Goode Vibrations

by Jasinda Wilder

  Eventually we found ourselves passing through a middling-sized town with a few decent places to get a real meal, and with only a minor amount of good-natured squabbling over fast food versus sit down, we ended up at a sit-down place eating burgers and fries and drinking sweetened iced tea, which Errol had never had before and found bizarre but good, in an eye-wateringly sweet sort of way.

  “It’s like a fizzy, without the fizz,” was his remark.

  “Fizzy?”

  “Soft drink. Soda.”

  “Oh.” I laughed. “You have funny terms for everything.”

  “Only funny to you because you’re not from New Zealand,” he said. “And honestly, I’m rarely in New Zealand these days, so I don’t really use all the latest slang, plus traveling abroad like I do, the accent is fine but I gotta be understood by people for whom English is a second or third or fourth language. So I can’t really say things like what time is brekkie and how much are those sunnies and are you here visiting your rellies, and chur bro let’s bowl round the pub for a piss up…it kinda makes communication harder, so I try to drop the lingo and use basic English. Sometimes an old word will slip through, especially now that I’m in America and most people can sort out what I mean.”

  I wasn’t going to tell him that I found the slang fucking adorable and hysterical at the same time, in a highly arousing sort of way. But then, what about him didn’t I find attractive? Not a damn thing. The way he drove was sexy, the way he slid his fingers through his hair was sexy, the way he talked was sexy, the way he looked at me was sexy…

  He was just…sexy. But not in a trying too hard way. He was cool, smooth, easy to talk to, a good listener. He rode a very fine line between arrogant and confident, and the ability to straddle that line was, in some ways, the sexiest thing about him. I mean, yeah, everyone knows we women find confidence sexy but outright arrogance a turn-off. A man who can fit somewhere in between? A unicorn, as far as I’m concerned. And, so far, Errol seemed to be a unicorn with the biggest sparkliest horn of them all.

  No, I don’t mean that horn, but if he was as hung as the rest of him was sexy? Ooh lordy.

  Question was how and when it would happen. I didn’t want to seem too thirsty, or so easy you can doink me with a little grin and a wink of those blue-blue eyes.

  But then, I’m just not into games. I want someone, I’m not gonna drag it out for funsies. I want you, you want me, we’re both adults so let’s just have some fun and be mature about it.

  Simple.

  I knew he’d be game—I saw the way he was looking at me. The way his eyes flicked from the road to my boobs when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. I wondered if he’d make the move, or if I’d have to drop the obvious hints, like shoving my hand down his pants.

  Afternoon turned to evening, and sunset found us rumbling down a dirt track somewhere just over the state line in Iowa, just to see where it went. Which was nowhere. After twisting and turning through cornfields, and between cow pastures and through stands of swaying cottonwood, it narrowed further to barely a deer track big enough for the van, and then dead-ended at a small pond buzzing with dragonflies, smooth as a mirror and the color of brine-worn green sea glass.

  We got out, engine off, and stood with our feet bare in the muddy shore, algae sticking to our ankles.

  Errol glanced up, around, at the muted red-purple of late sunset as it bled into lowering dusk, and then at me. “So the question here is, do we turn around and find a motel for the night, or do we camp here?”

  I looked around. “I dunno, I’m sure this is private property.”

  “Yeah, but there wasn’t a tire track in the dirt newer than a few weeks, so I’m guessing if it is private property, it’s seldom visited, and if someone does take exception, we can just apologize and move on.”

  “So you think it would be safe to just stay here for the night?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, she’ll be right.”

  I inhaled deeply. “Then let’s just stay here. It’s quiet, peaceful. I’ll bet we’ll see the stars real well out here.”

  “Oh, no doubt. They’ll be nice and bright. I don’t think there’s anything like even a village for miles in any direction.” He eyed me. “What about sleeping arrangements? The caravan has a tent top, but I’ve not tried to use it. The back bench folds down and that’s where I sleep, but it’d be proper cozy for a pair who’ve just met this morning.”

