Authors: Kelly Martin
A nervous laugh escaped her lips. “Yeah, right.”
He cut his eyes at her, and she saw the seriousness in them. “I’m not lying. Okay, maybe not a criminal in the served hard time sense, but I have been arrested once or twice.”
“For what?”
“Guess.” He threw the stick he’d been poking the fire with into the flames and laid back on his elbows, studying her.
“Um, I don’t know…” She didn’t want to answer. What if she offended him? What if she guessed robbery and it was simple vandalism?
“Not even one guess? You’re not afraid of hurting my feelings, are you, Rachel?” When she couldn’t answer, he laughed. “You are too moral for your own good.”
“You can never be too moral.”
“Touché. Humor me.”
Blah, she just wanted out of this conversation. Why did she need to know why he’d been arrested? Did it change their current predicament or make him any less trustworthy? Would it do her any good to know? “Thankfully, Asher, whatever you did is in the past. It’s not important now.”
She saw the shocked and bewildered expression fall on his face, like no one had ever said anything like that to him before. “Not important? What if it was something horrible? What if I’m a murderer or rapist or something?”
“I don’t believe that.” And she didn’t. If he had done something like that, he wouldn’t be on this trip. “Stop trying to scare me.”
“I’m not trying. Just informing you of your current situation.”
“I know my current situation, thanks. And it doesn’t matter to me why you got arrested, as long as you are on your best behavior with me.”
“You truly believe that, don’t you?” he asked like the concept was foreign to him.
“I try to.” It was an honest answer. One that made him laugh.
“Fighting. I was arrested for fighting.”
Fighting. Good. Nothing too bad. She felt herself ease and tried to hide it. Didn’t she just tell Asher that it didn’t matter what he was arrested for? “Fighting who?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He turned his face away and started going through his pack.
Why did he bring it up if he didn’t want to talk about it? “If you ever feel like talking about it, you can talk to me, you know? I won’t judge you.”
“Everyone judges, Rachel,” he said without looking at her. “Some people just don’t know it.”
“Your mood has turned sour,” she said, more as a statement than an accusation.
“And yours hasn’t? You seem more confident today.”
She smiled an actual smile, glad to be moving ahead from talking about his time in jail. “I am. I know that we will be found today.”
“That sure, huh?”
“God will take care of us.”
His head snapped around quicker than she expected, and his brows were arched. “Maybe you, sweetheart, but He doesn’t care much for me.”
“He cares for everyone, Asher, you just—”
“Please.” He put his hands up to stop her. He pivoted on his knee to look her in the eyes. “Please just stop right there. I’ve heard it all from David, and once or twice from Sid. ‘God will protect you. God will save you. God loves you.’ I’m going to tell you right now, I don’t need to be saved, okay? I’ve taken care of myself this long without His,” he pointed up toward the sky, “help. So just drop it. We’ve got enough to worry about without you just sitting there and relying on God to send an angel to miraculously carry you out of this dark, cold forest.”
“Don’t think that’s how it works, but… I’ll do my part.” When he opened his mouth to speak again, she added, “I won’t try to cram God down your throat if you don’t roll your eyes every time I pray.”
He hesitated before agreeing.
Rachel wished more than anything to prove to Asher that God loved him, but she refused to beat him over the head with it. Didn’t mean she couldn’t pray for him every chance she got though.
Deciding the conversation was over, Rachel scooted to her pack and dug through until she found her hairbrush. Even without a mirror, she could tell her hair had seen better days. When she felt all of the knots, she cringed. At close to waist length, it would not be fun to brush. Knowing it was now or never, Rachel pulled the knotted mane over her shoulder and struggled to get the brush through the tangles. It wasn’t an easy task, and she grunted with each painful stroke.
“You okay over there?” Asher asked, peering from a few feet away.
“Fine,” she said, trying to tone down the sound effects.
“Liar.”
“You keep calling me a liar, and I’m going to take offense.” She yanked the brush through her hair to get out one of the bigger knots. She had to admit that between the lack of food, soft bed, and now her hair, she was getting a pretty major headache.
“No offense intended.”
