Page 39 of Last Chance Cowboy
“I care. And I’m pretty sure not throwing up is a good piece of survival.”
“There are a lot of cultures that eat them, you know.”
She frowned. “Really?”
“Yes. Really. I’ve had them in parts of the world where they flavor them up and make them into a nice snack. I like them. Grasshoppers, crickets, ants. They’re a good source of protein, and yeah, you can definitely make them taste a little bit more appealing if you put a little bit of work into it. You’re a baker, you experiment with all kinds of flavors.”
“Fruit is right up my alley. I’m not sure about insects. But then, sometimes I eat chicken, and it tastes too chicken-y to eat. So I wouldn’t say that I’m necessarily the most hardy and adventurous eater.”
He hadn’t wanted to think much about his eating preferences for a long time. When he had started going to her bakery in the morning to grab a roll, she had asked him one day which kind he liked best, and he really hadn’t known how to answer the question.
He had gotten to the point where he didn’t much question what life put in front of him. If that happened to be a pecan roll when he didn’t prefer pecans, that was fine.
He would just eat them anyway.
It seemed reasonable enough.
But of course, most people weren’t like that.
She had to walk with quick, sharp steps to keep up withhim, and he slowed his pace. They weren’t on their way to a destination, after all.
“If you are in a survival situation, the best thing you can do is hunker down. That way you can save energy, and you won’t get any further away from help.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, if you get to where you feel like you’re going in circles, and you’re in a stopping place where you feel like you can make a decent shelter, it’s best to just stop. You’ll have your supplies, and you can always get yourself more lost.”
“What if you get yourself more found?”
The question was sincere. He looked at her for a long moment. “My experience is that it’s much easier to get yourself lost than found.”
She wrinkled her nose just slightly, the corners of her mouth twitching. And he found himself captivated by every small movement that she made.
For just a moment, the forest around them receded, and all he could do was look at her.
For just a moment, he forgot everything. What they were doing, where they were, who he was.
He wanted…
He felt like there was a wall between them, but he felt like that with everybody.
What he didn’t feel with everybody was the desire to knock that wall down. So that he could dig deeper into who that person was. So that he could feel a little bit closer to that person.
The sensation was so disoriented, so utterly outside his normal experience, that it made him feel like he was standing in the middle of a dream, rather than in the middle of real life.
What he had to remember was that he was lost. He had been lost from the time he was thirteen years old.
And he hadn’t yet figured out how to get himselffound.
Cara didn’t deserve to have to deal with a lost boy.
He pushed that down, deep, where it lived. Where all the exiles stayed. All the memories, all the feelings, everything that he wanted to avoid as best he could.
He locked it all down.
He was good at that.
Like securing everything at camp in a storm. Taking everything loose and extraneous and tying it down, sheltering everything possible. That was what he did with himself. Every day.
