• • •
Jacob reclined against some pillows on the sofa, and she lay between his long legs, her head resting in his lap. He’d brought out a blanket. She snuggled beneath it, warm and content beneath it and next to the heat of his body. He’d turned on a stereo earlier, and the sounds of classical music swirled around them in the darkness. She looked up at the brilliant fireworks display in the sky, but her entire awareness was caught up in the sensation of his fingertips lightly skimming her bare shoulder, the feeling of his body beneath her and his long, strong legs bracketing her. She stopped fighting it. For the first time, she accepted the full, sweet feeling in her chest.
She’d fallen in love with him. And there, in that moment shared so completely with him under the stars with colorful fireworks shooting across the sky, she knew that no matter what happened, no matter how short or long their time together, she would do it all again. He was a man who deserved to be loved unselfishly. Wholesale. For all of his many glories. For all of his sadness.
For all of his secrets.
Twenty Years Ago
Jake drove them hard all that day, only allowing them brief respites for food and water. This wasn’t hiking like Harper was used to doing with her parents, an easy stroll through pre-blazed trails. This was grueling, sweaty work made even more challenging by the fact that Jake was as fastidious and careful in their movements in the forest as he was ruthless in keeping them traveling at a brisk pace. If they broke a branch during that exhausting ten-hour trudge, Harper would have been shocked. He insisted they move through the territory with utmost caution. She came to admire his agility in the woods, his almost dancerlike avoidance of trees and brittle brush beneath his feet. She came to resent it, too, as the warm summer day wore on and her fatigue mounted. Not just her exhaustion weighed on her. The first several hours of their hike had been undertaken in the rain. The wet, in combination with the fact that Jake’s old tennis shoes were a little large on her, had brought out a blister on her right heel. The pain became excruciating.
“Jake, I can’t take any more of this. We gotta stop. Please?” she begged him through a parched throat. They’d just approached a clear stream and Jake had bent to refill their canteen. The coolness coming off the water and the soothing sound of the trickling brook had made her long for peace and rest.
He stood and handed her the canteen. She drank from it greedily and then handed it back to him.
“Why are you crying?” he asked her sharply.
“What?” she touched her face dazedly. “It’s this blister,” she admitted, lifting her foot. “It hurts so bad.” She blinked at the sound of his curse and looked down to where he stared. Crimson blood had leaked through the dirt-stained white canvas.
“God damn it, Harper. Come here.”
She followed him and sat where he directed, sitting on a large rock beside the stream. He pulled out of his pack the familiar first-aid equipment they’d used for her wrists. He washed her foot in the cold water. She gritted her teeth at the mixed feeling of pain and relief.
Jake noticed.
“You should have said something.”
“I didn’t want to complain,” she grated out miserably. “You
’ve seemed so worried ever since we left the cave.”
“We’re out in the open now. We’re vulnerable,” he said irritably as he dried the blister with a corner of a blanket. He smeared on some antibiotic ointment and then bandaged her. For the hundredth time since she’d first met Jake, she wondered at how such a skinny kid could make her feel like she was in the hands of a competent adult. He could make her feel like a stupid little kid like some adults could, too. “Your feet are important, Harper. You should have told me when you first thought you were getting a blister.”
“I was trying not to complain,” she repeated. Unwanted tears swelled in her eyes, products of her fear and exhaustion . . . and shame at the irritation in his tone. He was scared, and seeing his fear undid her.
He glanced around the forest distractedly as he pulled an extra pair of socks out of their pack.
“Shit. They got a little damp,” he said, grimacing at the socks.
“I don’t care.”
“I do,” he snapped. “Don’t you know anything? We need to keep your feet dry, damn it.”
“Well excuse me! I’m sorry I can’t control whether or not I get a blister. You were pushing us like we were on some kind of a death march.”
“The marching part isn’t death,” he seethed. “The standing still is. If Emmitt has caught our trail, he’ll catch up, and it ain’t gonna be pretty when he does.”
She started back at his harsh statement. After a few seconds, he seemed to focus in on her face. He clenched his eyelids shut. She saw the muscles in his thin neck convulse as he swallowed.
“Do you think you can make it another half hour or so?” he asked her levelly after a moment. “There’s a place up ahead that offers a little shelter. We can camp there for the night, and leave at first light.”
“You wanted to keep going until night comes. It can’t be much more than four or five o’clock, can it?” she asked, miserable at seeing his fraying nerves, hating that she was the one holding them back on their flight to safety.
He shoved her foot into a sock. “It’s going to be all right. Just answer me. Do you think you can make it?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Jake.”
He looked every bit as miserable as she felt when he looked up at her, the bloody tennis shoe clasped in his hand.