“Well, there was the time I saved you from falling off that boulder, then when I pulled you out of the river, and now here I am with my snake maneuvers.”
He inched closer to her as she tightly tugged on his belt loops.
“Well, Indy’s got nothing on you. He would have left me to die if a snake came at me.”
“I guess it’s a good thing I was named after Harrison, then, and not Indiana.”
He leaned forward, their faces less than a foot apart. Her full lips begging to be kissed. Her entire body begging to be near his. Eight years. Eight years since he’d let this same momentpass them by in the library. He wouldn’t be letting this moment pass again.
“Mayday! Mayday!” Jon’s panicked voice yelled through the walkie. “Dr. Matthews! Dr. Mejía! Mayday!”
Fuck.
Corrie and Ford scrambled to get up, reaching for Ford’s backpack containing the walkie-talkie. Worst-case scenarios ran through Ford’s head. Broken leg? Puncture in the raft? More snakes? Cheetahs? Shit. While he and Corrie had been messing around, something bad had happened.
This time Corrie didn’t fight Ford for the walkie. He pulled it out of the backpack and called back.
“Jon? What happened? Is everything okay?”
Crackle... crackle...
“Dr. Matthews! We need you. Come quick!”
“Where are you? And are you okay?”
Crackle... crackle...
“Oh... yeah. We’re fine. But we think we found something. South of the raft.”
Fine? They werefine? Did those two haveanyidea what they’d interrupted? After all their goading that morning, they deserved to be strangled.
“We should get going,” Corrie said, standing and brushing the remaining dirt and debris from her clothes and hair. Ford’s heart sank.
And like that... the moment faded. Again.
They hiked back to where Jon and Memo stood waiting beside a moss-covered boulder. Ford examined it, but there wasn’t anything special about it. Another rock half-buried in the dirt. Nothing like what he and Corrie had found up top. They’d better have something good or Ford would never forgive them.
“So, what’d you find?” Corrie asked, striding up to them.
“Well, you told us to look for a cave. Something that might not be obvious. ‘Hidden by nature’s curtain,’ I believe was what you said,” Memo started.
Then Jon picked up the story. “And we saw this boulder and all the moss. And, honestly, we would have missed it if Memo hadn’t tripped—”
“And I fell right through,” Memo finished.
Corrie and Ford each scanned the boulder. There were no holes in the ground. No cracks in the stone. If this was what they brought them down here for...
“Fell through what?” Ford asked, his patience wearing thin.
Memo smiled. “Through this.”
He reached his hand to the sheet of moss and pulled it back like a curtain. A cave. Hidden by nature.
“What the...” Corrie said, walking toward it.
“They’re vines,” Jon said. “Vines that have grown over the top of the boulder and are covered by moss.”
“Yeah, when I fell and put out my arm to brace my fall against the rock, it gave underneath.”
