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I’d plug my ears, except one hand’s sort of busy throbbing and I’m afraid to use it, and the other’s planted in the cool sand,keeping me upright. “Hey, if you couldnottalk about gruesome injuries right now, that’d be stellar.”
“Aw, it wasn’t that bad. He never told you about that? For a sec, we thought he’d have to go to the ER. If there was nerve damage—”
“A splinter big enough to cause nerve damage? Yeah, um, that’s my definition of gruesome.”
He sets the white box I noticed earlier on a flat-ish rock nearby, then opens it up like a surgeon preparing to fix a malfunctioning heart valve.
“Cole?”
He holds his upturned hand out, and I rest my quill-decorated palm in his.
“Yeah?” he asks, as he bends over my hand and goes to work.
“I’m really glad you came out here with me. My idea of preparing for an emergency is packing Oreos.”
He glances up, and it feels good when his gaze rests on mine. His lip hitch up on one side in a quick, humble smile. “I got you. Don’t worry about it.”
Maybe I’m feeling swoony because a lot has happened to me today, and I just hiked up and down about a million scrabbly ravine sides, and I’m exhausted.
Or maybe it’s because I’ve never had a guy look me in the eye and say those words before.
‘I’ve got you.’
I believe him.
I trust him.
And even out here in the middle of nowhere, with the sun sinking lower with each passing minute, I feel completely safe.
Chapter 18
Cole
“You warm enough?” I ask Olivia, after poking at the fire to get a big hunk of juniper wood into the flames.
She nestles down lower into my bag. “Yeah, thanks to you.”
“No big deal.”
“Itisa big deal,” she insists. “You built this big, toasty-warm fire out of nothing. With that hatchet of yours. If I tried to use that thing, it would go so wrong, even my emergency cookies wouldn’t save us.”
They’ve become sort of a standing joke for us, these past few hours.
Like everything turns funny when you stick ‘emergency cookies’ on the end.
She kidded that she could try to start a fire with them. I said maybe we could use them to build a shelter. She thinks if it came to it, we could throw them at a bear or at the least, keep him satisfied while we ran away.
Olivia swears that our jokes are going into some logbook she’s keeping of all the goofy things we’ve said this week at Sunrise Ranch.
‘Crab walking’s for heroes.’
‘I don’t talk to goats.’
Those kinds of things. I think we’re both feeling slap happy. The kind of happy kids get on Halloween, after too much sugar, too much running around causing mischief, and too much fun.
Being out here with Oliviaisfun.
She even liked the dinner I cooked up for us, which was really nothing special. One of those packaged backpacker’s meals: Mexican-style adobo rice and chicken. I mixed up electrolyte packets into cups of water for us, too.
