3
By the time Rowan had finished hanging the cured meat to dry, dusk had begun to tickle the tops of the trees. Rowan strung the last of the salted pig belly from the bits of twine, carefully securing it to the rafter. He tugged it, testing to make sure it was safely attached to the solid wooden beam. Then he stepped down from the chair, nodded to himself, and wiped his hands upon his apron. Flecks of rock salt caught in his beard and he chuckled, brushing them free with his muscular forearm. Then he hung the apron from a hook on the back of the kitchen door and headed outside to wash his hands.
Rowan ducked, bending his long, tattooed body to fit beneath the door frame. He began to walk across the lot, but after taking three slow steps, he stopped. The dusk was too beautiful, it commanded his attention. He paused and tilted his head up towards the glorious purples and pastel oranges that splayed themselves across the darkening sky. A half smile twisted its way onto his face, and he spread his arms and breathed in the beauty of the falling night.
“If you were a living woman,” he found himself saying. “I would hold you in my arms and kiss your dusky lips until you turned into morning.” The moment the words left his lips he dropped his arms and instinctively checked behind his shoulder, instantly embarrassed by his romantics. Then he caught himself, and laughed, his body relaxing. “There’s no one there, Rowan,” he chuckled. “No one to judge you. Not anymore.”
He grinned and picked the large white bucket from its silver handle. He swung it through the air, singing softly to himself as his steel toed boots traced the remainder of the route to the well.
Rowan dropped the bucket lightly to the ground beside him and set to work fetching water from the well he had worked so hard to dig. His arms worked the black iron pump, his arms surging with power, muscles flinching so that they made his tattoos look like they were jumping up and down. The water poured, cool and clean, from the mouth of the spigot, and Rowan pulled the bucket beneath the iron lips. He grinned with satisfaction as the bucket filled with water.
Walking back to his cabin, swinging the bucket of sloshing water gently back and forth, the dusky sky riding his shoulders, casting shadows across the ridges of his muscled body, Rowan could not help but smile to himself. He felt perfectly content. The wind kissed him lightly on the neck, rustled the hairs of his beard; the smell of fall hung thick and pleasant in the cooling air. He was about to open the door back to his cabin when he heard it.
A shriek, piercing and hair-raising, echoed through the forest, bouncing off the rocky inclines and getting caught amongst the top of the trees. Rowan dropped the bucket and turned, squinting, trying to discern the direction the scream had come from. There was no other sound for so long, just the simple sighing of the forest readying itself for another night, that Rowan began to wonder if he had not just imagined it.
“Is it finally happening?” he mused out loud, running his hand over his beard in thought. “Am I finally losing it? Has living out here all by my lonesome finally made me go a little mad? Could I really be imagining hearing things?” He frowned and strained his ears, trying to pick up the slightest scream or call for help.
But no sound came, none out of the ordinary, at least. After one more moment of listening, Rowan shook his head and shrugged. He again picked up his bucket and placed his hand on the door knob, ready to enter the coziness of his cabin once again.
“Uhhahhhhhghhhhhhh!!!!!!”
There it was again. Rowan set down the bucket full of well water and huffed. This time he walked towards the edge of his property, to the place where the trail he had carved through this portion of the woods began. He stood at the edge of the trail and cupped his hand around his ear, listening. He heard something else. A very faint:
“Fuck, fuck, FUCK!”
He dropped his hand. The curse words had confirmed it, the originator of the cries was definitely human. Rowan turned on his heel and jogged back to his cabin. He threw open the door and grabbed his rifle from its place above the mantle. He gripped it in his tattooed fingers and again ran out the door. He ducked under the overhanging branches of a naked limbed tree and began to slowly jog down the trail and into the forest. Every few minutes Rowan would stop and pause, listening carefully for any other cries or yelps that might help him get a better sense of the direction he ought to head towards.
After jogging for about twenty minutes, Rowan began to catch the distant and faded sound of crying. The wind carried it to him, small wisps of shuddering tears. He began to slow his pace to a quick and sure-footed walk, his ears and eyes alert as night began to lay herself heavily upon the forest. As he walked onwards still, Rowan would catch snippets of tears, carried through the darkening sky. The further he got towards the heart of the forest, the louder the tearful cries became. Rowan’s eyebrows slanted downwards, and his eyes narrowed in practiced concentration. He gripped the gun and gritted his teeth. He felt his body tense with the effort of tuning in so deeply to all of his senses, his muscles twitched and jumped, sensing every movement that occurred in the darkening landscape that surrounded him. He, the hunter, the plaid-wearing, gun toting, tattooed bear, patrolling the grounds of his kingdom for whatever trespasser this might be, screeching painfully into the night.
