I feel pinned by hurt and fear and this looming, choking sense of loss that somehow feels even closer now than when I was about to break up with him.
About to break up with him because I needed to know we have a future. I needed to know that he wants more than the stage we’re at now. A home together. A family. A life more combined than set-aside drawers at each other’s places and me using his Netflix account.
I pull my knees up to my chest, hug them close.
Everything is so jumbled up in my head; I have no idea what to think or what to do and my eyes are burning like hell and it’s not from the smoke.
If he just needs time to settle into the idea of all of this, that would be one thing.Two years feels like a long relationship to me, but not everyone is ready to plunge head-first into cohabitation or marriage or babies by that point. I get that, even if I’m increasingly ready for all of it. I’m also increasingly worried that even if he wants as big of a family as I do—a size I’m nervous to admit to him, especially now—we’re running out of the time do so. I’m twenty-six, which isn’t exactly old, but if we waittoolong to start . . .
I close my eyes. I could live with our family being smaller than I’ve dreamed. I can give him more time.
But I don’t think it’s about him needing more time. If anything, he’s become more uncomfortable with the future the longer we’ve been together.
It’s a future he doesn’t want, and it’s one I don’t know if I can give up.
Which means I didn’t imagine our problem, the thing causing that disconnect.
“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!”
My increasingly desperate mental wheedling is blasted apart as a roar echoes through the canyon.
That roar was definitely Jason.
“Jason?” I grab the flashlight and start running in the direction he went, the direction of the yell. Did he fall? Did a bear appear, and he’s doing that thing where you make yourself seem all huge and loud (not really a problem for Jason) to scare it off? If so, how the hell am I going to help?
I don’t care. I need to make sure Jason’s okay. My sneakers skitter on dirt trail and loose rocks, and I can hear him up ahead—not as loud, but still yelling.
“Fuck! Fucking fucking FUCK!”These words are punctuated by strangled coughing sounds that scare me even more than the intensity of the swearing.
“Jason?” I swing my flashlight back and forth as I go, the light catching on rock wall and scrubby trees, and—
“Shit, Emily, stay back!” Jason says, and thatishim there.
I open my mouth to ask what’s going on, but a wall of stench hits me so hard that I stop and bend forward, gagging. “Oh my god,” I manage, stepping backwards—not that it helps.The smell is in my nostrils now and down my throat, and I totally understand the coughing because I’m doing it now, too. “Is that—”
“I got skunked. It’s dark and I pissed on a goddamn skunk and he sprayed me. Right in thejunk!”
Any other time, I might have laughed. Okay, I definitely would have laughed—like, totally doubled over, tears running down my cheeks, dying laughing. But right now I’m still feeling like my heart is breaking, and also, it’s not the easiest to laugh when the smell of skunk is so strong that it’s burning off every nose hair I have ever had in this and any past lives.
“Okay, let’s—” I gag some more.This is unreal. Holding my nose barely seems to do anything to stop it. I’ve smelled dead skunk before, driving by one of those roadside stench-bombs, but this is a hundred times worse.
And, I imagine, even worse for Jason. It’s a wonder he hasn’t vomited. Or maybe he has, and I can’t smell it over the skunk.
I grimace and try again. “Let’s get you to the trailer for a shower. Maybe three showers.”
“Gaaahhhhhh!” Jason yells to the sky, and I don’t blame him. He lets out a breath. “Fine. Yeah. Let’s go. Feel free to get a head start so you don’t need to walk anywhere near me.”
I can’t say I’m not tempted. But he sounds so miserable, and I know he felt that way even before he got his crotch skunked. I’m miserable, too, and scared, and part of me feels like he’s slipping farther and farther away. I want to hold on.
But maybe I don’t want to literally hold on at this exact moment.
“No, I’ll go with you,” I say. “But this is a good distance right here.”
He doesn’t argue with that, and we start back. We haven’t even made it back to our little picnic site when we see flashlights bobbing, people coming this way along the trail.
“Jason, man! Emily, there you are,” Geoff calls out, jogging toward us. “We heard you yelling, and—oh shit, dude. Is that skunk?” Geoff stops jogging and starts moving back.
“Exactly,” Jason says. “Right in the fuckingjunk.”
