by Monroe, Max
Today, Bailey and I will be headed east on a hiking and camping trip to visit Lou—someone who means a lot to both of us. A short boat ride upstream and thirty-six miles of fairly treacherous hiking each way, we’ll be gone for about six days, and it’s imperative I make sure we’re prepared. One stupid mistake or error could result in us not coming back at all.
Needless to say, my top priority before I head out the door is my large hiking backpack.
I double-check that all of the essentials—everything I need before I can re-up my supply at Lou’s—are there and in their correct spot. Food for me and Bailey, water, tent, sleeping bag, extra clothes and shoes, Lou’s medicine…
It’s all there. Which means, it’s time to get the show on the road.
I finish scribbling the note for Billie about the spare key and toss it on top, head out the door, lock up the cabin, and move toward the water, where the first leg of our trip will begin.
I’m not entirely sure why I’m willing to let this lunatic of a woman stay at my place while I’m gone, but I’m pretty sure it’s mostly because I’ve run out of ways to tell her to get the fuck off my property.
She also took a beating out there in the river last night, and lucky for her—and unfortunately for me—I’m not completely heartless. I am, however, still stubborn enough not to adjust my own schedule just to ride her back to the other side of the water. Her persistent little ass can wait it out here for a few days, and I’ll take her back when it’s convenient for me.
Does that make me a bastard? Probably.
But do I care? Not a single fuck.
Not to mention, the mere idea of her robbing me blind is a goddamn joke considering she’d have to tote all my shit in a kayak she can’t even maneuver.
“C’mon, Bailey!” I shout as he lifts his leg on a tree and takes a piss. “It’s half past eight, and we’re already a half hour behind schedule!”
He gives me a proverbial eye roll by striding over to another pine tree and lifting his leg.
You’d think since I’m the one who feeds his stubborn ass, he’d listen—but no, not Bailey.
He’s only obedient when it’s convenient for him.
“Fine!” I call over my shoulder as I walk toward the deck stairs that lead to my small boat dock. “If you want to be a dick about it, then I guess I’ll see you when I get back! Bye, Bailey!”
I hear a canine groan behind me, and eventually, the jingle of his collar starts to follow suit until the sounds of his paws tap across the deck. It’s the only noise in the otherwise silent morning until I hear the word “Shit!” echo off the water.
I squint my eyes, and at the bottom of the stairs, right beside the dock, I see her.
Billie.
The woman who’s supposed to still be sleeping in my guest bed.
What in the fuck is she doing out here?
In a whirlwind of long blond waves, jean shorts, and knee-high furry fucking boots, she has her back facing me and she’s tossing shit out of Earl’s kayak—the one I went back out to collect last night after she was all settled in—and onto my dock.
She huffs and puffs with each toss over her shoulder, and Bailey’s footsteps down the deck speed up like he finally found a reason to be prompt today. Quick as a whip, his promptness turns to excitement, and the damn dog nearly knocks me over as he runs past me and proceeds to hit the bottom of the steps at a damn near sprint.
Oh no…
Impending disaster flashing before my eyes, I jog after him, shouting, “Bailey! No!”
Billie stops unloading Mary Poppins’ kayak of fun and looks over her shoulder in confusion. Instantly, her eyes go wide when she spots the sprinting, tail-wagging, happy-as-fuck canine barreling toward her.
But there’s no time for me to stop him.
Or for her to react.
Boom. Human and dog collide in a hurricane of bouncing excitement.
Bailey jumps up, his paws hit her chest, and the two of them fall off the dock and back into the kayak.
Billie yells, then grunts. And Bailey, the bastard, proceeds to lick her face like he didn’t just nearly knock them both into a fucking coma.
“Bailey! Off!” I shout as I run toward the two of them and shrug off my backpack onto the ground between one long stride and the next. “Bailey!” I boom again. “Off! Now!”
