by Katie Cross
The words escaped me before I could stop them, and once they broke free, I couldn't pull them back. I held my breath when a startled expression crossed his face. An interminable seven seconds passed while he considered his response. What would he say to such an audacious question after all I had—and hadn't—done the past three years?
Trust was not something either of us had earned.
Not lately.
"I want to," he whispered with a heavy frown. His eyes met mine, then dropped. "I want to."
"You don't?"
The question came out of me in a dying whisper. It slipped free with a quick stab in the heart as it passed. Of course, he didn't trust me. Why should that surprise me? It did surprise me—more than I would have ever admitted.
He ran a hand through his hair and turned away. I opened my mouth to say something else, but clamped it shut again. Wasn't his answer enough? I closed my burning eyes and stumbled a few steps away.
This wasn't our first disagreement. We had them all the time in high school. Some of them days long because neither of us would back down. One had lasted a week. We didn't speak to each other at all.
I'd never had this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not then. Because then I knew that if he was angry at me, it would be fine. Dev always came back. Emotions were just emotions. Back then, boxes didn’t exist and Mama didn’t whisper to me from the depths of the grave. Now, I knew differently.
Men leave.
Love dies.
You take care of yourself.
They always leave, Mama whispered now and I didn't have the energy to shove her into the back of my mind where she belonged.
Emotions weren't just emotions. They were tidal pools deep enough to drown in. They were miasmas. Places to lose yourself. Things that swept you away on a current you never asked for. Emotions were better left boxed up because left to their own accord, they wreaked havoc.
My nostrils flared in a poor attempt to control the boxes. On their own, they started to unpack, spilling frustration, annoyance, fear, and panic. The chaos flooded my mind all at once and occupied most of my mental thoughts. Slowly, one at a time, I reigned them back in. Tucked them into their rightful places until I had a better grip on . . . everything.
Go back, I told them. Not now. Not. Now.
Minutes passed while I got myself back under control. Eventually, I could judge my decision to sleep first through a different lens. Was it wrong to suggest we stay here? No, that plan was best. We'd only lose ourselves even more at night and risk another injury.
Devin had wandered close to the creek to drink and brood and stare at the rocks as if they held all the answers in their gray depths. Thick trees and bracken surrounded us until I spotted a place where I could clear out a hollow beneath quakies and have a spot to hide. Whether I hid from Steve, Kimball, or Devin, I didn't know anymore. Regardless, tonight would be a cold night. The chill already brought goosebumps to my arms. I felt so tired, however, that the cold may not matter.
With trembling, weary hands, I cleared out a place to lay down beneath a grove of saplings. Thick bushes cluttered their roots with foliage that created a little canopy. Two trunks rested against my back and provided a morsel of safety. Something firm behind me and close overhead felt like a wild cocoon, though still not as solid as Devin's arms.
Devin didn't return to the spot where we'd stopped or follow me. He just stood near the stream like an immobile statue. Had I pushed him back into an episode? I almost crawled out of my wooded nook, but I stopped. Not yet. He needed time.
We both needed time.
I lay on my side and watched his silhouette through the leaves. A thick darkness fell, bringing the quiet hum of nightlife. Singing bugs. Rustling wings. The distant tinkle of the brook. One muscle at a time, my body began to relax. Memories of our other fights passed through my mind. They were so long ago, the origins of the fights eluded me. None of them stuck in my head, which meant none of them mattered.
Except for one thing.
Devin had always initiated the apology. Even when I tried to get there first, somehow he beat me to the punch. After a disagreement over something when we were sixteen, he showed up with three pink roses just as I left to apologize at his house. He'd bummed a ride from a friend and beat me to it.
Do you trust me? I had asked.
I want to.
Sleep would be a long time coming.
18
Devin
How had I messed things up already?
The moment I snapped at her, I regretted it. The flare of fire in her eyes told me I'd crossed a line. Certainly not my first time making her angry, but when I'd done so before, it hadn't been this scary. High school Ellie had a temper, to be sure. But high school Ellie hadn't yet proven just how stubborn she could be.
Three-years-without-talking-stubborn carried a lot of weight behind it.
The thought that I may have just destroyed everything I came back to accomplish barreled through my mind. Ellie had cut me off before. She'd turned her back to me at prom and never once looked back. She didn't show up to my farewell dinner and managed to be out of town when I made it home.
Maybe I shouldn't have been so vague when I responded to the question of whether I trusted her or not. I could have reassured her that I did, that things were fine. I dismissed that thought as soon as it came. No, we both needed and deserved the truth. It had to be said. How could I expect her to trust me if I didn't tell the absolute truth anyway?
While I felt I bore most of the responsibility between what had happened with us lately, she had skin in this trust game too. She was the one who never gave me a chance to explain. Who worked hard for three years to avoid me. The only way any connection had happened again was because I surprised everyone.
That kind of avoidance determination scared the hell out of me.
My mind wandered back to my original purpose for coming home in the first place: to tell Ellie the truth. Never again would I walk into another deployment or day without Ellie knowing that I had loved her all my life.
