The Savage Wild

by Roxie Noir

“Bullshit that you’re still recovering?”

  “Bullshit that you’re taking the floor.”

  Imogen rolls her eyes, shoves her glasses up her face.

  “Look, the floor is colder, and it takes a couple of days to recover fully from a bout of hypothermia, especially if you’re—”

  “I don’t mind sharing.”

  Something flickers across her face, this moment of uncertainty that I don’t see, so much as I feel punch me in the gut. I want to shout I was inside you an hour ago, where the fuck was this then, but I swallow it and don’t. Imogen’s a deep lake, bottomless depths.

  I stand up, brushing myself off. I open the grate on the wood stove and fill it up with the wood that Imogen brought in while I was still sleeping earlier, make a mental note that if I can, it might be nice to chop some more wood for whoever owns this cabin.

  Then I remember the food situation. My stomach growls. I’ll have to fulfill my karmic duties some other way if we’re gonna walk out of here.

  Imogen stands, unsteady. She grabs the sleeping bag she was using, tosses it on the floor, straightens it out.

  I grab it and throw it on the single bed, followed by my own, and she crosses her arms, glares.

  I take her by the shoulders in the dim orange light, and for long seconds, I just look down at her.

  Imogen looks like hell. There’s no getting around that. We crash-landed a plane in the wilderness and then walked out for a couple of days. She’s listing slightly to one side, favoring her good ankle. She’s got deep purple circles under her brown eyes, the shadows of her glasses making them look worse. There’s dirt and leaves and twigs stuck in her hair, which is back in some kind of messy bun.

  She’s got dirt on her face, scratches on her neck. Her jaw clenches as she looks back up at me, waiting for whatever I’m about to do but I don’t know what I’m about to do.

  Yes, I do.

  I kiss her.

  I kiss Imogen with no excuse, no ulterior motive, no impulsive adrenaline rush. I kiss her because I want my lips on hers and that’s all I want, to kiss her and have her kiss me back.

  She does. Soft and gentle this time, like we’re being careful. Like we’re doing this for the first time even though it’s anything but, like we suddenly have everything to lose.

  I turn my head, put my hand against her face like she’s a bird that could fly away. Her skin’s warm under my fingertips and I swear she leans into me slightly as I stroke my thumb along her cheekbone.

  Our lips separate but we don’t move apart, our faces still touching. Hesitantly, she puts her hand to my face, her eyes closed like she’s blind and trying to find out who I am.

  “Imogen,” I whisper. “What are you afraid of?”

  “That I haven’t learned a thing from my mistakes,” she murmurs. “That I’m doomed to repeat the same pattern forever and never break out of this stupid cycle that led me back to you.”

  “This is different,” I whisper. “I swear this is different.”

  Imogen doesn’t say anything, just presses her lips to mine again. I don’t know if it means that she believes me, or she just wants me to shut up, but it works and I go quiet.

  “C’mon,” I murmur when we separate again. “It makes more sense to share body heat.”

  She doesn’t answer right away, just leans her head against my shoulder, turning her face in toward my neck as I slide my arms around her and she lets herself relax into me.

  “All right,” she finally says. “Try not to kick me too much.”

  The bed’s not very big — maybe smaller than a twin bed, I’ve got nothing for comparison — but for the first time ever Imogen falls asleep in my arms, and I let myself be rocked gently on the waves of her breathing.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Imogen

  Ten Years Ago

  “Oh my God, did you see him trip over the curb the other day and just sprawl on the sidewalk? Peyton said that when all his textbooks fell out of his bag there were also a bunch of drawings of naked elf women, like with pointy ears and everything.”

  Jessica, the blonde siting at the desk right in front of Melissa, giggle-gasps.

  “Of course he gets off on pointy ears,” she whispers back. “He’s such a weirdo, remember the time he wore a suit to school to ask that girl Diane to Homecoming?”