He groans in annoyance, but thankfully, does as he’s told for once in his stubborn fucking life, and jumps from the kayak back onto the dock. His momentum jolts the kayak, and with Billie still flat on her back, the small boat starts to make its way back into the water.
Goddamn, not again.
In a rush, I hop down, my boots crunching into wet gravel, and snag the rope of the kayak, pulling Billie back.
She looks out toward the water, then at me, then at Bailey, then at me again, before her pretty little mouth morphs from shocked to hysterical. Her melodic laughs echo off the water, and Bailey just stands there, staring down at her with his tail wagging.
Of course, he likes her laugh. I pay no mind to the fact that something about me likes it too, and I discreetly adjust my tightening pants.
I shake off that ridiculous thought and quirk a questioning brow toward her.
“Mind telling me what you’re doing out here?” I ask, and it’s then my brain begins to comprehend what exactly she was tossing out of her kayak.
Sleeping bag. Flashlight. A hiking backpack. All the shit she had stocked inside that damn thing for reasons I still don’t understand.
“You planning on camping instead of staying in the cabin while I’m gone?”
“No,” she retorts and pushes herself to standing. “I’m going on the hiking trip with you.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I ask. Surely, I’m hearing her wrong.
“I’m going with you,” she repeats. “On your trip. I noticed you got the kayak with all of my stuff back for me—thanks, by the way. I’m sure Earl would have screwed me on the price to replace it, and having more than one outfit is nice since my boots are gone.” She runs a hand over her body as though I wouldn’t have noticed her ridiculous getup all on my own. “So, now, I’m all set. Ready for the big adventure!”
“Yeah.” A barking laugh escapes my lungs. “No. You’re not coming. I told you that you can stay here to rest up. Not join me on my trip.”
“Well, good news, I woke up this morning feeling like a million bucks. So, no more rest needed. I shall join you on your trip.” Her voice is confident to the point of confrontational. There’s a small part of me, just like before, that can’t help but admire her persistence. But the larger part of me, the mostly annoyed part, isn’t having any of it.
“Princess, there is no fucking way you’re coming on this trip,” I retort and look pointedly at the small patches of scratches and bruises on her arms and face. I can’t deny that they look world’s better than they did last night, but fuck if that matters to me. She’s not coming. “You’re going to stay here and rest.”
“You’re not the boss of me,” she snaps back, grabbing all of her shit off the ground in a flurry of motion. “I’m not a princess, and I’m going on the trip.”
Jesus. This woman is a pain in the goddamn ass.
“Why?” I ask and run a hand through my hair.
“Why, what?”
“Why do you want to go on this trip I didn’t fucking invite you to go on?”
“God, you’re a stickler for invitations, aren’t you? It’s like a crazy fixation with you. Someone needs to tell your future wife about this, or else she’s going to have a hell of a time with you when she’s trying to plan your wedding.”
“Wedding? Future wife?” I question in confusion. “What in the fuck are you talking about right now?”
She brushes me off with a shrug and makes a poor showing of tying her sleeping bag to the bottom of her hiking backpack. Which, mind you, still has the fucking tags on it.
“Why did you even have all of this shit in the first place?”
> “I already told you,” she says and rolls her pretty green eyes toward the sky. “Earl suggested I might need it. And look at that, he was right!”
Of fucking course.
I watch her struggle with the straps for a full minute as she tries to sling the thing over her shoulder before I can’t stop myself from asking, “Have you ever in your life gone hiking before?”
“Yes!” she asserts strongly. “I hiked up to see the Hollywood sign. Twice. Personally, once was enough, but Birdie wouldn’t stop yapping about doing it when she came to visit, and apparently, it makes you a bad sister when you suggest she do it by herself.”
I clench my jaw and rub my temple to combat the flurry of useless information she’s spewing. “What about camping?”
“What kind of camping?”
“What do you mean, what kind of camping?” I retort. “Camping is camping.”
“No,” she responds with a hand to her hip. “There’s tent camping, RV camping, glamping…”
“Glamping? What the fuck is glamping?”
