Chapter 6 Signal #2
"I didn't notice," he says simply, but I can see all the memories rushing through his mind, all the moments he took the credit for my work, all the times I supported him and loved him anyway.
"I know." I swallow. "That's actually the part that bothers me more.
I know this is mostly a 'me' problem. I know I should step up and take the credit.
I know I should be... proud... of who I am and what I do.
" My voice wobbles like a traitorous little bitch.
"And I love you, and I am genuinely glad every single day that I'm not back at some operations center at 1 a.m. fixing someone else's emergency for free, but I would also very much like, at some point in my life, to be the person people thank first. Not eventually.
Not as a footnote. First." Cue the tears.
God, I hate looking this vulnerable. "And I want you to be proud of me, too.
You said you fell in love with me for the person I am, but who I am would stand up to those Cumbre Verde assholes, but you thought that I would embarrass you. "
Andrew has tactfully drifted ten feet away and is making a great show of investigating a tree.
Derrick reaches out, slow, and tucks a piece of wet hair back behind my ear. "What do you want me to do? Tell me how to fix this?"
An infuriatingly very "Derrick" question, always looking for the fix.
"You can't fix this in the next ninety seconds. But it would be nice to know you actually hear me, so that the next time Carmen, the board, or a journalist asks who handled this, you say my name first. Out loud. Before they have to ask twice."
"I can do that." No hesitation in it. "I will do that."
I poke him in the chest. "And the next time some asshole starts catcalling me and wondering out loud if my pubes are the same color as my hair, you let me go and knock the shit out of him."
His smile is rueful. "I can do that, too."
I nod once decisively. "Good. I know you will. Eventually." I almost manage a smile. "You're annoyingly good at fixing things once you actually see them as broken. The problem was never your follow-through. It's your noticing."
"Then I'm noticing." He holds my gaze, steady, the CEO calm replaced by raw emotion underneath it.
"Riley Mitchell, my darling wife, found the trail, ran the extraction priorities, and got us a four-hour rescue window while the rest of us stood around being grateful for the signal.
I'll make sure Carmen's report says exactly that. "
"Good." My throat feels tight. "Now let's go find that tree cover unless we want things to get even weirder in front of Andrew."
"If you guys start having make-up sex, I can't promise I won't watch," Andrew calls out with a wicked grin.
I poke my tongue out at Andrew, and the three of us move under the denser stand of trees, ready to wait out the next four hours and hoping the rest of our group is doing okay.
***
Nora
We find a signal on a narrow rock outcrop jutting out from the ridge, high enough above the canopy line to catch whatever satellite Santi's radio is desperate enough to grab onto.
He works the dial with single-minded focus, crouched at the outcrop's edge, rain running off the brim of his cap in a steady line.
"There," he says, when the static finally resolves into coherent words. "Lodge, this is Reyes. Do you copy?"
The voice on the other end is clipped and professional, but relieved after managing panic all afternoon.
I catch fragments of the conversation while Santi listens, while he's running his own calculations.
No one has heard from Mateo yet. He tells them that Ryan and Erica have split from us and learns that they haven't checked in yet, but Derrick's group has made contact.
"Copy that," he says. "We're at the ridge outcrop, elevation roughly thirteen hundred feet, north-northwest of the original trail split. No injuries. We'll hold position." A pause, listening. "Understood. We'll keep the channel open every twenty minutes."
He signs off and sets the radio down, and his posture changes with it, his shoulders set differently, jaw tighter.
"Four hours," he says, mostly to himself.
"Rescue's coming from the secondary trailhead.
They'll hit the reconnect point first, then fan out from there.
" He's already reaching for the map, smoothing the bleeding ink flat against his knee, tracing a line with one finger.
"If they're moving at standard pace in this terrain, that puts them at our position somewhere in the back half of the window.
We should consider relocating closer to the reconnect point ourselves, cut the gap down—"
"Santi."
"—though that risks missing the rescue team if they take the ridge trail instead of the valley floor, which depends on how bad the flooding's gotten down there—"
His profile is all edges now, none of the quieter curve he'd had when he'd been sitting across from me earlier, eyes dark and intent and whole attention anchored on my mouth.
Heat creeps up my neck under the damp.
What we'd done there…
"Santi."
He looks up. "What?"
I don't have a good answer for what, exactly, except that two hours ago this man told me exactly what he'd wanted for years, and acted out the whole of it with a wildness that undid a part of me I'm not sure has fully gone back together.
And now he's looking at a map like I'm a logistics problem that's already been solved and filed.
"Nothing," I say, afraid to voice what I'm feeling. "Map. Logistics. Got it."
Perhaps this was just a wild jungle encounter, and everything would go back to the way that it had been before.
He's already back in the radio bag, checking the battery, running through the kit with the closed-off focus of a man doing his actual job, the one his bio describes, the one that doesn't mention anything that happened in a rock shelter or beside a fire.
I watch him do it and feel myself go still in a way I recognize from a dozen boardrooms, a dozen mornings-after that weren't mornings-after at all, with nothing to follow up on, just a closing door dressed up as professionalism.
I try to tell myself it's not that. He's doing what needs doing; that operational focus under a four-hour deadline is not the same thing as a man deciding the last two hours were a fever the rain induced, and now that the fever's broken, he can go back to who he was on the floatplane.