The Savage Wild

by Roxie Noir

  “How do you know that?” she asks, and I tear my gaze away from Imogen, look at Melissa again.

  My girlfriend. In the cheerleader outfit, with the pouty lips and the skirt that barely covers the tops of her thighs. The one any red-blooded American male should be lusting after right now.

  “She told me,” I say.

  Melissa raises her eyebrows, and I shrug.

  “Dunno, we were studying, and it came up somehow,” I say. “Why, babe, you jealous?”

  I grin at her, knowing that it works. Knowing it always works, and it does, because Melissa rolls her eyes and scoffs.

  “Of course not, silly,” she says, putting her Diet Coke down on the table and playfully grabbing the front of my jersey. “Why, have I got something to be jealous of?”

  She sounds like she’s in a bad teen TV drama as she pulls me in, kisses me long and hard but chastely on the lips. Melissa tastes like marshmallows, like candy, and when she finally pulls back my lips are sticky with her gloss.

  I slide an arm around her, glance over her head again. There’s a flash of black disappearing around a corner, and then Imogen’s gone.

  Somehow, I feel even worse, even as I squeeze Melissa against my side, lower my face for another sticky candy kiss.

  “How could I look elsewhere when I’ve got you?” I ask her, our lips touching.

  There’s nothing there, just flesh against flesh, pressed together for the correct length of time to make it a kiss. Not like the conference table, on the biology handouts, lips and tongues and hands and fingers, panting for breath, wanting and needing blindly.

  Pressing Imogen against the wall before she left, getting just one final taste. Feeling completely helpless against the weird girl.

  “Hey!” a teacher’s voice shouts, and I disengage from Melissa to see Mr. Pike in full bulldog mode, charging over. “There is absolutely no PDA during school hours, you two!”

  Melissa giggles, hiding her mouth with one hand.

  “Sorry,” I say, and Mr. Pike huffs.

  “Next time, it’s detention for both of you,” he warns, shaking his finger at us.

  Chapter Twenty

  Imogen

  Present Day

  Wilder strikes a match and I think we both hold our breath as it flickers, nearly dies.

  Then catches, the pine needles going up in a quick whoosh. He shakes the match out, on his knees, carefully pokes the smaller branches into the pyramid he made. Gloves off, fingers delicate, the orange light flickering over his face and making him look somewhere between human and demonic.

  Accurate, I think. Given that Wilder Flint’s probably somewhere between human and demonic.

  Human because right now we’re sitting in a space between two huge boulders, their tops meeting over our heads, and I’m leaning against the rock with my bad ankle propped up on my pack. The moment we found this place Wilder basically ordered me to sit like this and not move, and for once I didn’t fight and just sat here, exhausted and in pain, while he found firewood.

  Demonic because of everything else, not least the kiss on the landslide scar today. I spent a long, long time trying to forget everything Wilder Flint ever did to me, both human and demonic, and maybe more than anything I hate that he’s right about when I started thinking about kissing him again.

  It was at the airport. It was watching him with that girl, wondering if she had any idea who I was or what Wilder and I were to each other. I’d bet a thousand dollars that that answer is no, and I don’t really have a thousand dollars to bet.

  The twigs are catching fire, slowly. All the wood here is at least a little damp, and getting it to catch is an exercise in patience and frustration. This is Wilder’s third try, after insisting that the only thing he wants right now is to not be freezing cold for ten minutes.

  I’ve got my doubts. I think the cold is bothering me a whole lot more than it’s bothering him, because even though we grew up in the same town, I’ve moved to Seattle. I’ve got a research position at the university there. My office has heat and air conditioning and so does my apartment. So does my car.

  I’ve got a feeling that his years as a naval pilot mean he’s a lot more accustomed to discomfort than I am.

  “It’s fine,” I say for at least the third time since he started trying to do this. “It’s not gonna help that much anyway.”