It was after about an hour of walking that Rowan caught a glimpse of a light. It was a tiny, rectangular brightness, about a mile north of where he stood, he guessed. He squinted, confused. It seemed to be moving ever so slightly, or was it blinking? He began to stalk towards the light, body hard and ready, crouched towards the ground, concealed by the combination of tall grasses and dark night.
About ten feet away from the light he stopped. He took a breath and raised his gun, pressing the sight against his eye. He blinked, his dark blue eyes staring at the magnified image. He lowered the gun and uncocked it. Then he strode forward, bent, and picked up the cell phone.
“What the…”
Rowan rolled the iPhone in his large, rough hands, stunned at having found it in the middle of the forest. He stared hard at it for a moment before tapping at its screen with his index finger. The date and time leaped into view. He stood holding the phone in the palm of his calloused hand for one moment longer. Then he slid it into his pocket and turned his attention back to his search.
The weight of the phone in the pocket of his jeans felt foreign and odd, but Rowan refused to let it distract him from the task at hand. Taking a deep breath, he filled his lungs with the familiar refreshment of clean country air. Then he turned back to the trail, taking several moments to retrace his steps so that he arrived back at the location he had been standing when he had last heard the sounds of crying bouncing through the trees.
He took a few steps, and then stopped very suddenly. He froze, becoming as still and solid as the trees around him. He stared straight ahead, not a single muscle on his toned body moving. There, a few feet before him, sitting several paces in front of a large outcropping of silvery gray rock, was a girl. Her back was to him so that all he could see was the long hair that tumbled down her neck and past her shoulders. As he took a silent step forward, his heart leaped into his throat, and it took every inch of restraint he possessed in order to stopper a gasp from escaping his lips. For as he had taken that single step forward, the moon had slid its way through a gap in the tangled forest ceiling and flashed itself across the girl’s head. And Rowan had noticed that the girl wore a gleaming mane of bright fiery hair.
“The woman of fire,” he whispered to himself.
“Well yeah,” the girl was saying to herself, her voice flat and tired. “We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere.”
Rowan stood to his full height and dropped his gun slightly to his side.
“The middle of fucking nowhere,” he said in his deep, earthy voice. It was a voice that truly matched the forest. “Poetic. We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere, sure is beautiful, isn’t it?”
The girl spun around so suddenly that Rowan was afraid she might fall over. She raised a rock high in the air and reared her arm back as if she aimed to smash Rowan in the face. Like lightning, his own arm shot up to grab the rock from her hands. The rock was sailing through the air to land seemingly several miles away before the girl even realized what had happened. She stared, pretty pink lips hanging open in shock, as Rowan brushed his hands off on his pants and cleared his throat.
It was then, standing about three inches away from the stranger’s face, that Rowan realized he had no idea what to say. He had not spoken to another human for over a year, and the beauty of this girl, her hair like the flames that had danced for him just only the night before, completely overwhelmed him. Dirt streaked her pale face, lining her cheekbones and clinging to her neck. Her hair was tangled, and dead leaves clung to the golden ends, rustling slightly as the wind played over her body. Her breasts heaved up and down, her breath rushing in and out of her perfectly shaped lips, flushing her cheeks the color of freshly bloomed rose petals. It was all he could do not to reach out a tattooed hand and brush the mud from beneath her eyes.
“You lost?”
Those were the words he found himself saying to this girl who had shown up at the heart of the forest. She stared back at him as if she had not heard the words at all, her breasts still heaving up and down in such a way that Rowan found it difficult to concentrate on her green eyes, though they sparkled with a sort of light that Rowan swore was made of the stars themselves. He cleared his throat, forcing himself to remain smart. He did not do this, he did not feel this way about people, ever; he was independent, strong willed, and had never felt distracted since first calling the forest his home. He blinked rapidly, filled his nostrils with the sharp, cool air and felt some of his normal aptitude and focus returning to him.