  I slid him a slow, coy smile. “We can figure something out, I’m sure.”

  Oh, he caught the subtext all right. “Yeah, I’m sure we can.” He gestured up at the sky. “I mean, it’s a warm, clear night. If nothing else, we can just sleep out here.” A glance at me. “You ever sleep outside under the stars?”

  I shook my head. “Suburbanite city girl born and raised, my friend. Closest to camping I’ve ever been is glamping with my family the summer before my dad passed.”

  “Your dad’s passed, too? Sorry to hear.” He blinked at me. “What’s glamping?”

  I laughed quietly. “Ah-ha! A slang term for you! Camping is, like, tents and sleeping bags and those little unfolding stoves and stuff, right? Glamping is when you have a big RV and you sleep in a bed and cook in a kitchen and all that, but at an RV campsite. Glamorous camping. Glamping.”

  He snorted. “That doesn’t even count as camping.” He gestured to the van. “So is this glamping, then?”

  “Nah. Not swanky enough. I’m talking the RVs that are like decent-sized apartments on wheels.”

  He nodded. “Sleeping rough under the stars? Nothing like it. You’re never so alive as when you fall asleep watching the stars go ’round and the moon go over, and then waking up to a pink horizon.”

  “Best sunrise you’ve ever seen?” I asked, wading a little deeper with my skirt hiked up around my thighs.

  He stayed where he was. “Word of advice? I wouldn’t go much deeper. Bound to be leeches in water like that.” He laughed as I made an abrupt U-turn right out of the water, checking my legs as I went.

  “Best sunrise, hmm? Hard to pick one—I’ve seen some truly incredible sunrises. Last project before posting up here in the States was a piece on the fjords in Norway. We went over the whole coast, near-about, from Oslo all the way up around to the Barents Sea and the national park up there, which I still can’t pronounce properly, way up where Norway curls over the top of Sweden and meets Finland. Varangahol…something near that, leastways. I don’t know. Gorgeous country. Cloudy there a lot of the year, but when the sun does come out? Really makes you believe in God, I’ll say that, and I’m nowhere near a religious person. I slept out rough with my guide more than a few nights, in the bed of the truck we used on the journey, and you watch the stars and then the sun comes out and it’s huge and red and gold like the molten, freshly minted coin of some great giant god, I dunno. It’s…there aren’t words for it.”

  He went back to the van, tugged open the sliding door, reached in and rummaged in a backpack, pulled out an iPad protected by a rubberized case that looked like it could survive being dropped from ten thousand feet without a parachute. And, from what I knew of Errol so far, it wouldn’t surprise me if it had.

  He opened the iPad, tapped, swiped, and then scrolled through a rotating display of photos until he came to a particular section, and then handed me the iPad. “There aren’t words, but there are photos. Swipe left.”

  I swiped.

  And gulped.

  His photography was…breathtaking. I know I’ve seen his stuff in the magazine, but you assume that’s all been professionally retouched and such before publication, and things always look different on the glossy pages of a National Geographic. But…seeing his raw, unedited photos? Fucking stunning.

  “This is all the rough stuff, mind,” he said, as if he had to qualify what I was looking at. “I sent something like ten thousand shots to Jerry and he had to cull it down to a dozen or so for the feature. I went through them myself before I sent those on, and after he picked, I cut what wa
s left to my personal favorites. I’ve got cloud storage by the ass-load, of course, and I keep all the originals on the memory cards I shot them on, but what’s here is my personal collection of untouched photos that aren’t straight rubbish.”

  “Shut up,” I said, “I’m admiring.”

  He laughed. “All right, then.”

  One shot in particular I had to stop and just soak in for several minutes. It was taken from the back of a small fjord, where two spits of land angled away and then curved back toward each other until they nearly touched. The sun was perfectly framed between the points of land, and the sea was nearly still. The shot was taken from low to the sea, and a small fishing vessel was backlit by the huge golden-red half-sun, a net in the process of being cast caught in perfect clarity mid-throw.

  “Jesus, Errol.”

