I clear my throat and train my eyes on something safe. “Okay, those are the ones I saw this morning. The rest of this is new stuff for both of us.”
“As it should be,” she says with manufactured hurt in her voice, though I suspect what she’s feeling is competitiveness.
I don’t look at her. I can’t. “Next time I’ll wait for you. I promise.”
Click, click, click.No surprise, there are a lot of raccoons in the preserve. And is it me, or is Stevie moving closer?Click, click, click.I remind myself to breathe and act normal.
She leans toward the laptop, gripping my forearm with a gasp. “Wait. What is that?”
It’s her holding onto me, that’s what it is. How can I pay attention to anything else? “W-what?”
She points at the screen with her other hand. “That’s an arm.”
In the corner of the photo, what looks like a dark arm curls into the frame. “Hang on, let’s see what it is.” I click through a series of images that follows.
The arm belongs to a hiker wearing a black hoodie, who seems to be darting across the trail, pumping his arms. Stevie deflates.
The poor guy looks like he’s running for his life, though. The images aren’t the highest resolution, but there’s terror on his face when he turns like something is chasing him. I sit up straighter. The series of black-and-white images are haunting, like something you’d see on the news after a body was found in the woods.Isthere something dangerous living in the preserve? Could Stevie be right?
I shake my head. No. The proximity to Stevie is making me lose my head. That’s all.
Then, in the frame after the hiker disappears, something appears in the underbrush. I pause on the picture.
Stevie leans in. “Is that a—”
I click to the next photo. Tall tail feathers, a determined, avian face, and an obscene snood poke through the bushes. I click again. In the next image, Butterballsy crashes through the brush, waddling angrily after the hiker.
“That dang bird,” Stevie mutters.
I’m ashamed to admit I’m relieved to see the turkey chasing that hiker and not something else. We’re nearing the beginning of the captured photos, and we still haven’t seen a tall bipedal primate of any variety—Bigfoot or poachers.
In the next series of photos I see myself on the trail.
Oh, this is it.These are the pictures I’ve been waiting for.
I peek at Stevie in the corner of my eye. She’s chewing on her bottom lip, cringing at the laptop. She knows what’s coming.
I click, and she appears on the screen.
Then, an image opens that will be burned in my brain until the day I die. It’s Stevie, kicking and karate chopping at a turkey, while I stand off to the side with a shocked smile on my face. I click the three tiny dots at the top of the screen to save the photo to my computer.
“Oh, no, you’re not.” Stevie tries to swat my hand away from the trackpad, but she’s not fast enough.
I snatch her hand, holding it tight while I save the photo with my free hand. “You don’t think that’ll make a nice T-shirt?” I tease while she tries to wrestle away.
“Adammm,” she whines, giving up quickly. Her fingers soften in mine. “Okay, you know what? Fine. Save the picture. But it’s for your eyes only. No putting it on your Instagram feed or making me go viral on TikTok.” She doesn’t slip her hand out of mine.
As a man whose picture is, according to my sister, going semiviral online and is splashed across T-shirts being sold in the town diner, I force myself to swallow down the injustice of this moment.
And there’s so much she still doesn’t know about me. I would never show that picture to anyone else. She’s mine.It’smine, I mean. I clear my throat. “You’re safe. I never put anything online.”
She rolls her eyes with a squeeze of my fingers. “Oh,I knowyou don’t.”
“What?”
“What?” she repeats too quickly.
My eyes tighten as I take her in. She licks her lips, her gaze darting everywhere but my face. I haven’t known Stevie for long, but I've figured out that she’ll crack if I wait her out.
