I stay there. It seems foolish to consent to going even deeper into the wilderness now.
“If I carry you to the canoe, do you think you’ll spill your precious coffee? I think you might.”
Pick your battles.
“Fine.” I go over. He stabilizes it as I get in. He has the packs arranged differently now, so that the only place for me is a little nest right in front of where he sits to paddle.
“You want me to sit between your legs now?”
“I don’t know what you might do.”
“I liked where I sat before. When I was in the front. Like the Queen of Sheba.”
“And now you’ll sit in a different place.” He urges me forward.
Pick your battles,I think again. Though it occurs to me he’s winning every one.
“Fine.” I settle in and stretch out my legs over the plank of the canoe bottom, back against the bedroll. He shoves us off, and we begin to move. His long, powerful strokes move us silently up the stream.
I sip my coffee and watch the scenery go by, thinking about where we are, where the sun is. I need to pay attention now.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks.
“How I’m going to escape.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
It’s common for freelance journalists to wade too far into danger in the course of digging up the real story on something. You just keep going further and further, because that truth you need, that nugget you need, is just up ahead—you’re sure of it. And you need it so bad for this story that you’re going to write, this story that will make some fucking difference in this twisted-up, tangled-up world.
You see a lot of us dying to get a story. You see a lot of us quitting once we get married and definitely once we have families. The last thing you ever want is for your kids to see your beheading video. Or for your partner to get a hundred pieces of you in a body bag.
I always figured I’d quit.
This isn’t what I had in mind, though. I was thinking more along the lines of writing a book or a blog. Not being a captive in the wilderness.
I lean back, bracketed by his thick, muscular shins, which are lightly covered with hair. His muscles flex with every stroke, thick and powerful. I tear my eyes from them, force them down to the boots we bought him.
“How are the boots?”
“Fine for now. Once I get my feet used to rough ground again, I won’t need them. You won’t need shoes eventually, either.”
I snort. “And if you look out the tour bus window to your right, folks, you’ll see a massive rock formation as we enter utter and complete motherfucking fantasyland.”
“Tour bus? What?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“Don’t you want to be strong?” he asks. “How can it be a bad thing for your feet to be so tough and strong that you never need shoes? To be so free and wild you don’t need anything, and this is your home, and all of this beauty is yours? Out here, you’re richer than the richest person in the world.”
My heart pounds like it does whenever I feel the edge of another person’s reality. We all see the world so differently from one another, but every once in a while, you see through the eyes of another. And it never ceases to blow me away.
Kiro definitely blows me away.
Abused and lied to all his life. So he makes his own damn life out here—fuck all the people and phones and cars and insurance plans. The sky is his. The river is his. With everything he tells me, I want more, more, more. Not for the story, but just…to know him.
“King of the forest.”
He says nothing. He is king of the forest. Master of everything he sees. It’s madness.