“What kind of supplies?”
“Blankets.”
“Well, I like blankets.”
“Coffee.”
“You have coffee?”
“I travel with camp coffee fixings everywhere I go. I’ll start us a fire.”
He got out of the truck, then opened up the back door, the light from the cab bathing his naked body in a warm glow.She watched the shift and bunch of his muscles as he pulled on his jeans, his cowboy boots.
He looked up at her and waited.
Her cheeks went hot, caught staring at him like that.
“Well, if you don’t want me to ogle you, you should dress a bit more modestly,” she shouted at the open door.
He didn’t respond.
She slipped her dress back on over her head but didn’t bother with any of her underwear. Didn’t bother with shoes. She stepped gingerly out of the cab of the truck into the darkness. Cody was hunkered down, fire-starting equipment, she assumed, by his side. She didn’t know anything about stuff like this. Survival, wilderness skills.
He was wearing a headlamp, the beam from the flashlight giving her a view of his hands. The ground was cold, the rocks sharp under her feet, so she simply stood a few feet away from him, motionless, arms wrapped around her midsection.
He managed to get his tinder to catch a spark and set it beneath an arrangement of wood he’d laid out.
Then he took out an old, metal pot and put it right in the flame.
“That works?”
“It’ll do,” he said.
He stood up and walked back toward her, then grabbed hold of the tailgate on his truck and lowered it.
“I have my blankets and things back here.”
He grabbed a bundle of blankets out of a closed box in the back of the truck, and she stared at this whole arrangement with a gimlet eye. “Do you do this often?”
“In the last fifteen years? No.”
“Did you bring girls up here in high school?”
“No. I didn’t. I went parking, sure. But not here.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you may have realized, Marlowe, that this is a place that gives me a view of my deadbeat dad’s ranch.”
Her stomach tightened. “Right.”
“Not a place I personally wanted to go get frisky.”
“I guess not.”
“No, I used to come up here and look down there and think about how much I hated him. That someday, somehow, this place was going to be mine. That I deserved it. I like to think sitting up here hating him like that is what got him to leave the ranch to me.”
“Why did he leave the ranch to you in the end? Because everything you’ve said about him makes me feel like it… must’ve been a surprise.”