“You lost?” he repeated, and it seemed as if his words caused the red headed stranger to suddenly jump back to life.
She choked on her heaving breaths and coughed violently, sputtering back into the moment. Her face instantly clouded over with an anger so sharp that Rowan felt it stabbing him like a knife, flying out of the center of her electric green irises. She opened her mouth, then slapped it shut again, then opened it again, her fists clenching into small, hard ball at her hips.
“Who the fuck are you to ask me anything.”
It was not a question. Her words shot out of her mouth like punches. But Rowan was not alarmed. He slid his gun into his holster and slowly crossed his arms across his chest. His biceps pressed against his abdomen, hard and sculpted.
“I am the man who has run for an hour, responding to screams he heard echoing through the forest,” he replied, his voice steady and solid as the rock that stood behind them. “I am the man who is holding a gun, and I am the only person around for miles and miles and miles.
The girl met his stare with fiery defiance.
“And you,” Rowan continued. “Are the girl who seems quite lost, and quite alone. And you are missing a shoe,” he added, glancing down at her bare foot. “And the one shoe that you do have does not seem to be the type of gear appropriate for hiking the twelve hours it would take to get you back to the nearest side road.”
Rage danced behind the girl’s pupils.
“So,” Rowan said calmly. “Who the fuck am I to ask you anything? Let me answer that. I am your only chance of making it out of here alive. That is who I am to ask you anything. Of course, you don’t have to answer,” he continued, arching an eyebrow slightly. “Whether or not you choose to respond is entirely up to you. I don’t mind either way.” And with those words, Rowan turned his back to the girl and began to walk back towards the direction of his cabin.
“Okay wait,” the girls sputtered out behind him.
It had taken but five steps for her to respond. Rowan stopped walking but kept his back to the girl. He waited.
“Okay, wait, yes, I am lost, and yeah, I guess I need some help.”
Rowan breathed out quickly. He turned to face the stranger once again.
“I’m glad you decided to answer,” he said, looking at the girl. “Leaving you for dead out here wouldn’t have weighed well on my conscience.” And he turned his back to her again and began to walk through the overlaying shades of green and gray, back towards the spot in the woods that he called home.
Nina followed the strange dark man through the forest, trying to keep track of him amidst the shadows that tangled with the light. Following his trail proved more difficult than she originally expected; he was as dark and sturdy as the trees they walked past. She found it tricky, with her inexperienced eyes, to pick him out from the other forms that decorated the landscape of the forest at night. She also found it difficult to concentrate on anything but his body. When the moon flashed through the trees, it caught pieces of this stranger, this man. She saw flashes of the shape of his bare arms, working to push branches out of the way; the form of his waist, swaying back and forth, squeezing through narrow pathways between trees, curving paths for Nina to follow; the flinching of his ass, purely muscle. She tried to not to take him in, but her green eyes would just not relent, leaping and relaxing, working his legs forward, ever forward, towards what, she did not know.
After about a half hour of silence, Nina cleared her throat.
“Hey,” she said tentatively to the figure carving his way through the darkness, to the man that led her path. “Hey!”
He did not respond.
She took a few more careful steps through the undergrowth, her right foot still fitted tightly into the precious stiletto, and stopped. She bent down quietly, her eyes still on the mysterious bearded man who walked the forest in front of her. She slipped her foot out of the shoe and lifted it above her head. Before she had the chance to second guess her instinct, she hurled the shoe forward towards him and succeeded in smacking him, hard, in the small of the back.
“Holy shit!” he cried, his voice breaking into a higher register.
She was surprised to find herself giggling. Giggling, in this situation? The middle of an unknown landscape, following a potentially murderous stranger to who knows where, and I’m giggling? Nina shook her head, shaking away instinct, settling back into the comfortability of practiced suspicion, and learned privilege. She cleared her throat again.
“Ahem,” she coughed. The man finally halted his fast pace and turned to face her. In the very dim light, she was able to see an unimpressed sneer carving its way across his face. “Well,” she continued. “Now that I have got your attention…”
“You did more than get my attention,” he snarled back. “You effectively put a serious bruise on my back. What the hell was that?”
“That,” Nina said calmly, staring him in his black hole eyes. “Was a very expensive shoe. Which I shall shall want back just about now, thank you very much.” She stared at him expectantly.
