Page 26 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

“Sometimes,” Rowan snaps, “we’re just telling you to stop hitting our trees with your clubs. It’s annoying. It wakes the birds.”

The room falls silent as he stops speaking. Barnaby squints into the shadows of the back row, trying to locate the source of the interruption. I freeze, my hand instinctively reaching out to grab Rowan’s forearm. His skin is hot, his muscles coiled like springs.

“Who said that?” Barnaby asks, his voice pitched in that faux-calm tone people use with toddlers or the mentally unstable. “Do we have a skeptic in our midst?”

I squeeze Rowan’s arm, a silent plea for him to dial back the ancient-guardian-wrath. He glances at me, and for a second, the frustration in his eyes wavers. He looks baffled, genuinely hurt that his life’s reality is being sold as a sequence of aggressive, lonely malfunctions.

“Just a local,” I say, raising my voice as I step forward, keeping my body between Barnaby and Rowan’s looming silhouette. “He’s very... protective of the flora. He thinks the wood-knocking research might be biased toward the human perspective.”

Barnaby chuckles, a patronizing sound that makes Rowan’s jaw tick. “A valid concern, my friend. But we must rely on the data. The wood knocks are consistent with primate territorial displays. It’s science.”

“It’s a headache,” Rowan mutters, but he allows me to pull him to the side exit. He’s still vibrating with a low-frequency hum of irritation, but he’s following my lead. He lets me guide him out onto the porch, where the night air is cool and smells of damp earth and the pine needles he treats like family members.

The door closes behind us, muffling Barnaby’s transition into Scent Marking and the Alpha Musk. I lean my back against the wood and blow out a breath. The silence is a physical relief, until Rowan starts pacing.

“Linguistic bridges,” he says, throwing his hands up. “I’ve lived through numerous forest fires and floods, and I’ve never seen anything as devastating as that man’s slide deck.”

“I don’t know,” I say, leaning my head back and watching him. “I thought the diagram of the naked ape-man was a nice touch. The artist really captured that brooding isolation you have going on.”

Rowan stops pacing. He turns to look at me, the yellow light from the lobby window catching the sharp line of his nose and the shadow of his stubble. He looks rugged, exhausted, and profoundly put-upon. His Don’t be an Assquatch T-shirt is stretched tight across his chest, the cartoon Bigfoot on it looking far more relaxed than the man wearing it. When I gave him the shirt a few days ago, he actually laughed, and the warm sound of it is still rushing through me even now.

“You’re enjoying this,” he says accusingly, though the edge in his voice has softened into something closer to resignation. “You brought me here to watch me suffer.”

“I brought you here so you’d know what we’re up against,” I counter, pushing off the door and taking a step toward him. “Knowledge is power, Rowan. Now you know that if you want to find a mate, you just have to find a rotten stump and hit it four times with a stick. It’s much more efficient than whatever you’ve been doing for the last three hundred years.”

He stares at me, his expression flat. Then, a slow, reluctant tug of a smile pulls at the corner of his mouth. It changes his whole face, smoothing out the ancient creases of his forehead and making him look like a man who might actually enjoy a joke.

“I’ve been doing it all wrong,” he says, his voice dropping an octave. “No wonder I’m so lonely. I’ve been using words and honey when I should have been focused on causing structural damage to the timber.”

I laugh, the sound bright and easy in the dark. We’re standing close now, the air between us charged with the lingering adrenaline of the lecture and something else, something heavier that I’m trying very hard to ignore. His height is a constant, physical fact that makes me feel like I’m standing at the base of a monument. I have to tilt my head back just to meet his eyes.

“Exactly,” I say, my voice a little breathless. “You’re just a solitary male with a territorial display problem. It’s not your fault. It’s the science.”

His gaze drops to my mouth, then slowly moves back up to my eyes. The teasing glint in his eyes fades, replaced by a stillness that feels more intimate than the laughter. He reaches out, his hand hovering near my shoulder before he catches himself and drops it. The movement is small, but it says everything about the distance he’s trying to maintain and the way it’s failing.

“Why would they want to find a nine-foot predator?” he asks, his voice suddenly soft, sincere, and a little bewildered. It’s a genuine inquiry from a creature that has spent its entire existence trying to be the space between the trees.

I look away, out toward the dark line of the forest. “Because people are bored, Rowan. And because the world feels small and figured out. They want to believe there’s something left that hasn’t been mapped or cataloged. They’re looking for wonder, even if they have to call it a monster to make it fit in their heads.”

“Wonder,” he repeats, testing the word as if it’s a foreign currency. “I don’t feel like a wonder. I feel like a man who wants people to stop shining lights in his backyard.”

“That’s because you are that man,” I say, looking back at him. “But you’re a mystery to them. And people will pay a lot of money to be the one who solves a mystery.”

He shakes his head, his brow furrowing again. “I’m not a puzzle to be solved. I’m just... here.”

“I know,” I whisper. The admission feels heavy, a secret I’m keeping from the room full of people just on the other side of the door. “But people want to believe there’s more than that, so they make up shit and monetize it. Bigfoot ‘just being here’ doesn’t sell tickets. ‘Solitary Ape-Man Uses Wood Knocks to Find Love’ sells tickets.” As I say it, that ever-present guilt comes knocking. I’m one of those people who made shit up and monetized it.

“Humans are exhausting,” he says, but there’s no heat in it. He leans against the porch railing, his gaze following mine out into the forest. “You spend so much time looking for things that aren’t there that you miss everything that is.”

“Tell me about it.” I sigh, thinking of the four years I spent learning how to decode symbols in paintings while my family’s lodge was rotting from the inside out. I’d spent my whole life looking for meaning in old things, never realizing that the most significant thing in my life was a seven-foot-two man with a bee obsession and a tendency to argue with projectors.

We stand there for a while, the silence between us shifting from sharp tension to something more comfortable, like a well-worn pair of boots. It’s the first time our teasing hasn’t felt like a defensive maneuver. It feels like a bridge, though maybe not the linguistic kind Barnaby would recognize.

“You know,” I say, nudging his arm with my shoulder. “If you ever get tired of guarding the forest, you could always have a career in public speaking. You have a very commanding presence when you’re correcting people about their research.”

“I’d rather be stung by my own bees,” he says, but his tone is light. “Repeatedly. In the soft parts of my face.”

“Fair enough. But the ‘Honey Man’ brand is really taking off. We could do a whole line of artisanal wood-knockers. ‘Guaranteed to attract a mate or your money back.’”