9
Nina kept her eyes squeezed tightly, closed, as Rowan steered the gleaming black motorbike through the leave laden forest trails. He curled the bike left and right, curving around obstacles, leaping over rocky faces in a way that made Nina’s stomach fly and forced her hands to curl more tightly around his waist. As she heard the rush of running water, she knew they were nearing the place where Rowan had first discovered her, sitting crying in a puddle of her own filth, black forest mud streaked across her face. She felt a single tear dribble down her cheek and stuck out her tongue to catch the salty morsel before the man driving the bike through the dangerous trails could notice that she was crying. She finally opened her eyes as she realized that the light of the warm afternoon sun had begun to bathe her in golden warmth and she knew this must mean that the darkness of the forest was subsiding; that they were nearing the place where she had first left the car. She could not believe her eyes when she realized that she recognized the strip of narrow trail down which they traveled. For, yes, it was, it really and truly was, Rowan was slowly steering his prized bike down the narrow path that Nina had complained about when she had first entered the forest for a picnic with her friends.
Rowan slowed the motorcycle to a crawl as the bumped over several exposed roots and the path grew skinnier still. Nina peered forward, squinting, daring to loosen her grip around Rowan’s rock hard abs. She saw it, and she felt as if her heart was about to leap out of her mouth and dance upon her lips: the clearing. It lay just ahead of them, spangled in golden sunlight and treeless, absolutely, deliciously treeless. Nina could no longer stand it. Before she could second guess herself, she leaped off of the back of the motorcycle and sprinted forward on her bare feet, her naked soles slapping the rough forest ground, her toes gripping wet leaves, her arms outreached in pure, unadulterated joy. She yelped out loud as the forest edged its way away from her, thinning around her skipping form.
Finally, she fell to her knees at the edge of the parking lot, tears pricking her eyes, her cheeks flushed with the colour of rose buds, her hair wild and shivering all around her as she pressed her fingers against the gravel, feeling the very texture of civilization pressing up against every individual one of her nerves. Her fingers worked through the pebbled lay of the ground; her feet felt somehow suddenly more grounded, more sure of themselves and their footfalls. Her eyes had become overwhelmed, suddenly having to view such a wide and long and twisting expanse of solid road made Nina feel slightly dizzy, and the vastness of everything, the open land, clear-cut ages and ages ago, made her feel as if the world was rapidly expanding in all directions outwards, right before her very eyes. She swallowed and forced her eyes to remain open, despite the overwhelmingness of it all. Then she ran her hands through her hair, her head shaking back and forth, back and forth, a huge grin overpowering her face, bringing so much light to her features. She was happy. She could not believe she had made it back to the place where it had all began.
That thought, the fact that something had begun, brought Nina’s excitement instantly crumbling down around her. The day still shone with incredible brightness; the sun still breathed its sparkling warmth upon her skin. The vastness of the world still hung before her, yet these visions, these realizations, had suddenly lost their original sweetness. Nina felt the pinpricks of doubt popping up across the back of her mind and had to squeeze her eyes shut and violently bite down upon her lips in order to ignore the feeling of guilt and sadness that forced its way into the pit of her stomach. She breathed in and out, slowly, savoring the scent of the air, forcing herself to think about everything she was so happy to be going back to, her friends, her bed, her shoes, her favorite restaurants, but nothing reeked of happiness in the way it first had. Not anymore. Finally, Nina let her eyes drift back open. She blinked as a single, stubborn tear snuck out from between her auburn lashes and crept its path down her pale cheek. She swallowed once more and turned, slowly, to let her eyes fall upon the man who still sat behind her.
But Rowan was nowhere to be found. Nina turned and stopped short, her feet nearly tripping over each other in her shock.
Where could he be?
There had been no sound of the motor of the bike revving off or starting up; he had not so much as said a goodbye to Nina. She stared, frozen, absolutely unbelieving, completely thrown off, her mouth hanging open in a total lack of comprehension.
“He would never do that,” she heard herself saying out loud. Then she caught herself just as quickly. She snapped her lips back together, set her jaw, and straightened out her disheveled mass of fiery hair. She huffed out shortly. “Well,” she said, correcting herself. “You do not know that, now do you, Nina. No, you do not know that at all. Because, at the end of the day, you never really knew the guy anyway.”
