by Lucy Snow
Of course, my life could have used some hot sex these days. Well, right about now, hot anything would have done the trick. Even that got a short laugh out of me as I slowly turned around one of the bends in the road.
I was getting closer; I could feel it. Naomi was getting closer to me by the minute.
By every slow minute.
No, Alex and I were doomed from the snowy start. It had been nice to think about, to briefly daydream about, but I was a grown woman and I didn’t need to daydream about guys like that anymore, not when I had real issues in my life, with people that were important to me, that I had to work out while figuring out what I wanted to do with myself.
And that life plan certainly didn’t involve any tall, dark, and sexy men named Alex. At least, not right now. It might have, if I’d been able to carry on a conversation with the guy without it turning into a shouting match, but those were the breaks.
Attraction didn’t really mean much, because I knew from last night that we both felt it in spades. He’d have to have been a world-class actor to have pulled off that kinda ruse, fooling me into thinking he was into me last night in my room, and even though I knew he’d been around the world learning a very particular and useful set of skills, I doubt acting classes had been on the menu.
Nah, he was into it, and I knew from my own vivid memories of having him on top of me that I wanted little more than to take him inside me, so that part wasn’t the problem. Something else had pulled him back.
A girlfriend back home? A wife? Could be, I supposed, but he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy to play around like that. Of course, my friends would have said, knowing glances passing across their faces, they never did.
That probably wasn’t it, but as the harsh light of a snow-covered morning washed over me, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what other issue could there have been?
It was wearing me out just wondering about it, I knew that much.
That was when I reached the conclusion to this entire thing - I didn’t need this crap in my life right now. I had enough going on with school and my parents and figuring the rest of my shit out to deal with some boy who couldn’t make up his mind, whether or not we’d just met.
My parents were the big thing right now. Once I got out of here, I had to figure out how to sit them down and make them understand that even though Naomi was gone and she wasn’t coming back, that didn’t mean they had to hold me close to their chest just to keep me safe. That wasn’t any way for me to live.
I had to be allowed to go my own way and make my own mistakes. Sure, it was pretty likely that this world would chew me up and spit me out, but didn’t that happen to everyone? How else was there to live so you could really say that you had when it was all over?
For all the issues I had with Alex, and there were many of those, at least he seemed to have figured one thing out about himself earlier than I had — he wasn’t meant to stay in one place for too long. He knew that he had to keep it moving and figure out where the next part of his journey would take him, because that was the only way he knew how to keep getting closer to the prize, whatever that was.
I could still see the look on his face in my mind from last night when he told me about traveling and what it did for him, what seeing the world and helping out people less fortunate than him for no other reason than he was born lucky and they weren’t, and how that had affected him.
I wanted a piece of that for myself, wanted to see and experience those things.
I wanted to travel the world.
At the moment, though, I only wanted to travel to this bus. I chastised myself for the dozenth time for coming out of the inn like this in the middle of the storm, but I really didn’t have anything else to do that morning, especially since the last person in the world I wanted to see was Alex, after last night’s embarrassment.
I hoped I was going in the right direction - I looked up and raised my hands to my eyes, protecting them from the glare of all the white around and tried to focus on the path in front of me as it stretched out, making sure I was still on the road going north toward the bus and the cliff.
So far so good.
And then things stopped being so good, so far.
The wind picked up something awful and knocked me over like I was a domino getting a perfect tap from the one in front of me, and before I knew what had happened I was eating snow.
I gulped, feeling the cold water seep down my throat before I picked myself up, slowly, staggering to my feet, careful to make sure I hadn’t gotten turned around.
Yeah, this hadn’t been one of my brightest ideas.
I needed a few minutes to catch my breath, and out here in the open was no place to do that.
I searched around the inclines of snow on either side of the road before discovering a lone pine tree, decades old if it was a day, leaning over a little to the right under the weight of all the snow that had piled up on top of it.
That was probably as good as I was gonna get, so I hiked over to it, brushing off as much as the snow that I’d picked up while lying on the ground as best as I could, and shivering at the cold wetness that it left on me.
I settled down next to the tree, hoping it would grant me at least a little shelter from the oncoming deluge of snow, and hoping even more that the snow would let up for a bit so I could keep going.
