“Candace, don’t you have any imagination?” he asked as we descended the escalator.
“Obviously not,” I replied.
He didn’t answer. We reached the railing of the rink, and he placed his hands on my hips.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He met my eyes, and then lifted me right up, setting me back down on the other side of the barrier. He braced an arm against the barrier to heft himself over, then reclaimed my hand and dragged me to the middle of the rink.
We stood in an extra large circle of dirt.
“Okay,” I said, drawing out the word and raising my eyebrows at Gideon.
He smiled down at me, then took my other hand so that he was holding both of them.
“Close your eyes,” he told me.
I did, making sure he caught the look that said whatever he was up to was ridiculous.
“Shuffle your feet.”
I moved my feet up and down in a war march.
“That’s not what I meant.” He let go of one of my hands; I heard his knees crack as he squatted down beside me, and almost jumped back in surprise when I felt his hand on my calf. “Like this,” he said, moving my foot horizontally against the dirt. “Like you’re skating.” He stood up again, taking my hand back. “Rotate your feet, shuffling forward.”
I did as he said, still keeping my eyes closed, shuffling forward as Gideon pulled me. I could feel dirt clouding up around us, settling on any bare skin I had.
“What does this feel like?” Gideon asked.
“Something less than magical,” I replied, coughing and pulling my hand away to swat at the dirt. I opened my eyes.
Gideon was frowning in thought. “Let’s do it this way,” he finally said; he grabbed my hands again. “Step up on my boots.”
I sighed and rolled my eyes before doing so.
“Close your eyes.”
I did.
He started walking backward so that I moved forward. He let go of my hands, his hands going to my waist instead. I didn’t know where else to put my hands, so I rested them on his shoulders. He kept us gliding around, and dust didn’t get into my face.
I giggled.
“What does this feel like?” he asked.
“Definitely not ice skating.” I paused, thinking. “More like dancing.”
“Da da da da dun, da dun, da dun. Da da da da dun, da dun, da dun. Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm.” His tune was some classical composition.
I burst out laughing, then opened my eyes and met his; they were sparkling in response to my laugh, a big grin on his face. He was closer than I’d expected, and my whole body froze as I realized this.
He noticed immediately, and his breath caught. It felt as if the air thickened between us as we stood there, looking at each other. His eyes slowly focused on my mouth. My heart sped.
What would it be like to kiss Gideon?
“Whoo!” A shout from the other end of the rink.
I jumped back from Gideon, pulling out my gun and pointing it at the intruder.
The boy, probably about fifteen, cackled at me and raced off.
I didn’t shoot; I placed a hand to my forehead and looked at the ground, the hand holding the gun falling to my side.
“Sometimes I can almost forget there’s other people in the world,” Gideon muttered, looking after the boy.
“Yeah. It makes me uncomfortable. Look, can we finish checking the shops? I know I wasn’t keen on it earlier, but I think I’d like to get out of here.”
“Yeah, no problem,” Gideon replied, heading for the entrance to the rink, which was now nearby. “We’ll start down here and work back up to where we were upstairs. Sound good?”
“Yeah, that sounds fine,” I said, following him. He didn’t try to take my hand again, and we began looking through the stores. A lot of them on this level had nothing to do with clothing, which made our job significantly easier since we didn’t have to check the storerooms for those – most of the stuff was useless, items that wouldn’t help us survive in any way.
Again, though, the clothing shops were all picked clean. The only thing useful we found was a single lighter.
Gideon flipped back the lid, and it caught fire; it was full to the brim with fluid. He smiled at it. “Always useful,” he murmured, then pocketed it. “Anything else you want to see?” he asked.
I looked around at the empty food court we currently stood in; not even a whiff still remained of the smells that had once existed here.
“No,” I said. “Let’s get back to the forest.”
“Sounds good to me.” He headed straight for the exit, and this time he walked through the broken doors rather than holding them open for me. “Unfortunately, though, that forest ends here.” We started walking away from the mall, following the exit signs to US-5.
“Can we get back into a forest the first opportunity we get?”
“Of course, if that’s what you prefer. It might be a few days, though.”
“Fine. Where are we going to sleep tonight?”
“I seem to recall us enjoying the ‘under the bridge’ option,” he said, smiling at me.
I shrugged. “I prefer ‘under the trees,’ but sleeping under a bridge is a good option if there aren’t any trees.”
“This is Oregon; I’m sure we can find some trees by the road.”
“Alright. It’s not the same as a forest, but I’m sure it’ll be nicer than a bridge. Nothing against bridges, of course.”
“Of course,” he replied. He took my hand again.
~ * ~
We walked a few miles, through the city and onto the freeway. We stopped when Gideon walked up to the base of a large pear tree, peering upward.
“Anything in there?” I asked, standing off to the side.
“Yes,” he replied, immediately hoisting himself into the branches. “And they’re very ripe,” he called, “so I’m going to carefully hand each one down to you. Can you come here?”
I came to stand by the trunk, taking off my pack and setting it on the ground. I looked up at him as he plucked a few light red pears from the leaves. He leaned down to me, handing over each one in turn, and I carefully set them down on my backpack.
