by Rachel Kane
“But you don’t even know if we’ll find a trail. We don’t have a map, or a compass…”
I’m breathing awfully quickly…is it the mountain air? Is there enough oxygen in the air to breathe? Maybe my lungs were damaged by the smoke. How high up are we? Oh god, what if I suffocate up here, or—
Jake’s hands were on my shoulders, his face inches from mine. “Are you okay?”
I gulped down air. “Are we going to die up here? Be honest. Is this it? Did we survive that crash, only to get trapped in a deadly—”
“Whoa now,” Jake said. “You’re panicking, and there’s no need for that. Look, we already made our choice, right? We’re headed up. It’s going to be okay.”
But how can you say it’s okay when we have no food and no real idea how far away the airfield is and no one even knows we’re missing—
My heart was pounding against my ribs, so fast and hard there was no way I could survive it. I raised my hands and took a step back, getting a little space between us.
Deep breaths. Long, long breaths, the kind that made your lungs feel like they were going to burst. Breathe it in, hold it, breathe it back out.
There was a bottle of tranquilizers in my backpack, a little brown bottle full of tiny white pills, now turned to ash. I’d been taking them since my book bombed and my family freaked on me, after these sudden rushes of doom started up. My doctor said they were panic attacks. That sounded so clinical. They felt like little apocalypses.
“I’m okay,” I said. “This happens sometimes. Just…let me breathe a minute.”
He watched me warily, like I might run off, or maybe I’d attack him. Fight or flight. That made me chuckle, although my throat felt strained by the fear. Fear that was, thankfully, starting to recede.
I leaned against a tree. The breaths were coming more slowly now, more naturally. My lips were tingling after all that hyperventilating.
“I think I’m okay now,” I said after a while.
He looked me over and nodded. “You sure? You want another minute?”
“No. Let’s move out.”
Well, that was embarrassing.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. I grabbed Jake’s hand, and he helped me up a tricky, slippery little area where the leaves were wet on the ground.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“I don’t want you to think I sit around having panic attacks all the time.”
It was a little hard to have a conversation. Just as he’d said, it was getting steeper here, and we were doing a mix of walking and clambering. But I felt like I had to say something to allay the humiliation of it.
Why couldn’t you have a panic attack in front of someone less attractive?
Yeah, that was part of the problem. Jake just looked so fucking confident, moving from rock to rock, getting his footing, grabbing trees to steady himself. He was in his damn element, while I’d just come across as a delicate little crybaby.
“It’s fine,” he said.
He didn’t want to hear my explanation for panicking. I don’t know why that made me want to explain myself even more. Maybe it was a fear that I’d appear weak to him. I wanted him to think well of me, and—
Wait, when did you start caring what this stranger thinks of you?
I got my hand on a young sapling, and pulled myself forward and upward. He was a few paces ahead, waiting for me.
Isn’t it obvious? Nobody wants to look weak, especially not at a time like this. But maybe if I spent a lot of time explaining myself, that would be the thing that made me seem weak.
People are too damn complicated.
“You hear that?” he said.
At first I wasn’t sure if he was just trying to change the subject or what. But I held still and listened.
“Is that water?”
He nodded. “There’s a stream up there.”
“Is that good news or bad news?”
For some reason that made him laugh. “We won’t know until we find it. Come on.”
As the sound grew louder, I could hear it better, a rush and a splashing, so many sounds at once they seemed to fill the air. The ground was getting wetter, and my shoes wanted to sink in. It was harder to take each step, squelching towards our goal, and I was gratified to see that even Jake was having a little trouble walking.
It’ll probably be good exercise for him. Make his ass that much bigger and stronger.
He reached the stream first, and looked back at me, a broad, innocent smile on his face.
When I made it to his side, I couldn’t help it, I smiled too.
The stream was beautiful. Trees arched overhead, providing a canopy that was shot through with sunlight, dappling the water with gold. Off to the left, the water bounced over rocky terraces cut into the ground over centuries, like a hundred little waterfalls, their fine spray catching the light.
Jake knelt by the water’s edge, and thrust his hands in. “Holy shit that’s cold,” he said, before plunging his entire face into the water. He sat back up in a rush, water flying in an arc from his skin, laughing. A sunbeam caught his face, and I wanted to kiss him so badly right then.
I mean, I wasn’t going to. I knew better. No sudden lunges at the straight man.
But he was so pretty, if I can say that about a guy five times tougher than me.
“You should wash off your wound,” he said, pointing at my forehead.
That seemed like a sensible idea. I unwrapped my bandages, wincing a little as that last layer came off the cut, where blood had cemented down the fabric.
I splashed water onto my face, and immediately gasped. “You weren’t kidding, that is fucking icy.”
Wetting down the bandages, I dabbed at the cut. Jake meanwhile was cupping water in his hands, drinking it.
Stay hydrated. That’s smart. Especially since we don’t have any water or food and we’re going to die out here.
After I was done patting my wound clean, I put my head down, thinking I would put my face in the water like he had.
