by Amber Burns
“I said,” she said quietly, pressing her lips close to his cheek. “Who. Are. You.”
His shoulders heaved up and down under her elbows, and he grunted slightly in pain.
“Let...me go,” he gasped, and she was shocked to feel a stab of guilt spread its way through her middle. She forced her elbows deeper into his shoulder.
“Tell me who you are.”
The stranger breathed out in anger, blowing the hair back from her face. Nina began to sweat with the effort of smashing her elbows so deeply into his chest.
“It doesn’t… matter who I am,” he said. “What matters is that we get the fuck outta here before it gets too late and the coyotes come out. So let me fucking go.”
Nina stared down at him appraisingly, not sure whether or not she ought to believe him. She squinted at him and drove her elbows even deeper into his shoulders.
“Holy fuck!” he cried, trying to swat her off, but she would not let him go.
She squeezed her eyes shut, the sweat pouring down her face in rivulets, her hair sticking to her forehead, her arms shaking as she forced the answer out of him.
“Who...are...you…” she gasped, pressing down so hard into his shoulders that he gagged slightly and her body trembled with the force.
“I’m Rowan! I’m Rowan! Holy shit I’m Rowan!” The stranger screamed.
Nina released her elbows and rolled off of him, gasping for breath, exhausted. The two of them lay like that for several long minutes, side by side in the complete darkness, gasping, panting, their bodies trembling with exertion. After a while, Rowan finally spoke.
“Is that how you normally meet people?” He asked, his voice flat and level.
Nina stared up at the heavy blackness. She felt herself almost smile.
“No,” she admitted, her chest still rising up and down, recovering from the rush.
“Oh,” Rowan said, rubbing his shoulders and wincing. “Well then. You certainly had me fooled.”
“Yeah,” Nina heard herself saying. “I thought it was pretty good. You know, for a first time attacking someone and all.” Her cheeks flushed the instant the words left her mouth. Attacking someone and all? What the hell, Nina?
Rowan emitted a rough, low sound that Nina thought might be a chuckle.
“Yeah. Well. My shoulders are going to hurt for probably about two days so, I would say, yes, red-haired forest wanderer, that was pretty damn fucking good for your first time… attacking someone, as you say.”
Nina felt her blush deepen. She pushed herself up off the ground and began to walk again. She heard a rustling that confirmed that Rowan had wrestled back to his feet, too.
“Hey,” he called, rooted to the spot as firmly as a tree. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going home.” She pushed onwards down the hill, slipping and grabbing at trees every few feet. The leaves were wet and cold under her bare feet, and she winced as she slid over a slice of jagged stone.
Rowan reached out and grabbed the back of her jacket, stopping her mid-slide.
“I don’t think that would work out for you too well,” he said gently. He carefully turned her around and grabbed her hand, guiding her back up the steep incline. “You’re about three hours of a walk from where I first found you, and I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that that locale is still lots and lots of miles away from whatever high class, city penthouse decked out in four million dollar paintings that you call home.” He dropped her hand and yawned, throwing his arms up towards the forest ceiling. “So,” he continued. “I would say that you’re best bet… in the case that you do not, in fact, wish to spend the rest of your night getting torn to pieces by vicious and starving coyotes or bears… is to follow me back to safety and then set out again tomorrow.”
Nina took a breath. She opened her pink lips to protest, but words failed her. She knew he was right. She was cold, starving, and flat out exhausted. The idea of sleep was suddenly so appealing to her that she felt she could likely curl up on this mud covered incline and fall into the most fulfilling and fitful rest of her life. But she would sooner risk being murdered by this frighteningly handsome stranger than she would risk ruining her hair by using a pile of animal excrement and rotting leaves as her bedtime pillow. She pulled in a shaking, dragging breath and stared ahead, up the incline, towards the place where Rowan’s voice had come from.
“Fine,” she said.
The word was short and tuneless, but its utterance pushed him forward suddenly and quickly again, like a sharp whip against a race horse’s flanks. She found them driving onwards, tackling the hill, and tumbling forward still, forward still, until she swore her legs would give out if she did not soon find a bed to call her own for the night.
“But only,” she gasped as they skidded down a rock overhang. “For the night.”
The forest suddenly disappeared. Small windows of light peered at them from the clearing ahead. Nina was blinded by the sudden brightness and staggered backward against Rowan, smacking her head against his hard, muscled chest.
“Woah there,” he said, his voice soft against her cheek. She shivered in spite of herself.
“Sorry,” she grumbled. “It is really fucking dark out here in…”
“In the middle of nowhere, yeah,” Rowan cut her off.
In the dimness of the forest night, she thought, for a moment, that she spied a half smile hanging onto his face. She blinked, and her eyes lost their hold on the details of his form. Nina bit her lip, pissed off at herself.
Come on Nina, you are in the middle of a fucking deserted forest with a strange guy in the middle of the night. There are more important things to worry about than whether or not this man is smiling at you. Like, oh, I don’t know, maybe whether or not he is a raving serial killer? That’s a good one.
