“You finally getting tired?” I was hoping beyond hope that I wasn’t the only one on the brink of passing out. I’d reached that stage where my heartbeat flooded into my eardrums and the echo of my pulse didn’t just reside in my wrist and my neck, but strummed all over my body.
“Not at all.”
“Oh.” Shoot.
“We gotta do a tick check.”
“A what-what?” Of course that rock had to be precariously placed right in front of my left shoe, and I stumbled forward, my gangly arms flailing on either side as I awkwardly skip-jumped before rebalancing back into an upright walking position.
“You okay?”
“Yup.” I totally almost ate it.
“A tick check. I need to check you for ticks.”
I went more bug-eyed than the literal bugs Torin was talking about.
“You do know what a tick is, right?”
My eyes rounded and I held up an impressively unfazed front, but the thought of a bloodsucking parasite burrowing into my body sent waves of panic through me that I could hardly contain. I loathed insects to an unhealthy degree.
“There are ticks here?”
Torin pulled his backpack off of his broad shoulders and tossed it to the ground, then grasped the hem of his t-shirt between his fingers. In one fluid movement, he lifted the fabric from his torso, the sheen of sweat glistening across his tanned chest. “Now you do the same,” he said, monotone.
“Wha—?”
“Totally kidding.” A playful smile burst onto his face. “Just take off your backpack.”
I did as he requested and the tick inspection began.
Lowering into a squat, Torin started at my ankles, carefully surveying the bare patches of skin up to my shins. He grazed across my flesh with the palm of his hand, running it up to my knees with the lightest amount of pressure. I wasn’t sure if this was actual survivor overnighter protocol, or if he was pulling another bikini prank on me, but I honestly didn’t care. I felt too good to be angry, and I really did hate the idea of a tick making itself at home in my skin.
“All clear. Turn around.” I rotated 180 degrees and his hands drug across to the backs of my thighs, his thumb brushing against the soft flesh at the base of my jean shorts. The pit of my stomach felt heavy as I trapped a breath in, hoping my actual body wasn’t as shaky as my breathing. “This looks good, too.”
With his hands on my hips, he swiveled me around to face him, guiding my body under the intense scrutiny of his eyes. Torin coursed his hands up my arms to my shoulders against my exposed arms to the slope of my neck, every area that my tank top didn’t cover. I could see his midsection flex out of the corner of my eyes into six distinct ripples and I thought maybe for a moment he was trying to control something in himself, too. But I didn’t let that thought get too comfortable in my head. I shouldn’t be thinking things like that about Torin.
“See anything?” My loose hair tumbled across my shoulders and Torin scooped it into a ponytail to survey the skin underneath.
“Nothing so far,” he said, his mouth so close to my skin I could feel the air behind his words. “But you’d be able to feel them, too. They pinch.”
That was a relief to hear because it terrified me to think that I could have a foreign bug feasting on me without even knowing it.
“Almost done.”
I felt his fingers skimming my shoulder blades and in the same moment that he said, “Uh oh, wait,” I felt the prick of something at the base of my neck, a piercing sensation that completely freaked me out.
Unfortunately, my freak out wasn’t limited to just my thoughts, and it burst through my body, too. Swatting at my hairline, I bat Torin’s hand away, using my own to claw and scrape at whatever was stinging my neck.
“Get it off, Torin!” I shrieked, beating his bare chest with my palms. “Oh my God, get it off of me!”
“Hold still.”
“I can’t,” I screamed, jumping up and down and shaking my head with the force of a heavy metal head banger. “Seriously, Torin!”
“Let me see,” he said way too calmly. “You have to hold still.”
But asking me to do that was like asking a sugar-loaded toddler to sit through an opera at the MET.
“I can’t!”
“You have to.” Torin grabbed me by the shoulders, bracing me tightly as he said, “Stop moving.”
“Get it out! I can feel it crawling into my neck!”
“No, you can’t.”