“Good… ow…” The sound slipped out. Stupid curly gene from her mom’s side.
“Here, you’re gonna hurt yourself. Let me help.” He had already started to stand.
“What? No, no. That’s okay. I’ve got it.” What in the world was he thinking? He couldn’t help her with her hair. That seemed borderline intimate to her. On the other hand, she had made little progress by herself.
“Besides being too moral, you are also way too stubborn.”
“We’ve covered that.”
“Well, it bears repeating. Take my help, Rachel. I promise I’ll be easy.”
Before she could answer, he sat behind her and placed his hand over hers on the brush. Rachel stopped, frozen by the feeling his fingers brought. His hand lingered on hers longer than needed, and she released the brush.
Gathering all of her hair at the nape of her neck, Asher began at the bottom and worked his way toward the top. He apologized when he pulled too hard, “Sorry, I’m not used to this.”
“That’s okay. You’re doing fine.” He was he was doing better than fine, in Rachel’s opinion. His fingers felt amazing flowing through her hair. Her eyes closed, and instead of hurting her head, Asher’s soft touch made her relax.
Asher couldn’t get all of the tangles out, but he got most of them. She thanked him and put her gray toboggan back on. The curls flowed wildly around her shoulders. “I think you have a future in hair dressing.”
“Yay, just what every guy wants to hear.”
“Great way to meet women though.”
“Eh, I don’t need a gimmick to meet women.”
“Guess not,” she said, trying not to let his reputation and gossip of others form her opinion of him any more than she already had.
He smiled at her and threw her a bag of chips. “Breakfast?”
“Is it gourmet?”
“Top of the line.”
“Awesome.” She opened her chips, prayed without an audible word over her food, and savored the first bite. Even though it was sour cream and onion flavor, it tasted heavenly to her. “How many of these do we have?” she asked, covering her mouth while she chewed. Polite to the end.
“Four. I ate one this morning while you were… taking care of business. Three bottles of water too.”
Goosebumps formed on her skin even under her heavy winter coat. “That’s it?”
“Yeah. But you're confident we will be found today, remember?” The way he said it made her want to throw something at him. No one liked their words coming back to bite them.
“I remember,” she said. Maybe she would only eat half of the bag for breakfast. Better safe than sorry, after all.
Chapter Eight
Asher remained calm all the way past noon. A triumph for him. By two, he was up and pacing. Ever since he was a little boy, he pictured a thin string holding his temper in check. The string was being pulled tightly, threatening to snap. Why hadn’t they heard anything? No yelling. No footsteps. No twigs breaking. Nothing. It seemed like they were the only people left on the entire planet.
“You don’t think the world ended, did you?” he asked, only half joking. “You know, like end-of-days-type stuff.”
He could tell by the expression she gave him that she hadn’t expected that.
“Didn’t think you were into end-of-the-world-type stuff?”
He shrugged. “Thought you were.”
“Don’t joke about things like that.”
“Gotta joke about something,” he said. A nagging thought wouldn’t leave him alone. “If…
if…
Jesus did come back, and you were still here with me, well, you’d be up a creek, wouldn’t you think?”
“If Jesus
did
come back, I don’t believe for a second I’d still be here with you.” she said, and it bothered him a little bit. Why, he didn’t know, but it did. What? So, she would, theoretically, be gone to some unimaginable paradise, and he’d be stuck there on the mountain all alone? He didn’t like the sound of that.
“Confident, aren’t you?”
“Very.” The way she sat with her back straight and her eyes unflinching let him know she meant it.
“Wish I was that confident in Sid. I don’t think he’s coming back,” he said, pushing his fists in his pockets to keep from hitting a tree or something equally as stupid.
“He’ll be here,” she answered, sitting where she had for most of the day with her foot propped on her backpack.
“Maybe Sid got lost…”
“He didn’t get lost. He told them where we are.”
“We don’t even know where we are!” he said louder than he meant. This day wasn’t going the way he’d planned it. A search party finding them around one — or sooner if they were lucky — had been his ideal day. Not this.
As the afternoon dragged on, his faith in his friend dwindled. He did not want to spend another night out in the woods, even if the company wasn’t half bad.
