Walk of Shame

by Gregory, O. L.

  "We'll just do the group thing tonight," Mike said.

  Once I'd overheard their ready agreement, I came outside with the pot full of meatballs. "Whenever Chloe comes out on the road with me," I said after I'd set the pot down on the table with the rest of the food, "we like to cook massive amounts of something yummy and then eat it for days so we don't have to do it again anytime soon."

  "Yeah, and if we get tired of it before it's gone, we'll freeze what's left to come back to later, after the next batch of whatever we make is gone," Chloe agreed.

  "And this is an antic you two plan on continuing after you marry whoever you end up with?" Liam asked.

  "Yep. Sometimes I do it when she's not around, especially if I'm knee-deep into a novel that I have a ton of ideas for." I fixed my plate and kept right on talking. "Sometimes I get tired of being in the living room day after day and I'll set up a spot on the bed for a few days. Sometimes I'll take over the dining area table with stuff spread out for conventions for three days and deal with it all in stages. Sometimes I pull out the sleeper sofa and take over the whole thing with pillows and blankets, like Chloe had me do today, and write there for a few days. Sometimes I'll sleep out there just for the change of pace."

  They were all looking at me as I sat down, waiting to see if I'd say anything else, so I kept on talking. "I'm so particular about my awning because if you look at it, you'll see Velcro pieces sewn in all along the edges because I have screen material I can attach and create a screened porch for myself. On insanely gorgeous days, I'll extend the awning, drag the spot's picnic table underneath, open up my outdoor kitchen, and screen myself in. I have a box in one of the storage compartments that has all the parts for a three hundred dollar desk chair, and the mat to roll it around on. I have to be comfy when I'm writing, so I'll put it together and put it out at the picnic table to work. Or sometimes I put it at the kitchen table and shove two of the standard chairs under the rig."

  I looked up at them, after getting my drink settled on the ground, next to the chair I'd claimed, and my plate balanced on my lap. They were all still watching me. "Mostly I work on the couch, but I need a change of pace from time to time is all I'm saying."

  "What spurred all that on?" Stephen asked.

  "You guys are tripping over yourselves to snag time and sell me on how each of you should be the one. I'm just trying to give you more insight on what you'll be getting. I know that maybe I won't be able to take over the table, or what have you, after I get settled with one of you. But I'll need some temporary alternatives sometimes, and it'll go on for up to a week before I'm back to my normal spot."

  "Have you always suffered from bouts of cabin fever?" Jared asked with a smile.

  "I used to be fairly normal before I started sitting at a computer for hours on end, day after day."

  "No, she wasn't," Chloe said.

  I turned and looked at her.

  "What? You used to rearrange your bedroom two or three times a year." She turned to the guys. "Her senior year, we got snowed in with a blizzard."

  I started laughing. "Yeah, okay, I wasn't normal."

  "What did she do?" Phillip asked.

  "She switched the living and dining rooms and made me help," Chloe said.

  "It's no wonder you can't live in a house like a normal person," Mike teased.

  "Maybe if I was commuting back and forth to an office... No, not even then." I sighed and shook my head. "My point is for you all to know what you're getting into with me. It's like there's a whole slew of things I have to go through and take care of before I can sit and focus on my novel to the point that the world falls away and my mind can get to a different place. "

  "Almost like you have to be in a different place in order for your mind to get to where it's going?" Mike asked.

  "Yes," I answered.

  "I get that," Stephen said. "That's probably why you also like wide open spaces to park your rig. It lets your mind wander."

  "Exactly. I'm glad you guys seem to get it," I said.

  "There's something else about her that you guys should know," Chloe said.

  I turned to her, frowning. "What?"

  She looked at me. "You snore."

  "I what?" I asked.

  "You snore." She turned to the guys. "She snores."

  "What kind of decibel level are we talking?" Jared asked, grinning.

  "Yeah, should one of us invest in some earplugs?" Mike asked, his eyes sparkling.