“Yes, I can, Torin!” Visions of me laid up in a hospital bed with Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever cartwheeled through my head.
“Did it feel like this?” With the tips of his thumb and index fingernails, he grabbed a section of skin on my forearm and squeezed down, leaving two crescent marks in their place.
“Exactly like that.”
An innocent couldn’t wear the grin that crept onto Torin’s face, so mischievous and coy. No, he was guilty—incredibly guilty of making me just complete the biggest freak-out session anyone this side of the Trinity Alps Wilderness had ever witnessed.
“You,” I snarled through gritted teeth, slugging him solidly against his chest again. I wasn’t expecting my knuckles to actually sting from the punch.
“I’m just trying to keep you prepared, Darby.” He coiled back from my fist against this shoulder, but I could tell that I wasn’t hurting him in the slightest. “I had to prepare you for what it might feel like to have a tick on you. Helping you with your fear of the unknown and all.”
“You suck.” I rubbed out the soreness from my fist, flexing my hand open and closed.
“I’d like to prepare you for a few more unknowns, too.”
I twisted my fist in my palm. “And what would those be?”
“This.”
Torin took one quick step forward and suddenly we were face to face, his mouth inches from mine. His lips were slightly parted, and the tingle of air that rushed in and out through them grazed over my wetted lips. His eyes lingered on mine, blinking softy with fluttering movements. I could see his chest rising and falling again, and this time I could feel it as it pressed against mine each time he drew in a trembling inhale. Snaking his arm around the small of my back, he hooked me closer to him until he was pressed fully up against me. Fireworks went off in the pit of my stomach, the igniting spark of some sort of passion that was nothing short of explosive.
I almost readied myself for the kiss, slipping my eyelids closed, but Torin didn’t lean in any further just then. He held me there, in this intense space where his lips hovered just over my lips, this pause of anticipation, like the moment at the starting line before the gunshot rings into the air.
Every millimeter that he drew closer was a vast expanse of measurable depth. I’d never been so aware of the proximity of anyone to me ever before. I could sense his breathing, his heart rate, even the damp moisture held on his full mouth.
“A man had given all other bliss, and all his worldly worth for this, to waste his whole heart in one kiss, upon her perfect lips.”
The words tumbled out from him and I swear I could taste them on my tongue, like some sweet, forbidden fruit.
“Tennyson,” he explained, shaking his head as if to snap himself out of the trance he was under and had sucked me into. Just as quickly as he’d drawn toward me, he circled away, his back to me, a shield between us. “I can’t waste my heart on you, Darby. As much as I may want to.”
Knotting my fingers together, I asked with insecure, frustrated words, “Why would it be a waste?”
“Because I can’t have yours.”
***
We stopped for lunch after the impromptu bug inspection and I tried to fill my stomach but I couldn’t; the ball of guilt was so large it seemed to expand and take up every square inch of my gut, leaving no room for anything else, not even food.
Torin was honest with me, even if his honesty was coated in the form of Sir Lancelot’s poetic declaration to Lady Guinevere. I owed him
that same honesty. I needed to tell him about our late night make-out session, even if he didn’t remember it as vividly as I did. I owed him that. He confessed his feelings to me. Now it was my turn. Spill my guts. Let it all out.
I readied for the admission, but I couldn’t do it. I went about my morning, pretending nothing happened. I seriously could have gotten an Oscar for outstanding female performance based on the act I tried to maintain. Things were different, and even if Torin didn’t consciously know the reason why, I’m sure he sensed it. He’d wanted to kiss me, but wouldn’t allow himself to, and I wondered if he’d felt the familiarity in that hesitant restraint. It was definitely like déjà vu for me.
I’m sure he also sensed the way my breathing changed when he got close to me. I’m sure he noticed the way my eyes fastened on his mouth when he talked, not at all interested in the words that spilled out of them, but focused on their texture, shape, and form. I’m sure he saw that I took a few seconds to respond when spoken to, distracted by the memory of last night on my lips. Things were different, and all it took was one little mistake. One omission of truth. One little regret.
