The Woodsman's Baby

by Eddie Cleveland

  I sit up and my ankle flashes with pain as if to remind me of exactly where I was injured. “Here,” I point and Cole kneels in the dirt before me. His large hands are gentle as he maneuvers my foot from side to side.

  “Can you bend your toes?” I can see in the dark that his eyebrows are furrowed together.

  I slowly curl my toes over and the pain builds. “I can,” I wince, “but it hurts. A lot.” I answer through gritted teeth.

  Cole stands up and holds out his hands to me. “I don’t think it’s broken, but I can’t be sure. I can take a better look at my place, but you need to let me help you,” he looks into my eyes and my fear slides away.

  I bite my lip. If I stay here, there’s a good chance I’ll die. The only person who knows to look for me, besides Cole, tried to rape me. Not exactly a knight in shining armor. I meet Cole’s gaze, my trembling subsides and I reach up to his hand.

  “Yes.” I whisper. “Please help me.”

  It’s like being between a rock and a hard place. Go with him and possibly die at his hands. Although, when I look at him, it’s hard to believe he could ever execute someone like the pictures showed. Or, I can stay here and most likely die in the woods.

  Cole wraps his arm under my back and my feet, hauling me up toward his chest. I instinctively slide my arms around his neck to steady myself and I see a small smile pull at the corners of his mouth. He looks handsome when he smiles. Not like the stony-faced pictures I’ve been looking at with Cecil all month.

  “Just relax,” his voice rumbles in his chest as he holds me close, “I’ll do my best to get you fixed up, okay? You have my word, I won’t ever hurt you,” his tone soothes me somehow. Despite common sense, despite the file I’ve studied, despite everything my mind keeps screaming about why I shouldn’t believe him, I know that for some unexplainable reason, my heart does.

  “Thank you,” I mumble into his jacket and cling on to him tight. My mother always said that the brain is smart, but the heart is wise.

  “If you want to know the truth, you don’t read it from a book,” she’d say. “You feel it, here,” I remember how she tapped two fingers above her breast. Before the mastectomies took them both. Before the cancer spread and left my heart no wiser, but certainly more broken.

  I tilt my head back against Cole’s arm and look up at the stars above. Up to her. I hope you were right, Mama.

  8

  Cole

  My breathing is getting heavy, but I’ve got a good hold on her as I carefully carry her through the brush. This reminds me of when I first escaped across the border and made my way up here. I bought a shit-ton of supplies so I could hide out in the woods for as long as possible without needing to go back in town and risk being arrested. In the military, I’ve hauled heavy rucksacks in blistering heat and skin freezing cold, but those marches had nothing on that first hike I took out here.

  I must have weighed myself down with well over two hundred pounds of canned goods and supplies. Hauling that much is always taxing, but especially when it’s not packed right and is digging into your flesh the whole way. When I finally found a place to set up camp and call home I was completely exhausted from maneuvering through pines and trudging over tree roots and uneven ground for hours.

  This girl probably weighs a fraction of those supplies, and this time I only had a forty-minute walk to get to my cabin instead of a three-hour death march.

  “Okay, here we are,” I try to keep my voice soft and even. I know she’s terrified of me, and based on what she knows, I can’t blame her.

  “What do you mean?” She twists her head and looks around.

  “Home sweet home. This is where I’m staying,” I answer.

  “But,” she squints, “all I see are trees.”

  “You’ll see,” I hold her close as I make my way to the small clearing among the large pines. To the untrained eye, it can be easy to miss my place. From this side, it appears to be nothing more than a hill between two trees. I carry her around to the other side of the hill, the side I dug into and built my cabin in. From the back my little place is hidden, and even though she can’t see it in this darkness, the cliff face that jaggedly falls down the other side provides a spectacular view of the canyon below.

  She looks around with wide eyes, “Wow, this is amazing,” she murmurs. “It’s completely camouflaged. You could be standing right in front of this and never even realize…”

  I open the door and carry her inside. “That was the idea. On one side I’m hidden by the hill and on the other side it’s sheer rocks that drop off about two hundred feet.”