  He looked over my shoulder. “Oh yeah, that one. I stood waist-deep in the freezing water for an hour to get that. I was on the beach before sunrise, and those fishermen were getting ready—there’s a little fishing village just out of the frame to the right, and I watched them most of the morning. I knew the shot I wanted, and I knew there’s this moment, real early, when sometimes the water is just still like that. I mean, it’s never like glass like you’d see on an inland lake, but it goes quiet like that, just around dawn, but only sometimes. I was hoping and praying it’d be one of those mornings. I waded out as far as I could, and I had to wait for the ripples to stop and the sun to come up and the fishermen to go out. And it was just straight up luck that they stopped to cast out just there, while the sun was just there.”

  “All good photography is art, but that’s just…sublime.”

  He grinned, rubbed his hand through his hair. “Thanks. I am proud of that shot.”

  I swiped through a few more, and then handed him the iPad. “Better give that back before I get lost and just keep swiping.”

  He pulled out a little folding camp stove, and browned some ground beef, sliced up some fresh tomatoes, set out a little bag of shredded cheese, and a package of tortillas. When all was ready, he gestured at the spread. “Not fancy, but it’ll fill ya.”

  I gaped at him. “Seriously? You can just…whip up fucking tacos, from a van, in the middle of nowhere?”

  “It’s no great magic, Poppy. There’s a little fridge I keep the meat and cheese in, fresh tomatoes I got from a farm stand day before yesterday, and the tortillas I got at a petrol station dairy last week.”

  “Petrol station dairy?” I puzzled that one out. “A gas station with a little grocery store?”

  He chuckled. “Got it in one.”

  “Dairy. Why dairy?”

  He shrugged. “I dunno. They sell dairy products? Just what we call the little convenience stores like that.”

  We ate his magic tacos, which were not fancy but were delicious and filling; by the time we were done and things were cleaned up, it was getting dark.

  Errol climbed into his van and dug around through his stuff, coming up with a sleeping bag, two pillows, and a tightly rolled fleece blanket bound by a small bungee cord. The sleeping bag was the super expensive mountaineering kind, but the pillows seemed suspiciously like they’d come from a hotel; I couldn’t have said what gave me that impression, but they were not pillows from anything like home.

  When I mentioned it, he laughed sheepishly. “Yeah, I sorta nicked ’em from a hotel in…where was that? Bergen? Oslo? Norway, somewhere. They’re nice pillows, and I’d forgotten mine, so I packed ’em up and took ’em with.” He held up the sleeping bag in one hand and the blanket in the other. “You pick. I’ve used both and they’ll both keep you plenty warm, ’specially on a night like this.”

  I looked around. “We’re just gonna sleep on the ground?”

  “Yeah. Bit firm at first, but you get used to it.”

  I made a face. “A bit firm. The ground is a bit firm, you say?”

  “Yeah nah.” He stomped on the earth, no hint of sarcasm on his face. “Nice plush grass here, no rocks. I mean, you want to get fancy about it, you could go cut some branches and make a little nest.”

  I snorted. “How do you say it? Yeah, nah.”

  “You say it in all one go—yeah-nah.” He laughed. “But that’s not really how that one works. It’s…well, it’s complicated. It can mean heaps of subtly different things, but it usually doesn’t mean yeah, no like you used it just then.”

  I sighed. “Oh.”

  He laughed all the harder. “No worries, you’ll get it.”

  “I’ll take the blanket,” I said, reaching for it.

  He unfurled the sleeping bag and lay it in the grass near the van, sat in the open doorway of the van and unlaced his boots, which were well-worn Salomon hiking boots—he tossed the boots into the van and shucked his socks off, which he carefully laid out beside the boots. He was wearing gray-and-blue board shorts with a plain heather-gray muscle shirt, which combined with the hiking boots gave him an air of someone who could hop onto a surfboard and ride some waves, chuck on his boots again and then go free-climb a mountain face. He’d been wearing his Wayfarers till the sun set, and then he’d shoved them up onto his head, using them to hold his hair back from his face.