  “Peyton said the drawings all had Diane’s face,” Melissa confides, leaning forward over her desk. “Like, all these naked elf girls, all with her face, kind of.”

  “Ew.”

  “I know, right?”

  I’m sitting one row over, pouring all my concentration into the shapeless doodle I’m making, lines in circles in triangles in lines. My face is slowly going bright red, because they’re talking about my friend Pete.

  Pete’s a nice guy. He’s not weird, just awkward, but he’s friendly and smart and kind of funny when he relaxes, and he volunteers with Habitat for Humanity every summer.

  And he does not have weird elf-girl naked drawings of Diane. At least I don’t think he does, but who cares? He’s not hurting anyone.

  “We should steal one and put it up on Facebook,” Melissa says.

  Jessica giggles, and I just turn brighter red, even though I don’t dare say a single thing.

  I just think about how I spent last weekend. Midterms are coming up, so Wilder told Melissa that he really needed to study or he’d get kicked off the football team, and then he drove me in his dad’s Mustang to this amazing view, out in the national forest.

  Not that I saw a ton of the view. I mostly saw the back seat of the Mustang, because I recently discovered reverse cowgirl and wanted to see if it could be done in a car.

  You know, for science.

  For the record, doggie style can also be done in the back seat of a Mustang.

  And this, right here — Melissa spreading rumors and lies about people who aren’t cool enough for her, no matter that they’re good people — is why I don’t really feel bad about sneaking around behind her back with her boyfriend.

  If I’m being really, really honest with myself, I kind of like it. She’s famously saving herself for marriage, something that she brings up constantly and obnoxiously, like that simple fact makes her Princess of the World and everyone else is her sinning, dirty peon.

  She’s the one people look at, the one they get judgy about. People spread rumors about the stuff she does with guys — for example, the one that she lets Wilder put it in her butt only — and leave me out of it.

  I get jealous. Every single time I walk past them holding hands or kissing in the cafeteria or when I got the voting ballot for Prom King and Queen, I get jealous. When I see the pictures of them on Facebook looking cute out on a date somewhere, when she posted the flowers and candy he gave her on Valentine’s Day, I got jealous.

  Even though I got something way better than shitty chocolates and roses that’ll just die.

  But it’s hard to stay jealous when he calls me midweek, begs me to meet him at the resort and bring my swimsuit. Hard to stay jealous when he sneaks me off to the spot where the butterflies are migrating, and really hard to stay jealous when he asks me, straight-faced, if I’ve ever come twice in a row.

  For the record, the answer is now yes.

  I know it’s immoral or whatever, but I have a hard time caring. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but I’m pretty sure that all that is relative and there’s no heaven or hell anyway.

  “Hey,” a voice says behind me.

  I jump about a mile, dropping my Calculus textbook into my locker with a loud thud and whirling around.

  Melissa’s right behind me, one hip cocked, both her hands holding her backpack straps.

  Oh shit she knows oh fuck—

  “It’s Imogen, right?” she says, her forehead crinkling ever so slightly.

  I swallow, my mouth dry.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Listen, Wilder’s my boyfriend—”

  Oh God oh God oh God—

 
; “—And he was telling me that you’ve been helping him study for biology lately?”

  I nod mutely.

  —Oh God oh God—

  “And so, like, he was telling me that you’re really helpful and his grades in bio have gone way up so he can stay on the football team? And you’re really good at explaining stuff?”

  My heart’s still thumping, beating nearly out of my chest.

  “Uh huh?” is all I can muster, still certain that in the next second she’s going to accuse me of exactly what I’ve been doing.

  “I’m like, failing English?” she says, her blue eyes going wide and worried. “And I can’t be head cheerleader any more if I don’t keep my GPA up, and that’s like really important because otherwise I can’t go to the University of Arizona and that’s like really really important to me, so I was wondering if you could help me?”

  I wait, but she doesn’t say anything else.

  For a long moment I’m wide-eyed and open mouthed, and then it finally hits me.

  This has nothing to do with Wilder.