  "Here, judge for yourself," Chloe answered, looking at something on her phone.

  "Oh, come on!" I yelled, jumping up to snatch her phone away from her.

  She fended me off with one hand and gave the phone to Phillip with the other.

  I dove after it and Mike yanked me off my feet and lifted me with his arm wrapped around my abdomen.

  We spent that evening goofing off in camp. To counter my embarrassment, the guys started telling tales of things that happened in the main house and of the other's antics. It was a perfect, laid-back ending to the day.

  Saturday

  I was up bright and early on Saturday morning, waiting to see if Mike would come to get me for our run. But I didn't hear a knock, and I saw no one outside. Goldie followed me as I crept, past a sleeping Chloe, to the door and went out.

  Goldie, getting entirely too used to extra food handouts, started sniffing around for breakfast. I went over to Mike's rig, seeing if I could find any evidence as to whether or not he'd already left to go hit a trail. But all looked to still be set and quiet from the night before.

  All our rigs were circled around the area we'd taken over, and I figured not all the guys were being particular about locking their doors. I quietly tiptoed over and tried turning Mike's doorknob.

  It opened for me, and I climbed inside to look around. It was your basic fifth wheel. Not overly long, all the better for negotiating mountain passes and park roads with. It looked like his furnishings were chosen for comfort and functionality. It had a small kitchen and eating area in the middle. A small couch and a comfortable looking recliner sat opposite a desk area. An entertainment center sat at the end of the space with a TV big enough to be seen from anywhere in the open floor plan. At the front end were two steps leading up to, what had to be, the bathroom and bedroom in the gooseneck.

  An accordion-style door separated the two areas. I pushed it aside as quietly as I could and heard Mike's own soft snoring. A door to the right probably led to a toilet and sink. To my horror, a glass-doored shower sat open to the bedroom on the left. I hated layouts like this, but mostly because I was used to having an occasional guest along for the ride.

  Mike was under the covers in the queen-sized bed that filled the room. I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself at this point. The guys had always come to me. What did it say that I was sneaking into one of their rooms? And what was the best way to wake up an ex-Army guy who'd been through combat? I didn't really want to jar him out of sleep, but standing in the corner and staring at him until he sensed he wasn't alone seemed like a good way to get myself shot.

  I should have announced myself as soon as I'd walked through the main door.

  As it was, I backed myself up to the entrance of the room and plastered on a smile. "Up, please!" I announced.

  The snoring stopped, but Mike didn't move.

  "Up, please!" I repeated in as sweet a voice as I could muster.

  His faced relaxed into a smile before he opened his eyes. "I thought you were on strike."

  "The strike is over and it's a new day. The sun is shining and the birds are singing."

  "When in the hell did you turn into a morning person?"

  "I didn't, I'm just faking it. Come on, before I go out into the middle of camp and bellow out my need for a running partner."

  "Now why would you wanna go and do that?"

  "I'm curious to see who'd volunteer."

  "Who's your money on?" he asked.

  "My money was on you, that's why I'm here. But I'm betting
second place would go to Jared."

  "All right, I'm getting up. But you'd better go back out to the living room, unless you'd like to get an eye full," he teased.

  I laughed and shut the door behind me when I left. I snagged two bottles of water out of his fridge and five minutes later, we were out on a trail.

  It turned out to be a long trail, and by the time we were getting back to our base, we'd slowed to a walk. "If I end up going home tomorrow," Mike said during a lull in the conversation, "I'd like to thank you for keeping me this long."

  "Why?"

  He shrugged. "It's just that, well, something about my weeks doing this has shifted some things for me. I feel more... I don't even know how to say it, maybe... centered? I don't let the leg get in my way, but... it's nice to feel valued and wanted by a woman. It's nice to feel whole and looked up to for who I am now, and not just for who I was. And you did that for me."

  "Stop putting up that wall. We've dealt with this before and moved past it. You're just bringing it up again as a defense because you're afraid you might go home."