  I noticed he was wearing a necklace made of shark teeth; each tooth separated by a complicated knot of the hemp the necklace. Errol being Errol, I just knew there was a fantastically, unbelievably cool story to go with it.

  Realizing I was standing with the blanket and pillow in my hands, blatantly staring at him, I flung the blanket onto the ground a bit more forcefully than necessary and lay down on it, twisting to unzip my boots and kick them off, and then slid my thick, sweaty socks off with them.

  “Bit of advice?” I heard Errol say.

  “Sure?”

  “Put your boots in the van and lay out your socks like I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure what sort of creatures live around here, but nothing you want taking up residence in your boots. And the socks, if you want them dry by morning, leaving them all crumpled up like that won’t do you any favors.”

  “If there are creatures that might crawl into my boots, what’s to stop them from crawling on me?” I asked, squirming uncomfortably.

  “Because they can sense you’re a living thing, and not a place to hide.”

  “Oh.” Somewhat mollified, I tried to banish the creepy-crawly feeling I had imagining something slithering over my skin when I thought of something with too many legs crawling on me. I did as he suggested with my boots and socks, and then lay back down on the blanket.

  For the first time since we met this morning, there was silence between us. I shifted, he shifted. A cough. Rustle. Feeling the cool setting in, I tugged the blanket out from under me and covered myself with it.

  I heard his breathing shift, falling asleep.

  “Poppy?”

  “Mmm.”

  “I sleep light, so you know.”

  “’Kay?”

  “So, you know, you’re safe.”

  I huffed a laugh. “Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I wasn’t.”

  “Good. Because you are.”

  “Thank you, Errol.”

  And holy moly, did that notion set my brain to whirling.

  It literally did not for a single second cross my mind that I might be unsafe, sleeping outside in the middle of nowhere with a total stranger.

  Because…he was just…safe.

  I was safe with him.

  A total stranger.

  A man five years older than me, who very obviously felt a serious amount of lust for me.

  I was absolutely safe with him, as safe as if I’d been at home in my apartment in New York. Safer, maybe.

  Fucking weird.

  I stared up at the stars for a long, long time. I’d never seen such a sight, a countless billion, trillion points of light twinkling and scintillating like diamonds lit from within, scattered across the sky in washes and sprays. I picked out the few const
ellations I knew—the Big Dipper, and…well, that was about it, actually. But just lying there, watching the stars turn overhead, I did, as Errol had predicted, feel strangely alive, a frisson of wild energy surging through me, as if rising up from the earth and into me.

  And all the while, I was hyperaware of Errol, snoring gently and softly beside me. Close, but not too close.

  Safe.

  What a weird thing to feel with a stranger.

  Errol

  I woke up abruptly, and totally. Dead asleep to fully awake in a split second, but unsure what had woken me. It was predawn, between dark and graying to light, the air chilled and still and dew-laden.

  Then I heard it, a snuffling, shuffling. Errrrrrfff. Rrrrrrowwwwfff. Chuff chuff.

  A bear.

  I saw it, less than six feet away, ambling opposite us and the van toward the pond. Huge, black, shaggy head swiveling, paws padding quietly.

  “Mmm.” Poppy, sensing something, stirring. Not trained to wake up quickly and immediately like I was.

  I wiggled closer to her, leaned over her, placed my palm over her mouth and hissed her name. “Poppy.”

  Her eyes flew open and her hand latched onto my hand, twisting against the joint with a vicious yank that spoke of self-defense classes.

  “Poppy,” I hissed again. “It’s me.” I kept my palm over her mouth, used my other hand to point at the bear.

  Her eyes widened, and her defensive grip slackened. I shushed her again, and she nodded, so I let go. She twisted in the blanket, watching as the bear prowled lazily down to the water and drank, pausing to look around and listen, and then drink again. A few rounds of drink-pause-drink, and then it continued on around the pond, vanishing into the forest. As soon as it was out of sight, it was so quiet there was no indication that it had been there at all. A bird whistled, another answered, and then the forest was alive with the song of dawn.