  Wilder ignores me, feeds it more sticks. I close my eyes and lean back against the rock behind me, the granite cold through my hat and hair against my head.

  “There!” I suddenly hear him say, and I open my eyes to see that one of the bigger sticks has caught, flaring bright and high in our makeshift cave. Wilder sits back, legs akimbo, shoves his hair out of his face and grins at me.

  “Third time’s the charm,” he says.

  I just shrug, staring into the fire. I feel like I’m in high school again, like he’s just kissed me in secret while he’s got the pretty girl on his arm, out in public. Even though everything is different now and I know that, this all feels familiar.

  Horribly, gut-wrenchingly familiar.

  “Imogen,” Wilder says slowly.

  He’s across the fire from me, staring into it and leaning against another part of the boulder, his elbows casually on his legs like he’s hanging out in someone’s basement, not lost in the wilderness.

  I just wait. I know there’s more coming.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally says.

  His eyes flick up to mine, and I have no idea what to say. Seconds pass and all I can do is blink, stare back at him.

  “What?” I finally say.

  He looks back into the fire.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again.

  “For what?” I ask, honestly curious. Not because there’s nothing to apologize for, but because there are so many things.

  “For everything.”

  I just wait.

  “For cheating on you with Melissa for months,” he says slowly. “For thinking that some popularity bullshit was important and for thinking that what anyone thought meant a damn thing.”

  I shift, staring into the fire, drawing my left leg under myself. For the first time in days — probably since I got on that plane in Solaris — I’m actually starting to feel the tiniest bit warm, and I lean in toward the fire, heat-seeking.

  “I thought you cheated on Melissa with me,” I point out. “She was your girlfriend. I was just the side piece.”

  He half-smiles, orange flickering over his face.

  “You’re the one I never lied to,” he says.

  “I wish you had.”

  “You’re the one I took out in my dad’s Mustang to the national forest,” he says, still talking half to me, half to the fire. “You’re the one who watched the northern lights with me that night. Melissa didn’t give a shit about that stuff.”

  “But you weren’t ashamed to be seen with her in public,” I point out.

  Silence from Wilder. We’ve never talked about this before, not even when everything ended in flames the way it did.

  “I was awkward and nerdy, not a leper,” I say.

  “Those were basically the same thing back then.”

  My back stiffens. What, now it’s my fault that he was a cheating asshole in high school? It’s my fault that he didn’t want anyone to know about us?

  “I don’t know if I forgive you,” I finally say.

  I look at the fire, not him. I keep my voice carefully neutral because I’m a little bit afraid that I’ll break down into messy, ugly tears. For days now I’ve been tired, I’ve been cold, I’ve been hungry, I’ve been in pain, and now Wilder is apologizing for half his bullshit, but it just doesn’t feel like I thought it would.

  I thought it would feel good, or at least better. I didn’t think it would feel like too little, too late, all that water already under the bridge and hundreds of miles downstream.

  “I didn’t think you would,” he says. “For the record, I’m also sorry about prom.”

  We fi
nally lock eyes over the fire, and suddenly it’s not water under the bridge any more. Suddenly I’m there, in the ballroom of the Granite Pointe Resort, and everyone is slowly turning to stare at me while Wilder’s up on a stage, his arm around Melissa, grinning.

  I don’t answer him. I’m not sure what to say, other than maybe you can never be sorry enough, but I think he gets it.

  “I did it, not her,” he goes on.

  “I know,” I say softly. “I always knew.”

  “I shouldn’t have.”

  I swallow hard, anger bubbling inside me because this is too little, too late about something I was hoping to never remember again. Something that scarred my life for years, and he thinks that a couple of words are going to fix it.

  “That’s how you apologize?” I ask softly, trying to overcome the lump in my throat at the memory. “Like it’s a side note? Like it’s just something that casually happened, and you were there for it instead of something you did to me?”

  “Maybe if the plane weren’t busted I could skywrite you an apology,” he says, a biting edge to his voice.

