The sound of imminent doom.
Noah slammed the hood shut. “Battery’s dead. You turned the light off when you finished looking in the mirror, right?”
“Um…” Before our hike, I’d asked Noah if I could turn on the interior light to check my makeup in the mirror. “I thought it turned off automatically?”
“Does this vehicle look like it has automatic anything?”
I couldn’t post selfies with an imperfect face, could I? I made the wise choice not to say that part out loud. “Good thing you brought those flares with you, huh?” I mimed a flare shot, or at least my imagining of what shooting off a flare would look like, since I’d never actually done it.
Noah’s eyebrows sank even lower. “We’re not using the flares.”
“Satellite phone then?”
Noah came around to my side of the Jeep and yanked the door back open, the metal protesting like it was being summoned from the dead. “We’re not calling for help either.”
“Air lift it is.”
Noah pointed to an opening in the trees, a narrow path barely visible through the undergrowth. “We walk.”
“Great. More hiking.” To say Noah was unsympathetic would have been generous.
“Come on, Yeti.” The wolf-dog sprang from the back of the Jeep as if she’d been waiting for this opportunity her entire life. She plunged down the path, a wolf-dog on a mission.
Noah grabbed both backpacks from the rear, slinging them over one shoulder. “Good thing you changed those shoes.”
Chapter Sixteen
You know those movies where the hero and heroine hack their way through the dense jungle with a machete, dodging spiders, bouncing witty banter back and forth, the sexual tension rising all along the way?
It was nothing like that.
First, we didn’t have a machete, which meant random branches kept whacking me in the face. Next, there was no banter, witty or otherwise. And sexual tension? Please. We didn’t even act the part of a hero and heroine. Noah did a lot of grumping. I mostly whined.
The spider part though? That was spot-on.
“Are we there yet?” Another branch jabbed me in the leg.
Noah didn’t answer. He’d stopped responding after the tenth time I’d asked the same thing.
Foot-tripping roots and ankle-busting stumps peppered the tangled underbrush as we made our way further down the overgrown trail. Mosquitoes swarmed over me like dark clouds of miniature vampires. Somewhere in the distance, a woodpeckerdrummed against a tree, searching for lunch. Or it was telling its bear friends where to find us in Morse code.
I stopped to pick a thorn out of my sock. “You know that poem they make you read in English class? The one about taking the road less traveled?”
Noah smacked a mosquito off his cheek. “Robert Frost.”
“Yeah. That one.”
Noah cleared his throat. His poetry voice was deep and sexy. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
“Yeah. That guy was full of shit.” I ducked under a fallen log, making sure there wasn’t a snake waiting to jump on my head first.
Noah flicked another mosquito off his ear. “For once, we can agree.”
Eventually, the less-traveled road merged onto something more traveled. The ground was even, and you didn’t have to step over a log every couple of steps. We even started seeing other people.
“Are you having some sort of medical emergency?” Noah stopped when he heard me grunting. “I’m not giving you mouth-to-mouth.”
“I’d rather choke than let you give me mouth-to-mouth.”