“I have something for you,” Torin said as we cleaned up our lunch. I had my pack hitched over my shoulders, ready for our trek down the hill toward our cabins. Five more days until the campers arrived. I could really use the extra people and bodies as a buffer and distraction. One-on-one with Torin wasn’t proving so good for my sanity, or my hormones.
“I made this for you last night when you were sleeping, hogging that bag all to yourself.” Torin dug his hand into his front pocket and pulled out a bracelet made of thick thread, woven into an intricate pattern with a charm dangling from its middle.
He thrust it toward me and I clumsily wrapped my fingers around it. “Thank you,” I muttered, rolling it over in my palm. “You made me a… um… friendship bracelet? How very endearing in an elementary school sort of way. Does this mean you like-like me or something?”
“It’s a survival bracelet,” he explained with a laugh, fingering a similar one bound around his wrist. I flipped it onto its side to examine the copper-colored charm. Quarry Summit was written in raised, hollowed-out lettering, pressed deep into the metal. “It’s made of 500 pound paracord—basically fourteen feet of rope that you can unravel within seconds if you’re ever in a situation that you might need it.”
I unclipped the clasp and fit it onto my wrist.
“I made yours red since you go to Stanford. That’s your school color, right?” I nodded and twisted the bracelet in circles, rotating it against my skin. “And your swimsuit is red, and your hair—supposedly—is red, too.”
“I’m Irish, I've had the same boyfriend for six years, and I like the color red.” I hooked my thumbs under my backpack straps and slid them up and down. “Yep, that pretty much sums me up.”
“You forgot the part about buildings and concrete.” Torin sidestepped around me and I fell in line behind him as we started our decent down the mountain trails. He really did enjoy being the leader of the pack. “I know that about you, too. But not much more.”
“Reminds me of those games I used to play back when I was a kid.” I spoke over his shoulder as he kept just two feet ahead of me on the path. Bits of light stretched through the rows of tree trunks that rose out of the ground at our periphery. I could see the dust that our boots kicked up shimmering in the morning air like speckles of golden glitter. “Remember?” I continued, trying to jog his memory. “I think it was called MASH or something.”
Torin only acknowledged me with the shake of his head, still facing forward. “I’m nineteen, remember? Not thirteen, sorry.”
“Oh come on, you remember. Same era as the cootie catcher?” I prodded, moving my hands in the motions of the game, opening and closing the imaginary, paper origami between my fingers even though he couldn't see me.
“Not a clue.”
“That’s unfortunate, because MASH was this game where you predicted who you were going to marry, where you would live, and other amazing stuff like that,” I explained, making cootie catcher motions with my hands. Open, close. Open, close. “Anyway, that’s what your little summary reminded me of: I’ll be married to a guy named Lance and will live in a red, concrete house in Ireland.”
“Sounds like an incredibly riveting game, and an equally riveting future for you.”
“It’s just something we did for fun, Torin,” I justified, probably a little too quickly. So what if I ended up in Ireland with Lance in a concrete house? What would be so wrong with that future? At least it was a future. Not everyone got to have one. “What did you do for fun, mountain man?”
He didn’t fire back to deflect my name calling, and instead just said, “We played Over the Edge.”
“And what was that? Like some game where you tried to push someone to their limit by getting on their nerves or something?” If it was, then that definitely explained the overnight success he’d had in forcing me dangerously close to my own metaphoric edge.
“No.” A laugh caught in Torin’s throat. “We cliff jumped. Like dove off of cliffs into the water.”
“Oh.” Torin totally confused me. One minute he was deep—reciting the famous words of philosophers of old—the next he was talking about leaping off hillsides. I just didn’t get him, how he could have so many layers. Even I only had two: my thirteen-year-old version and the nineteen-year-old update. And even those versions weren't entirely my own.