  “I trusted you and you chewed me up and spit me out!” I say, my heartbeat picking up.

  For years I’ve thought about everything I could say to Wilder now, the names I could call him, the ways I could make him feel like absolute scum of the earth, but of course it’s not working. Of course I’m just some nearly-crying hysterical girl who’s still upset about something that happened in high school.

  “You trusted me?” Wilder asks. “What the fuck for, Imogen?”

  “Don’t you dare try and make this my fault,” I say, fighting tears.

  “You’re the one who hooked up with me while I had a girlfriend.”

  “You’re the one who had a girlfriend!”

  “You liked it,” he says, his cadence descending into a snarl. “You liked keeping our dirty secret, and you liked seeing Melissa every day and knowing that you were getting everything she wasn’t. You liked hurting her without her even knowing about it.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I say, even though I know I’m lying. “I told her, didn’t I?”

  “And how’d that work out for you?”

  I stare at Wilder for a long, long time, trying to pull together a coherent thought that isn’t either sobbing or screaming. This all feels like a fresh wound, even worse than I thought it would, because I thought I could forget it, but it turns out I couldn’t.

  Not when he’s here, poking a stick into the sore spot.

  “It worked out to be a blessing in disguise,” I finally say, shifting my body and my foot again because I don’t want to look him in the eye. “I got out of that stupid hick town a year earlier than I thought I would. I got to college earlier than I thought. I got a jump start on my life away from that place and I haven’t had to look back.”

  “Good. I’m happy for you,” Wilder spits, and it’s obvious he’s not. He’s still angry about some slight or perceived slight or I don’t even know what, because I’m pretty sure I’m the one who had to leave, the one who never showed her face at Solaris High again.

  “Thank you,” I say, my voice hollow and stiff, ringing from the stone around us.

  There’s a long, long silence, and we both stare into the fire.

  I’m thinking of ten years ago: a phone call that was nearly impossible to make, the panic attack I had when it was over.

  The music cutting out suddenly at prom and the cruel smile on Wilder’s face, the PROM KING sash over his shoulder.

  And bolting through the doors, past the chaperones, out onto the melted slush of the late-spring ski slopes as my lungs screamed for air. Someone shouting my name behind me as I disappeared into the woods, feeling like I’d been stabbed through the heart.

  Ten Years Earlier

  I write paragraph after paragraph in my password-protected online diary about Wilder, the words spilling forth in some sort of horrible English diarrhea from my fingers. I’ve only got a handful of internet friends who read the thing, since it’s private, and most of them just comment with useless bullshit like he sucks or sweetie I’m sorry.

  Yeah, I’m sorry too. And yeah, Wilder sucks.

  I spend the weekend inside, working on a history essay that isn’t even due for two weeks, but I need something to do. Every time my mom looks at me she frowns a little deeper than usual, but I can barely see through the fog of my own hurt emotions to realize that she’s worried about me.

  Nope. Everything is pain, doom, and gloom. I write some poetry in my diary but delete it, because even I realize how awful it is.

  Sunday afternoon, there’s a knock on the front door of my house. My mom is humming to herself, clipping coupons at the kitchen table, my dad is watching golf on TV and my little brother is out somewhere, doing sports or something.

  My mom sighs, and my dad glances up.

  “I hope it’s not those Mormon boys again,” she says, her long skirt swishing as she walks. “I feel so bad telling them we’re not interested, they’re so nice.”

  I look back at the half-written paper on my computer and scowl. In my head, Napoleon’s started to look like Wilder Flint, and that’s making me take a somewhat biased approach to the subject matter.

  The door opens.

  “Oh, Wilder!” my mom says.

  Instantly, I feel like I’m going to throw up.

  “Imogen must have forgotten to tell me you were studying together today,” she says, all breezy and light. “Did you get your grades back yet on that test? I know she was worried about a few questions, and you know how she is, even though I’m always telling her not to stress.”

