“Baby, it’s OK,” he soothed. “You’re all right. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
I fought back tears of confusion. He saved me. But how? Dex was leaner and meaner than ever before. I had felt and seen those muscles on him. They were firm and hard but compared to the fallen meathead, he was in a different class. There was no way someone of Dex’s stature, no matter how newly buff, should be able to take on a man of Mitch’s size.
I swallowed hard and tried to calm my heart. My shaking was slowing down, as Dex held me in place, stroking the back of my head with gentle pressure.
“Baby,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry, baby.”
I pulled my head back and looked up at him, blinking my tears away.
“For what?”
“I shouldn’t have left you alone,” he said, rubbing his thumb under my eyes. He took his fingers and lightly traced my cheek where I had hit the tree. “This is swelling up.”
“You couldn’t have known,” I said, ignoring my cheek. “I didn’t think he was just going to…flip out like that.”
He frowned and closed his eyes, shaking his head. “I should have known…I was watching him. I kept seeing the way he was looking at you. As soon as we brought the llama to the woods, I just had this feeling and before I could do anything he whacked me on the back of my fucking head. Thank fuck I woke up in time, I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself if…”
“I should have said something,” I admitted. “He was coming onto me a few times before.”
Dex’s eyes sharpened. “What?”
I looked away at Mitch’s body. He was still breathing and still out cold.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
I chewed my lip, feeling the pain in my cheek creep up to my head. “I didn’t want you to get upset. You would have called off the whole thing.”
“You’re damn right I would have!” he yelled. I flinched in surprise. “Perry, you should have told me.”
“Then the show would be over.”
“Fuck the show!” he said, throwing his arms out. “I don’t care about the damn show. I care about you and only you. You’re everything to me. Nothing else even comes close.”
He came back and placed his hands on my shoulders, holding me firmly. He eyes roamed my face, and he winced every time they passed over my cheek. “We’ve got to leave and leave now. We’re going back to Rigby’s and then we’re going home. To our home. Got it?”
I nodded dumbly. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Come on, we can’t chance him waking up again.”
We scampered back to the campsite and grabbed as many things as we could, shoving them into our backpacks. The space blankets, flashlights, dried foods, walkie talkies, waterproof matches and extra layers of clothing were all we could fit. We decided we had to leave the llamas behind or they’d only slow us down, but just as we were running out of the campsite, we swung up by the llamas and let them loose of their leads. They trotted away from us, then stopped at the edge of the forest and began to graze. I was sure one day they’d find their way back home. They had time that we didn’t.
Dex took the opportunity to get the map off of Mitch. He approached the slumbering giant like Indiana Jones snatching a relic. I held my breath, my grip on the rifle tight, until Dex’s fingers ripped the map out of Mitch’s back pocket. The man began to stir and we both took off running into the woods, trying to find the path we had come on.
We didn’t have much luck and Dex didn’t want us running around in the open while we looked for the path in. So we headed straight into the middle of it, stepping over rotting logs, uneven ground and brushing past a million branches that pulled at our clothes and hair. We were lucky it was morning and there was enough light in the undergrowth to see but it was hard to look straight ahead when you had branches threatening to poke your eye out.
“I think we’ve lost him,” I said after a while, gasping for breath. Dex didn’t slow.
“Dex, please, I don’t think he’s following us.”
“You can’t be too sure,” he said without looking behind at me.
“But we have both guns,” I pointed out. I was gripping the rifle still and he had the shotgun. We made sure the safety was on both of them, knowing how easy it was to trip and have a major accident.
“We have guns but he knows this place like the back of his hand. And we’re definitely lost.”
My stomach flipped. “Don’t say that.”
He shook his head, still marching forward, brushing past branches and being careful not to fling them at me. “We’re lost, kiddo. Once we get out of the woods though, we might be able to find the way back.”
“We should have taken his compass,” I mumbled.
“It was in his front pocket.”
“Do you think he sabotaged the walkie talkies?” I asked, something that had been on my mind for a while.
“I don’t know. I don’t think any of this was planned, at least not by him.”
I mulled that over. We walked some more, my knees tired from stepping, my shoulders aching from the backpack.
“Dex?”
“Uh huh?”
“What happened to you?”
Finally his pace slowed and I was able to catch up. He still didn’t look behind at me, though his head was cocked, thinking things over.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not the same anymore…” I said quietly. “Who are you?”
A beat.
“I’m Dex,” he replied thickly.
“You’re Dex 2.0. You’re different now.”
“So are you.”
I reached out and grabbed his hand, getting him to stop. Somewhere off in the trees, a bird flew, flapping its wings noisily.