The second she spoke the words she felt something like a punch hit her hard in the inside of her stomach; her mind whispered rapidly, urgently, that Nina did know Rowan, that she knew him well, and that he knew her better than Nina had allowed any other single living person to know her. But Nina was stubborn, and she stayed resolute. She shook her head subconsciously again.
“You did not know him,” she repeated firmly to herself, working hard to convince her mind to play along with her words.
She cast one long, drifting look across the forest, squinting between the foliage. But the daylight fell in glinting flecks across the green and shivering leaves and Nina could not for the life of her make out the sign of the bike, or the man who comanded it, no matter for how long she forced herself to peer at the softly blowing trees. Finally, Nina turned on her heel and put her back to the forest. She felt something pulling at her as if the forest itself was tapping her on the shoulder, reaching out and begging her not to leave, to stay. She swore she heard the wind whisper to her that if only she stayed, she would finally discover what it meant to be truly happy. Yet Nina shook this all off, she ignored it as she walked out of the forest.
The foliage fell away around her, and finally, finally, she was completely surrounded by tarmac and pebbles and emptiness. The tall trees fell away, and she stood before the shiny red surface of her sun-warmed car. She placed a fond palm upon the hood of her car and smiled. The warm metal of the vehicle felt comfortable and familiar beneath her fingers. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and fished out her keys. She grinned at them and twirled them through the air, swinging the shiny metal back and forth as she walked around the side of her car to the driver’s side. She pressed the car unlocked and beeped to life. The sound jostled Nina, she leaped up, forgetting the loudness of the metallic beeping. She laughed at herself as she swung open the car door and slid into the driver’s seat.
“Wow, Nina,” she chuckled aloud. “A few days away from the real world and you can not even handle a single freaking beep, huh.”
She shook her head and rammed the keys into the ignition, then twisted. The car jumped to life, and the radio blared in her ears. The sound of it was all so well known that Nina felt instantly comforted; as if she was finally back at home after a long and trying journey. She reached up her chipped fingernails and flicked the overhanging mirror down so that she could get a look at her face. Her jaw dropped open. Her cheeks were slightly tanned, kissed by the sun’s constant shining; her eyes looked so young without their normal heavy eyeliner and blue-black eye shadow. Her eyebrows looked as if they had become true rebels, growing every which way, tiny hairs sprouting off of the cardboard cut out shapes she had worked so hard on maintaining. And her hair, well, Nina did not even know how she was going to tame that mass ever again. It flew out in all directions, fiery red curls of burning chaos, tangling and leaping over each other as though burning with real flames. She shook her head in shock and quickly slapped the mirror closed. She twisted the knob of the radio upwards, for she was for once without her iPod, and her phone still remained uncharged. She checked behind her and then pressed her foot down on the gas pedal and began to slowly back out of the parking lot and back onto the open road that led back home.
Just as Nina was about to turn out of the lot, she decided to take one last look at the forest. The moment her eyes fell upon the green wall that stood before her, she swore, for a second, that she saw a glint of something moving behind the leaves. She slammed on the brakes and stared hard at the rustling of the leaves, but nothing jumped out at her. She knew it simply be her mind playing tricks on her, but had it been? She could not force herself to drive the car forwards. She sat like that, frozen, the car stereo still blaring the top forty of the summer all around her, her eyes fixed in a stare upon the mystery, the secrets that the green leaves just might contain. Finally, she had to tell herself she was being ridiculous, she could not sit there all day, staring, waiting for a sign when clearly there was nothing. She ripped her gaze off of the green expanse and slammed her foot down hard on the gas. The car shot forward, leaving the forest in a haze of dusty motor excrement, and sped down the road. Nina refused to even check the rearview mirror until she had turned off of the long side street and pressed the car into the whizzing traffic of the highway. She would never, ever look back.
The red car disappeared from the strip of side road that led from the highway to the parking lot and Rowan blinked back angry tears. He was angry because he was crying; he was crying because his heart felt as heavy as a stone inside his chest. He squeezed the handle bars of the ebony bike tightly, bracing himself, supporting himself. He inhaled deeply and slapped a hand across his face, wiping the tears away with his tattooed paws. Then he took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the clarity and calmness that only the forest’s pure, green air could provide him with. He pressed his hands against the bike and pushed it forward, slowly steering it from the spot he had stashed it in off of the trail, and rolling its reliable wheels back onto the skinny, tree cleared path.