Nope, not one of my best ideas.
Not. At. All.
CHAPTER 12 - ALEX
I woke up early that first morning in this village, the third I’d been to in the last two months. The family I was staying with was already up and about when I cracked my eyes open and rolled over in the already oppressive heat. Sleeping outside meant you’d have to be up before dawn or the sun would act as your alarm clock; it occurred to me that giving me a spot inside was a great honor normally reserved for the elderly and guests.
I got up and took a drink, trying not to waste any of it, before asking the head of the family what I could do to help. She smiled and shook her head, handing me a plate of food. I ate in silence, frustrated that I couldn’t refuse without insulting her but knowing that I was eating more than I was giving back.
Just then the middle daughter of the family announced that she was leaving, a large empty jug in her hands. Her mother nodded, and inwardly I was proud of myself for starting to understand their language after weeks of trying. The subtle differences in dialects between villages, even though they were speaking the same language, made things especially tough.
“Where’s she going?” I asked her mother, haltingly. It was still a chore to speak their language, but with each passing day I was starting to understand a little more of it.
She laughed and took my plate, giving me a look that I understood. I shook my head that I didn’t want more, and she replied, “To get more water.”
I jumped up. “Let me help,” I said, and before anyone could say anything I jogged out of the hut and caught up with the girl.
It was already blisteringly hot, and the heat rose up off the barely paved road in sizzling waves that reminded me of mirages in the desert. We walked silently side by side. I tried to practice speaking with her, but the girl didn’t want to speak with me for whatever reason, which I could respect.
I was so different, and I was here in their world. I was here to help, of course, but that didn’t mean I belonged. They didn’t need saving; they could use help.
It took us 4 hours of steady walking before we crested a hill and the smattering of huts surrounding the area’s prized piece of infrastructure, a roughly dug well. There was a line of people with buckets and jugs of their own on the ground next to them, and we got in line at the end.
The girl pulled some food out of her pocket and after looking down at it for a moment, broke half of it off and gave it to me. I smiled and nodded gratefully; I was starving and there wasn’t enough for her, let alone the both of us, but she gave me half of hers without thinking about it for a more than second or two.
&nb
sp; For the thousandth time I was struck by the generosity of people who had nothing to give, giving all the same, because it was the right thing to do, whatever the consequences.
After it came our turn to fill up the jug, the girl hoisted it on her head and we started on the way back. I gestured to her and spoke in my slow phrasing that I wanted to help, and after a mile of my asking, she let me carry the heavy jug for a ways down the torturous road back to the village, just when the sun reached its peak for the day, raining down spears of heat on all below it.
I tried to carry the jug in front of me at first, but my arms got tired way before my spirit flagged, and the girl shook her head disapprovingly before lifting her arms above her head, motioning like the other women had done with their containers when they were filled.
I nodded, and with a little help, and a few tiny splashes hitting the floor, which caused me great pain now that I knew how difficult it was to actually move water around this place, I managed to get the jug onto my head and stable, after taking off my shirt and coiling around my head like a combination heat shield and flattener to stabilize the jug.
It took us an extra hour to get back to the village weighed down by the water jug, and when we were about 30 minutes out, the girl stopped and wouldn’t continue walking until I had given her the jug back, speaking rapidly in words that I kinda-sorta understood to mean, “It wouldn’t look good if we arrived and you were carrying it.” I accepted that reasoning and gave the jug back to her, and she balanced it expertly on her head and we were off.
When we got back and set the jug down, the girl gave me a tiny smile before her mother admonished her for standing around and not helping. Before I knew it, the girl was right back to doing more chores.
The day didn’t end till after the sun had gone down.
And then the next one was just like it.
This was the opposite of that. In Africa I couldn’t get cool enough as the sun beat me down from above, but here I couldn’t pull my jacket around me tight enough to keep the cold wind from finding every nook and cranny and making its presence known, like a game of tag with an opponent that knew your favorite hiding places and taunted you mercilessly each time they found you.
I was headed in the right direction, and just as importantly, I was making progress — the footprints in the snow I was following were getting deeper, which meant less time between Naomi making them and me finding them. That was a good thing.