  This has nothing to do with last weekend in the back of his dad’s Mustang or the weekend before that in the hot tub or the weekend before that—

  I swallow, blink, make myself smile.

  “Sure,” I say. “When are you free?”

  Melissa taps a pen against her English notebook, then against her pink lips, her mouth forming a perfect little O as she frowns, looking down at what she’s written.

  “Wait,” she says, slowly. “The priest is the little girl’s father?”

  “Right,” I confirm, even though he’s technically not a priest, just a preacher.

  Her eyes go wide.

  “Oh,” she says softly. “But she could have totally said something, right? And then he’d be banished from society too because that’s also adultery, when you sleep with a married woman even if you think her husband is dead?”

  “Well, that’s sort of the point,” I tell Melissa, grabbing a handful of popcorn from the bowl her mom brought us earlier. “She’s kinda letting him hang himself here, that’s the whole reason he dies at the end, because of the guilt or something.”

  “But he could have told someone.”

  “Mhm,” I confirm, crunching the popcorn.

  “Huh,” she says reflectively. “So… okay, I think I get it. I think I’m gonna write the paper about that, about how like, sometimes guilt is the worst punishment there is because it can really eat you alive.”

  I look at the popcorn, not Melissa, my stomach shuddering in nervous little waves, because even though I’m 99% sure she’s just struggling with the themes of The Scarlet Letter, maybe she’s secretly telling me that she knows about me and Wilder, that she knows that every time I see her I feel a little guiltier about the situation, a little more like sooner or later she’s going to get her heart really really broken and it’ll be my fault.

  “I think that’s a great essay topic,” I say, talking more to the popcorn than to her.

  Melissa sighs dramatically.

  “Thank you so much for helping me with all this,” she says. “I had such a hard time with this book, it’s written so old-fashioned and stuff, and I know this is gonna sound dumb, but I honestly wasn’t even quite sure who the little girl’s father was.”

  I chew on the popcorn, kind of unsure what to say because I’m starting to feel really bad for Melissa. It’s true that she’s not the smartest person I’ve ever met, but it’s also true that there’s not a single person in her life who seems to expect her to be anything other than a pretty idiot.

  Her dad barely notices that she exists. Her mom’s an obvious trophy wife, a good fifteen years younger than her husband who plays the clueless, helpless housewife role to a T. I’m pretty sure that when my parents were giving me lab sets and taking me on a road trip to Wyoming so I could see the dinosaur skeletons, hers were entering her in beauty pageants.

  Also, I think she might be dyslexic or something. God knows I’m not an expert, but she picks things up pretty quick when she hears them. It’s her reading comprehension that’s total shit, but it seems like everyone’s just assumed she’s dumb this whole time.

  “No problem,” I say, pulling one foot in and sitting cross-legged on the couch in her parents’ den, my own notebook still in my lap. “It’s a weird old book, and a lot of the stuff doesn’t actually make sense, like the one guy dies of guilt.”

  She smiles at me and laughs a little, a nice, pleasant laugh, and I laugh too. Melissa’s still the girl who spread the rumor that I made out with my younger brother and that my friend draws elf-girl porn, but I get the impression that she just… thinks that’s what she’s supposed to do. There’s not much real malice behind it.

  Her phone buzzes, and she grabs it, biting her lip.

  Then she puts her thumb between her teeth, smiling secretly to herself.

  “Sorry,” she says, batting her eyelashes at me. “It’s Wilder, he wants to know if I can come to dinner at his parents’ house Friday night.”

  I swallow my jealousy and look at the blank TV across the room. I’ve never even met his parents, let alone had dinner with them. I’m not that girl to him, the sweet, charming, dumb one who can say the right things and bat her eyelashes the right way and be pretty on his arm.

  No, I’m just the girl he fucks in the back seat of a car. Since I got to know Melissa better it’s been harder and harder to take pleasure in being her boyfriend’s secret lover, and the whole thing just feels… bad.