He had slipped away and into the always friendly arms of the trees when he had no longer been able to watch the fire-haired girl’s joyous dancing. The happiness she so clearly felt when making her reunion with the beginning tips of civilization had first made him smile, because seeing the woman that he loved so filled up with joy made Rowan’s own heart sing. Yet as the moments passed and Nina walked further and further out of the forest and became more and more intensely involved with her celebration of all things material, Rowan’s joy had begun to ebb and ebb until nothing remained in his chest but deep and great sadness. Without even thinking, he had quietly pushed his way between the leaves, slipping into the green as easily as the wind itself. And there he stood, as silent and sturdy as a tree, watching with unblinking eyes, as the girl he loved was lured back to her world, a world so far removed from Rowan’s heart, by the glinting of her well-kept car, by the flatness of the paved road, ironed out by society’s glaring monotony. Rowan could not help the tears from falling as he watched his fire headed goddess slide inside the car and laugh to herself as she turned the vehicle away from him, flying down the road without so much as a single backward glance.
That was not true, Rowan caught himself as he stumbled through the dizzying thoughts. She did look back, he thought.
He had been about to press the bike away and out from between the bookends of the trees and the leaves when he had noticed that the red car, now just a tiny red speck on the horizon line, had stalled. He had wondered at first if maybe the car had given out, maybe the vehicle itself had protested Nina’s leaving so much that it had made itself conveniently out of gasoline. But that couldn’t have been it, he reasoned, because continue onwards the red speck quickly had. It had been brief, and he could not be sure because of the distance, but Rowan felt in his heart and in the pit of his stomach that Nina had stopped to stare back at the forest. To stare back at what she was leaving behind in the dust that spewed from the motor of her fancy car. To stare back, perhaps, though Rowan nearly dared not think it, perhaps to stare back at him.
Shaking the thoughts from his mind, Rowan succeeded in straightening the bike’s nose down the front of the skinny cleared path. He swung his muscled body over the seat and let the emotion fall from his body with a heavy sigh. He straightened his back, letting the wind rustle his hair and revive his spirits. What he thought about Nina’s parting did not matter now. What he had felt for her could not matter to him, either, because now she was gone, and she had made her choice. She had tasted life with him, and life between the trees, and she had announced, quite fiercely, that it was not the life she wished to have. It stung him to the core, but he could not allow himself to continue to feel this pain. It had no place out here, he lived alone, and he was not about to invite pain and heartsickness to move in and begin sharing his cabin. His cabin was his, as it had always been, and he realized now the real reason for that.
“Alone, that is the way you, Rowan, were always meant to be,” he said aloud, as he kicked the motorcycle into drive. Its engine soared to life, speckling the forest with shivering thunder. He slid his helmet down over his eyes. “Alone with the leaves and the wind and your animals and your crops. Alone is comfort and safety. And alone is where someone like Nina will never fit.”
The engine purred to life, and Rowan shot off, a dark, shining bullet, winding a speeding path of black sound through the green rustling of the forest. The trees seemed to bend gently to allow his passage; he steered the bike with such blind expertise that the forest seemed no longer a separate entity from Rowan; it seemed Rowan worked through the many twists and turns and over the bluffs and protruding roots in a way that could only mean the trees and rocky surfaces must in some way be a part of his actual being. He wound his way through the dense and complicated trails that filled with dark and pale green light as though this feat was no more difficult than tracing the lines of his own palm. As he drove through the filtered fluttering light of the forest, Rowan did not think. He did not blink. He simply stared ahead and drove, unfeeling, the roaring of the bike as it leaped over rocky outcroppings and over small holes in the path blaring all around him and silencing his inner turmoil, making him deaf to his feelings, making his insides quiet and numb. And that was exactly what he wanted at that time.