The man stared back, completely uncomprehending. Then, a single eyebrow arched its way up his forehead, and he glanced at the place on the ground that Nina’s Louboutin stiletto lay. He glanced back at her. She slowly raised her hand, palm faced upward. He crouched and grabbed the red-soled shoe in his hand. He stood back up and held it up to her, staring her down with eyes filled with disgust.
Nina stared the stranger straight back, her face completely neutral, her eyes boring into his own. Her face maintained its emotionless, blank slate appearance as she forced him to continue to maintain her gaze. Yet inside of her, she was experiencing something completely different. While she kept her face blank and composed, her insides were another story altogether. Beneath her cool exterior, Nina was a roiling storm of emotion. Lightning bolts of electrical attraction flashed across her middle and made it difficult for her to concentrate on anything but the shape of this man’s muscles, his build, the way his well-carved abs pressed up against his thin shirt. The shadows playing across his tattooed flesh made her want to run her fingers across his foreign skin; she felt fire and color exploding within her mind, her breasts, and it was all she could do not to grin or perhaps scream while she continued to maintain his stare. She was not sure whether joy or fear was the correct response to the intensity she was experiencing in feeling his eyes on her own. So instead, she held fast to her sturdy neutral outer mask. She kept her hand steady and outstretched, and she maintained the intensity of her controlling gaze. She held him before her until she could no longer physically bear it; and then she released him by ripping the shoe from his grip and shoving her foot stubbornly back inside of the red-soled prison.
Nina did not break her eye contact with him as she shoved her foot back into the shoe. She let the shadow of a wince flash across her face as she felt the tight edges of the high heeled shoe smash against the blisters already decorating her foot. But she forced herself to stand up and continued to stare at the strange man. His own gaze began to twist slightly, became warped under the intensity of her own eyes. Finally, after what felt like an eternity of darkness and silence, she spoke.
“Well? Where the fuck are we going?”
The man stared at her still, for one moment longer. Then, without so much as a word or facial reaction, he turned and began to walk quickly forward again, as if their interaction had never occurred at all.
Nina stood rooted to the spot for a moment, staring in disbelief, mouth hanging open. How could he react like that after she had stared him down with such strength, fitted him with such sass? No man had ever before proven so immune to her powers of control, to her concentrated suggestion of action. The fact that this stranger had the nerve to completely ignore Nina’s rage made her even more enraged than she had been when she had first realized that she had become lost in the tangled paths of the forest. After a moment of standing frozen in shock, Nina jumped back to life and began dragging her blistered foot through the trees, following the stranger.
“You think you’ve won?” She found herself mumbling as she walked into tree after tree, her naive city girl eyes unaccustomed to the night time light, or lack thereof, of the forest. “Oh, fuck that. You have not even begun to taste the feeling of a fight, woodsman boy. Just you wait until you really get a taste of Nina!”
She must have spoken the last bit louder than she had intended, for the stranger turned around just then. In the light of the moon, Nina noticed that a twisted half-smile curved its way across his bearded face.
“Hmm,” he smirked, his eyes unreadable. “I have never been one to have just a taste.”
He turned his back to her again and continued to trudge forward at an impossibly quick pace, his agility and knowledge of the path so impressive that Nina swore he would be able to navigate this journey even if she were to somehow overcome his muscled form and punch both his eyes blind. Which was something she had definitely been concocting in her mind’s eye. For the more time she spent trailing this stranger through the darkened forest, the more she had begun to question his motives.
“So who are you anyway?” She heard herself say as she stubbornly dragged her stiletto over a particularly burdensome patch of muddy undergrowth.
She thought she heard him cough, but it may have been just the crunch of crisp leaves protesting being squashed by his heavy steel toed boots. He did not turn, did not so much as flinch. The strange man continued to walk onwards, putting ground behind him, pushing on blindly towards some destination Nina was no longer sure she truly wanted to discover.
“Who are you?” she found herself repeating, her voice slipping out of her lips more whiney and shivery than she had wanted it to.
She cleared her throat as the dark stranger began to carve the way up a steep incline in the path. The trees pressed in so closely that Nina had to shimmy sideways in order to fit her curvaceous form through the small slit of a path. It was so dark now that Nina could not even see the hill they climbed; she only knew they were climbing upwards because of the pull of the ground against her bare foot; because of the way her breath began to push and burn her stomach with effort. She toppled forward as her stiletto twisted in the grip of some unseen rock or stick, and in anger, she tore the shoe from her foot and hurled it again forward. But this time, there was a loud thwack followed by a scuffling sound, and then a yelp.