“It’s like fancy camping, I guess.”
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter.
“I assume we’re not going glamping, right?”
“Fuck no. We’re not goddamn glamping.”
She grins, and it’s only then I realize she’s somehow managed to get me to say the word we’re. As in me and her. Us. Together.
Shit.
“So, where we headed to?” she asks, and a cavernous sigh escapes my lungs.
God, she’s stubborn. And really fucking annoying.
But you know what? Screw it. I was being nice by offering to let her stay here. She wants to hike thirty-six miles with no fucking training? She can have at it.
“You really want to do this?” I ask, and she nods. “I don’t want to hear a goddamn word about that movie.”
She smiles and crosses a hand over her heart with a prissy little wink.
“Fine,” I growl. “You want to come along? Then come the fuck along, but mark my words, you will regret it.”
Billie flashes me a victorious smile. “Where do we start our adventure?”
Our adventure. God help me.
Billie
In LA, the only thing that should drip-dry is a paintbrush. Out here, though, the meaning is a whole lot more interesting.
Which, since Luca is proving to be quite the boring travel partner, at least has a small silver lining. Regardless, I’ve been doing my best to liven him up.
It’s not going well.
A few minutes into our boat ride upstream, I asked him if I could steer. He said no.
When I noticed the small radio close to the steering wheel, I asked if we could listen to some music. Again, he said no.
And when I asked him to tell me where exactly our hiking and camping adventure would take us, he didn’t answer at all. Instead, he sighed, stared out ahead at the water, and mumbled something I couldn’t discern.
Sheesh. Tough crowd.
Thankfully, Luca’s dog, Bailey, has become the companion I didn’t even know I needed.
He sits close to my side, his head resting on my thigh, and the only time he gets up is when he spots some fish popping out from the water. He barks at them like a maniac as we move past, and then he resumes his trusty spot beside me.
I scratch between his ears, and I swear to God, the silver lab smiles up at me.
“I think you’re my only friend on this trip,” I whisper down at him, and he smacks his lips in a sign of contentment.
“What was that?” Luca questions over his shoulder.
“Nothing,” I mutter.
I’ve learned pretty quickly that Luca Weaver is a man of few words.
Unfortunately, it’s taken me a little longer to realize that I can’t bombard him with questions and info about the movie. I have to pick and choose my moments selectively. I’m still coming to terms with how incredibly rare those moments are.
Still, I’m here. I am on this trip with him, sitting in the back of his boat with his dog while he navigates through the channel of the Hatchal River. A plain of low-lying grassland on each side of the passing water—upstream from his house by a couple miles—the landscape doesn’t take all that long to change. Snow-capped mountains sit majestically in the distance, and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t found religion a time or two while I silently hope our hiking route doesn’t include them.
But I had to come. Leaving to go back to LA with nothing but some bruises and scratches wasn’t an option. Sitting and waiting at his house for days while he’s gone to God knows where also wasn’t going to help me achieve anything but temporary insanity born out of boredom. Obviously, the only option is to be on the front lines, infiltrating my enemy—his anger, loathing, and mistrust for everything Hollywood—one joke at a time.
I might be a little banged-up from last night, but I’ll deal with any and all discomfort as long as it keeps me in the saving-my-career game.
Plus…if he didn’t kind of sort of want me to go, wouldn’t he have made it impossible for me to come along?
Obviously, yes. He’s grouchier than a grizzly bear, and his words are most definitely sharper. Luca Weaver would have taken my beaten carcass straight to my car last night if his only reason for rescuing me was to keep his conscience clear.
Hell, maybe he even secretly wants to come back to Hollywood.
Stranger things have happened. I mean, I just saw Charlie Sheen on some kind of health insurance commercial with his father, Martin. If you would have asked me in 2007 what Charlie Sheen would be up to now, I sure as hell wouldn’t have said that.