  “Cool,” I tell her, even though I think it’s anything but.

  “Did I tell you about the present he got me for our six-month anniversary?” she gushes, texting away, giggling to herself. “It’s a Build-A-Bear! He had to go all the way to Spokane.”

  “Wow,” I say, my voice plastic and brittle in my ears. Spokane’s a two-hour drive, one way, and even though I couldn’t care less about an ugly stuffed bear I’m jealous of the drive, of the effort, of the fact that now she gets to parade this stupid thing around in front of everyone and all I get is to be his secret side piece.

  My grandmother once told me that men would never buy the cow if they got the milk for free. I was eleven, so I didn’t really get what she meant, not to mention that my mom overheard and instantly admonished her for putting sexist notions like that into my head, but maybe this is what she meant.

  I’m the milk, and Melissa’s the cow. And only cows get stuffed bears.

  “Okay, sorry,” she says, enthusiasm practically bubbling over. “I love Mrs. Flint’s spaghetti! Do you want some Diet Coke? I think I’m gonna go get myself one.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Wilder

  Present Day

  I wake up on my back, one arm around Imogen, her leg draped over mine and her hair everywhere, taking over the whole pillow. We’re buried under both sleeping bags, and the wood stove has pretty much gone out, the morning freezing cold.

  I don’t move. I’m barely awake myself, and even though I feel like I just slept for the first time in a week, I want to stay here a few more minutes while she’s asleep.

  Like this, she’s warm and soft and trusting. Like this, she doesn’t remember all the shit that I did to her, shit that she didn’t deserve just because I wanted to feed my ego. Shit I did purely because I was the high school big shot, the golden boy, and I could get away with it.

  Slowly, I turn my neck. I put my lips to Imogen’s forehead slowly, softly, so carefully that she doesn’t even stir.

  My clothes still aren’t completely dry and her ankle’s not much better, so I talk her into staying at the cabin for another day. She’s all for me taping her up and hobbling out into the woods, but I tell her that if I wear my clothes the way they are, I’ll die of hypothermia.

  That’s what gets her.

  We go through the plastic bins, quietly apologizing to whoever’s stuff we’re messing up. I find some galoshes — camouflage print, of course, apparently the cabin’s owner doesn’t
own anything else — and I go outside, grab more wood from the giant pile outside.

  Somewhere toward the bottom of the bin pile, Imogen finds a case of canned chili, and when I get back she waves one at me.

  “I saved us from eating bunny,” she says, holding one out.

  I examine the thing. It expired a couple of months ago, but does canned food really expire?

  “We can still have bunny dinner if it’s what you really want,” I tease, tossing the can in my hand. “Just give me the word and I’ll be back with the cutest, fluffiest critter I can find.”

  Imogen just scrunches her nose.

  “I’ve got a surprisingly fond recollection of you showing no mercy in biology lab,” I say.

  “Those animals were already dead,” she says, a smile playing around her lips. “Killing something is harder, trust me.”

  I raise one eyebrow.

  “I’ve killed some experimental mice in my time,” she says. “It wasn’t much fun.”

  “If I catch a bunny I’ll let you kill it, then,” I agree.

  She shoves her glasses up her face, takes the can back from me.

  “My point is, now we don’t have to,” she says. “Did you find cooking stuff anywhere in here? I think we can just put a pot on top of the wood stove and we’ll be good to cook this… stuff.”

  There’s strangely little to do when you’re lost in the wilderness, in some hunter’s cabin while you wait for your stuff to dry and your ankle to heal, and we mostly end up talking. Imogen tells me about Stanford and Seattle, about her life since the last time we saw each other. She doesn’t say it out loud but it’s obvious that leaving Solaris was the best thing she ever did for herself, that a small town in the middle of nowhere, Idaho, wasn’t for her.

  She tells me about the drama in the department while she was getting her Master’s degree, and how all the politics are the reason she’s not sure if she wants a PhD or not.