I gasp. “Oh god! James, what if it’s broken?”
“We’ll figure it out,” he says, shuddering again. He looks back down the river, peering as if he might be able to spot them in the rocky waters ahead. “Stay here. I’ll go look for them.”
He rises to his feet. As he walks away in his drenched boxer shorts, which are leaving very little to the imagination (he has a really nice arse), he calls over his shoulder, “Don’t look at your leg. Just stay like that.”
My leg!? Shit, what’s wrong with my leg?
I sit up fast. In doing so, I bend my knees and a sharp pain has me hissing. That’s when I remember the jagged rock, the blood trickling through the water. Itwasme bleeding. Specifically, my shin, which now has a nasty two-inch gash across it. Luckily I’m not squeamish, as the blood has poured all the way down and over my trainers.
In order to not make the gash worse I restrain myself from touching it, lying back down and crying into the grey skies above me that promise drizzle. Slow, lazy tears wet my cheeks and ears as I wait for James to return. After a while there’s the promise of heavy breathing and footsteps crunching through the overgrowth.
He stops a few steps away from me with a strange expression on his face. He places two soaked bags down on the ground in front of him. They land with a squelch. Another sob racks my chest.
“You looked at your leg, didn’t you?” he says, coming to sit beside me again.
I suck in air to calm my breathing. “What’re we going to do!?”
James sighs, raggedly. His breathing is still choppy from having hunted the bags down. “I don’t know. We need to find out if you can walk on it first.”
“Where were the bags?” I ask through fresh tears. So much for never letting this man see me cry.
“All the way down there, getting pummelled by the current on the rocky part… I saw an otter,” he adds, as if that somehow sweetens the situation. “We need to get somewhere dryer. I need to clean your leg up. Can’t believe he didn’t think to give us a first aid kit. Maybe he is trying to kill us off…”
“Are all our clothes wet now?”
James squeezes the back of his neck, as a breeze plays with the branches in the trees around us. “I haven’t looked at the clothes, but I suspect so. Definitely everything nearer the top of the bags. But I did check just now, and your phone isn’t turning on.”
I sniff, covering my face with my hands.
“We’ve been walking for a day now. We’re not in a desert, Fliss. This is Scotland. We’ll find somewhere, or someone, to help us very soon. I promise.”
I note how he’s started calling me Fliss intermittently over the past few hours. I decide not to comment on it yet. Instead, I power up my threshold for pain and try to sit up. James notices what I’m doing and offers me his arm like a gentleman. I let him help me, feeling like a fool and a baby for needing help at all.
Once I’m standing, we’re both relieved to find I can put weight on my leg and won’t need carrying. The clothes are drenched. My bag was hit worse than his for some reason.
James offers me his top, which although wet, is long, falling down over my buttocks to provide a modicum of dignity. He puts his shirt on, not bothering to button it up. It hangs loosely to the side of his toned abdomen. His wet boxer shorts are officially leaving nothing to the imagination anymore. I bite my lip to remind myself not to look, since he’s providing me with the same respect.
After hobbling off the bank, we find miles and miles of bracken-covered undulating Highlands. In the far distance, I can see the blue outline of mountains. The birds are well and truly alive here. We must spot at least three birds of prey in an hour. Ravens hop across our path, eyeing us suspiciously, before flying off again, crying out in their creepy way.
We don’t make it far, finding a patch of clear ground, where James pitches the wet tent, with a small lake about ten metres away. I sit and watch, as I’m ordered, sipping water from my steel bottle. He finds some fallen branches from a nearby patch of trees, using rocks to raise them off the ground enough to hang all our drenched clothes over. Somehow the sleeping bags are only wet on the outside. He shakes off the water droplets, hanging them out to dry too as I shiver on my perch.
“I’m going to attempt to make a fire,” he tells me, peeking over with a frown.
“Is it even legal?” I ask, my quivering voice giving my chilliness away.
“We don’t really have a choice, do we? I need to help you wash your leg. You’re not going to be able to rely on my body heat tonight as I’m also freezing. Plus, there’s hardly any sun here.” James rubs his face. “We really need to get you to a doctor. Your leg might get infected.”
“I’m sure we’ll find something tomorrow,” I say, slumping at the thought of spending another night in a dripping tent, fighting midges and digging holes for toilets. And now I have an injury to factor in as well. “Do we still have the tampons?”
“No. They were ruined.” He pauses, not looking at me. “Why? Do you need them?”
I snigger. “No, not for that! Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried… I have three sisters, remember? But I can’t nip to the corner shop for you right now, can I?”
“You do that?”
“What?”
