain wind—that’s so intoxicating.
It’s the emotion it pulls from my soul, this strange, unidentifiable longing I used to feel on the first day of school.
It’s a sense of things coming together for a brief moment in time, planets swinging close in their orbits, tides flooding high and receding low.
I step away carefully; McHuge steps back, too. Sadness, again.
“Thanks for the catch,” I say. His look of surprise gives me a burst of painful sparks. I should thank him a few times this morning. Get him acclimated to hearing nice things from me before the guests arrive, so he doesn’t do the facial equivalent of jumping away from me.
I scoop up my plate, stash it in the cookhouse, and head toward the sleeping area.
On the way, I run a few mnemonics about McHuge, like the one I made for the birth order of his six giant ginger siblings.
Bruce, Morag, Brigid, Angus, Lyle, Tavish, Elspeth: Bring More Bread And Let Toast Explode.
It’s not my best work, but I didn’t have time for anything else.
McHuge ambles up to the green sign I’m readjusting, which is mounted to the tree with rope, because McHuge would never poke a hole in a friend.
GROOVER THIS WAY! it says, groover being the inexplicable whitewater word for outhouse.
Also scattered around camp are a selection of McHuge’s favorite inspirational quotes.
From here, I can see CHALLENGE YOUR REALITY and HAVE THE COURAGE TO BE BAD .
Ha. It takes way more courage to be good than bad, to show your soft belly instead of your steely spine. Although by that metric, McHuge is the brave one around here.
“Looks nice.” His voice is a natural disaster. It raises the hairs on my arms, gives me the sensation of gathering electricity in the air.
“Could be better,” I say, undoing a lumpy knot and trying again. “I want to send the right message.”
“What message is that?” He makes an amused huff, tracing a freckled finger along the rope. I thought his hands were blunt and pawlike, but I was wrong. Their roughness doesn’t erase their elegance and deliberation.
I look back at the rope. “These knots say, Your eyeballs matter to us. What you put in them should be beautiful and luxurious. We know you have a choice of outrageously expensive experimental relationship therapy, and we thank you for choosing the Love Boat . Ha!” I exclaim, when the knot settles into the right lines. Thirteen more to go.
“I’d rather go for more heart and soul, less eyeball and wallet.”
I stare at him, amazed. “You have no idea about people, do you?”