Most of the time, I was fine with being alone. I could tell myself I was better off without love. Human beings were disloyal, greedy, ugly, shallow, selfish creatures. I didn’t need them or that sappy excuse of love to hide my fear of being alone. I had seen the worst in mankind and quite frankly, no thank you.
But sometimes …
I would see something unguarded like the couple in the car and want it. Hell, I would hurt for it. Not for the sex, although that wouldn’t hurt none. I wanted someone to laugh with. Someone to protect me. I wanted that best friend I’d never had. And if he were hot too … now that would be the icing and the cherry on the cake.
“Oh God, stop it, Katrina. You sound like a damn child. Whimpering and carrying on. Grow a pair.”
I began the ascent. The road twisted up, and I fought the car against the heavy wind. The creek below was a marker for my turn. I was close. I looked down. Jesus.
“Best to look ahead or up,” I told myself.
My stomach jittered from looking down at the inhospitable ravine below. One careless move and everything would be over. I stared ahead, but it didn’t help. It was mostly nerves at what lay ahead of me.
A row of aspen trees blocked my view to the lower road where I’d just been. They dropped off and from the corner of my eye I saw a truck.
“Shit.” I doubted myself. “It can’t be.”
Another hairpin twisted around. Through gaps in the trees I craned my neck to see if it was Chuck Pearson’s baby-sick beige truck. In the last glimmers of daylight I couldn’t be sure if it was him. I sped up all the same. A dense area of trees reached over the road concealing any remaining light and the driver behind me. I kept my speed up. The road curved around in a ‘C’ shape that cupped the mountain. As I came out of the bottom side, a truck exactly like Chuck’s entered the top half.
“Damn vulture.”
“Come on, baby. We can do this,” I said, hitting the gas. The car made a grinding sound. “Ugh, why do I have such a piece of shit car?”
I put a larger gap between us. After a hairpin into another section of dense trees, I noticed that the day was turning quickly into night. His headlights were still hovering behind me. I couldn’t let him see me turn off onto the access road coming up so I floored it just before taking a hard turn.
I gripped the wheel to keep control of the car, but I took that turn too fast. It snapped the passenger side chains off causing my tires to slip off the road. I fought the wheel to pull it back up, but it was sheer naivety on my part. I had already completely lost control. I was hitting every tree on that side of the mountain.
It’s funny what you think about in those moments of not knowing if you’re going to die. The car bounced about like a matchbox, and all around me were monstrous noises, but I didn’t even scream.
Time had slowed down.
As the car hurtled towards a massive tree, nothing mattered anymore. Absolutely nothing mattered. Nothing I’d ever done wrong in the past, nothing I’d been dreaming of doing. My dreams, my goals, it all went in a fraction of a second that felt like a million years long.
For the first moment in my life, I didn’t worry about anything. My sister. How I’d find the money for her. What I was going to do next. It was almost a sense of relief. The responsibility had been taken off my shoulders. There was nothing I could do to change what was happening, or anything that had happened before.
If it all disappeared into the blackness it was OK with me.
My life was shit anyway.
Cade
There was nothing in the world except the fire crackling in the woodstove, the snow falling quietly outside my window, and me sharpening my axe. Until a monstrous sound suddenly shattered the air. It reached into me like an invisible entity. My head jerked up, my body became still as I listened to it sweep over the forest air.
I had a split-second flashback.
The sight of jagged metal wrapped around still-warm human flesh. White bone broken and protruding obscenely out of human flesh, crimson blood gushing, dripping, spreading. Human flesh I had loved. The memory was etched into my cells forever. I couldn’t forget no matter how much I tried.
Branches continued to snap and metal screeched together monstrously. Without thinking I was on my feet. The axe clanked on the floor. I flung open the door, and ran blindly in the direction of the sound. I’d done this before. Run in the direction of horror.
Was I crazy?
I had hidden out here to get away from the nightmare and here I was running right back to it. My boots pounded the icy ground and hit a slippery patch. I steadied myself, jumped off the frozen track, and continued on the virgin snow. Hurdling over snow-covered fallen trees and brush, I hurried down the mountain in the last slivers of daylight.
It never ceased to amaze me how life could change in an instant. A moment ago I was relaxed by the fire, the sound of my axe lulling me into an almost dreamlike state while big, soft snowflakes fell over the creek.
