AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Not in the least,” he says. “I kept offering her Advil, but she got real snooty and told me she didn’t put pharmaceutical poisons in her body, so I let her keep chewing on tree bark.”
I try to imagine a version of myself that would prefer chewing tree bark to taking an aspirin. I can’t.
“Eventually, one of the rangers came across her hacking bark off of a weeping willow tree,” Levi goes on. “I think he got a real kick out of letting her know that black willow is the one that’s got the same compounds as aspirin, and she was chewing on tree bark for no reason at all.”
I snort, adjusting my pack for the one millionth time. It doesn’t help. Everything itches.
“I would have thought that park service employees would be better informed,” I say.
“The rangers generally are,” Levi says. “She was in communications and didn’t leave the office a whole lot, even though we invited her along on expeditions sometimes.”
“Ugh, communications people,” I tease. “Always typing, using all those words.”
We come out of the trail and into the small gravel parking lot, then head for his truck. He glances over at me, eyes smiling.
“I’m simply offering an explanation for why she spent months if not years chewing on the wrong kind of tree,” he says. “She also once tried to smudge our offices with sage and set off the fire alarm. I wasn’t happy.”
We reach his truck, and Levi slings his pack from his shoulders, tosses it into the back, and I do the same.
I’m rewarded with an itch explosion anywhere my shirt brushes against my body, and I grit my teeth against and Do. Not. Scratch.
I really hope I didn’t fall into a chigger nest or something, I think. I’ve never gotten chiggers, but I’m not interested in tiny insects burrowing under my skin.
“You all right?” Levi asks, as he’s been asking for at least the last mile.
“Just these bug bites,” I say, craning my head over my arm and trying to at least get a good look at that one. “I think I must have landed in a—"
There’s no circular welt like I’m expecting.
There’s a line of blisters.
“Oh, fuck,” I say. “I got poison ivy.”
Levi doesn’t say anything, just comes around the back of his truck and very carefully takes my elbow in his hand, studies the back of my arm.
Then he whistles under his breath, something I’ve never heard him do before.
“Looks like you’re very sensitive to it,” he says. “You ever gotten it before?”
“Yes,” I say, eyes closed, resigned to my itchy, itchy fate. “But not since I was a kid.”
The memories are flooding back: huge welts up both shins, bloodied and then scabbed after a couple of days because I always, always ended up scratching them. Or the time I got it on my foot and could barely wear shoes for a few days. Or, dear God, the time Silas threw some on a bonfire and I swear it got up my nose from breathing the smoke in.
“If you can make it back to my place, I can fix you up,” Levi says. “Try not to scratch.”
He’s still got one elbow in his hand, but for possibly the first time ever, his touch isn’t what I’m focusing on.
“Thirty minutes,” he says, and opens the passenger side door for me.I twist around, trying to get a good look at my back in the mirror. As always, it’s hard, for the obvious reason that my eyes are on the front of my body.
It looks ugly, though. There are at least two huge raised welts that go from my right shoulder blade almost to my left hip, looking like tiny, gross, fluid-filled mountain ranges on my back, surrounded by other ugly streaks with the telltale rash and bumps. There are some on my sides, one on my belly, one on the back of my left arm.
I might lose my mind from the itching. I swear it wasn’t this bad when I was a kid and got poison ivy, though this is by far the worst I think I’ve ever gotten it.
There’s a knock on the bathroom door, and I grab a towel, hold it over my front since I’m currently topless, my shirt and bra in a paper bag that Levi provided since they’re covered in poison ivy oil.
“Come in,” I call, triple-checking in the mirror that I am, in fact, something like decent.
The door opens just enough for Levi’s hand to enter, holding a black t-shirt. I take the shirt.
“Thanks,” I say.
“At this rate you’ll have gone through my whole wardrobe by Thanksgiving,” his voice says from the other side of the door.
Quickly, I drop the towel and dive into the shirt, pulling it on in record time, even though the door’s partly open. I think, for about the fiftieth time, about Levi stripping down in front of me at the pool of water, about the saucy look he gave me as he did.
