Sex & Sourdough (7 page)

Near the trail, he heard the fast stomp of feet. Aside from the long-distance backpackers and thru-hikers who covered vast distances on the Appalachian Trail, locals all along the trail used it for day hikes, fishing access, and for running. He glanced up, expecting to see a trail runner in shorts and a T-shirt. Instead, he saw a familiar cap, sunglasses, and a scraggly beard. Kevin had changed his clothes, and his blue coat was strapped to his pack. He was moving quickly. Anders watched the man’s long legs eat up the trail at a pace that Anders would only be able to match at a run. He remembered watching Kevin bob out of sight that first morning, as they both climbed Springer Mountain. The man really was in incredible shape.

Kevin spotted him through the trees, waved, and hurried toward him through the underbrush. “Damn,” he panted. “You made decent time….”

“I think you’re just humoring me,” Anders admitted. “What are you doing here? I thought you were spending the night at the hostel.”

Kevin unbuckled his pack and slipped it off. His pack looked a good ten pounds heavier than it had been at Springer Mountain. “Not anymore. Still, clean clothes and a shower are always nice. If I hadn’t already gotten laundry started, I’d have caught up to you faster.” He flipped the top of his pack back and pulled out his food bag. He also pulled out a plastic grocery bag filled with foil-wrapped packets of freeze-dried food. “You owe me twenty-eight dollars,” he said simply, tossing the entire bag at the spot where Anders had set his pack.

“You brought me food?”

“Well, I did laundry,” Kevin explained. “And that takes a couple of hours, you know? I figured that you were going to come back and get supplies, but when you hadn’t shown up by the time the dryer was done, I figured you had just kept going.”

Anders wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen Kevin hiking on his own. The man had covered the entire distance he did, and he had done it two hours faster than Anders. Kevin wasn’t even out of breath. “How many miles would you cover each day if you were on your own?”

Kevin shrugged. “Depends on the terrain. And the weather. I hate the cold, so sometimes if it’s raining I just wait it out.”

“You’re totally humoring me.”

“Twenty to twenty-five miles.”

“Twenty miles? You’ve only been doing ten with me.”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “Everybody starts out doing eight to ten miles a day. You’ll get faster.”

“Twenty miles a day….” At that pace, Kevin really could finish the entire length of the Appalachian Trail before September 1, provided nothing went wrong. “I guess it was kind of stupid leaving without food, huh?”

Kevin shrugged. “Stupid for hiking, smart for dealing with someone who’s obviously looking for a fight. There were a lot of ways that could have gone bad. Your boyfriend was trying pretty hard to make something happen. He even hung out in the parking lot for a bit, hiked about half a mile down the trail and checked the hostel to see if you had gone in there.” Kevin looked up at him from the pots he was sorting. “It was kind of crazy. I don’t think most people would have known how to defuse that kind of situation, and walking away did the trick. It was just bad timing, not getting supplies beforehand.”

Anders stared down at Kevin, trying to figure out if the man was being serious or not.

“You’re pretty good at reading people,” Kevin said, not meeting his eyes.

Anders did a double take when he realized the slightly red tint peeking out from beneath Kevin’s beard was darker, as though he was blushing. Was Kevin talking about more than how Anders had dealt with Joel? Could he be talking about how Anders had assumed Kevin was interested in him? After walking on eggshells in his encounter with Joel, Anders couldn’t even think about that.

He helped Kevin make a simple dinner and got water heating to wash the dishes afterward. He wiped the dishes clean and set them in the rinse water while Kevin hung their food bags from a tall oak tree. He was just finishing as Kevin stepped up beside him and plucked the dishes out of the rinse water, then set them to dry on the rocks. Kevin meticulously dried his hands and put his gloves back on. Anders stared, noticing the pale white fingers tipped with blue that disappeared inside the gloves.

“Are your hands okay?”

Kevin looked at him for a long moment before answering. “Nope.” He grinned brightly. “Arthritis. It only hurts when my hands get cold.”

