Isaak and Booker kicked dirt over the coals. Enough dried vegetation covered the ground that they couldn’t leave the coals unattended.
The mountains chopped black voids out of the horizon around them, but stars crept out of the darkness above as the fire burned down.
When the fire was mostly out, Alfonso poured water over the last traces of red glow to extinguish it. Steam hissed into the air, clouding their flashlight beams.
Stars salted the sky.
Dree said,“Oh.”A sigh lifted her voice like when Maxence trailed his mouth over her shoulder to her throat, though he stood several feet away from her in the dark.
An errant flashlight beam crossed her face.
She was staring at the sky, enraptured. “The stars were always bright out on the ranch, but this is amazing.”
Maxence and the other guys clicked off their flashlights to see the stars better.
The pinpricks of light grew brighter as his eyes adjusted until the galaxy blazed around them, innumerable trembling motes flooding the heavens.
Yet, even as Maxence gazed across God’s creation, the stars and the deep and the world without end in a moment of pure wonder and awe, awareness of Dree’s nearness drew his attention.
The pale silver light of the stars touched her nose and her cheek. A faint blue reflection from her eyes sparkled in the night.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said.
“Yes,” Maxence agreed.
“It’s—like Heaven. You can see how people back before there were artificial lights must have looked up and seen this,” her hand waved in the darkness, “this world of crystals and diamonds in the sky and conceived of Heaven.”
He wanted to see the heavens and the world through her eyes.
Max waited, but she didn’t say any more, and neither did the other guys.
Eventually, they flipped on the flashlights again. The light scoured the stones and earth, blinding him, and he squinted.
The other guys spoke, and Dree’s soft voice lilted in the night.
Maxence trailed Isaac and Alfonso as they walked back to the tiny, tiny tent standing on pebbly ground.
Just before Max crouched to duck into the pup tent, he looked back to where Dree was crawling into her tent, the flashlight beam filling the fabric prism and reflecting back onto her supple form.
His longing for her was not entirely physical, and Maxence didn’t know how to think about that.
Chapter Six
Choices
Dree
Later that night, Dree awoke to the sound of a table saw ripping through rough wood, the screaming rustle of slithering nylon, and angry masculine grunts.
Her tent wasn’t particularly near the other two. The three tents clustered around the cold fire pit, but the guys had purposely set them apart a bit so disturbances would be minimized.
And yet, the scuffling and growling were definitely human and male in timbre.
She wrestled around inside her mummy-style sleeping bag and stuck her arm out into the chilly air. Her flashlight was right beside her bed, and she clicked it on to the lowest brightness and squinted in the glare.
The tent lit up around her, revealing cardboard boxes she’d stacked at the far end. The temperature outside was below freezing, so she’d brought the boxes of vaccine inside where the air wasn’t quite so bitterly cold due to the little bit of her body heat escaping from her thick bedroll. The alpine-rated sleeping bag was so warm that she’d left it partially unzipped because she’d started to boil. Considering that the outside of the bag was burgundy fabric, she would’ve ended up looking like a steamed shrimp.
The pup tent was constructed to accommodate people sleeping in it and not much else, and she could only sit upright near the very middle where the tent poles raised the center to a triangle. Dree tugged her coat and boots on, not bothering to zip or lace them, and crawled to the far end of the tent with the opening. She unzipped the tent flap and stuck her head out, swinging her flashlight beam in the darkness.