“Is your arm okay?” I asked, watching as the injured arm stretched out to grab fruit.
“It’s doing fine. A little sore. Why? Do you care?” He waggled his eyebrows down at me, and I rolled my eyes.
He continued to hand the fruit over; we had a collection of fifteen when he climbed down.
“What about the others?” I asked, looking up and spotting at least five more.
“Not ripe yet,” he replied, easing himself down against the tree and biting into one of the pears.
“What is it with you and ripeness? We can pick them now and wait for them to ripen, then eat them in a few days when food’s a little more scarce.”
“Candace, sit down and eat.”
“But I seriously want to know what’s wrong with picking them now. You can’t expect me to want to leave them for someone else to find.”
“And why not? They’ll be tastier that way.”
“But we won’t be the ones eating them.” I sat down beside him, taking a pear and sinking my teeth into it; juice filled my mouth.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” he replied. “How many pears can you really eat?”
“A few days from now, plenty more than these fifteen.”
“Fourteen.” Gideon discarded the core of his first pear, taking another.
“Great. Fourteen. You know what? It doesn’t matter what you want to do. I’ll wait until morning, and, before we start walking again, I’m going up there and picking the rest of those pears.”
“They’ll just get squashed and juicy in your backpack; they’ll make a mess of things.”
“They’ll still be calories,” I told him.
“Not worth it,” he murmured, his eyes focused on my chin as juice dribbled down.
I lifted my hand to w
ipe the juice away, but he caught it, interlacing his fingers in mine as he set his pear down and lifted his other hand to my chin, his calloused thumb soft as he wiped it away himself; he sucked the juice off his thumb, eyes still trained on my mouth. Then he looked into my eyes.
My heart sped up again.
With one hand still wrapped around mine, he placed his other hand along my jaw, laying it there and fitting it to the shape of my face. His eyes were locked on mine, and he leaned in closer. I could feel his body heat emanating from him.
I couldn’t think clearly. What was happening?
“Slap me if this isn’t okay,” he whispered, his eyes going back to my mouth.
Then his lips touched mine in a soft, gentle caress.
Chapter 12
I slapped him. I raised my hand upward, and slapped my palm against his cheek. He immediately flew away from me, shifting his body a foot further from mine than where he had previously been resting.
“Sorry,” he muttered, not making eye contact as he hurriedly finished his second pear. He threw the stem into the street, then pushed himself down so that his back rested on the ground; he closed his eyes.
He wasn’t going to eat any more?
I looked down at the rest of my first pear, and understood why he wasn’t still eating. I had lost all interest in food; I followed his lead, finishing the pear before laying down for the night.
“Gideon?”
“Mmm.”
“I just don’t know, okay?”
“I know.”
I didn’t know. How could I let the man who’d killed my parents kiss me, no matter how close we’d become?
Maybe I’d wanted him to kiss me. Maybe I’d wanted him to hug me. But what did it all mean? What did it mean for me to kiss the man who, just a few short weeks ago, I had wanted dead by my own hands? How messed up was that, anyway?
My gut clenched as I remembered the look on my dad’s face when he’d found me with my last rapist. He hadn’t even been able to look at me directly. Gideon was nothing compared to that – this was a completely different situation – but how would Dad look at me if he knew I was starting to have feelings for the man who killed him?
I fumbled with the bracelet, running it through my fingers and feeling the weight of Gideon’s necklace as I did so.
I wanted to be closer to Gideon. With our bodies laid out in different directions around the base of the tree, I had the strange desire to adjust myself so I was laying lengthwise beside him.
No one wanted to be alone. Wasn’t that the reason I hadn’t killed him in the first place? But I felt so much guilt, even thinking about letting myself become closer to him. How could I?
I rolled to my side, the guilt the last thing I felt before I drifted off, my parents’ faces still burned into my brain.
The next morning, as Gideon loaded his backpack with the uneaten pears we still didn’t seem to be hungry for, I climbed the pear tree and wordlessly took down the seven remaining pears, carefully packing them in my own bag. Gideon didn’t comment on this, and we got back on the freeway and continued walking.
We walked. For days, we walked. After a while, we left the freeway behind because it became more winding than was efficient. We came across one mall, searched through it with no luck, and kept walking. We walked along smaller roads, camped under trees and bridges, and kept walking. We didn’t say much. Was there anything to say? We knew each other well enough that our routine flowed together, not much communication necessary. Pick the tree or bush of whatever fruit it had, shoot that rabbit hopping across the road, set the bottles out to collect water. There was a rhythm to it, and speech was hardly necessary for us.
At first, Gideon kept some distance between us, probably not wanting me to get the wrong impression about his intentions. After a couple days, though, we began walking closer again. We slept several feet away from each other at night, but became more comfortable with the occasional elbow bump or nudge – though each one sent shivers up my spine.
After a week, we met more trees.
“Forest?” I asked, watching as the road wound into the woods.
A corner of Gideon’s mouth lifted. “Yes. What you’ve been waiting for, right?” He offered me a hand, as if he were escorting me from civilization and into wilderness.
