Unbound (16 page)

As I gathered up wood for kindling and then kicked aside some larger fallen branches, I kept glancing back out to him. To call whatever I was feeling towards him a crush was massive overstatement. Part of me still hated him. And part of me, honestly, was indifferent to him. I tried to rationalize it all, telling myself that I was only attracted to him
at all
because he was the first man that had shown any interested in me.

Those few days where we had awkwardly flirted seemed like they had happened years ago, though. Still, it made me wonder where Jack and I might be if the plane hadn’t have come into the picture.

For one,
I thought,
it wouldn’t have taken the cold ocean to get him to take his clothes off.

“
Stop it,” I muttered as I gathered up the wood.

I stood there for a moment, looking out to the sea from between the trees. The plane bobbed there uselessly and seeing it in such a way made me realize how unfair I had been to Jack. The worst part of it was that I didn’t even know where all of the anger had come from. Was I really so entitled that I believed the plane should have been mine just because I had seen it first and because I had lived in Sitka my whole life?

As I walked back towards him, where he was brushing off an area for the fire, I knew that my options were simple. I could make this potentially disastrous scenario even worse by letting my unjustified anger control me, or I could try to help and stay calm.

“
Is this enough?” I asked, dropping the wood at his feet.

“
Perfect.”

He still sounded angry but I could tell that he was having similar thoughts. Why make the situation any worse with hostility.

“
There are also some stale crackers in the bag if you want them.”

“Mmmm, t
empting,” I said as playfully as I could, trying to ease the tension.

I got down to my knees and started spreading the sticks around in a way that would best support a small campfire. He joined in and actually gave me a smile—albeit a rather strained one.

“
What?” I asked.

“
You
do
know what you’re doing,” he said.

I laughed.  “Don't sound so surprised. 
I was a tomboy as a kid. My dad taught me all of this stuff.”

“
Good,” he said. “Now go catch us some fish and we’ll feast like kings tonight.”

We laughed at the same time and something about it felt good. The tension was still there, but it was as fragile as the foam that the waves left behind on our sad little shore. We worked together to get the fire going; Mr. Tanner’s matches were as old as everything else in the bag and we struck eight before one actually lit.

“
I’m pretty confident I can fix the engine,” he said after the fire was going.

“
Good.”

“
And even if I can’t, we’re not far from the coast. The chances of anyone crashing here and going any longer than a day or so without being spotted by a boat or a plane are pretty slim.”

“
That’s a relief,” I said.

He sat close to the fire, warming himself. I was glad to see that he had stopped trembling.

I wanted to ask him to tell me about himself… to tell me things that I hadn’t already picked up from our dinner with Grandfather. But it didn’t seem right. After treating him so badly, what right did I have?

After a few moments of silence, he stood up and looked to the plane. “There are no sleeping bags or sheets,” he said. “But I’ve got a wet t-shirt and a duffel bag that we can use as pillows.”

“
In other words,” I said, “no sleep tonight, huh?”

He shrugged. “We can try to sleep in the plane but it might be crowded.”

I thought about it and decided that I wouldn’t object to sleeping in tight quarters with Jack. Especially, when he was cold and needed to be warmed up.

Shut up,
I thought to myself.
Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP.

“
You get the storage compartment in the back,” he said. “You can stretch out there. I’ll take the passenger seat.”

“
Are you sure?” I asked.

“
Yeah.”

But instead of going back to the plane, he hunkered back down by the fire. I looked from Jack to the plane and then back to Jack. And in the end, I stayed there with him.

Suddenly, with this man in my presence, sleep was the furthest thing from my mind.

And that terrified me.

16—Devlin

The silence around the campfire was daunting. Given the last few years of my life, any sort of silence while in the presence of a woman was uncommon. I had almost forgotten what it was like. I was able to endure it for a grand total of two minutes before I had to get up. I had to do
something.

That’s when I remembered the brief shopping excursion I had taken that morning. I’d had no idea that Mac’s grandfather would set us up with lunch, so I had taken the necessary precautions. I went into the plane and removed the small brown paper bag that I had tucked away beneath the seat.

When I got back to the campfire, I opened the bag and—not so proudly—showed Mac my offerings.

“
Oh,” she said, suppressing a laugh. “You shouldn’t have.”

I set the contents of the bag on the sand around the fire: a can of pork and beans and two packs of Saltine crackers.

“
I didn’t think to bring any wine,” I joked. “Sorry.”

I popped open the pork n’ beans and pulled out the one plastic spork I had thought to pack. I offered them both to her and she took them with a slight smile. She looked into the can and stirred the beans around. She looked to be deep in thought about something and while I certainly didn’t want to pry, I also couldn’t stand the silence.

“
You okay?” I asked.

“
Yeah.” It wasn’t convincing.

“
We really
will
be okay. I think with some light, I’ll be able to figure it out. I’m pretty good with engines and fixing damn near anything you can think of.”

“
That’s good,” she said. She scooped up a mouthful of beans and ate them. She grimaced a bit when she swallowed them and passed them over to me.

“
That good, huh?”

“
Mmmm.”

We both laughed and it was a musical sound. She looked to me for a moment and I was reminded of the first time we met—when there was no hostility and there was simply the pleasure of meeting someone new and seemingly interesting.

“
You know,” she said, “I think I was being something of a bitch for the last few days. And you didn’t deserve it.”

