“Nope. Just not very busy close to dusk.”
“You walk alone out here often?”
She slides me a glance, and I can’t tell if she’s still suppressing a desire to pull me off the trail and do what comes naturally out here in nature, or if that’s just me and my teenage fantasies.
“I’m not alone,” she says. “I have my dog.”
“So you and Jitter have done this a lot by yourselves?”
“Laney and Emma used to come with us a lot.”
“Mm.”
“Laney has a broken leg.”
“I noticed.”
“Emma’s back.”
“I heard.”
“If you see her and say a single dick thing to her, I will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
“You’ll be dead?”
“I’m an overachiever. I can haunt you while I’m still alive.”
“Probably easier that way.”
She cuts another glance at me. “You know I don’t actually believe you’d be a dick to Emma.”
That makes me smile. “Only because we have a common enemy.”
“WhyisChandler your enemy?”
“Wow, really nice hike until you said the Cheese Turd word.”
She coughs, and I’m certain she’s covering a laugh, though I’m not certain if it’s a happy laugh or a desperate laugh, and now I feel like an ass.
I don’t want to hurt her. But I don’t know how to change course without feeling like I’ve let someone else get the better of me again.
“Are you drinking the water I gave you?” Sabrina asks.
“Just had a big gulp.”
She draws to a stop and turns to face me again as the trees open up around us. “Take another one.”
Felicia had no qualms about ordering me around. Neither did my siblings for most of my life.
But Ilikeit when Sabrina does it.
Sit down. Drink your tea. Wear safety tools on your feet. Have you eaten?
It’s vastly different frombuy me this. Go here with me. Smile bigger for the picture.Can you pretend you’re happy to be here? Make Zen get a real job and not be so dependent on you.
I loop the hiking poles over one wrist and obediently drink from the water bottle.
But as I lift it, I catch sight of something unexpected on the horizon, and it’s not until I feel the chill of water dribbling down the side of my mouth that I remember I’m drinking and jerk the bottle away to stare.