Did the world just turn upside-down?
I was so dizzy I couldn’t stay upright.
One moment, I felt light as air, and the next, I was falling face-first into the water.
Maybe I had been in mid-gasp or something, I don’t know, but I made the mistake of inhaling, and crystal-clear mountain water flowed right into my throat and lungs. Whatever dizziness I’d been feeling was gone in a split-second.
I didn’t even have time to react. Jake was pulling me out of the water. I coughed, sputtered, and he set me down on my side. It wasn’t even that much water, but it burned my throat, it felt like gallons of it had invaded me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, when I finally was able to catch my breath again.
“Quit that,” he said to me.
I pushed myself upright, and sat by the edge of the water. “No, I’m serious. This is ridiculous. I don’t normally require saving multiple times a day. I don’t know what’s gotten into me, I just—”
“Dude,” he said, holding out the remains of his t-shirt. “Who knows how hard you hit your head when we came down? You’re injured. You got dizzy. It’s not a big deal. Wrap your head back up.”
Not a big deal.
It felt like I only had two choices, either I was a big weenie who couldn’t hack the great outdoors, or I had a concussion. Neither was particularly stellar. Neither would’ve been my first choice for how to comport myself with a guy like this.
Maybe you need to stop thinking about him as a Guy Like This. First off, he’s straight, so even if this were the right time and place for it, you have no chance. Second, you’re lost in the fucking woods, with god knows what kind of brain damage. Third, you’re in a bad place emotionally thanks to your fucking book and how badly your parents took your coming out, so even if you weren’t sitting here with a cracked skull, and even if Jake were the gayest mountaineer in the world, nothing would happen, because you’re smarter than that, and a one-night stand would
just end up leaving you feeling empty inside.
For a person with possible brain damage, I sure did have a lot of thoughts going on.
But I had to concede the point. How I looked in front of Jake was irrelevant. I’d missed my chance to be a charming, rakish raconteur, and now I was just a guy who needed saving all the time.
So I could put all those thoughts aside, and focus on the business of staying alive.
That’s when Jake started shedding his clothes.
7
Jacob
As much as we needed to move, I realized we were going to be stuck here for a while. I didn’t like the way Eli looked. He was pale after falling into the water, and I needed to know if he’d really recovered. We could make up the time. Hopefully.
I wished he would stop apologizing. I knew exactly what he was doing. You see it all the time with tourists. They want you to think they belong out here. They want to look tough.
You can only say it’s okay so many times. If the tables were turned, if we were back in the city, I would probably worry about looking incompetent, wouldn’t I? Not knowing how to catch a train, or which side of the sidewalk to walk on, or…well, whatever it is city people do differently from us.
But I couldn’t say that without Eli feeling even worse. He’d had his ego bruised, and sympathy wasn’t going to make it better. I felt like saying It’s not my fault you hit your head, except of course it was.
I glanced back in the direction of the plane. Whose responsibility could it be, if not mine? I’d wrecked Pop’s livelihood, nearly killed Eli, and hell, who knew what would happen next, all because…
…all because what, exactly? I shook my head. What was I feeling guilty about? I babied that damn plane. Spotless service record, always careful, always obeying all the damn rules, and look where it got me.
That sounds suspiciously like self-pity, because you don’t want to feel guilty.
I shook my head. Maybe my own skull had been rattled in the crash. Time to snap out of it.
Besides, I was sitting by the bank of a beautiful, crystal-clear mountain stream. It was just about noon, and the sunlight was pouring down. Any other day, this would’ve been a great day to be here.
Honestly, the water gave me a good idea. My shirt smelled like smoke, and I was already sweaty from the crash and the walk. I didn’t mind sweat, but sweat plus grime plus burnt fuel wasn’t a combination I enjoyed. I’d get cleaned up, feel more like a human being for the rest of the trek.
I pulled off my shirt.
As soon as I did, I realized Eli had stiffened up.
Whatever it was, I didn’t want to deal with it. If he found it offensive that I wanted to get cleaned up, he’d just have to keep it to himself. I unbuckled my belt, and shucked my jeans to the ground. As much as I wanted to dunk them into the water, I knew they’d never get dry. My shirt would be different; the thin cotton would dry pretty quickly.
I stepped into the water. I almost wanted to laugh at the shock of it. Of course it was cold, I knew it was cold, and yet it kept surprising me, every time.
The stream wasn’t more than a foot and a half deep in the middle, so it wasn’t like I was going to do any swimming, but I did kneel down, washing my face in the clean water, running it through my hair. I splashed it over my chest.
Is he sitting there judging me?
I didn’t want to turn around and look. City folks could get weird about matters of hygiene. Wait till you have to explain to them how the bathroom works when you’ve got nothing around but trees and leaves.
I wanted to lie flat on my back in the water, just let it wash over me…but I didn’t want my damn underwear to be soaking wet, and I wasn’t going to strip down that far in front of a stranger. God knows he’d probably report me on Yelp or something if I did that. I gave my face another good scrub, and then looked over at him.