“OW!”
The man had tripped over the shoe and tumbled to his knees, sending himself scuttling down the steep incline. His heart raced as he gripped for something to grab ahold of, to stop his mad skitter down the incline, but found only dead leaves, slick with the night’s dewy darkness. His feet skittered, gaining speed with the lubrication of the shed leaves, and he found himself sliding unstoppably downward until he smacked directly into Nina. She grabbed him with more muscle than he had thought possible from such a skinny girl as her and she stopped his downward tumble.
Nina knew that this was her only chance. She stood perfectly still, listening to the slithering sound of his body tumbling down the hill. When the noise neared, she was ready to pounce, and she threw herself upon the stranger as he slid down the hill and into her path. She landed and thrashed at him wildly, digging her bare toes into the wet muck of the forest floor in order to gain traction and keep them from sliding further downwards. She drove her elbows, hard, into his chest, in order to prevent him from being able to fight her off. The result was a shocking success, even to her. She found herself panting and shivering slightly with adrenaline as she straddled this strange, dark man in the middle of a landscape that was even more of a dark stranger to her than the body she clenched beneath her.
She felt his breath, hot and quick, against her cheek and turned her face to face his own. Blinking rapidly, she felt her green eyes begin to find tiny bits of light within the vast darkness. A few moments passed and, as she gained her breath, his chest sliding her slightly up and down as he too struggled to again find the air to fill his lungs. Pieces of the night time scene began to edge into view. She saw, with heightened clarity, the lay of the hill stretching forever upwards, rimmed by trees placed so close together that the pass made her feel sickeningly claustrophobic. She was able to pick out the gentle sway of individual leaves as they silently clung to life, gripping the branches of the trees that curled their bodies above. And, she realized, she was able to make out the shape of the man’s face. For it was no more than two inches, now, from her own.
His cheekbones were the first things that came into her vision. Sharp, like knives, the perfect match for a chiseled jawline that wore a beard so dark it blended into the night itself. His mouth hung open, framed by plump lips. As he struggled back and forth beneath her tight and stubborn hold, his shoulder length black hair whipped her gently in the face. Then, his eyes, black and glinting with the tiny slivers of moonlight that every now and then managed to flash through the trees. His body was pure muscle, and Nina could feel every fiber, taut and desperate, straining and pulsating under her own form. She straddled his abdomen, and she could feel each individual, perfectly carved muscle working beneath her ass. She swallowed, struggling to maintain her cool. She closed her eyes, reopened them. The night still hung dark and heavy. His breath still flushed her cheeks. She took a steadying breath through her nose and felt her anger and fear flutter to life again in the pit of her stomach. And she spoke.
“I said,” she said quietly, pressing her lips close to his cheek. “Who. Are. You.”
His shoulders heaved up and down under her elbows, and he grunted slightly in pain.
“Let...me go,” he gasped, and she was shocked to feel a stab of guilt spread its way through her middle. She forced her elbows deeper into his shoulder.
“Tell me who you are.”
The stranger breathed out in anger, blowing the hair back from her face. Nina began to sweat with the effort of smashing her elbows so deeply into his chest.
“It doesn’t… matter who I am,” he said. “What matters is that we get the fuck outta here before it gets too late and the coyotes come out. So let me fucking go.”
Nina stared down at him appraisingly, not sure whether or not she ought to believe him. She squinted at him and drove her elbows even deeper into his shoulders.
“Holy fuck!” he cried, trying to swat her off, but she would not let him go.
She squeezed her eyes shut, the sweat pouring down her face in rivulets, her hair sticking to her forehead, her arms shaking as she forced the answer out of him.
“Who...are...you…” she gasped, pressing down so hard into his shoulders that he gagged slightly and her body trembled with the force.
“I’m Rowan! I’m Rowan! Holy shit I’m Rowan!” The stranger screamed.
Nina released her elbows and rolled off of him, gasping for breath, exhausted. The two of them lay like that for several long minutes, side by side in the complete darkness, gasping, panting, their bodies trembling with exertion. After a while, Rowan finally spoke.
“Is that how you normally meet people?” He asked, his voice flat and level.