“I mean it,” I told him, examining his face. “The other day you picked up Maximus with your bare hands. Now you threw Mitch back with a single punch. You’re turning into Chuck Norris.”
“Will you make Chuck Norris jokes about me?”
“No,” I said sternly. I stepped up to him and squinted at his face. He was hiding something, and despite the grey, dim light, I could see it in his eyes. “Tell me the truth. What happened to you?”
He exhaled through his nose and let his eyes search the woods as he planned his answer. I waited. We didn’t have the time but I made the time.
Finally he said, “I don’t know what happened to me. I’m just…I’m still me, Perry. I feel like me. Except sometimes I feel this extra energy kind of swirling around. In here.” He pointed to his chest. “It feels like adrenaline. Or, like, I’m on a fuckload of meth. And suddenly I know I can do anything. I’m…I just get really strong and I have no fucking clue why. Or how. I just don’t know.”
He brought his eyes to mine, the corners crinkling gently. “I know how fucked that sounds and I’m right there with you. It doesn’t make sense but it keeps happening. I don’t know how to stop it and to be honest, I don’t know if I want to stop it. Perry, I ripped a fucking sink out of the ground when I was in jail. I don’t know how to explain that. I can’t.”
He tugged down his newsboy cap and looked at the ground. “I don’t blame you if you think I’m a freak now.”
“Dex,” I said carefully. “I’ve always thought you were a freak.”
He chuckled, still avoiding my eyes.
I decided to bite the bullet and be honest with him. Even though the mountainous woods wasn’t the most practical place for confessions, it was only fair.
“And I guess I’m a freak too. Because something happened to me. I’m different now too.”
He looked at me sharply. “What?”
I gave him a quick smile and shrugged. “It’s hard to explain. Ever since I went into the Thin Veil, I’ve…I’ve been able to project my thoughts. At least to Ada, and maybe Maximus.”
His body stiffened at the mention of his name but I continued, “and I don’t think they can hear it all the time. And I don’t think anyone else can hear it. But, so far, this just seems to be the way it is. People can hear my thoughts.”
A slow smile spread on his lips, causing the dimples in his cheeks to deepen. “I know.”
I jerked my head back. “You know?”
He kept smiling and pulled down at his cap again so I couldn’t see his eyes.
“Jerkface,” I said, punching him on the arm. “You know? You know? How could you…oh God. Oh my God. Dex, can you hear what I’ve been thinking?”
He licked his lips lazily before answering. “Yes.”
I gasped. Then I hit him again, harder this time. “Fuck you!”
“What?” he exclaimed, grabbing his arm. “It’s not all the time. Only sometimes!”
“What sometimes?” I asked through gritted teeth. “Tell me!?”
Oh dear lord, what did Dex hear?
“Nothing too personal, don’t worry!”
I raised my fist at him and he shied away. “I’m being serious. I’ve only heard you a few times. Like, the other day, you were comparing the woods to Lord of the Rings. Stuff like that.”
I thought back at all the times when I was certain he could hear what I was thinking. I felt raw, exposed and mortified. I wrung my hands together. “This is terrible.”
“It’s not. Really, it isn’t.”
I speared him with my gaze. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
He rubbed at his chin. “I wanted to know the truth.”
“The truth about what?”
He pursed his lips and looked down at my boots. His eyes were flashing from some internal monologue. It was a pity I couldn’t hear his thoughts. How fucking unfair was this?
“I wanted to know how you really felt about me,” he answered, his words barely audible.
My breath hitched and I was surprised at the butterflies rolling around my insides.
“And…what did you find out?”
He slowly met my eyes. He looked crestfallen with brows pressed together. “That you don’t know.”
My tongue felt thick in my mouth and words failed me. I just looked at his face, the way his eyes sparkled sadly, and wished above everything he had figured me out. I wanted him to tell me how to feel because I sure as hell didn’t know.
He touched me on the arm. “Come on, we have to keep moving.”
We had to leave that conversation under those towering trees. We pushed on through the grey.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When we finally made it out of the forest, we weren’t at all surprised to end up in completely unfamiliar territory. Not that we knew the area or anything, but we were even higher than where we had camped. Traces of snow coated the trees just north of us and the landscape was full of moss and loose shale. A steep mountainside bled onto our new path and we had to navigate over boulders and rocky outcrops as we made our way across.
Dex thought he had the map figured out, so we followed that best we could. We could always hear the roar of the river we had seen yesterday, but so far it never made an appearance. We just pressed on, him ahead of me, our backpacks straining, feet aching, only stopping to rest and eat something. We were running low on water too, another reason why we hoped to come across the river again.