“Arthritis? I thought that was something old people ended up with.”

“I suffer from premature old age,” said Kevin seriously.

Anders laughed and dried his hands too. “How old are you?”

“Too damn old.”

“Come on, how old are you? Thirty?”

Kevin’s mouth dropped open wide. “What? Thirty! Now I do feel old, thank you.”

“So, you’re what? Twenty-nine?”

“In terms of actual age, I’m twenty-five. But I feel, and apparently look, quite a bit older. If you take the average of my actual age, my health age, and my age in cynicism, I think I’m one hundred and thirty-seven.”

“You’re twenty-five?”

“Yes.”

“You’re only two years older than me!”

Kevin glared at him.

“Man.” Anders picked up the dishes, wiped off the last drops of water, and then began to stack the dishes to repack them. “Twenty-five and you’re stuck with arthritis. And that beard. That sucks.” And that was probably what those little pill bottles were for.

“There’s nothing wrong with my beard.”

“It makes you look old.”

“Yeah, well…,” Kevin grumbled but didn’t finish the sentence. “Your curly hair makes you look twelve, you know.”

“What?” Anders pulled at his own hair, trying to tell if it had gotten long enough to turn into its usual frayed mess of tight curls. “Damn it!”

“I like my beard.” Kevin watched him sit down on the ground, staring at him for a long time. “So,” he said eventually, “How long were you and that asshole together, anyway?”

Anders wrapped his arms around his knees and wished he had thought to start a fire. Cooking and washing dishes over the stove had proven to be less work, but he would have enjoyed the warmth and light now that the sun was setting. Kevin, Anders noticed, had kept his blue down coat close. Even as Anders glanced at it, Kevin was reaching for it. He pulled it around him and pulled a small headlamp out of one of the pockets, but didn’t turn it on.

“About two and a half years. We got together when school started sophomore year. This whole thing was his idea. It was supposed to be a chance to spend time together before I started school again. He’s technically done with his BA, so he was talking about going back to his hometown, since he didn’t get into grad school. It was supposed to be our last chance to spend time together.”

“So you two were calling it quits at the end of the summer?”

Anders shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to, but as far as he’s concerned, not getting into grad school is basically a death sentence for his career. We got into a dozen fights about it. He’s convinced that I was the reason he didn’t get in to the master’s program.”

“What was he going to study?”

“English. He’s a writer and he wanted to go to grad school so he’d be able to really focus on writing. He didn’t get any writing done over the past four years, so I can’t see how grad school would be different. But apparently him not getting anything done was all my fault too.”

“How was him not getting into grad school your fault?”

“First he said that I had distracted him, and that was why he didn’t get into UNF. He didn’t apply anywhere else because I’m staying in Florida. Taking more classes and trying to get into the graduate program again means he could stay with me a bit longer, so I guess I should be grateful.”

“Grateful?” Kevin narrowed his eyes. “I’m not so sure. Has he always been like he was today?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re probably better off. You know that, or I hope you do. But I am now completely and totally confused. Why would you want to keep doing this? I’ve seen guys drag their girlfriends out here, and the girlfriends are always gone within a week. You really seem more like the girlfriend type than an actual hiker. Why do you want to stay out here?”

Anders shrugged again. “I don’t want to go back….”

“You don’t want to go back? Back to what?”

“Jacksonville. Law school. Joel.” Anders began to draw small circles in the dirt. “I’ve got a degree in business administration, and I applied to law school because… well, because it was what I was supposed to do. My dad already had an internship lined up for me before I even got my LSAT scores back.”

“LSAT scores?”

“It’s like the SATs for law school,” Anders explained. “I don’t know if I want to be a lawyer. I don’t know if I want to keep going to school for another three years. I mean, I’m twenty-three and I’ve spent my entire life in school. I feel like my life hasn’t even started yet, and it won’t be my life when it does start. It’ll be my father’s….”