  He raised an eyebrow. "Damn. And here I was, trying to pay you a compliment."

  "No, you were trying to put a Band-Aid on your heart. I didn't seek you out this morning because I'm gearing up to send you home. I sought you out because I never feel like I get enough time with you. I like being with you, Mike. Deal with it."

  He stopped walking.

  I turned around to face him from five steps down the trail. "I keep telling you, I like you. If that leg is the biggest obstacle you see us having, then we have no obstacles. I know you've had to make certain adaptations and things might take you an extra minute or two, but I don't care. I don't give a damn about the fact that you only have a leg and a half."

  "Maybe that's been my problem. Maybe I keep looking for an obstacle, for the thing that's going to keep us apart. And since I can't find any, I dig into my own insecurities."

  "Do you want to leave?"

  He started walking toward me. "No, sweetheart." He lifted me off my feet, turned, and backed me against a tree. "I don't want to go anywhere," he whispered, and then kissed me so intensely that I forgot to be annoyed by his defenses. "I don't want to go anywhere where you're not," he whispered into my ear.

  I turned my head and kissed him quickly. "I care about the kind of person you are and how you live your life. And I can't find anything about you that I don't like."

  "You like my rig, too?" he joked, leaning his forehead against mine.

  "No. I hate the layout of your rig. But I sure do like the guy who lives in it, and the toys he hauls around."

  He laughed as he released me so we could go around the final corner before our camp area come into sight.

  Phillip was waiting with a picnic breakfast for me, to take out on a paddleboat.

  Handing me off from one man to the next might be an awkward thing, but the guys were good about it. Though that didn't stop Mike from giving my butt a squeeze before I stepped across the campsite to go grab my shower so hair and makeup could have a quick go at me before I joined Phillip.

  Once we'd paddled out into the middle of the lake, and Phillip pulled out the fruit salads he'd packed, he said, "I think I may have screwed up with taking you to tag that grizzly."

  I sighed. "It took me by surprise, that's for sure."

  "We did it to track him. We're making strides in bringing them back from near extinction. This is something we do in order to save them."

  "I know."

  "You knew I worked with endangered species."

  "Yeah, I know. It's just that you creeping through the forest with a gun is not a picture I even had in my mind."

  "You imagine me in a kitchen?"

  "Not always. Sometimes I imagine you saving furry little woodland creatures. And maybe butterflies."

  "What about tigers, leopards, and rhinos?"

  "We're on the wrong continent for them. You don't go stalking them in zoos do you?"

  "Sometimes my work takes me to zoos, to check on our captive populations. And when I do, I either go in the cage with them, or we tranquilize them from the fence line."

  "Zoo animals, who are used to having humans around and occasionally getting shot from behind the fence, seem a lot less dangerous than hunting them down in the wild."

  "I'm not killing them. I'm trying to help them."

  "I know, but they don't understand that. And it can't be pleasant for them to be hunted, surrounded, and shot. They don't know they will wake up later and be fine."

  "You think we traumatize them?"

  "I think maybe some of them feel traumatized. I feel traumatized from watching it."

  "Em..."

  I put a hand up to stop him. "This is why I don't do what you do for a living. It's my hang-up to work through, not yours."

  "But I want to know you'll get there."

  "I have to adjust my preconceived notion of your life, that's all."

  "I should have taken you to a zoo that has baby pandas. You'd have a whole other kind of image in your head if we'd gone into an area with baby pandas to wrestle with."

  "Yes, I bet I would. But I still needed to see the grizzly. I need to understand that not only do you save little endangered species, you're also the kind of guy that can strap on a rifle and hunt down big game."

  "It's not like that."

  "Yes, it is. You're not looking for a meal or a trophy head. But you still hunt them and raise a weapon to them. And if they charged you, or something went wrong, you'd switch rifles and shoot them for real. Sure, you'd use the body for research or whatever, but I just didn't picture you as that kind of guy. Do you know, at all, what I mean?"

  "You had a much gentler picture of me in your head."