  My gut knots up as she twists her head around like a barn owl, trying to soak it all in. It was a mistake to grab her and a fucking fatal flaw in my plans to bring her here. Now I’m compromised, just as I finally got everything set up and running smoothly. Now I’m stuck with a gimped up girl who came here to hunt me down. And her partner is going to wake up with an angry lump on his head and even more motivation to find me.

  I carefully sit the girl in a chair I put together and grab a flashlight along with a first-aid kit. What else could you do? Leave her injured and alone? No, I know I did the right thing, but I can’t help but wonder, at what cost?

  Kneeling in front of her, I try not to notice her full lips or her mesmerizing eyes. I refuse to let myself look at her that way. Right now, the only thing I care about is her injury. The sooner I get her patched up, the sooner I can get her out of my hair.

  “Hey, so you probably know my name, right?” She nods and her eyebrows scrunch together. “So, what’s your name?”

  “Abbie,” she answers simply and tries to push her mud caked hair from her dirt streaked face. “Abbie Hart.”

  Even covered in grime, she’s irresistible. “Abbie Hart,” I repeat. “Well that was one hell of a tumble you took, so let’s check out the damage, okay? I’m gonna take a look at your ankle.” I don’t wait for her to answer and unlace her hiking boot.

  “Okay,” she tenses up as I try to ease the leather down over her heel and off her foot. “Oww!”

  “I know. I just need to see if it’s broken or bleeding,” I put the boot down beside me and begin to roll her sock down her leg and expose her swollen ankle.

  Abbie breathes in sharply, but she doesn’t cry out again. I can tell by glancing up at her that she’s putting on a brave face. I refuse to acknowledge her beautiful features, instead letting my anger about this intrusion on my life guide me.

  “So, you and your friend obviously aren’t cops, right? Why are you guys trying to find me?” I peel the sock down and tug it off her toes.

  “He’s, oww! He’s not my friend,” she answers through her gritted teeth.

  Regret washes over me, “You’re right, sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. He’s obviously a piece of shit,” my anger swells back up like ocean waves in a storm. “Why are you out here with him?” I try not to sound accusing when I ask, but the anger I have for the man that tried to rape her spills over into my tone.

  Abbie’s eyes grow about two sizes and she freezes in place. I scared her, again.

  Fuck.

  I’m really not off to a great start here.

  I fill my lungs and breathe out slowly, “Listen, I meant what I said about you being safe with me, okay? Would I be trying to help you right now if I had bad intentions?” I let myself meet her eyes. How can she be so beautiful? How old is she? From the looks of her supple, vibrant skin, she can’t be too old. I force myself to look back down at her injury, no good can come from studying her beauty.

  “No, we’re not cops. Cecil is a private investigator and I am, I mean I was, his assistant.” She finally answers.

  I nod and push my thumb into the fleshy part of her big toe. The color returns immediately, so the blood flow in her foot is good. “Private investigator? He doesn’t have any legal authority then,” I gently rock her foot to the side, no grinding noises.

  Abbie flinches but she doesn’t cry out, her ankle seems to
be growing by the minute, inflating like someone slipped a party balloon under her skin. “No, he wasn’t here to arrest you,” she squints up her eyes as I tilt her foot to the other side. “He was hired by Senator Turner to track you down. Cecil was supposed to get pictures of you and send back your GPS coordinates.”

  “I see,” my lips twist down as I frown. My anger boils back up. I’ve spent countless hours over the past several months finding this perfect spot and turning it into my new home. As soon as the ground thawed, I began digging into this hillside, pulling out rocks with my bare, calloused hands until I hollowed it out. I built this entire place and almost everything in it, working eighteen hour days only to drop with exhaustion and soak in the amazing view off the cliff side each night.

  My cabin isn’t perfect, but it’s my home. And now I have to abandon it. Abandon all my hard work, dedication and craftsmanship because these morons decided to try to find me. You need to control your temper, I remind myself. Scaring this girl is only going to make the entire gong show, worse.