But now that I tried to do the right thing, I realized that it wasn't so easy. I'd come out here with a heroic determination to have it said . . . but life seemed to thwart my every attempt.
Really, there may never be a "right" time to tell Ellie that I loved her. Maybe my hidden feelings for her would be the great secret of my life. The unexplored trail I would never conquer. Ellie would be the one that got away.
If I didn't tell her, we could eventually grow apart as friends and into her category of acquaintances. That process had already started, anyway. Might not be hard to finish. If I did tell her how strongly I felt, it might frighten her away forever, too. If I never meant that much to her, could she really be that for me?
The question haunted me sometimes. Especially when I realized those bleak Afghani nights, and how the hope of reuniting with her had carried me through.
Second only to that was the concern over her massive, hulking, unscalable mental walls. Everything she felt remained locked down so tight, I wasn't sure what she really thought. Did she even know?
My eyes closed on that question, and I wished I could open them onto a different scenario. Besides, she was right. I was too tired to make a wise decision, and the decision of what to do and where to go next needed to be a wise one.
We needed food. We were lucky to have as much hydration as we did today, now we had to make the most of it somehow. Stars popped out overhead. I shifted, my body tight with tension and fatigue. My stomach growled in protest again, and I dreamed of a steamy, hot shower. That thought, tangled so closely with my argument with Ellie, led my mind down different paths that I had to shut down.
I sighed, then turned to leave. Her voice stopped me in my tracks.
"I'm sorry."
I froze.
"I'm sorry that I snapped at you tonight," she continued quickly. "I think we're both tired. I'm sorry that we don't know where we are. I . . ." She let out a long b
reath. "I'm sorry that I've lost your trust. It's deserved. I . . . abandoned you right when you needed me the most."
She nearly choked on the words, and so did I. We hadn't faced each other yet, which seemed to make all of this a little easier. A tension deep, deep inside that I didn't know that I held onto released.
"You gave me a chance to tell you what my life was like when we parted." She exhaled softly. "Now I want you to tell me what it was like for you."
Had I ever expected to have this opportunity? To talk about my side of the last three years felt like a luxury. I'd been so focused on Ellie that I hadn't thought much of myself. Maybe that was part of our problem.
In fact, I wasn't even sure she'd see this situation the same way as me or if she'd see blame in herself. She had, though. Openly admitted she had been wrong too, which went a long way in repairing some of that broken trust.
Did I want this opportunity to be wholly truthful with her now?
A little bit, as frightening as it was.
In the days that followed prom, I'd oscillated through every emotion. Mostly, I just tried to stem the rage. I'd been frustrated that she ignored me, then stressed that she'd keep ignoring me. Anxiety over what it meant to be without Ellie in the world kept me up at night. Terror that we'd never reconcile or reunite haunted me during the day.
All the emotions had been a rolling, jumbled ball deep in my gut that I didn't untangle for years. Now it sat inside me like a heavy weight that I didn't realize I'd been carrying all this time.
Silence had fallen without me realizing it. So had nighttime. When I turned to face her, the dark made it almost impossible to see her features. Only a bright sliver of moon overhead set a gentle glow on her hair and brow.
"I thought a part of me had died," I said.
Her face fell.
"And I think it did. I felt betrayed by your silence. I knew if I could just explain my decision then you'd get it. You'd have totally understood and we could put all of that behind us. I wouldn't have had to go alone into that new world."
For a moment, I paused. Did I want her to feel the full weight? The words came fast once I let them flow. If I let them go, she'd know exactly how much it had sucked.
Yes.
We needed to do this.
"Although I never would have admitted it," I continued, "I was terrified. Freaking out inside. I wrote you letters, but it never felt right to explain it that way. Plus, I didn't think you'd read them."
Her eyes closed, her thick eyelashes a shadow against her porcelain skin. "I would have burned them, probably," she admitted softly.
The truth stung. I took a moment to process the intensity of her admission, and kept going with mine.
"When I did come home, you were gone. It sucked. Felt like you'd just abandoned everything we had experienced before for one single, fateful decision. I . . . I was scared by how intensely and how quickly you shut me out. How completely it happened. There was no forgiveness in your actions. None. For so long I felt like I would have never measured up to you anyway, so maybe that was the best path. Even now, I . . ."
Although I didn't want to admit it out loud, I couldn't help but say it. The words came out.
"Even now, I wonder if you'll ever fully let it go. And if I don't trust you, it's because, at any moment, you could decide to shut me out again. I won’t live those three years again, Ellie. And, to be honest, until you asked, I hadn't realized just how deep my fear of this happening again went. It's sort of new to me, too."
My own words cast a bleak pall on the night. Not for the first time, I wondered if there was any hope for us. Yes, I could trust her as a friend. Someone to catch up with when I returned to town. Someone held at arms length and consulted for the big times in my life.
Could we go back to the Devin and Ellie that lived and thrived in the details?
We had been strong because of the depth of our affection and trust. Now it had been shattered—on both parts—and the pieces seemed overwhelmingly too small to gather back together.