“It might be our last chance to get cleaned up,” I said.
But when I looked at him, he quickly looked away, bashful, blushing.
Like he’d been watching me for quite some time, and just got caught.
“I’m okay,” he said, studiously looking at a bit of pine straw on the ground.
Were you watching me? Why would you do that? And why would you act so guilty about it?
I realized one reason he might do that.
That realization sent a nervous chill through me. And that chill was accompanied by a memory.
I had looked the same way, when Marcia had walked in on me a few months ago. Suddenly bashful, suddenly shy, although in my case, also hurriedly trying to close her laptop before she could see what was on the screen. She’d stared at me balefully for a moment and said, I don’t know what that is you’re hiding, but you better get it off my computer.
After she left the room, I’d opened the computer back up and cleared the search history. But not before taking one more minute to look at the men who had been on the screen. The video was paused; three sweat-slick men frozen in mid-thrust, faces tight with intense pleasure.
Marcia didn’t ask for any explanation, and I sure as hell didn’t offer her one, at least not then. But I’d done the same thing Eli was doing now, staring off, trying like hell to be nonchalant as though nothing in the world mattered.
He wasn’t judging me. He was checking me out.
I glanced down at myself. Water was dripping off me. I looked… Well, damn. I looked like I was showing off.
I really wasn’t.
Or were you? Come on now. When a muscular guy like you gets half-naked and wet, aren’t you really hoping someone will notice?
I shook my head at my own thoughts. I wasn’t vain. I didn’t spend time posing in front of the mirror or anything.
But maybe Eli thought I was showing off.
Maybe that’s why he was looking away, maybe he was wondering, Why is this guy stripping naked in front of me? We don’t know each other, we’re not in a locker room, so what’s the big idea?
I realized neither of us had spoken for a really long time. And that neither of us seemed willing to speak, as long as I was standing here in my underwear, dripping wet.
Maybe he thinks I’m coming on to him. Even though nothing could be further from the truth, because I’m not gay at all. Not in the least. The stuff Marcia saw on the laptop was…it was meaningless, it was just curiosity, it wasn’t—
I soaked my shirt in the stream, then wrung it as hard as I could, until the muscles in my arms stood out from the strain. It felt good to do something active, something that took strength, to clear my head.
I was just off-balance, that’s all. All that business with Marcia was in the past. And whatever Eli was thinking right now, would fade into the hard climb we were about to do, because there was a long, long trek ahead of us. I rinsed and wrung my shirt one more time before pulling it on, shivering at the feel of the cool damp cotton. A little embarrassed to see how hard my nipples were. I left the shirt unbuttoned so it would dry faster, then I pulled on my jeans.
The faster we got moving, the less time I’d have to think about all this shit.
“All right, you up to walking?”
8
Eli
There’s nothing peaceful about mountains. They might look stately and majestic, but that’s because you’re viewing them at human speed. From the mountain’s point of view, the stone thrusting up from the earth is struggling to get out, as though it had been buried alive. That’s what I thought about, when Jake disappeared into the crevice, never to be seen again.
But that was later.
Right now, we were talking. Trying to, anyway.
“They weren’t robots exactly,” I explained, “but more like a collection of microscopic—”
Jake shook his head. “I guess I don’t read science fiction.”
I sighed. “Well, anyway, I think the only people who bought a copy were my mom and my sister.”
The climb had stopped being quite as beautiful and stunning a few thousand miles back
. Sure, great, nature is a lovely thing, but when you’re stumbling upwards and losing your breath trying to make conversation, it all starts to blend together into one uncomfortable brown blur.
Maybe making conversation was a bad idea, but I felt like I had to do something to fill the time. Things had gotten damn awkward after Jake’s little dip in the stream, when he’d caught me watching him. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he’d noticed.
Yes, but did he notice you noticing that you noticed him?
For a split second, as he started stripping, I’d wondered if maybe he was giving me a great big Sex In The Woods signal.
Then I realized he probably did this all the time. It was one of those things you did if you were straight, confident and self-assured, unlike some of us.
Unlike me.
His confidence was as addictive as his body. The way he’d thrown his head back, the spray of water catching the light, every muscle on his chest delineated by sun and shadow: It was one of those images I would store away in my head to think about over and over again.
Why can’t I ever meet guys like this back home?
Because part of the allure was knowing I couldn’t have him. Knowing there was no chance at all. We were from different worlds, and I didn’t just mean that I lived back in Corinth while he was out here in the sticks.
Straight people were from another planet. They were aliens—sometimes very attractive ones—and there was always going to be something I didn’t understand about them. Some basic wiring in their brains was different from mine.
You always want something you can’t have. Straight boys, an award-winning career writing about gay robots, it’s always something.
But I couldn’t help looking at him. Wishing things were different. Because a boyfriend could really have gotten me through these recent dark days. Someone to lean on. Someone to love.
Then he caught me and everything changed, and the urge to change the subject to almost anything other than bodies and mountain streams and sunlight and skin, was overwhelming.