  I grit my teeth and push away my thoughts about the cabin. About my home. “You have a bad sprain, from what I can tell. You need to stay off your foot for a couple of days and it should start getting better. Wait here, okay?”

  I stand up and grab a stainless steel thermos. It’s nice and cold. “Here,” I hand it to Abbie, “hold this against your ankle to help with the swelling, it’ll be best if we can fit your foot back in your boot. The laces give nice support for your ankle, the only shitty part is you’ll have to sleep with it on,” I shrug.

  “That’s okay, I’m just glad it’s not broken,” she tenderly holds the thermos against her ankle and looks up at me. For a second I can easily picture her looking up at me like this from her knees as I slide my cock into her wet, warm mouth.

  I close my eyes and twist my head away opening them only after I know she isn’t in my line of vision anymore. Fuck! I never asked to get stuck playing nurse to this girl. Now I’m here with someone whose presence makes me tense up with anger as her every movement seems to set my nervous system on fire with temptation.

  “Okay, hold that on your ankle. I’m going to get the bed ready, you’re probably tired. We’ll get your boot back on and hit the hay. I’ll take another look at it tomorrow,” my words are too loud, too abrupt. I sound like I’m barking orders at a platoon instead of talking to a stunning young woman.

  “You want me to sleep in your bed,” she swallows hard and looks across my modest cabin to the bed. It’s easy to spot since the bedroom, living room, dining area and kitchen are all in one big, open space. When I built this place, I wasn’t exactly planning to entertain houseguests so separation between spaces and privacy were never considerations.

  “Trust me, it’s not what I want either, but I don’t have a sofa to crash on.” I sweep the flashlight over the corners of the room as if to prove that I’m not secretly hiding other sleeping accommodations in the shadows. “This way you’ll stay warm and safe until the morning. Then, maybe we can figure out something better. Let’s just deal with one crisis at a time, okay?” I nod at her ankle.

  “Umm, I can just sleep on the floor,” she whispers and fidgets with the ends of her hair, nervously twisting them around her fingertips.

  “That’s stupid, you’re not a dog. Besides, it might be June, but it still gets chilly in the middle of the night.”

  “No, that’s okay,’ she insists. “If you can spare a blanket, I’ll be fine.”

  I sigh but don’t argue. I’m not going to force her to do anything she doesn’t want to, including sleep next to me. I don’t blame her for her skepticism. Actually, I admire it. “Okay then, suit yourself,” I kneel back down. “Let’s see if we can get that boot back on now,” I grab her sock and ease it back on to her injured foot. Opening the top of the boot as wide as my fingers can stretch it, I slowly pull it on her foot. It’s snug, but her ankle fits back inside.

  “Perfect, this should help give you the support you need,” I lace it up for her and stand back up, holding out my hand. “Let’s not make this weird, okay? I’ll help you into bed and we’ll both sleep in our full clothes on opposite sides.” I try one last time to talk some sense into her. “I understand that you’re shook up and you don’t exactly have a good reason to trust me, but you can,” I wait for her to reach up, but she doesn’t. Instead, she sits like a statue, like she’s catatonic.

  “No,” she finally answers.

  “Okay,” I hold up my hands in surrender. Crossing the cabin, I peel a blanket from my bed and bring it to her. If she wants to lie on the floor all night and try to catch some z’s with her teeth chattering, then that’s on her.

  “Goodnight Abbie,” I walk away and climb into bed.

  It’s been a long day. Carrying her through the woods has been exhausting. I only hope she heals up well enough to get out of here soon. I glance down at the foot of my bed and watch as she settles down on the floor and pulls the blanket over her. Survival skills don’t exactly seem to be her strong point. Oh well, I’ve done enough for her for one night, if she wants to be stubborn, that’s not my problem.

  I let my eyelids droop closed. Now that I’m living here, my cabin flanked by nature’s protection, I never need to surround myself with pillows and pretend to be in a sniper’s blind anymore. I’ve been sleeping like a rock every night since I built this hidden place. I begin to drift into sleep when I hear a thump.

