9. Logan
After spending one day, then three more, with Heidi, I was still fascinated. She was braver than I think even she understood. Quiet and withdrawn, because she was thoughtful. Sitting on the bank of a creek under the hanging branches of a cypress, I watched her toss bread into the water for the fish, smiling as an old catfish came up from the bottom and closed his gaping mouth over the soggy pieces.
I’d spent a lot of time watching her over the week. She’d called in sick for the first few days, then told Eli she needed more time, and surprisingly, he let her use some of her vacation time. When I thought about it, I figured it was more likely because she was close to maxing out on hours, not out of kindness. I hadn’t talked her into quitting, but she looked different, even after a few days of freedom from the hell her work really was.
I tugged on a stray strand of her hair, and she looked at me, smiling. Her jacket hung loosely on her thin frame. I’d thought she was just naturally rail thin, until I saw her take her jacket off to climb a tree, and I saw how muscular she was. Her eyes were soft and dreamy as she glanced back at me, her full lips parted in a sweet smile that I’d started learning how to draw out of her.
“Is it red or brown?” I asked, winding the burnished copper silk around my fingers.
“More brown, I think. But it looks red in the sunshine, so my mom always called it auburn.” She arched an eyebrow at me. “You seem to spend a lot of time looking at me.”
“I do that. But only with things that are important to me. It’s a photographer thing, I think.”
“Do we know each other well enough for me to be important to you?” She dropped her eyes. I’d noticed that she demurred anytime she thought I was complimenting her. It was sweet but made me wonder how she’d react once I paid her an actual compliment.
“You became the single most important person in the world to me the moment you took Honey the fawn out of my arms and started treating his wounds.” I tweaked her hair. “That you’re beautiful and charming and funny… I wasn’t expecting funny. It was a real bonus, considering…”
“Considering what?”
“Considering how much time I expect us to be spending together.” I winked at her, and she scowled.
“Another week. Until you go back to your regular job, and I go back to mine, and we maybe text each other or Facetime for a few more weeks. People don’t stick around, Logan. Especially not people like you.” She threw another clump of bread into the water.
“People like me? Like you said, we don’t know each other that well.”
“My dad’s a journalist’ did I tell you that?” I shook my head, and she continued, throwing pieces of bread at the water with increasing vehemence. “He’s won awards, too. He was great, for a little while. He’d stay home for a couple of months at a time, sit with me at the hospital.”
“What happened?”
She sniffed and shrugged her shoulders. “Mom said my illness ruined their lives, so he left and made a new one, with a new wife and children who didn’t get sick.” She threw the last crust and brushed off her hands. “Funny thing is, he stopped traveling. Got a new job as an editor of some stupid local rag of the small town he moved to and stayed there, happily, with his new family.”
“Pretty shitty of your parents to blame you, if you ask me. What exactly did your father have to say about leaving you?”
“I don’t know. I was in the hospital when he left, and I never saw or heard from him again.”
“And that was it? You never trusted anyone again, until your stupid track team in high school. Who then screwed things up for me.”
“When did this become about you?” She gaped at me, totally taken aback.
“The moment I realized that I don’t want to go back to Austin unless you come with me. I could spend time with you on the weekends, head over to Cedar Park and make you go to barbecues with George and Callie and their little one.”
She smiled, and her face was wistful. “Oh, that sweet little face,” she murmured. I glanced at her, and she scowled. “What?”
“I’m going to marry you, Heidi. You’d best get used to the idea because it will just make things easier for us down the road.” I glanced at her again. Of course, she’d met Callie. Until a few months before, she’d been a happy dog-momma. The suburb just outside Austin was a popular place for commuters like my brother, who didn’t want to pay Austin prices for homes. But I was curious why she hadn’t mentioned knowing Callie. I left it alone. Heidi was all about protecting herself. I just wanted to take some of that load off her and do the protecting.
“We’re getting married?” She looked up at me sideways.
“Well, sure, someday. I mean, you don’t want to rush into these things. I figure we’ll date for a few months, move in together, get a dog. When you’re ready, of course. I mean, somewhere in there you would get to meet my family, and they’d all get the chance to tell you I’m not good enough for you. You’ll ignore them and marry me anyway.”
“Oh, I will?” She was giggling now. “Do you plan out the lives of all the women you kiss?”
“Nope. No point, if she’s not spending the rest of her life with me.” I laughed and held out a hand. “So, Miss Heidi West. Would you go to dinner with me?”
She giggled and shook her head. “I’m sorry to say it, but I’m not sure where we could go, with you smelling like campfire. Are you willing to take a shower first?”
I put a hand over my heart like she’d cut me. “How about this? You help me break down my campsite. We go back to your place and you, good Samaritan that you are, let me shower and shave.”
She gasped and stared at me wide-eyed.
“Then, we go out to a steakhouse.” I glanced at her and shrugged. “My clean clothes aren’t real fancy, so it has to be a jeans and boots kind of place.”