But it was like Torin embodied the sensitive, emotional side that all women inherently desired, yet at the same time he was wholly masculine, to the point of cliff jumping and killing and cooking his own food. He was a complete conundrum.
“Have you always been outdoorsy?”
“Yeah,” Torin started, just as we came up on a fork in the road. There were lots of forks in this utensil-filled forest, it seemed. Without hesitation, he veered left, like he could do this in his sleep. “I’ve always loved the wilderness. I’m at home here. This is where I’m comfortable.”
“If you hadn’t grown up here—if you had the chance to go to college and have a career—what would you do?”
“I did have the chance to go to college, Darby,” Torin corrected smugly, his blond hair glinting under the morning sun that pierced the leafy greenery overhead. “And I would have majored in Religious Studies.”
I hiked the straps higher on my pack and shifted the weight on my shoulders, one to the other. Torin spied me and said, “Need some help with that? I can carry it for you if you like.”
“I got it, thanks though.” I shook off his offer with my head. “So how come you chose to stay here instead of get your degree? If you had the opportunity, I mean.”
“Because I’m a lot closer to God here on this mountain than I could ever be in the confines of a college classroom.”
Sonja’s parents had been missionaries, and I remembered hearing stories about when she was little and they lived in Peru. How they would witness to the people in remote villages, converting them at a high rate. I wondered if Torin had that same experience—if some missionary ventured out here to his corner of the wilderness and shared the gospel with him. It felt remote enough that I wouldn’t have been surprised if that were actually the case.
“How do you even know there is a God?”
“Just look around, Darby.” Torin’s feet planted underneath him and he fluttered a hand skyward. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” He was doing it again, reciting some verse in an attempt to bolster his case. But this time it felt different, not like the movie quotes, or even the philosophical notions he’d rattled off earlier. Something in him changed when he said it; like this was his truth while the others were maybe just things he thought about.
“How do you know?” I followed his eyes toward the hundred-year-old trees that climbed into the sky, reaching so high that they nearly made themselves at home among the clouds. “How do you know that God made all of this?�
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“How do you know he didn’t?”
“I’m not saying he didn’t,” I defended, and as I look at our surroundings, at the intricacies and beauty of it all, I was fairly certain that, in fact, he probably did. “I’m religious, too, I guess.”
“There is a difference between being religious and believing in something greater.”
When he said it, it all made sense. His concern over using people as a means to an end. His interest in all of the little steps along life’s journey. His belief that something bigger was at work in the details. I’d thought he was an enigma—some indefinable sort of person that just clung to a bunch of random beliefs and principles. Someone like so many of the people I knew. People that were searching to find themselves. People that pulled bits and pieces from different ideologies, hoping they fit together in a believable, workable way. People sort of like myself.
But Torin was already there. He seemed to think he had it all figured out. Or maybe this was just his truth. Maybe truth was different for everyone. I always assumed that to be the case, because I didn’t know how there could be just one path that would lead to our ultimate destination. Just like these various paths that crisscrossed through the forest; maybe there were many options that would take us where we needed to go. It had to be that way, right?
One thing I was certain about was that I wished I’d taken a different path in making my way to Lance.
“I haven’t always believed.” Torin’s voice cut through our silence and my reverie. “In fact, for a long time I was a total atheist.” He turned to look at me, his green eyes pulled tight and haunted. “My brother’s death changed things. I didn’t understand how a supposedly righteous God would allow that to happen.” I swallowed and listened intently as he spoke, but my mouth watered with that familiar acidic bitterness that I’d been biting back for as long as I could remember. “I was angry at God and at my parents. Because they seemed to think that God not only existed, but allowed for what happened to Randy to actually occur.” He shook his head violently and strained his brow, dragging his hand down the length of his face like he could sweep the emotion from it into his palm and keep it there, tucked it away, rather than vulnerably exposed for me to see. But I was glad to be able to see it, because looking at him felt like looking into a mirror.
The Rules of Regret Page 9