  My eyes snap open and I see Abbie hopping on one foot across the floor, dragging my blanket behind her. I have half a mind to give her a hand, but don’t want to jump up and startle her. She makes her way over to the side of the bed and I squeeze my eyes shut. I can hear her breathing as she watches me. I pretend to sleep peacefully and listen as she carefully slips into my bed and pulls the covers up over her.

  A smile spreads over my face as I let myself drift off into my dreams. I’m glad she finally came to her senses. Maybe there’s hope for her after all.

  9

  Abbie

  My eyes flutter open and it takes a couple of seconds of staring at the wood ceiling to remember where I am. I’ve heard about people waking up and being confused about where they are. Not just because they spent the night before drinking or going home with some one-night stand, but because they travel so much. Jet-setters and adventurers who aren’t sure what country they’re waking up in, let alone what bed.

  That’s never been my life. I’ve always started each predictable day in my predictable bed and lived my routine life until the sun predictably sets again. I’ve never woken up confused about where I was. Definitely not from traveling too much. Not even from drinking too much.

  This is a first.

  I pat the empty bed beside me. He’s gone. I sit up and tilt my head to the side as I try to listen for him. Did he leave? I’m surprised by how disappointed I am by the thought.

  My mind flickers to last night. The tender way he looked after me. Then, how like a man of his word, he didn’t try anything when I finally decided to lie down next to him rather than shivering on the floor. At one point, I did wake up to find him curled up to me with his arm draped over me, but it was innocent. If I’m being honest, I liked how it felt to lie in his strong arms. I felt safe. Ironic since he’s on the run for killing a man.

  I twist on the bed and let my legs dangle over the side. Carefully I put my feet on the ground and a shot of pain radiates through my ankle, reminding me to keep off of it. I place my weight on my good foot and hobble to the entrance of his little cabin, expecting to see him just outside.

  When I look out the window, I don’t see him, but I’m am overcome by an absolutely breathtaking view. Last night I could see the mountains and river below the scraggly cliff his cabin is perched beside. I’m greeted by the chirping of enthusiastic birds in the distance. But, besides them and the occasional rustling of wind in the trees, the silence is so peaceful.

  “Hello?” I call out, instantly cringing and hoping that Cecil isn’t wi
thin earshot of this camp. When I last saw him, he was knocked out on the forest floor looking like the perfect entree for a hungry bear. After the shit he pulled last night, I hope a bear did find him. Hopefully it just mauled his dick off. That’s what he would get for trying to use it like a weapon.

  A shiver runs over me as I rub my hands over my arms. Cole was right about the temperature here. Back in Texas, the start of June is already sweltering. Here, however, it’s gorgeous and sunny in the day and then still frigid after the sun sets. I remember reading up on the Yukon about how, by the end of this month, the sun stays up longer and longer until summer solstice when it circles around in the sky for twenty-four hours straight. They call it the land of the midnight sun. Though, I doubt I’ll be here long enough to see it. Then again, with my return plane ticket in the hands of an attempted rapist and any hopes of getting a paycheck dashed, I can’t help but wonder how I’ll leave.

  As I sit back down on the edge of the bed Cole has put together, I soak in my surroundings in detail. Last night, I couldn’t make out much in here. It was all shadows and blurs and the pain in my ankle made it hard to think about anything else. In the sunlight, however, I can see the sparse shelter that Cole has called home for months now. I slowly check out the room, impressed that he built all of this alone.

  He's definitely well stocked with supplies. My eyes trail over the shelf of stacked canned goods and the hunting gear against the other wall. My gaze drifts across the cabin to the end of the bed. I see a small stack of books. My curiosity is overwhelming. What could he be reading out here?

  Shuffling down the edge of the bed, I keep my weight off my foot as I get closer to the pile. As I lean over them, I can see that the top book isn’t a novel, it’s a journal.

  I guiltily look up to the door. Should I?