Rowan curled the bike around the corner of a particularly thick tree, and at last the cabin popped back into his view. He slowed the bike, its roaring petering out to a slow but steady purr, and rolled up towards the cabin. As he made his way halfway across the green lawn of his property, he suddenly found himself stopping, braking the bike and twisting his hands against the handlebars. Before he could even understand what was happening his hands were wrestling the gleaming black helmet from his head and he was tossing it to the ground; he was swiping tattooed fingers through his tangled hair, choreographing a dance of inked on symbols through midnight black tendrils; and suddenly, silent tears, hot and unwanted, were burning in his eyes. He blinked then, and rapidly, willing the tears to stop, yelling at them to go back to the insides of his pupils, to retreat and never bother him again. But they would not.
As Rowan sat, the cabin laying, waiting, before him, the green vastness of his own private world stretching out all around him, the tears decided that they were the ones who were in control, and they began to carve a slick and painful path down his face. They slipped over his pronounced cheekbones, slipped between the dark hairs of his beard, and jutted down over the ridge of his well-defined jaw. It was moments before he was able to become unfrozen, to regain his control over his own body, and that was when he reached slow hands up and slapped the hot tears away from his cheeks. But even without tears trickling down his face, Rowan found he did not have the energy to move. He simply sat on his bike, staring out at the land that lay, as it always had, before him. He felt something dark and cold weighing heavily upon his chest and pressing down upon the bottom of his stomach.
He slowly reached down to the grassy forest floor and heaved his bike helmet back up into his lap. And there he sat, his arms resting on the top of the shining helmet, his eyes staring out, tracing the shapes the dark shapes of the naked trees began to make against the sky until the last bits of sunlight had snuck away to their hiding spot beneath the horizon. It was only then, when the world around him had transitioned from green to black, that Rowan slipped off of the motorcycle and pressed onwards towards the cabin he had built in the heart of the forest.
The moon hanging over him, full and voluptuous, caught the shoulders of his leather jacket and tickled him beneath the chin as he dragged his muscular body across the grass and towards the door. He stared up at the sky, so full of stars, just yesterday so full of possibility. He felt suddenly as if the stars would never again hold the same beauty that he had felt they had shone with on that night that he and Nina had soared around the darkness on the bike. Thinking of her now brought the ghost of a smile to his lips. The way she had held the gun so fiercely, it made him hard just to think about how confident, how fiery she was. Her red hair suited her well, the woman who wore fire upon her head was a lady whose soul was stitched from flame. She was passionate, beautiful, sexy beyond belief, Rowan’s hand caught the door knob of his cabin, and he felt something catch in his throat, felt himself unwilling to turn the knob and let himself back inside of his home. For in that second, for however briefly, Rowan truly believed that opening that door would send all of the bits of Nina, her smell, the memories of her looking up at him as she lay on the kitchen floor, the sound of her laughing or singing as she made them coffee, would all come flooding out and smack him so hard in the face that he would be unable to breathe, that he would drown in them, these memories, these images, these smells.
After a long moment, Rowan finally twisted his fingers and let the door open. The wooden door creaked open slowly, revealing the inside of the home, just as Rowan had left it. It was uneventful, no rush of Nina flying through the rooms to suffocate him. Just silence, the gentle whisper of the wind as it passed through the open doorway and tickled the rooms of the house. Rowan simply looked at his home, peered at the interior as he balanced upon the brink of the entryway, as if he was an intruder inspecting the house to see what treasures or dangers might lay in store. After a long second, Rowan took the step forward. He walked into his home, closed the door behind him, and busied himself with the kindling of a fresh fire in the fireplace.
When the flames burst to life, Rowan leaned back from the heat and watched in silence. The warmth kissed his cheeks and brought color back into his heart. He felt calm at last begin to again take over his center, it spread a sort of peacefulness, a rested “It’s alright” feeling over his body. He felt his shoulders relax, though he had not been aware of the fact that he had been tensing them. He let himself lean back, resting upon his strong arms, his muscles catching the light of the dancing flames, emphasized by the shadows that had begun to dance dreamily about the room.
Something about watching the fire licking and leaping made Rowan feel comforted, it made him feel as if he were watching Nina’s hair blowing in the wind as it had on that dark and passionate night. So he let his dark eyes tangle with the wild dance of the flames, and in doing so he felt calm enough, comforted enough, that he was at long last able to drift off to sleep.