“So don’t go,” Kevin said, as though it was that simple.

“I can’t
not go
. I’m already signed up for classes. My dad’s already paid for the semester. And it’s not like I have anything else to do with my life.”

“And you don’t want to go back to him, either?”

Anders shrugged again. “Joel? No, I don’t.”

“So don’t. What’s the worst that can happen from taking a few months off?”

“Nothing, I guess. I know I can come up with some kind of bullshit answer to make it sound good in a job interview. And it’s not like Joel and I were serious,” he lied.

He dropped his head to his knees. He didn’t want to admit how serious he’d been about Joel. The truth was pathetic. The truth was, being with Joel had been the only thing that made him feel like he was someone worthwhile. Everything else was just living up to the examples set by his older brothers and his father, playing the part—none of it was really him.

“Thank you for rescuing me, again.” Anders pushed himself off the ground and dusted himself off. “This is twice now you’ve saved me, from the woods or just from doing something stupid. Someday I’m going to figure out a way to return the favor.”

Kevin stood up beside him and set his hand on Anders’s shoulder. “I brought you food. I didn’t rescue you from anything. You did that yourself. He was an asshole.”

“I guess so. I think I’m going to turn in, try to get some rest.”

“All right. Good night.”

Anders crawled into his tent and wished he could just will his body to sleep. He wished he could stop seeing the world so clearly, stop obsessing over going back to Jacksonville. He shimmied into his sleeping bag and tried not to think about it. He’d known his relationship with Joel was a mess from the start, and after the initial shock, he was surprised to find that it ending didn’t hurt nearly as much as he’d always feared it would.

His mind began to wander to Kevin’s chocolate eyes instead, and he wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Kevin’s eyes were soulful and warm, but it wouldn’t be fair to focus on Kevin rather than Joel. The last thing he needed was to fall into a messy rebound relationship, and he’d already insulted Kevin enough with unfair assumptions. Besides, Kevin was the embodiment of all the jocks Anders had hated in high school—strong, supremely confident, and not at all interested in him.

He needed to stay grounded in reality, not give in to the urge to fawn over the first man he saw now that Joel was out of his life. He needed to focus. “Hiking,” he whispered to the darkness. “One foot in front of the other….”

If Kevin really could keep up the kind of pace he bragged about, pacing him might give Anders a chance to finish the entire trail before school started, not to mention leaving him too damn tired to be upset about Joel. He had never imagined actually making it halfway, but now the thought of finishing didn’t seem impossible at all. Since everyone else was assuming he’d fail, too, the worst that could come of trying to accomplish the whole thing was that he’d prove Joel and his father right.

In the darkness, he heard the zip of a sleeping bag and the rattle of pill bottles.

Tomorrow he would let Kevin take the lead and just try to keep
up.

T
HE
RED
dirt slipped from underneath his hiking boot, sending Kevin sliding down the small gulley on his ass.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Anders asked from the narrow rock outcrop above him.

“No,” Kevin answered honestly. “But the lady who maintains the shelter said it was cool. If you’re only doing half the trail, you don’t want to miss anything, right?”

“But we’re seven miles from the trail,” Anders reminded him. “We’re not even going to make it back tonight.”

It was the second week of May and the weather was starting to get hot in the afternoon, and the base of this waterfall, even though it looked unassuming from the top, was supposed to be spectacularly beautiful. Plus the mist at the base would give them a chance to cool off.

“We’re only two miles outside of Franklin, so we can just stay there tonight.”

“Is there a hostel?”

During the past two weeks, they had stopped for supplies twice, but they’d stuck to the trail as much as possible. Kevin was surprised when Anders seemed to get into shape fast. By the fifth day on the trail, two days after leaving Mountain Crossings, Kevin didn’t have to stop and let Anders catch up. They were averaging nearly fifteen miles a day now. Spending the day poking around waterfalls and then heading into town for a comfortable night would be worth the lost time.