Luca slows down the engine as he pulls us toward a boat dock, and I start to get excited at the possibility of a bathroom. My bladder has been full for the past hour, and now that there’s an option other than hanging ass over the side of a boat, she’s positively screaming.
“Pit stop?” I ask as casually as I can manage.
“Final stop,” Luca corrects, wheeling the front end of the boat in at an angle and cranking the throttle back to reverse.
I scrunch up my nose and look around at all of the…nothing. It’s a desolate no-man’s-land—no people, no boats—just a single slip dock that leads to nowhere.
“Where are we?” I ask and stand to my feet as Luca turns off the engine and hops off the boat to grab some rope and secure us to the dock.
“A boat dock.”
Wow. Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Bailey wags his tail and jumps onto land, and I look around in confusion.
“This is our final destination?”
“Not even close.” Luca grins at me as he heads for the back of the boat, bends down, and secures the stern with another rope. “This is where our hike begins.”
Oh, right. Hiking.
Ha. Ha. I almost forgot about that part.
I just nod my head—careful not to let any of my inner hysterical cackles fly free—and grab my backpack from the back of the boat, lugging the heavy sack with me as I step onto the dock.
I can do this. In a way, I asked for it. Not in the grand scheme, sure, but definitely when he was telling me I couldn’t go. So, I can, and I will. I am woman, hear me roar and all that jazz.
All I have to do is pee first.
“Well, before we begin the hiking portion of our day, mind pointing me in the direction of the bathroom?”
Luca stops in his tracks at the end of the dock and turns around to face me. “A bathroom?”
“Yeah, you know, so I can start fresh.” He stares at me, his eyes nothing more than hollow orbs of blank, blue ocean. I smile slightly and pick up my point again, only this time, mixing up the terms in the hope that I’ll land on one he understands. “Empty the tank. Clear the screen. Erase the board. Reset the—”
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news here,” he says while shaking his head and chuckling, clearly not sorry at all. “But we’re in the middle of nowhere, princess. There aren’t bathrooms out here. Just na
ture.”
I narrow my eyes. “Where am I supposed to pee, then?”
He smirks and nods toward Bailey, who is now lifting his leg on a nearby tree.
“You’re not serious,” I say, and his stupid smirk grows wider.
“Oh, but I am.”
I have to pee…in the damn woods?
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
“You having second thoughts, princess?”
I can’t deny this whole no-bathroom thing has raised a few doubts, but he doesn’t need to know that. If I can grit my teeth every time he calls me princess, I can gird my loins to go in the damn outdoors.
“Nope,” I respond and take a page out of Bailey’s book. Toward the forest at the edge of the grassland and behind the biggest, widest tree I can find, I attempt to pee. Outside. Like a freaking dog.
Sheesh. Men have it so easy when it comes to this. They just whip out their wieners and do the damn thing.
But, women? Our parts make it far more complicated than that.
We have to pull down our pants and underwear, squat, and then, while squatting and peeing at the same time, we have to make sure the pee hits the ground instead of our clothes. And Lord knows there’s not a woman alive who has any real control over her stream. Left, right, or a hundred and eighty degrees out in left fucking field, that thing’s going places—places you don’t want it to go, specifically.
Not to mention, in cases like mine right now, when there’s no freaking toilet paper, we have to do some weird form of a squat and shimmy to assist in the drying. No shaking the joystick and tucking it back in. It is a squatting, pee-scented rain dance, and it is hell.
But I manage.
I squat like a sumo wrestler, pee like a racehorse, and my shimmy to drip-dry puts Shakira’s hips to shame.
I am an outside-peeing, nature-defiling goddess, and nothing can stop me!
When I make it back to the dock, Luca is sliding his large green backpack over his shoulders and heading for the trail. Without any time to waste, I follow his lead. I use my newfound squatting powers to get low to the dock, put one strap over my right shoulder and the other over my left, and then engage the muscles in my thighs to push to standing. I know I’m short, but I’m not lying when I say it is a long and arduous journey. I can barely breathe with the way the heavy pack is pulling at my chest.
