“Don’t what? Want me to leave?”
I search my brain for coherency. Nothing comes out.
Jax’s frown deepens. “What are you trying to say?”
I have no idea. Am I asking him to crash on my couch for the rest of his life? Or do I want him in my bed every night for as long as he wants to be there? Either way, I’m standing here in a parking lot, dumping it on him first thing in the morning when he has other things to worry about.You’re an asshole.
That’s a sentiment I can articulate. But Jerry pulls up before I can speak.
Jax shoots a fractured glance over his shoulder. “I have to go.”
“I know.”
“Are you okay?”
I haven’t been okay for a long time and for a million reasons that have nothing to do with Jax and everything to do with my inability to rip shit out of my head and lay it in the ground. But I’ve thrown too much at him already.
He deserves the world at his feet, not me on my knees.
I let go of his arm and start to back up.
Jax holds me firm. He doesn’t say anything, still waiting for me to answer his question. But I can’t. And he leaves anyway.
* * *
Jax
Today is long. I’m tired from a night of broken sleep, and my head is so full of Tanner I can’t think straight. I stumble around the wilderness, marking abandoned cabins on the map, checking cameras, and setting up new look-out points, but I’m a fucking mess. Jerry calls time on our day when I walk into a low-hanging branch and bruise the shit out of my face.
“You look beat,” he says to me on the way home. “And what was going down with you and Tanner this morning? Problems at home?”
“Hmm?”
Jerry gives me as long a look as he can while he’s driving. Then turns his attention back to the road. “That kid has been through a lot,” he says eventually. “If he’s hard to live with, it isn’t his fault.”
“He’s not hard to live with, he’s just…”No. I’m not about to tell Jerry that Tanner is the perfect imperfect housemate. That he humors my rediscovered tea habit, cooks me dinner, and kisses like a wet dream. That he cries in his sleep and chases me down the street to throw wild eyes and aborted sentences in my face.
I don’t tell Jerry anything. And his heavy sigh clues me into the fact that perhaps he understands.
He doesn’t drive straight back to Burlington. We stop at the foot of another trail Wildfoot manages, and he hustles me out of the truck. “Gentle Deer. This is my easiest trail. The one we take corporate groups out on in the warmer months. We show ’em the views and birds. The moose at dawn and the geese arriving for the spring. It’s not high-adrenaline, but some people don’t need it that way. Simple things make simple folk happy. I like that.”
Jerry sets off along the trail. Lacking any better ideas, I follow him to a lookout point on a raised ridge. He’s right. The view is simple, but glorious. The mountains, the trees, and the late afternoon sky. It’s a clean slate of beauty. Cleansing. Pure. The glimpses of Lake Champlain make me miss the sea. Perhaps. Or maybe I miss being underwater where the world is somewhere else.
I make myself look at Jerry.
He’s watching me with a shrewd frown on his weathered face. “You know, both Reid boys worked for me once, back in high school. After their mama passed, Tanner was working hard to keep Gabriel out of the system. He did it too. Stuck around till Gabriel graduated, then they both jumped ship to do wild things.”
“‘Wild things’, eh?” I wonder why he’s telling me this, but I can’t deny I’m fascinated. Even before I met Tanner, his brother intrigued me. “Where did they go?”
“One to the military, the other to mountain rescue in Alaska. I thought they were gone for good, but every year or so one of them would come back for a while. Never thought I’d get them on my payroll again, though, and I was sad about that. Those boys raised themselves on these trails when their ma was working. No one knew them better than they did.”
I’ve heard an incarnation of this story before. And I already know Gabriel Reid was a military man once upon a time. That leaves the Alaskan mountain rescue to Tanner, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to explaining why he’s running a wine bar now and shouting in his sleep.
“Tanner did come back to work for you, though, right? You’ve both told me that.”
Jerry leans heavily on the stone lectern that has a route map carved into it. “That he did, but he wasn’t the same kid who ran these trails a decade ago. He was a man who’d seen too much, so I sent him up here to give him a break from that. Gave him the easy groups and the soft routes. I thought I was doing him right, but you know the trouble with the simplest of things, son?”
I tear my gaze from the horizon. His tale scares me, but I need to know the ending. I need just a single puzzle piece of the man who chased me down the street this morning. “Go on.”