Now my lungs were pinched from running in the thin air, and my blood ran cold with the fear of what I might find. I knew what the piercing sound was. Will the past, the demon I’ve been running from for two years, sink its teeth into my flesh, and pull me under again?
I pulled myself over a boulder, and scanned the area. It was difficult to see now that the last of the sun had slipped behind the mountain, but fifty feet ahead of me, just below Dogwood Pass, a car was wedged into some aspen trees. Oh fuck! I forced myself to get closer.
Please, don’t let there be kids in there.
Through the window I saw long golden hair spilling over the inflated airbag. She was alone and obviously unconscious. My heart was pounding hard as I ripped the door open and gently pulled her away from the airbag. She had a small gash above her eyebrow, but even in the circumstances it was impossible not to notice in fading light how beautiful she was.
I put my fingers to her neck to check for a pulse. It was strong … and her skin felt warm and silky.
It was cold and snowfall was growing heavier. She was bleeding. Responsibility for some stranger was the last thing on earth I needed, but I had no choice but to take her back to my cabin and lay her by the fire. When she came to I’d explain what happened and drive her into town tomorrow. And that would be the end of the matter. My life need not change in the slightest.
I would just be doing the decent thing.
It was not like I had a choice, anyway.
I unhooked her seatbelt, slipped one hand around her back, the other under her knees, and scooped her out of the car. She was slender, but I still felt her soft curves press into me. It’d been so damn long since I’d held a woman this close.
Cade
My heart was pounding hard as I kicked open the door to my cabin. There was nothing fancy like a couch. She’d have to make do with the floor. I laid her down on the rug in front of the wood-burning stove, and pushed an old cushion under her head. Then, I found some blankets in a wooden box and wrapped them around her. Her hair lay across her face like silky gold strands. For a second I hesitated, then I smoothed it back to reveal her features. In the firelight, they were soft and delicate. Her mouth looked like it’d been dropped lightly on her face like a cherry on whipped cream.
I began to stir in a ravenous way.
Like a wild wolf.
Hardly surprising, given I had been without a woman for two years, but even so. Disgusted at myself, I jumped up and moved away from her. Restlessly, I put a log in the wood burner and looked around for a way to occupy myself. I filled the whistling kettle with fresh water and put it on the gas stove. Blowing out the matchstick, I turned to look at her. She had not moved at all. The sight of a woman, such a beautiful woman in my one room cabin, was stifling. Agitated, I rubbed the back of my neck. I need something to do with my hands. I returned to finishing my work sharpening the rest of my knives for tomorrow.
But I couldn’t concentrate.
I thought about the lumpy old cushion I had shoved unde
r her head. It probably stank of smoke. I let my knife drop to the floor and climbing the ladder to the bed above us, I snatched my pillow. I lifted her head and placed the pillow beneath it. Her hair was threaded through my fingers. I gazed down at it in horror.
Fuck, I didn’t want to let go.
I forced myself to release her, and go back to my knives and sharpening block.
Out here by myself, I could completely lose myself to the rhythm of the blades as soon as I found a good flow on the straight blade. For some strange reason, the scrape of the blade against stone was not sinister, but incredibly satisfying.
Today the zen-like peace from sharpening my knives was nowhere to be found.
Instead the tangled rope of desire and restlessness inside me grew. Hell, I wanted her to wake up so I could take off her clothes piece by piece and run my hands down the inside of her curvy thighs …
“Damn.”
I turned away from her and sharpened harder. Straight blades need a figure of eight motion over the stone. Back and forth, forward around and back, I built up faster and faster. A thought of her flashed into my head, it tripped my concentration. The knife slipped and cut me. My own blood welling up was enough to jolt me out of my uneasy trance. The kettle started whistling. Before I could go to it, the wide-eyed blonde sat up, alarmed. Her enormous eyes were trained on me. They were the most amazing color, emerald green.
We stared at each other for a long unreal moment. Awake she was so fucking beautiful, it robbed me speechless. She looked like what I imagined an angel would look like. Long blonde hair, huge green eyes, heart-shaped face. Then, I remembered myself. I dropped my knife on the floor and went across to take the kettle off the stove. A clothesline ran across the cabin above my head. I reached up and took down a t-shirt with holes in it and ripped a strip off it. I wadded up and pressed over the gash in my hand.
“Hey,” I said.