  We don’t have a study session. If we did I’d have canceled it, for sure, because we are never studying together again, and I hope he fails everything forever.

  “Not yet, Mrs. Gustavo,” Wilder says.

  My mom laughs.

  “Please, call me Krista,” she says lightly. “Mrs. Gustavo is my mother in law. Let me go grab Imogen, she must have her headphones on.”

  Quickly, I grab my headphones and jam them onto my ears so I can pretend like I’ve got an excuse for not greeting Wilder, then stare into my computer screen like I’m hypnotized.

  My bedroom door’s not even closed, and my mom knocks softly, standing in the doorway. I look up and she gestures at her ears for me to take the headphones off.

  “Wilder is here?” she asks, crossing her arms over her chest.

  I don’t move or say anything. I think I might throw up if I do, so I just stare at my mom like a deer in the headlights.

  “Look, sweetie, you know we’re happy for you to have your friends over to study, but you’ve gotta tell us when they’re coming. The poor boy is lucky I look decent today.”

  I have no idea why he’s here and I wish he wasn’t, I think, but I don’t say it out loud because then I’d have to explain way more to my mom and I just… can’t.

  “Sorry,” I say. I try to smile but my face refuses to cooperate, so I just stare at her.

  She frowns slightly, glancing at my desk.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “In the future just let us know, all right? Come on before your dad starts boring him with the time he almost made the Olympic Trials back in 1977.”

  I almost ask her to tell Wilder to leave, so I don’t have to see him, but I also know that that will only open a whole other line of inquiry on her part, so I save my essay and stand, feeling like my whole body is filled with bees made of lead.

  As I leave my room, I glance at the desk. My headphones aren’t even plugged in. Shit.

  My house is tiny, so in about five steps I’m down the hallway and Wilder is standing there, smiling like he hasn’t got a care in the world, hands in his jacket pockets.

  “Hey,” he says.

  My right foot kicks the back of my left and I stumble slightly, catching myself against the wall.

  “Hey,” I answer.

  We tell my parents that we’re going to the library to study. I take
my textbook and everything, my stomach clenched and locked as I get into Wilder’s shiny, brand-new Jeep and sit in the passenger seat staring straight ahead like I’m on my way to the electric chair.

  He doesn’t say anything as we drive past the library, past the hotel where we studied last time, past the driveway to his parents’ enormous house, past the edge of town. We reach a rutted dirt road turnoff with a huge NO TRESPASSING sign posted next to it, and Wilder just blows past it.

  Of course he does. Rules aren’t meant for him. Everyone here knows that. I’m just hoping that he’s not taking me down here to axe-murder me and dispose of my body, though I don’t think he’s smart enough to not get caught.

  I mean, my phone is on. Both my parents just watched me leave with him.

  We still don’t say anything. Both my hands are white-knuckled on my backpack, sitting stiffly on my lap as I watch the rocks and evergreens go past, the Jeep rattling from side to side. Finally, we get to a pool of water, granite-lined, a small waterfall running into it from one end.

  Wilder pulls up next to an outcropping, kills the engine, and turns to me. I stare back, hugging my backpack to my chest.

  “This is my secret spot,” he says, leaning back against the driver’s seat.

  I swallow. My mouth’s gone dry, and I glance around for a moment.

  “You bring Melissa here?” I ask.

  The words are out of my mouth before I even know it, and I feel my face go hot. I look away, at the waterfall, wondering how fast I could get back home if I just jumped out of the car right now.

  “I haven’t,” Wilder says. I can feel his eyes boring into the side of my face, and I look ahead, stonily, because I’m a little afraid I’ll freak out if I look at him. “Actually, I haven’t taken anyone out here.”

  I can’t help myself. I turn and look at him, but all I can see is him kissing her in the cafeteria, the smile on his face when he did. The way she curled her hand around the back of his neck and the way watching it felt like getting slapped in the face.