Nina stared up at the heavy blackness. She felt herself almost smile.
“No,” she admitted, her chest still rising up and down, recovering from the rush.
“Oh,” Rowan said, rubbing his shoulders and wincing. “Well then. You certainly had me fooled.”
“Yeah,” Nina heard herself saying. “I thought it was pretty good. You know, for a first time attacking someone and all.” Her cheeks flushed the instant the words left her mouth. Attacking someone and all? What the hell, Nina?
Rowan emitted a rough, low sound that Nina thought might be a chuckle.
“Yeah. Well. My shoulders are going to hurt for probably about two days so, I would say, yes, red-haired forest wanderer, that was pretty damn fucking good for your first time… attacking someone, as you say.”
Nina felt her blush deepen. She pushed herself up off the ground and began to walk again. She heard a rustling that confirmed that Rowan had wrestled back to his feet, too.
“Hey,” he called, rooted to the spot as firmly as a tree. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going home.” She pushed onwards down the hill, slipping and grabbing at trees every few feet. The leaves were wet and cold under her bare feet, and she winced as she slid over a slice of jagged stone.
Rowan reached out and grabbed the back of her jacket, stopping her mid-slide.
“I don’t think that would work out for you too well,” he said gently. He carefully turned her around and grabbed her hand, guiding her back up the steep incline. “You’re about three hours of a walk from where I first found you, and I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that that locale is still lots and lots of miles away from whatever high class, city penthouse decked out in four million dollar paintings that you call home.” He dropped her hand and yawned, throwing his arms up towards the forest ceiling. “So,” he continued. “I would say that you’re best bet… in the case that you do not, in fact, wish to spend the rest of your night getting torn to pieces by vicious and starving coyotes or bears… is to follow me back to safety and then set out again tomorrow.”
Nina took a breath. She opened her pink lips to protest, but words failed her. She knew he was right. She was cold, starving, and flat out exhausted. The idea of sleep was suddenly so appealing to her that she felt she could likely curl up on this mud covered incline and fall into the most fulfilling and fitful rest of her life. But she would sooner risk being murdered by this frighteningly handsome stranger than she would risk ruining her hair by using a pile of animal excrement and rotting leaves as her bedtime pillow. She pulled in a shaking, dragging breath and stared ahead, up the incline, towards the place where Rowan’s voice had come from.
“Fine,” she said.
The word was short and tuneless, but its utterance pushed him forward suddenly and quickly again, like a sharp whip against a race horse’s flanks. She found them driving onwards, tackling the hill, and tumbling forward still, forward still, until she swore her legs would give out if she did not soon find a bed to call her own for the night.
“But only,” she gasped as they skidded down a rock overhang. “For the night.”
The forest suddenly disappeared. Small windows of light peered at them from the clearing ahead. Nina was blinded by the sudden brightness and staggered backward against Rowan, smacking her head against his hard, muscled chest.
“Woah there,” he said, his voice soft against her cheek. She shivered in spite of herself.
“Sorry,” she grumbled. “It is really fucking dark out here in…”
“In the middle of nowhere, yeah,” Rowan cut her off.
In the dimness of the forest night, she thought, for a moment, that she spied a half smile hanging onto his face. She blinked, and her eyes lost their hold on the details of his form. Nina bit her lip, pissed off at herself.
Come on Nina, you are in the middle of a fucking deserted forest with a strange guy in the middle of the night. There are more important things to worry about than whether or not this man is smiling at you. Like, oh, I don’t know, maybe whether or not he is a raving serial killer? That’s a good one.
“Take this,” Rowan said softly, and he pressed a sturdy wooden stick into Nina’s hand. His fingers were rough against her skin, he wore the flesh of a man who works hard, with his hands, each day and every day. Nina swallowed and wrapped her fingers tightly around the stick, gripping the wood with such intensity that her knuckles turned a sharp white. “Use it while you walk,” Rowan instructed, beginning to head up the trail again. “And it will help you feel where there are impasses in your way.”
Nina nearly scoffed out loud at this comment. Using a piece of a tree to guide herself through a darkened forest?! What was this, some sort of terrible discovery channel show? Yet, just a few moments of walking proved the true usefulness of the stick. The walking stick would bump into large stones or catch in the depths of holes that lay several feet ahead of Nina; it served to effectively protect her from treading a treacherous path. Within about twenty minutes, Nina had gotten the hang of maneuvering through the darkened forest, and all thanks to the assistance of the walking stick.