“Take this,” Rowan said softly, and he pressed a sturdy wooden stick into Nina’s hand. His fingers were rough against her skin, he wore the flesh of a man who works hard, with his hands, each day and every day. Nina swallowed and wrapped her fingers tightly around the stick, gripping the wood with such intensity that her knuckles turned a sharp white. “Use it while you walk,” Rowan instructed, beginning to head up the trail again. “And it will help you feel where there are impasses in your way.”
Nina nearly scoffed out loud at this comment. Using a piece of a tree to guide herself through a darkened forest?! What was this, some sort of terrible discovery channel show? Yet, just a few moments of walking proved the true usefulness of the stick. The walking stick would bump into large stones or catch in the depths of holes that lay several feet ahead of Nina; it served to effectively protect her from treading a treacherous path. Within about twenty minutes, Nina had gotten the hang of maneuvering through the darkened forest, and all thanks to the assistance of the walking stick.
They continued on for several long, winding minutes. Rowan was leading the way, pressing through the brush almost blindly, as though he possessed some sort of innate, uncanny understanding of exactly where it was he must go. Nina picked her way more slowly, but forced herself never to fall more than a meter or so behind. She smacked the walking stick out in front of her like a desperate blind man, pulling herself forward and onward. The night air was cool and pleasant against her sweaty brow, and a gentle breeze whispered through the trees and played with her long, red hair. She found the silence uneasy; she was used to the rush of traffic screeching by her bedroom window as she slept, but the feeling of the wind kissing her skin was a surprising delicious sensation. In an entirely different situation, she thought, I might, like, kind of almost sort of like this.
Just as the thought crossed her mind, a high yipping sound began to bounce through the forest. Nina froze. She squinted through the dark curtains of night. The sound began to grow louder and louder; strange little barks that seemed to skip across the forest like stones across the water. She turned to Rowan.
“Rowan, what the hell is…”
“Be quiet,
” he quietly commanded.
In the shadows, she saw him raise a finger to his lips. His dark eyes were wide and alert. The yipping faded back into the night for a moment, and his tensed body seemed to relax.
“Alright,” he began, turning to meet Nina’s terrified gaze. “That is why I told you we had to get home quickly. Those yipping sounds are coyotes. The last thing we want is to be circled by them. Draws a lot of attention to us, which would not be the best thing, as I didn’t bring any spare bullets. But they seem to have decided to change courses now, so let’s just…”
The yipping sounded again, this time so close to Nina that she jumped and nearly lost hold of her walking stick. Beneath the constant, ear-piercing yip yip yip she was now able to hear the scuttling of tiny feet racing across the wet leaves of the forest floor.
“Shit,” Rowan said.
“What the fuck are we going to do?”
Nina felt her heart leap into overdrive, begin pounding out panic with speedful integrity. She clutched her hand to her breast, squeezing at her chest, trying to calm her anxiety. Rowan huffed and grabbed her roughly by the arm and yanked her off the path and into the brush.
“What are you doing!” she yelped, but he did not stop, nor did he respond.
His tattooed fingers curled tightly, meaningfully, around her wrist and he pulled her forward with urgency. She panted and tripped over her own feet, the foreign landscape catching at her clothes, tearing her remaining stiletto from her foot and sending her crashing down through the mass of wet leaves and reaching thorns. She stumbled and cried out, but Rowan’s grip did not slacken. He continued to run, and the momentum pulled Nina back upward and onto her feet again, tumbling forward through the tangled underbrush.
Twigs snagged her hair and tore at her skin as they sprinted blindly forward, and the ear piercing yip yip yip yip yip was their soundtrack as they crashed through the night. Nina’s heart was in her mouth, cold sweat dripping down her face and her breath hanging off her lips when they finally came to a stuttering stop. Rowan stopped suddenly and pulled her gently to his chest. He crouched, forcing her down to the ground with him. She spat out dirt, and his neck snapped her way, his eyes alert with danger. Even in the darkness, she could sense the message he was sending her with his eyes: Do not make a sound.
They crouched against the underbrush, a small sheet of cool rock shielding them from view. They stayed like that, chests heaving, panting, frozen beneath the ground and the intimidating darkness of the night, the all-concealing shadows of the forest; until they heard it again.
Nina’s grip on his arm tightened as the clacking sound of many pairs of sharp paws racing just feet away from where they sat fell upon the air. Rowan pressed a finger silently against his lips and huddled closer to her. The yip yip yips sounded again, and Nina flinched, tears pricking her eyes. The coyotes circled just on the other side of the face of the rock. She tucked her head down and against Rowan’s muscular chest. He placed his arms protectively around her and rested his solid jaw on top of her fiery mane of hair. His fingers worked their way around her shoulders, caressing her body comfortably, reassuringly. She felt a sudden sense of calm spread over her, and she squeezed her eyes shut. With each hurried breath, she took in the comforting smell of him, a combined scent of dirt, pine, fire, and mint. She exhaled slowly and felt his grip on her loosening. She opened her eyes just in time to watch Rowan leaning forward, standing up.