I glanced around at the deserted buildings around us before taking his hand. I grinned back at him. “Definitely.”
He pulled me into the trees but, as we walked, never let go of my hand; it was the first time he’d done so since the kiss.
The forest wasn’t perfect – asphalt broke it up every two miles or so – but it was nice to be away from the reminder of what civilization used to be. Try as I might, I couldn’t see what Gideon saw – I couldn’t see beauty in the ruin.
Gideon was getting physically stronger; we managed seven miles that day before finding a nice space between the trees, only a few paces away from a creek, and settling in for the night. We didn’t have a reason for a fire that night – we usually saved those for if we needed to cook meat – but Gideon built one anyway because there was a chill in the air that hadn’t been there before.
“Winter,” he muttered as he piled in the branches, urging the flames to grow.
I sat on the other side of the fire, watching as he worked. “I could get us more wood,” I offered, feeling useless; making a fire wasn’t a three-person job, so I had usually watched as Dad and Mom quickly put it together.
“Naw, there’s plenty here. Just give me a few more minutes.”
I rested my chin on my knees as he worked, then met his eyes over the flames as he took a seat in the grass.
“Sorry I’m so useless,” I told him.
“You’re not useless,” he responded, surprised.
“But it seems like you do all the grunt work around here.”
“That’s because I’m the guy. You’re - ”
“A skinny teenager, I know.” I rolled my eyes.
“Er, no. I was going to say you’re just as hard working, but I’m able to do things more efficiently because of how big I am. You always step in if I need help, and you’re good at jumping to do any tasks that you can. Besides,” he grinned, “you make my job easier just by being around.”
I tried to pretend my face wasn’t turning red. “You’re job being ‘the guy.’”
“No. My job surviving. I enjoy your company, remember?” he wiggled his eyebrows at me.
“Yeah, yeah. That doesn’t mean you can’t survive without me. You know how not to rely on others for contentment.” We both knew I was too scared to try.
“That doesn’t mean I want to,” he replied, his gaze steadily meeting mine.
I looked away.
He yawned, then stretched out on the grass. “You sleep well, Candace,” he said.
“You too, Gideon.”
He felt so far away. It had been a while since we’d had a campsite arranged like this – each of us on either side of the fire. The last several nights in which we’d had a fire at all, the arrangement of each area had been a tree or a bridge, with the open world beyond the fire. We both had preferred to have our backs to something solid, and so slept on the same side, though with several feet between us. Most nights, we hadn’t even started a fire, and the lack thereof somehow caused us to sleep closer – though, still, several feet between us.
“Oh, forget it,” Gideon muttered, grabbing his backpack as he pushed himself to his feet. He rounded the fire and threw himself down a few feet away from me, settling on his back. “This okay?” he asked.
“Yes, fine,” I replied, silently both relieved and thrilled – relieved because I didn’t have to worry about how far away he was, and thrilled because he had been feeling the same way as me about the distance between us.
The fire cracked, and the sound of a few crickets joined the sound of our breathing. I listened to it all, concentrating on relaxing, concentrating on clearing my mind. The wind blew; I shivered.
Gideon’
s breathing was steady. I couldn’t tell if he was sleeping, mostly because I hadn’t trusted my judgment on the matter ever since realizing he was aware of my bracelet.
I was cold. How could he sleep with the chill? The fire helped, but not nearly enough to allow me to sleep. As the cold crept in each fall, it took my body several days to adjust to the change before I could completely relax in it. Usually, though, like last year, I had more layers – I currently still only had a thin shirt with one sleeve entirely missing, as well as a very sparse, sleeveless shirt under that.
My parents had also always made sure to find us a well-built building to sleep in each night – even if it was only for one night before we moved on.
Gideon’s body was warm. I knew because of the heat that came off him every time he came near me. Oh, for some of that warmth right now.
Maybe if . . .
No. That was ridiculous. Why would I ever get that close to him? The hug was a one-time thing, and if I didn’t even feel comfortable kissing him, why would I decide to sleep directly beside him?
I rolled over, facing away from him, hugging my arms around myself and trying to think about something other than how warm Gideon could make me.
Several minutes later, I gave up. Heart hammering, I crawled those last few feet over to him and carefully lowered myself beside him, the fabric of my clothing barely touching the bare skin of his arm. Heat didn’t exactly emanate from him in this position, but I did feel warmer.
He kept breathing deeply.
At this proximity I could see the goose bumps along his arm, making the hair stand up on edge. He was cold, even with how serene he looked.
After a few moments, I edged closer, pressing into his arm.
“We’d be a lot warmer if you let me hold you,” he murmured.
I jumped away from him, startled. “You’re awake!” I accused.
“How could I not be? You’re breathing really heavily, and I can feel your heartbeat.”
I sat over him, frowning.
He shivered. “Hurry up and make a decision, because neither of us are getting any sleep this way.” His eyes were still closed, making him seem very nonthreatening.
“Fine,” I muttered, settling in beside him again. He lifted his arm and, after a moment of hesitation, I drew all the closer. He set his arm along my back, wedging me between his arm and body. This was definitely warmer.
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