I still couldn’t make any sense of this, though. What had possessed that girl to wander off out of the inn in the middle of a storm like this, that didn’t look like it was planning on getting any better any time soon?
I knew there was something important to her in the wreckage of the bus, Naomi had made that abundantly clear, but hadn’t all she’d seen on our way to the inn and since convinced her that now was not the right time to go off half-cocked on some sort of adventurous trek through the middle of a blizzard?
I shook my head as the bitter cold enveloped me. How could she do this? Did she not see how dangerous it was to be walking around here?
Even if she made the decision to go back to the bus for whatever the fuck she’d brought with her but couldn’t live without…wouldn’t it have been wise to reevaluate 5 or 10 minutes in and, you know, turn the fuck around and come back to the inn?
Hell, the bus had probably fallen off the cliff by now, and I smiled acidly as I thought of her standing there trying to see if she could climb down, get what whatever bauble she needed and bring it back.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d tried it, not after pulling this kinda stunt.
Almost as soon as I let my anger out, I reigned it back in — this was no time for me to lose my cool. That prompted another laugh — seemed the cold managed to bring out my icy humor.
No, I just had to find Naomi and make sure she was safe - I could figure out what had possessed her to do this later, once we were back inside where it was warm and, you know, not subjected to the elements all around us.
And then, just like that, the footprints stopped moving forward. I was about to step into the next one, as I had all along, following where Naomi had walked not a too long ago - I’d come around a corner and then…nothing. There was no more trail to follow.
What the fuck?
I stopped in the last of her prints, letting my hands fall to my waist as I tried to figure out where she’d gone. The road kept going around further turns in front of me, snaking down toward the cliff and the bus.
But no sign Naomi had kept going in that direction.
Where was she? The snow was coming down even faster now, and as I turned to look back the way I came I noticed that my own footfalls in Naomi’s earlier prints were already tough to spot.
This rescue mission was about to get a whole lot tougher since I didn’t have guidance anymore.
And then something caught my eye — something off in the distance, not too far away under normal weather conditions, but right now what felt like miles away. A lone tree on the side of the road.
And…something huddled underneath it, just off to the side. Something seeking shelter.
My breath caught in my throat as I surged toward it, gritting my teeth at how difficult it was to start moving again after letting my inertia break down. This was the only lead I had, I had to follow up.
As I got closer I could see the snow-covered thing shaking, moving slightly every few seconds as if to brush away the snow that threatened to accumulate on it.
“Naomi,” I croaked, the first time I’d spoken in what felt like forever. I must have sounded terrible, but I was thrilled to see the thing stir, and then Naomi’s dark eyes looked at me.
“Hey, Alex,” she said, just loud enough for me to hear. “Fancy seeing you around here. Come for the weather?”
“What the fuck, Naomi?!” I shouted at her as best I could, as I closed the short distance between us and wrapped my arms around her. “Why the fuck did you come out here?”
She laughed a little, just under her breath and gave me a wan smile as I pulled her into me, trying to warm her up. “It was a little too hot in the inn, so I figured I’d cool down out here,” she joked with another laugh. “Clara’s got lunch ready, eh? Is that why you’re here?”
I frowned. “This is no laughing matter! You could have died out here!”
“Nah, I’m all good.” She stopped smiling. “Hey, where’s the bus? Couple more turns, yeah?” She tried to stand up, moving slowly but surely. “I can make it there and back to the inn by lunchtime,” she said, a look of determination spilling out across her face.
My jaw almost hit the snow. “Are you fucking crazy? You want to keep going?”
Naomi stepped out on her feet before almost falling down. I moved as fast as I could and caught her just before she hit, and she braced herself on my shoulders, standing up. “You wouldn’t understand, Alex. You don’t want anything. You don’t save anything.” She stood up fully and brushed herself off. “You don’t treasure anything.”
“You say that like you know-“ I sputtered before catching myself. “This is not the time nor the place to have this discussion, Naomi! We have to get out of here.”
“Just point me in the direction of the bus.” She walked to the edge of the tree’s cover. “I’ll go the rest of the way myself. I just need the dia-” Her words got cut off in a sudden gust of wind that whined through the hills as it raced around trying to remove all heat from the area. All I could make out were a few words like “Clara” and “soup.”
