Page 87 of Unmanageable

He turns and steps onto the trail, his sneakers clearing the first root with an easy, athletic stride. I take a deep breath, mutter a quick prayer, and follow him into the trees.

***

The first twenty minutes aren’t completely terrible.

The trail slants upward at a moderate angle, the path clear enough for me to avoid twisting my ankles on the rocks protruding from the dirt.

The air is incredibly clean, smelling sharply of damp earth and green canopy, and as my legs get used to the strange rhythm of walking on something that isn’t concrete, I actually start to relax.

Cash stays about three paces ahead of me. He keeps looking back over his shoulder, checking on me every few minutes with a quiet, observant look that he tries to pass off as casual.

“You doing okay back there, Sharky?”

“I am currently sustaining life,” I pant, my chest heaving slightly. “But if you increase the speed by even one mile per hour, I am going to lie down on this rock and let the moss claim me.”

He laughs, stopping on a small flat ridge to let me catch up. “You’re doing great. Look at the view.”

I stand beside him, leaning my hands on my knees as I gasp for oxygen. I look out through a break in the trees, and my breath catches for a completely different reason.

The valley spreads out below us, a massive, unbroken sea of green canopy that stretches all the way to the horizon, where the rolling blue ridges are covered in a faint mist. The sky above is a deep, impossible blue.

“Okay,” I admit. “It’s slightly better than an office cubicle. I’ll give you that.”

“See?” Cash says. “Told you. You just have to get out of your own head, Scottie.”

I look sideways at him.

In the bright, unfiltered morning light, he looks incredible. The sharp lines of his jaw, the faint scar near his eyebrow from a stray stick during his rookie year, the way his dark eyes reflect the deep tones of the ridge.

He turns his head, catching me staring. The easy, playful banter drops away, once again replaced by that heavy, magnetic heat that has been circling us for weeks.

His gaze drops to my lips, lingering there for a long, quiet second, and my heart starts beating even faster than it did during the climb.

I clear my throat quickly, pulling my eyes away and stepping back onto the trail. “Alright, let’s keep moving before my muscles freeze into solid blocks of ice.”

Cash lets out a soft, low sound—half-laugh, half-sigh—and steps back into the lead.

As we move higher, the trail starts to change.

The clear dirt path gives way to larger, sharper rock formations, and the incline gets significantly steeper. The trees get thicker, their branches weaving together overhead until the bright morning sun is blocked out, plunging the trail into a dim, greenish twilight.

The temperature drops fast.

“Cash,” I call out. “Is the trail supposed to get this narrow?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He steps up onto a large boulder, looking ahead into the dense gray shadows of the woods.

The path in front of us has disintegrated into a messy field of loose gravel and fallen logs, the painted trail markers on the trees disappearing.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket, staring at the screen for a moment before flipping it around. “No signal.”

“What do you mean, no signal?” I step up beside him. “How is there no signal?”

“The ridge walls are too steep,” he says, his voice perfectly calm, though his shoulders have gone slightly rigid. He looks around, his eyes scanning the dense, identical trees that surround us on all sides. “The trail must have split back by that rock ridge. We took the higher path instead of the loop.”

I look back the way we came, but a thick fog has started rolling down from the upper crests, a heavy, white wall of mist that is rapidly swallowing the forest behind us. The path we just walked up is gone, erased by the gray haze.

A sharp, freezing drop of rain hits my cheek, followed immediately by another.