They continued on for several long, winding minutes. Rowan was leading the way, pressing through the brush almost blindly, as though he possessed some sort of innate, uncanny understanding of exactly where it was he must go. Nina picked her way more slowly, but forced herself never to fall more than a meter or so behind. She smacked the walking stick out in front of her like a desperate blind man, pulling herself forward and onward. The night air was cool and pleasant against her sweaty brow, and a gentle breeze whispered through the trees and played with her long, red hair. She found the silence uneasy; she was used to the rush of traffic screeching by her bedroom window as she slept, but the feeling of the wind kissing her skin was a surprising delicious sensation. In an entirely different situation, she thought, I might, like, kind of almost sort of like this.
Just as the thought crossed her mind, a high yipping sound began to bounce through the forest. Nina froze. She squinted through the dark curtains of night. The sound began to grow louder and louder; strange little barks that seemed to skip across the forest like stones across the water. She turned to Rowan.
“Rowan, what the hell is…”
“Be quiet,” he quietly commanded.
In the shadows, she saw him raise a finger to his lips. His dark eyes were wide and alert. The yipping faded back into the night for a moment, and his tensed body seemed to relax.
“Alright,” he began, turning to meet Nina’s terrified gaze. “That is why I told you we had to get home quickly. Those yipping sounds are coyotes. The last thing we want is to be circled by them. Draws a lot of attention to us, which would not be the best thing, as I didn’t bring any spare bullets. But they seem to have decided to change courses now, so let’s just…”
The yipping sounded again, this time so close to Nina that she jumped and nearly lost hold of her walking stick. Beneath the constant, ear-piercing yip yip yip she was now able to hear the scuttling of tiny feet racing across the wet leaves of the forest floor.
“Shit,” Rowan said.
“What the fuck are we going to do?”
Nina felt her heart leap into overdrive, begin pounding out panic with speedful integrity. She clutched her hand to her breast, squeezing at her chest, trying to calm her anxiety. Rowan huffed and grabbed her roughly by the arm and yanked her off the path and into the brush.
“What are you doing!” she yelped, but he did not stop, nor did he respond.
His tattooed fingers curled tightly, meaningfully, around her wrist and he pulled her forward with urgency. She panted and tripped over her own feet, the foreign landscape catching at her clothes, tearing her remaining stiletto from her foot and sending her crashing down through the mass of wet leaves and reaching thorns. She stumbled and cried out, but Rowan’s grip did not slacken. He continued to run, and the momentum pulled Nina back upward and onto her feet again, tumbling forward through the tangled underbrush.
Twigs snagged her hair and tore at her skin as they sprinted blindly forward, and the ear piercing yip yip yip yip yip was their soundtrack as they crashed through the night. Nina’s heart was in her mouth, cold sweat dripping down her face and her breath hanging off her lips when they finally came to a stuttering stop. Rowan stopped suddenly and pulled her gently to his chest. He crouched, forcing her down to the ground with him. She spat out dirt, and his neck snapped her way, his eyes alert with danger. Even in the darkness, she could sense the message he was sending her with his eyes: Do not make a sound.
They crouched against the underbrush, a small sheet of cool rock shielding them from view. They stayed like that, chests heaving, panting, frozen beneath the ground and the intimidating darkness of the night, the all-concealing shadows of the forest; until they heard it again.
Nina’s grip on his arm tightened as the clacking sound of many pairs of sharp paws racing just feet away from where they sat fell upon the air. Rowan pressed a finger silently against his lips and huddled closer to her. The yip yip yips sounded again, and Nina flinched, tears pricking her eyes. The coyotes circled just on the other side of the face of the rock. She tucked her head down and against Rowan’s muscular chest. He placed his arms protectively around her and rested his solid jaw on top of her fiery mane of hair. His fingers worked their way around her shoulders, caressing her body comfortably, reassuringly. She felt a sudden sense of calm spread over her, and she squeezed her eyes shut. With each hurried breath, she took in the comforting smell of him, a combined scent of dirt, pine, fire, and mint. She exhaled slowly and felt his grip on her loosening. She opened her eyes just in time to watch Rowan leaning forward, standing up.
