“Water!”
He nodded. “Little creek up ahead.”
She smiled softly. “You knew that the whole time, didn’t you?”
He gave her an amused look. “Course I did.”
“It’s hard to even pretend to be lost when I’m with you.” She stepped forward and slipped her hand in his.
He tugged her up against him. “Pretending you’re lost isn’t as important to what we’re doing as learning valuable skills to use if you ever find yourself in a real survival situation in the future.”
“True.” She kept her hand in his as they walked, enjoying the warmth and strength of his grip. They reached the stream, and Mark spent the next hour showing her how to hunt for crayfish and other potential food sources in the water before turning his attention to shelter for the night.
“We’ll build a shelter for practice, then I’ll pitch the tent,” he said.
“Great.” Building a makeshift shelter sounded fun, especially knowing she’d be sleeping in the relative luxury of Mark’s tent tonight. They gathered pine straw and leaves for the flooring.
“Ideally, you want several inches of this stuff underneath you this time of year,” he said. “It’s good insulation. The ground gets cold at night. Hypothermia is a real danger for lost hikers.”
They selected a spot near a fallen tree, using its trunk as one side of the shelter. They wove pine branches together to form a protective canopy, and then their shelter was complete. Jessica crawled inside, looking up at the pine boughs overhead. Beneath her, the bedding was thick and soft. She couldn’t sit up without poking her head through the roof, and it was just wide enough for the two of them, but somehow the tight quarters felt cozy instead of claustrophobic. “You know, this isn’t half bad.”
“Not at all.” Mark leaned back, resting his hands behind his head.
“You’ve slept in worse places.” She lay beside him.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me,” she said softly.
“The desert’s a tough place,” he said, staring into the branches above him. “Your mouth gets so dry you can taste the sand. Sometimes I still taste it.”
She slid closer, silently urging him to keep talking.
“Can’t sleep out in the open. We’d look for caves, places like that.”
“You’ve slept in a cave?” For some reason, that creeped her out. She imagined bats swooping overhead and spiders crawling over them as they slept.
“A cave was the best-case scenario. Protected from the elements, and the enemy. We’d take turns standing guard. But there was one night…” He paused, glancing over at her.
She curled herself against his right side. “Yes?”
“Whole mission went to shit. Me and a couple guys were stranded overnight in hostile territory with no cover. We had to burrow down in the sand with our combat helmets over our faces and pray like hell we’d make it until morning.”
She blew out a breath. “I can’t imagine what that’s like. I really can’t.”
“You aren’t supposed to. You shouldn’t.” He wrapped his left arm around her, drawing her in closer.
“You were a natural, weren’t you? The danger, the adrenaline, all of it.” She could feel the steady thump of his heart beneath her cheek.
“Yeah.”
“You never would have left if you hadn’t been injured.”
“No.” It was a simple answer to a loaded question. If he hadn’t been injured, they never would have gotten this second chance.
“Do you miss it?”
He nodded. “It was the first time I’d been part of something like that, a team, a unit. Someplace I really belonged.”