I shrugged. “It’s no big deal, really.” And right then and there, I almost came clean. I almost told her about how I could use some tough love and having people mistreat me because of the luxuries I had grown accustomed to over the last few years. But I kept all of that bottled up; there was no sense it letting my guilty conscious get in the way of her apology. And it wasn’t that I thought I was owed the apology at all. It’s just that it seemed to me that it was rewarding to her in some way to admit to me (and, perhaps, herself) that she had been angry at me over something that, in the long run, was sort of small.

“
I just feel like a spoiled little girl for complaining the way I did.”

“
Seriously, it’s okay,” I assured her. “I get it.”

She let out a sigh and took one of the packs of crackers. She opened one and ate one of the crackers slowly, looking out to the sea.

“
So,” she said. “Let’s change the subject. What do you say?”

“
Sure. What sort of pleasant dinner conversation did you have in mind?”

She smirked at me. “You said that you were in the army. What brought on that decision?”

The question surprised me. It was direct and the total opposite of the small-talk that I had been expecting. Still, I found myself anxious to tell her. Usually when I went into this story, it was for a stuffy news reporter or an over-hyped talk show host. It was nice to have the topic raised in such a simple setting.

“
When I was in high school, I was sure I was going to go pro with football. I was a great wide receiver. I played all four years. I even broke the all-time school record for catches in a season. But I twisted my ankle in my senior year and was never quite as fast. But I knew I wanted to do something active—I didn’t want to spend my life in an office or a cubicle. So I signed up for the Army.”

“
How long did you serve?”

“
Six years. I did active duty in Afghanistan for the Special Forces.”

“
Yeah?” she asked. I thought I heard something like disbelief or sadness sin her voice. It was odd, but she kept on. “What year?”

“
A few different tours between 2002 and 2007.”

“
Did you see any combat?”

Before I could answer her, the image of that helicopter popped into my mind, sitting their on the ground with my dying comrade, looking up into those whirling blades.

“
Yeah. Some.”

There was silence around the campfire for a moment. She dryly chewed at a cracker and looked for the sea, into the fire. It seemed to me that she was doing everything she could to not look at me.

This woman is complicated,
I thought. And then, on the heels of that:
Aren’t they all?

“
You okay?” I asked.

“
Yeah,” she said, finally looking up at me.

We held eye contact for at least five seconds. I have no idea where the urge came from, but I found myself wanting to kiss her. Again, this was an instinct I had been able to get away with over the last few years. But now, with this goatee and the fact that Mac knew nothing about who I really was, I was second-guessing myself.

It was something of a relief when she broke the eye contact and stood up. “I think I’m going to turn in,” she said.

Then, as she started walking away, something in my head clicked. The conversation we’d just had… her reaction to it and the conversation back at her Grandfather's…. it all meant one thing and my heart nearly stopped when it came to me.

“
Who was it?” I asked. “Who did you know and lose that was in the Army?”

She stopped, not bothering to look back at me. I didn’t think she was going to answer me but she said two simple words that made me ache for her.

“
My brother.”

She started walking away then and I nearly got up to follow her. I had been told by family members that had lost loved ones overseas that talking about their grief really
was
the best thing for the pain. And it was clear to me in that moment that Mac had not yet spoken to anyone at length about it.

I opened my mouth to call out for her but decided not to. If she wanted to talk about her brother, she would. I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to open that door to a stranger—especially one that she had just now learned not to hate.

I watched her walk carefully out to the plane, ready to rush out to help her if she needed it. She had no problem getting into the plane and I couldn’t help but smile when she gently closed the door behind her.

I started eating the rest of the pork and beans, wondering what Mac was thinking. Instead of denying that I was developing
some
sort of feelings for her, I honed in on it and tried to figure out what it was.

The past five years had been spent around voluptuous women that were damned close to flawless. I thought of Aubrey and the way she looked in those tight little black dresses with the plunging neckline. She was beautiful, there was no doubt about that—and source such as
People, Maxim,
and countless blogs agreed.

But Mac was, to me, beautiful too. There was a natural beauty there, a casual flair that made her more natural than any starlet in Hollywood could ever be.

I smirked at myself as I finished off the beans. I stared out to the ocean, giving Mac enough time to fall asleep. I then stamped out the small campfire and made my way to the plane. I climbed aboard quietly, as not to wake her. Once inside, I peered into the back and saw that she was sleeping on one of the packing blankets that had been left over from the shipment.

Grinning, I plopped myself down in the pilot’s seat and tried my best to get comfortable. I looked out to our naked little stretch of beach and thought about how great it would have been to have happened upon this place with someone I loved. The idea that it seemed like the stuff of the romantic movies I had starred in did not escape me.

With that notion in my head, I lay back as much as I could in the seat and tried to let the gently cresting waves rock me to sleep. It
almost
worked, but then a sudden thought occurred to me. It hit me like a wrecking ball to the chest and made me sit upright as if I had been electrocuted. I looked into the back of the plane and looked at Mac’s sleeping body…at Mac Blackwell’s sleeping body.

No…
I thought.
There’s no way.

But no matter how hard I tried to deny it, my mind kept going back to that day in Afghanistan, peering up into the helicopter blades as a man bled out on me. I saw that man now, his face as clear as a bell—a face that bore some resemblance to the woman in the back of my plane.

A man named David Blackwell.

“
Oh my God,” I said quietly.

I looked back out the beach, dumfounded. And in my head, I could swear I hear the
thump thump thump
of a rescue copter, coming down to the ground to lift me away.