“They have gone,” he said quietly.
He extended a hand her way, and she grabbed it eagerly. He hefted her up easily, his strong arms popping with muscle as they worked to pull her to her feet. She swallowed and brushed leaves from her hair. He grinned, reached forward, and carefully plucked a long twig from behind her ear.
“Oh,” she said, for it was the only sound her trembling pink lips seemed to remember how to make.
Rowan dropped the twig to the forest floor and stared at her for a moment, his chest rising and falling. Then he stretched, throwing his arms above his head and tilting his bearded face back towards the tops of the trees. As he reached upwards, his shirt rose and Nina caught a glimpse of his chiseled stomach. A tattoo of a snake curled its way across his lower abs, its tail disappearing beneath the waist of his pants. She swallowed, feeling warmth blossoming in her center.
“Alright,” Rowan heaved, shaking his body out and running his tattooed fingers through his hair. “See,” he said, turning to Nina matter of factly. “These are the sorts of things that happen when we try to play the big hero out here.” He gestured to the vast expanse of dark and green that surrounded them. “This here? This is Nature. And she is a beautiful beast. She can be sweet, but the number one thing to always keep in mind is that she is in charge. The second we start thinking otherwise, the very moment we think that it is us, and not her, who’s got the upper hand… that is the very second that Nature decides to snap us out of it, teach us a lesson to remind us that she is the real master, and we are but tiny creations of her own.”
Rowan cleared his throat and leaned forward. He fished Nina’s walking stick off the ground; she had discarded it in her panicked tumble. He straightened up and extended it to her, his eyebrow arching up his face in a way that made Nina’s knees give out slightly. She grabbed the walking stick and gripped it, feeling woozy as he flashed her a half smile.
“Ready?” he asked.
Nina licked her lips, squeezed the walking stick, stared into the coal black eyes of this stranger. She let her green eyes fall down his form, catch the shape of his abs pressed against his shirt, observe the way his thighs trembled with muscle beneath the tight hug of his jeans. She looked back up at him and found that his own eyes wandered the expanse of her body. She cleared her throat, and he snapped back to attention, his dark pupils finding her own.
“I’m ready,” she responded.
“It is going to definitely take us longer now,” Rowan began, slowly starting to lead the way back up the incline they had tumbled and slid down in their race away from danger. “So get ready to hike. And I mean really hike. We have got a good couple hours ahead of us.” They took a few staggering steps upward, Nina struggling not to slip down the hill in her bare feet. Rowan turned suddenly and fixed her with a serious stare. “And I mean it when I say it’s gonna be hours,” he affirmed. “So it’s a good thing that I’m in good company.”
And with that, he turned and continued hiking upward, leaving Nina wondering whether or not he had truly meant the words he had just said. She ran the sound of his voice over and over again in her head as she pulled herself upwards, her muscles burning, her fingers cramping in the cool evening air, wondering, trying to understand, exactly what he had meant by the simple phrase. Was he simply making an innocent comment? Or could he have been hinting at something more?
On they journeyed until dawn began to whisper the promises of its arrival, spilling dusty purple light across the very tops of the trees. Nina rubbed her hand at her eyes, forcing them to remain open, shoving the sleep that clouded her view out of the way. When she dropped her hands tiredly from her eyes, she stopped short. Her jaw snapped open, and she shook her head. Was it a mirage? Could she be so exhausted and hungry that she was actually imagining seeing things? But no, she noticed that Rowan had turned to look at her, a large grin spreading across his face. In front of her stretched a cleared plot of land, and in the midst of it, a cabin. It was built expertly, polished log upon polished log, glass pane windows, vegetable garden stretching out before it like a welcome mat. A water spigot gleamed proudly in the early morning light, and horses whinnied in salutation to the dawning of a brand new day. Rowan dropped his walking stick and spread out his arms.
“This,” he smiled softly. “Is home.”
The sun cracked her yolk across the pastel palette of the sky and the daylight spilled over the man with the outstretched arms, tangling in his disheveled hair, glinting in his eyes. He tilted his head back and breathed in deeply, audibly, and it was as if every cell in his body grew invigorated by this simple breath. Then he dropped his arms, opened his eyes, and looked to Nina.
“Well,” he said. “What do you think?”
Nina turned her gaze from the cabin to the muscled, disheveled man and promptly passed out.