His whole demeanor shifted. His eyes got distant, his shoulders going stiff. “I don’t know.”
She was almost ready to press him on that, but something about the look on his face made it die in the back of her throat.
Instead, she said nothing.
She just let the silence stretch between them.
“Okay, so I think that pretty well covers your lesson for the day.”
“Oh, I thought we were going to do the compass.”
“We will. But actually, we’ll do that on the camping trip.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.
I’m formulating a plan for that, but I think that it will be good.”
“It will be good. And I am going to go in blind?”
“Yep. Because that’s how survival situations are.”
“Great,” she said.
She left that encounter feeling more confused than she ever had.
But one thing was certain: her fascination was as strong as ever.
Chapter Ten
Oh, he was being a real big fucking idiot about all of this. He didn’t want to do this camping trip, but he was also chomping at the bit to do it.
Touching her the way he had to help her start the fire had been idiotic, and then…
Then he had mentioned Tyler. He shouldn’t have done that. She hadn’t been pushing in a way that required him to mention his brother.
She hadn’t pushed after he said he didn’t know where Tyler was.
It was the God’s honest truth.
No man could be certain what happened after you died.
Tyler could be all around him, could just be in the dirt. Could be in heaven, could be in hell, he supposed, if God was as vengeful and full of wrath as some people claimed he was, and Tyler had failed to repent for some sin or another before his death.
That wasn’t something that Zane believed, wasn’t something he wanted to believe, but then, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to believe.
It didn’t really matter. So he didn’t know.
He had decided that for the camping trip, they would be hiking one of the most remote parts of the area, and wherever they got to in the darkness, that was where they would camp. It would be the place that they had to settle down for the night.
It would be unfamiliar to her, and she would have to try to use the compass to get them back, so she would need to establish the coordinates at the beginning of the trek.
Obviously, he would be there to help her if anything went wrong, and when they made camp for the night, he would have her start a fire, try to build something up as a shelter for them, and have her get her space blanket out.
Which meant that he would have to buy her a new space blanket. But that was fine with him.
He was also messaging with a guy about a horse. Not in a metaphorical way.