“They have gone,” he said quietly.
He extended a hand her way, and she grabbed it eagerly. He hefted her up easily, his strong arms popping with muscle as they worked to pull her to her feet. She swallowed and brushed leaves from her hair. He grinned, reached forward, and carefully plucked a long twig from behind her ear.
“Oh,” she said, for it was the only sound her trembling pink lips seemed to remember how to make.
Rowan dropped the twig to the forest floor and stared at her for a moment, his chest rising and falling. Then he stretched, throwing his arms above his head and tilting his bearded face back towards the tops of the trees. As he reached upwards, his shirt rose and Nina caught a glimpse of his chiseled stomach. A tattoo of a snake curled its way across his lower abs, its tail disappearing beneath the waist of his pants. She swallowed, feeling warmth blossoming in her center.
“Alright,” Rowan heaved, shaking his body out and running his tattooed fingers through his hair. “See,” he said, turning to Nina matter of factly. “These are the sorts of things that happen when we try to play the big hero out here.” He gestured to the vast expanse of dark and green that surrounded them. “This here? This is Nature. And she is a beautiful beast. She can be sweet, but the number one thing to always keep in mind is that she is in charge. The second we start thinking otherwise, the very moment we think that it is us, and not her, who’s got the upper hand… that is the very second that Nature decides to snap us out of it, teach us a lesson to remind us that she is the real master, and we are but tiny creations of her own.”
Rowan cleared his throat and leaned forward. He fished Nina’s walking stick off the ground; she had discarded it in her panicked tumble. He straightened up and extended it to her, his eyebrow arching up his face in a way that made Nina’s knees give out slightly. She grabbed the walking stick and gripped it, feeling woozy as he flashed her a half smile.
“Ready?” he asked.
Nina licked her lips, squeezed the walking stick, stared into the coal black eyes of this stranger. She let her green eyes fall down his form, catch the shape of his abs pressed against his shirt, observe the way his thighs trembled with muscle beneath the tight hug of his jeans. She looked back up at him and found that his own eyes wandered the expanse of her body. She cleared her throat, and he snapped back to attention, his dark pupils finding her own.
“I’m ready,” she responded.
“It is going to definitely take us longer now,” Rowan began, slowly starting to lead the way back up the incline they had tumbled and slid down in their race away from danger. “So get ready to hike. And I mean really hike. We have got a good couple hours ahead of us.” They took a few staggering steps upward, Nina struggling not to slip down the hill in her bare feet. Rowan turned suddenly and fixed her with a serious stare. “And I mean it when I say it’s gonna be hours,” he affirmed. “So it’s a good thing that I’m in good company.”
And with that, he turned and continued hiking upward, leaving Nina wondering whether or not he had truly meant the words he had just said. She ran the sound of his voice over and over again in her head as she pulled herself upwards, her muscles burning, her fingers cramping in the cool evening air, wondering, trying to understand, exactly what he had meant by the simple phrase. Was he simply making an innocent comment? Or could he have been hinting at something more?
On they journeyed until dawn began to whisper the promises of its arrival, spilling dusty purple light across the very tops of the trees. Nina rubbed her hand at her eyes, forcing them to remain open, shoving the sleep that clouded her view out of the way. When she dropped her hands tiredly from her eyes, she stopped short. Her jaw snapped open, and she shook her head. Was it a mirage? Could she be so exhausted and hungry that she was actually imagining seeing things? But no, she noticed that Rowan had turned to look at her, a large grin spreading across his face. In front of her stretched a cleared plot of land, and in the midst of it, a cabin. It was built expertly, polished log upon polished log, glass pane windows, vegetable garden stretching out before it like a welcome mat. A water spigot gleamed proudly in the early morning light, and horses whinnied in salutation to the dawning of a brand new day. Rowan dropped his walking stick and spread out his arms.
“This,” he smiled softly. “Is home.”
The sun cracked her yolk across the pastel palette of the sky and the daylight spilled over the man with the outstretched arms, tangling in his disheveled hair, glinting in his eyes. He tilted his head back and breathed in deeply, audibly, and it was as if every cell in his b
ody grew invigorated by this simple breath. Then he dropped his arms, opened his eyes, and looked to Nina.
“Well,” he said. “What do you think?”
Nina turned her gaze from the cabin to the muscled, disheveled man and promptly passed out.
4
“Are you alive?” A rough voice found Nina’s ears.
Light tickled the edges of her vision, and she stirred then awoke to a throbbing headache, pain radiating through her temples with alarming power.
“Holy fuck…” she grumbled, forcing herself to sit up. The room spun, and she immediately slammed her eyelids shut again. “Okay… what the actual hell…”
She breathed deeply and tried to use her hands to pull herself upwards and into a sitting position. Her fingers were shaking so badly that she could barely move her hands, let alone use them to support her body. With no other choice, she reluctantly crumpled back down into the pillows. Wait… pillows?