“Okay. Dinner would be nice. Too bad we can’t get you showered before we get in the car.”
I leaned forward and splashed water up at her.
“We’ve hiked miles and miles of the park. What if the water wasn’t diverted in one spot that can be found?”
“Well, if dinner works out, I was thinking that a helicopter ride would make a nice second date,” I offered. “We can take up a topographical map and see if anything doesn’t match up.”
“A helicopter ride? Outside of a couple of flights to the Primary Children’s Hospital in Utah, I’ve never been on a plane.” She grinned. “Are you just trying to secure a second date, even if you ruin the first?”
“You got me. The only question is, will it work?”
She nodded and stood, brushing off her cargo pants. She held out a hand, and I considered pulling her into the stream. She saw the look on my face and froze, panic etched across her features. “If you really want a date. You won’t do it.”
I sighed and nodded, then started to stand. I got halfway to my feet, and she yanked hard to the left. I felt myself slide toward the water. She cackled, and I did the only thing I could think of. I held on tight and took her with me. Her laugh turned into a shriek, and I hit the water flat on my back, with her on top of me.
When we surfaced, she smacked my shoulder, laughing so hard she couldn’t get her feet under her. The water was only to her ribcage, and the way her wet tank top clung to her breasts made my mouth dry. She ran her hands over her hair and pulled it into a wet knot at her neck.
“Well, that wasn’t quite what I was expecting,” she scoffed.
“You thought I’d be chivalrous and let go?”
“I thought you’d have better coordination and not fall in.” She grinned at me and started slogging toward shore.
I dove under the water and came up with my arms around her waist. I lifted her and dumped her back into the water, laughing as she came up coughing and spluttering.
“Wow, Heidi. You really should have better coordination.”
She gasped and lunged at me. I caught her and held her up, grinning. “Don’t. You. Dare.”
I pretended to dunk her, then pulled her to me and kissed her instead. Instantly, she melted into me, and I tilted her upright so she could stand. Instead, she wrapped her legs around me. Even in the cold water, I could feel the heat from the “V” at the top of her thighs. She moaned and rocked against me with her arms around my neck and her fingers tangled in my hair. I ran my hands down her back to her ass, cupping it in my hands and dragging her harder over me as she moved.
My pants were pulled tight across me as my body reacted to her, and her rocking pressed my zipper painfully into my erection, but I couldn’t get enough of her. She whimpered and shuddered, squeezing tighter with her legs, and I knew if I took her now, she’d give herself to me without hesitation.
The realization brought me back to my senses. I gently disengaged her and held her upright in the water at my side while I caught my breath, the taste of her still sparking on my tongue.
“We should probably get out of the water before we make ourselves sick,” I suggested, and shakily, she nodded her head.
“Should I apologize?” she asked.
I scoffed. “Please do. Apologize for being sexy and sweet and making me want you. Because I sure as hell didn’t come out here looking to find a woman I could spend an entire week with and not get tired of her company.” I shook my head.
“You can really be an ass.”
“I’ve heard that before. Usually, it’s from my brothers or my pseudo-godmother. Oh, you’re going to love her. She will still grab me by the ear if she thinks I’ve been raiding the fridge between meals.”
“I like her already.”
I helped her climb out of the stream onto the algae-covered rocks at the waterline.
“What about your parents? You haven’t mentioned them, but I feel like I know your brothers.”
“I don’t know. Not much to say, really. They’re ranchers; they love each other even after everything life and kids have thrown at them. I don’t know them as well as I should, probably. But, I never had a good reason for leaving. Not good enough, anyway. George left, but he was at war, serving the country. Tucker left, but he was at Harvard getting a law degree, and he brought that right back to Texas. Jackson left, but he’s the baby. He can do no wrong, even when he’s breaking the law and hacking into the Department of Defense.”
We started walking toward camp, soggy and dripping water all along the way.
“I’m chafing. There has to be a better way to get back.” She giggled.
I nodded my agreement and undid my pants.
“What are you doing?” she gasped.
I tugged them down my legs. “Problem solved. Just leave your panties on.”
She gaped at me, then looked down at herself.
“You are wearing underwear, right?”
Her laugh was high-pitched and panicked, but she nodded. “Um, you can’t laugh, okay?”
My eyes got wide, and I started to grin. “Now I’m excited. Show me what you got, West.”
She hung her head while she undid the canvas belt on her pants and slid them down over her thighs. Underneath was a pair of cotton boxers in a teddy bear print. I snorted, and she glared at me. She slid her boots back on and took off, walking so fast I had to trot to catch up.
“I like them.”
“Shut up.” She laughed. “I have no reason to wear cutesy, lacy thongs. No one ever sees me without my clothes on.”
“I still like them.” I paused then had a thought. “Do you wear them to bed?”
“I don’t sleep naked, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No. I’m serious. Do you wear that little tank top and boxers to bed as pajamas?”