Only when my thoughts slowed did I realize that she'd made no response and several minutes had passed. She stood a few steps away, eyes luminescent in the moonlight as she swallowed back something.
"I went to your dinner," she whispered.
"What?"
"I watched the entire farewell dinner from the trees outside your property."
My heart sank further into my stomach. Back on that terrible day when I had to smile, act grateful, and pretend I wasn't dying inside, I couldn't believe she didn't show up. Some pipe dream of her appearing in the backyard with a wary, but apologetic, smile had kept me going. The shattered feeling after she didn't show up felt like drowning.
"You were there?" I asked.
She nodded.
I'd even considered the possibility that she might watch from somewhere else. Where else would she go but wild places? I should have looked for her. Maybe I could have just shouted it to her then. Told her everything. Blurted it out quickly so that . . .
No. It wouldn't have mattered.
When had Ellie ever allowed herself to be pinned down?
"The whole dinner," she continued with a thick voice. "I couldn't take my eyes off of it. And I couldn't bring myself to walk into that barbeque and tell you to be safe, even though I wanted to. I've hated myself for it for the past three years."
"Why didn't you come?"
She hesitated, lips parted. "B-because," she stammered. "I . . . I thought that I . . . I had always . . . After prom, I felt . . ." Her nostrils flared and her gaze dropped. "I lost my courage."
The feeling that Ellie had something else to say rattled me, but I couldn't fathom what it would have been. And I wanted to understand, because it felt like the real answer lingered in her words.
Ellie never just lost her courage.
I mulled over what she said for several long moments. History would never be erased. Certainly not by hashing it out like this and torturing ourselves with what we could have said or did. But there was some comfort in the truth. Regardless of what happened, she'd given me a chance to say my piece, and that meant a lot.
"Thank you," I said. "Thank you for letting me say it and for listening."
She frowned. "Why are you thanking me? I . . . I should have come. I mean, I get why you don't trust me. It's . . . it's fair."
"I wish you would have come. It does help to know that you did come, just not the way I wanted you to."
Ellie wrapped her arms around her middle with a frown. Both of us made concessions tonight after a long and grisly day. The time for emotions had passed. Pragmatism was ready for her spotlight.
"It's getting cold," I said. "We're sweaty and disgusting and probably smell like a bunch of nasty bears, but at least we're not alone, right?"
A hint of a smile played on her face. "You always smelled like this, Dev. I don't know what you're talking about."
I hooked an arm around her neck and reeled her in. "You like it, do you? C'mere. I'll give you a big whiff of it."
Her weak attempts to shove me off told me she wasn't really upset. She sobered when I pulled away, the lines between her eyes thickening.
"Maybe Daniel will be concerned," she said. "I normally check in via satellite text message every night. This will be the second night he hasn't heard from me."
"Can he track your location?"
She nodded. “My phone and radio are with my pack, though.”
I shrugged. "Maybe. Doesn't change the fact that we have another night in the mountains, we're hungry, we're tired, our stream is dwindling, and we need to get some sleep. In other words, it's cuddle time."
A weary smile replaced the vague uncertainty in her gaze. She tugged me to a cozy little spot under quaking aspens and bushes. Spiny branches dug into my sides and back when I slithered inside, then pulled her back to my chest. We hid in the foliage where the lack of exposure might help us sleep better.
With Ellie in my arms again, I dropped into sleep.
/>
The next morning, a bird fluttered through the branches overhead with a high-pitched squawk that brought me firmly out of a dead sleep.
With a groan, I stirred myself awake. I lay on my back, a rock jutting into my ribs. My right arm had fallen asleep where Ellie lay on it. She curled into my side as much as possible, her body tucked into my arm. The fan of her eyelashes opened against my neck with a gentle tickle.
Joe's repeated slamming into me, and a few well-placed punches, still kept me sore now. My stomach simmered angrily, sharp with hunger. I shoved away thoughts of breakfast burritos. Ellie untangled herself from my arm, her hair tumbling onto her shoulders as she surveyed our area through sleepy eyes. Early dawn unfolded around us a crisp, cool scent. We'd ended the day on a high, emotional level, but the cobwebs had cleared overnight.
"Sleep okay?" she asked.
I nodded blearily and rubbed the sleep from my eyes with the heel of my hand. "Yeah. You?"
She nodded. "Thanks for keeping me warm."
I gave her a roguish grin reminiscent of our high school days. "Anytime you need a man to snuggle, you know where I am."
She disappeared into the forest after a quick whack on my shoulder. I staggered over to the stream while my body attempted to wake up, and stared into the sky with a less emotion-cluttered mind.
Ellie had been right to stop us from making decisions while so tired, even if it had been frustrating. Now that morning had come, another plan hatched in my mind and unfolded slowly. When Ellie returned, her hair had been slicked with water and twisted into a braid that lay on her shoulder. She looked a little less disheveled, but her eyes were still bright.
"Thank you," I said. "Not deciding last night was the right thing to do."
Her lips quirked a little. "I know."
Her arrogant wink sent my heart into a whirl. If she did that too much, I'd kiss the breath right out of her, and then where would we be?
