She helped me. She really did seem to care for a while.
She looks up at the dawn sky above the tiptops of the pines. I follow the line of her gaze, wanting her to see the beauty here. Her gaze lowers, then.
“You’re not going to…”
She eyes a downed tree, then turns to me with a kind of wonder. She thinks I’ll move it. I suppress a smile. Even I have limits.
“No,” I say simply. “We’re here. Near.”
She looks happy.
My heart swells to see her happy. “We’ll leave the truck here,” I say.
She watches me a little bit longer, and I think she’s going to sneak a photo like she does, but instead she goes over to the downed tree and begins to crawl up. I hop up and pull her up and steady her. We stand there together, face to face. She looks into my eyes, and I wonder what she’s looking for, what she hopes to see.
I slide my fingers over her curls. She shudders a little. I think it’s me, then I realize it’s the cold. Early fall. There’s a chill in the air. I pull off my jacket and put it around her, over her smaller coat.
She resists. “Kiro, just a shirt can’t keep you warm. You need this, come on.” She begins to pull it off, but I still her arms.
“You’ll wear it.”
“You can’t just make me wear it.”
“Can’t I?”
Her pulse jumps—I see it in her throat. How well does she understand the situation she’s in?
“You’ll freeze.”
“I won’t freeze. You just have no tolerance for temperature variation.”
Yet.
She pulls the jacket around her, as if it’s so strange, as if she’s unused to…this. Has no male ever cared for her? I find it shocking, but at the same time, the idea of any other male warming her or feeding her or fucking her makes me feel crazy.
“So it’s near here?”
I jump down. Not only is it one hundred fifty miles away, but deep into Canada. I know only because the professor would show me maps on his computer, trying to get me to show him where I had lived. The summer and winter ranges. He figured out a good amount about me and the wolves. “The walk will warm you,” I say simply.
We pull the packs out of the back. Pull the canoe off the top. Ann puts plastic over the broken window—so the seats don’t get moldy.
I nod like I think it matters.
She brought a lot of energy bars and dried food. She’ll soon see she has no need of them. I’ll provide everything she needs. She’s also brought the wolf keychain. I won’t need that, either. I’ll have the real thing.
“There’s a river this way,” I say. “Maybe an hour’s walk from here.”
“You really know this place.”
We begin to trudge. I carry the canoe on my head. The canoe slows us, but not as much as she does. She asks me questions now and then, points out birds. “Stop!” she says after a while.
I halt, thinking there’s something wrong. She points out a doe on the ridge above us.
Has she never seen a deer? I put down the canoe, and we watch it together.
“It’s magical,” she says.
She won’t like it when I kill one. I decide I’ll kill things away from her and bring her the parts, not let her see the whole animal. “Have you never been in the wild?”