  "Yes."

  He nodded. "I almost feel like I've betrayed or lied to you in some way."

  I shook my head. "Nope, it's not you. I'm the one that made assumptions off what I thought I knew about you. It's not like you were hiding it. You told me what your profession was. And you'd never really had a chance to show me any of that before now."

  "No one's asking you to go tag bear. You don't ever have to come out and see me like that again."

  "That's not the point."

  "I'm still the same guy."

  Except, he wasn't. Not in my mind. I'd put Jared and Liam into the toughest of men categories, because of their jobs. Mike was up there, too, but at a slightly less level because he wasn't out there alone all the time, he had a team. Stephen and Phillip were my least dangerous souls, then ones who wouldn't get themselves trapped, caved in on, or eaten at work. Stephen and Phillip were my two choices for not having to worry about them. The only 'safe' one left now was Stephen.

  To track an animal was one thing, to go after it and confront it was another. Maybe the contradiction wouldn't bother me so much, if I hadn't felt so blindsided by it. I mean, I thought I'd had these guys generally figured out. And now, with Phillip at least, I felt like I knew nothing about him.

  Phillip and I walked back into camp and Liam extended his hand to me.

  I shook my head. "I have to use the bathroom and change out of these ridiculous shoes."

  He dropped his hand down to his side and nodded.

  I knew I was still miked when I went inside, and I proceeded, very purposefully, to rant aloud. "Why anybody thinks that heels are a good idea in a state park is beyond me. I'm short, I just am. Get over it. I'm putting on sandals. Not cute little strappy ones, real ones. So all of you just deal," I muttered.

  Liam grabbed a backpack when I came out and gestured for me. I grabbed a bottle of water and joined him. He took me by the hand and led me to a clearing where a helicopter awaited us.

  "I made you get up a mountain the hard way last time. I thought you'd like the easy way for a change," he said.

  The chopper landed us on the tallest mountaintop around. Some thought had been put into this one. Two very comfy outdoor recliners were waiting, along with a portable grill
and a couple umbrellas.

  "So, what are we doing up here?"

  "We're just going to stay up here for awhile. We're going to have a couple nice, quiet hours, where the world can't intrude. We can cook lunch, relax, talk, whatever. Some people would do the whole stranded on a desert isle thing, I prefer stranded on a mountaintop. I wanted to do this sooner, but it's been too windy up here. As it is, those umbrellas are severely weighted down and will probably be used more as windbreaks than for creating shade."

  "Just us and our camera crew, huh?"

  "I want to see if we can just be with each other. No agenda, no rushing, no technological intrusions, just us."

  "A small taste of life with you?"

  "Without the work obligations, yes."

  "Are you the type that would camp up here and be perfectly happy to do it?"

  "I've camped on mountains like this before."

  "Have you climbed Everest?"

  "Yes."

  He'd said it so matter-of-fact that I think my mouth dropped open a little. I shouldn't have been surprised, but how did I not know this by now? How had it not come up?

  "I think that's amazing," I said. "I think I'm a fairly daring girl, but roughing it for a week to climb a mountain... I hope that's not something you would have expected me to do with you. Writing a book is such a long-term project that when it comes to fun, I enjoy things I can go and get done in a day."

  "I don't expect you to like everything I do. Nor do I expect to like everything you enjoy. I just hope that we wouldn't stand in the other's way of going and doing the pastimes that we like so much."

  "Perfect."

  Liam cooked and we ate lunch, we had several more conversations as we got to know the more relaxed side of each other. By the end of our time, I was feeling pretty good about Liam again. He was just so good at the 'this is me and this is you, let's just be ourselves, but together' thing. We'd started sharing childhood stories and found the whole time to be very easy because we'd hit a point where we stopped checking and balancing ourselves against the other's reactions and we were openly ourselves, up there with the clouds.

  Liam packed up his backpack and stood to get ready for the helicopter. He waved me back into the chair when I'd tried to stand. "You're staying here."