Page 59 of Last Chance Cowboy
She wanted to talk to him. She wanted to be close to him. She wanted him to teach her things.
So, here she was, about to embark on the most extreme experience of that, and she felt like she was going to vomit.
Which was not sexy, nor was it totally reasonable.
The fascination was becoming a little bit too powerful.
She looked at Zane’s profile as he killed the engine of the truck and got out.
Thatpoor man.
She knew that he had given her the most abbreviated version of that story about the mission, knew that he must’ve seen some terrible things. Dark sides of humanity, the kinds of things that she had been spared.
Yes, she had been through a lot. But the truth was, she had just been through it younger than most people.
If life went according to the natural order of things, everyone would lose their parents eventually. It didn’t make it easy, but it was a common sort of grief, and there was something difficult embedded in that.
In the way that her grief was normal, and therefore sometimes felt like it shouldn’t hurt quite the way that it did.
In the way that it would get less impactful over time. Because someday, she would say that both of her parents were gone, and no one would even look at her with shock and say anything about how young she was.
That part of it would be invisible.
She wasn’t minimizing.
But it still wasn’t the same as what he had been through.
Not everybody had to look full in the face at the dark truth about humans. At the terrible things that they would do to each other.
But he had.
It was really no wonder that it seemed like there was a little bit of darkness in him. How could you see that without putting some in your pockets and carrying it home?
She climbed out of the truck and closed the door behind her. Then, she heard the locks click.
“All right,” he said. “Get your compass out. We’re going to walk southwest.”
“Okay. I don’t really know how to do this.”
“That’s okay. I’m going to show you.”
And he did. Standing near her, so close that she could smell his fresh, clean skin. She wanted to bury her face in hisneck and take a deep breath, which felt a little bit pathological.
She tried to pay attention to all of the directions that he was giving her.
They were important directions.
She really had no idea how to use a compass. It was one of those things that seemed impossible to her. But as they set out along the grassy trail that led deeper into the forest, it sort of began to make sense.
She was grateful for the compass, as the trees became thicker, the foliage around them blocking out the sun and everything else.
Because how else would she ever be able to figure out where she was? When they had been out in the open, she could’ve followed the mountain, but now, there was nothing. She had a vague sense of where she had come from, but that was all it was, a vague sense. He showed her how to see which way the compass should point when they were headed back toward the truck.
Then turned her back away from it.
“We’re going to walk until it gets dark. Well, not all the way dark. You want it to be light enough to figure out where you want to bed down for the night.”
“Are you going to tell me when that is?”