She nodded, and I had to hold my pants over me to hide my instant hard-on. “I’m going to have to dial back the timeline then.”
“The timeline? Do I even want to know?”
“I was going to give you a month or four to warm up to sleeping with me. Now that I know that you sleep in those,” I pointed at the sag in her boxers at the back, “I might not make it past tonight.”
“Whew. You must feel really lucky that it isn’t up to you, huh?” she replied. She gasped from the chill as she stepped into the shallow spot in the river we’d been using as a shortcut back to my camp.
“You are cold as ice, lady,” I pretended to complain. “And to think, I was going to buy you a nice dinner first.”
She scoffed and looked back at me over her shoulder. “Well, then, you should go ahead and buy me dinner, Logan. It might just change my mind. I hear that works for a lot of guys.”
I laid my pants out in the afternoon sun and tugged my extra blanket free from my sleeping bag. I handed it to her, and she wrapped it around her shoulders and laughed.
“Thanks for making it easy,” she said as I broke down my tent and repacked my gear.
“Making what easy?”
She hugged her knees to her chest and wrapped the blanket tighter around her. Her lips were purpling, so I put the sleeping bag over her, too.
“Being around you. If we’d met in a big crowd of people, I’d have disappeared into a quiet corner, and we’d have never seen each other again. But, out here, one on one, I feel like I’m normal. Just a regular girl, hanging out with the ‘cool’ guy.”
“The cool guy, huh? That was my brother Danny. I was the… hmm. I don’t really know who I was, back then. Other than desperate to get out of Austin, out from under my older brothers’ shadows. Then when George joined the army, out from under my younger brother’s shadow, too.”
“And that’s when you went to California?”
“Sure. First, it was a degree at UC Davis. I might have come home then, but senior year was when Rebecca was diagnosed with cancer.” I shrugged. “She forced me to make it to graduation. After all, if she could do it while undergoing chemo, radiation, whatever it was they were doing to her body… Well, I had no excuse.”
“She was your true love.”
I paused and thought about it. I’d once called her my only love. Time had made me wiser. I scratched my jaw and chewed on my cheek while I tried to find the right words.
“She was my first love.” I shoved the tent into its bag, and Heidi fell silent, waiting for me to continue. I could feel the weight of her eyes on my back, until I faced her. “If we’d gotten married, we still would be. But, that wasn’t meant to be.” I motioned to her with my hands. “Now, I’m here with you, and my chest hasn’t had that ache, you know? That empty feeling like it’s just not all there.”
“You think you could love someone as much as her, ever again?”
I pursed my lips and shook my head.
Heidi nodded, and I moved to her side and sat tucked under the sleeping bag with her.
“I don’t think we loved each other as much as two people are capable of loving,” I confessed. “So much of it was hormones and being young and the newness of being adults and having an adult relationship. Not just lust, but…”
“Playing house?”
I glanced at her.
She flashed me a wan smile. “Maybe that’s not right. Out loud, it sounds less respectful than I meant it.”
“No. That’s okay. We were playing house. Then things got very real, and very hard.” I felt around under the blanket until I found her hand. “I know I said you remind me of her. I didn’t mean that I was trying to replace her with you. I meant that you were unique. Different. Special. In looks and personality? Polar opposites. She was gregarious. Such a social butterfly. I’d send her out with friends just to stay home alone.”
“And looks?”
“She was so short. And not athletic at all. She always complained about her mystery fifteen pounds from freshman year that had never gone away. But she ate more greasy food and drank more beer than any guy I knew.”
“I don’t exercise to lose weight. I just want to stay strong. In case… you know.”
“Yes, I do. In case you ever have to fight for your life again.” She nodded, and I exhaled hard. It was the one thing that made me pause, thinking if I made her mine, tried playing house again, would I lose her to the disease that had stolen my happiness for so long?
“You don’t want to have to worry about me getting sick.” She made it a statement, instead of a question.
“It’s crossed my mind. But you can’t control everything. I’m not going to live without trying to have something good just because it could be taken away. We could both die in a car crash tonight, instantly dying with happy bellies full of steak and yeast rolls with cinnamon butter.”
“And baked sweet potatoes with marshmallow fluff,” she added gravely.
“Right? And, of course, fried pickles,” I finished.
She squeezed my fingers and pressed in close to my side. “Sometimes, you are my hero; you know that?”
I kissed her temple and rested my head against hers as her slender frame trembled slightly from the cold. I put my arms around her and surveyed what I had left to pack. We had time before the sun went down. So, I pulled her to the ground and tucked her back against me, resting her head on my arm for a pillow. Our body heat inside the blanket and under the sleeping bag warmed her until the trembling stopped and she sighed. The sound made my pulse speed. My heart beat solid and strong without regret for the first time in my memory. It beat in the soft curves and gentle kisses of the woman in my arms, who was too afraid to lose if she loved. But for now, this was enough. It was good, and honest, and more than I’d thought possible for a long time.