He lifted an eyebrow, and she added, “You werethinkingsomething, and it seemed… harsh.”
“I was thinking,” he said carefully, “I would not have thought to do that, and I should have.”
Before she could apologize, he offered her his bag, and she breathed in the scent while looking over his choices.
“Smoked almonds, walnut pieces,” she said, studying his. “Raisins. Sunflower seeds. M&Ms.”
She pulled out a small handful and ate it, and he did the same with hers.
The two sat high up on a mountain, far from civilization, ate trail mix, and looked out at the gorge.
And Tuesday thought about all the large and small things she’d been not thinking too much about since she’d thrown her leg over his motorcycle hours earlier. It felt like it’d been days ago, so much had happened.
The experience of the ride, learning to move with him at first, and then just letting her body move with the bike, which just happened to be the same as moving with him.
And then the multiple cascades and waterfalls. The ancient hemlock. The vanishing creek. The skunk he’d handled without ceremony. The way he’d moved through the Fruit Bowl. The climb he’d done in silence until he felt she needed to know the goal would be worth it.
And now this — his own silicone bag of trail mix, made with care. Practical ingredients that worked. Nothing fancy, just tasty calories, and he’d made enough for two wolves.
And he hadn’t made fun of her fancier trail mix. He’d eaten it and enjoyed it.
She’d created a box for what this was between them. Fun sex. Adventurous sex.
Nothing more.
But today had been more.A lot more.
She didn’t know what to do with all of it. It didn’t fit in her neat and tidy box anymore.
The wind moved through the misshapen trees on the point, the gorge spread out below them, and she thought that some places had a way of making truth impossible to deny.
Chapter 19
Knife let her lead most of the way back. He liked being able to keep an eye on her. Liked watching her. He shook his head, because that was such an understatement, it leaned into dishonesty because he’dlovedwatching her experience his favorite trail all fucking day long. But down that road lay danger, so he tried not to think too hard about the cherries and dark chocolate, salted with fancy flakes in her damned trail mix. Her genuine annoyance at the disappearing creek, the way she’d described Blue Hole Falls as oversaturated, how she’d climbed the Fruit Bowl with fucking glee.
She only stopped a few times on the return trip, and he wasn’t at all surprised when one of them was the spot where the water disappeared, then where it reappeared. She stood in the dry creek bed and just stared upstream for several minutes, and he sat on a boulder and watched.
Her scent told him she let her wolf come up into her psyche to see it firsthand, and wasn’tthatinteresting?
But by the time she walked back to him, her eyes were human, but he had a feeling he’d have seen the wolf looking out of hers, if she’d have glanced his way several minutes earlier.
Even after eating twice as much trail mix as he’d figured they needed, he was hungry when they made it back to his bike. He looked through the cameras covertly mounted to the frame, which he’d set to only record when motion was detected, and smiled at the herd of deer who’d circled and smelled it at length. He showed her, and she said, “Wow, I guess leaving your bike unsupervised is different than leaving your car.”
“It is.”
He regretted that he couldn’t tell her the MC control center would’ve called the cops if the bike left the parking lot before he returned. For things inside the city, the brothers would take care of it without law enforcement, but this far away, they’d tell the cops where the thief was. Or rather, where the bike was.
So instead, he told her, “There’s a mom-and-pop restaurant not far from here. Looks like a dive, but it’s farm-to-table country cooking, and has been since long before someone invented the term.”
“Sounds perfect,” she told him.
Potbellies Family Restaurant was a squat building with a barn-type roof, the parking lot about twenty times bigger than the building and half full even on a Monday.
He held the door for her and watched her walk in and stop.
She took in the laminated tables, the fact every table held an entire roll of paper towels, the huge chalkboard on the wall with the daily specials, and the chalkboard behind the register with the available desserts.
Her gaze went back to the main chalkboard, and she said, “They have chicken hearts.”