“We can’t be as lost as we think,” Rachel said. “There had to be a cutoff or something we just didn’t see.”
“What does it matter? Huh?” Without a doubt, his patience was hanging on by a thread. “Lost is lost, Rachel. “
“Yelling at me isn’t going to help.”
“I’m not yelling.” Okay, maybe he was a little. He’d always promised himself that no matter how mad he got or how frustrated he became, he’d never yell at a girl. That had been his one and only rule. Taking a deep breath, he sat in front of Rachel and tried to form coherent words that got his point across the way he wanted. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled. I didn’t realize I was.” Another lie. When was he going to stop lying? “Okay, yeah, I realized I was. I’m just — it’s just…”
“Yeah, me too,” she said. Her comforting emerald eyes, the same shade as her coat, let him know that she accepted his attempt at an apology. “And I’m sorry too.”
“You? For what?”
“You know what. For getting us in this mess to start with.”
“You still holding on to that?” Asher shook his head, amazed. Girls and their guilt. “It’s not like you did this on purpose. No, I’m not happy about it, but it does no good to dwell on it. We have bigger problems.”
“We’ll see if you still feel that way when we're still stuck out here a week from now.”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it,” he said, not wanting to imagine being out there that long with a few bags of chips and no shelter.
Rachel sighed, looking around the trail and stretching her tense muscles. “I don’t see anyone coming.”
“Don’t get pessimistic on me now, girl. Remember you are the positive one.”
“Well, I’m positive I don’t see anyone coming.”
“That’s the spirit.” He laughed despite himself. Rachel had something about her, some spark that made him want to be around her, which was good since he seemed to be stuck with her.
Truth was he had no idea what to do. Should he stay there and wait for Sid to show up, or should he pick up and go down the trail, hoping to find a way home?
Tilting his head back, Asher got his answer. Not from God, but from the graying clouds. “Looks like it’s gonna rain soon.”
“Of course, it is.”
“Positive one. Remember, you are the positive one.” Asher patted her shoulder as he stood and went over to his pack. “We can’t stay here. We need to get going before it rains, or we are going to be in all kinds of hurt.”
“I agree. Looks like we have at least two or three good hours of sunlight left — well if the clouds hold off, that is.”
“We’ll backtrack,” Asher said, moving her foot from her bag as easy as he could and laying it on the ground. She wrinkled her nose and grunted. He cringed, hating how it must have hurt her. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s fine.”
“Lying again. At this rate, you are going to have a lot of repenting to do when you get back to church,” he teased as he picked up her bag and threw his belongings in it. Hoping for a metaphorical miracle, he rolled up his pack, stuffed it inside Rachel’s, and forced the zipper closed. He let out a held breath when it fastened. There, it was much easier to carry one pack than two.
He snuffed out the fire, being extra careful to make sure all of the embers were completely out. That required the use of some of their water, a fact that Asher didn’t like, but had to be done nonetheless.
When he was satisfied he hadn’t burned the forest down, he threw the consolidated pack on his back and returned to Rachel, who hadn’t moved. He noticed a strange look in her eyes, a twinkle maybe. Could eyes twinkle? “What?”
“And you said you weren’t a boy scout.” She laughed.
“Missed my calling I guess. Come on, let me help you up.”
Taking her hands in his, he waited for her to put her good foot down to grip the ground. “Ready?”
“Sure.” She didn’t sound enthused. His hand hurt from how hard she was squeezing his fingers. She had quite a grip. Truth be told, he was as nervous as she was, but he had to find a way to hide it from her.
“Go,” he said, pulling her up. He caught her before she could topple over. “You okay?” He held her up with his arm around her waist.
“I’ve got this. I’m not fragile, Asher.” The way she said it made him almost believe her.
Despite what she said, he held her for a few more seconds to make sure she had her balance — that’s what he told himself, at least.
Before he wanted her to, she wiggled from his grip and balanced by holding on to his forearms. Her big green eyes sparkled when she looked up at him. “Asher — I walked to the bathroom all by myself this morning, remember? I can get down the mountain. I’ll be fine.”
“I know. Just trying to be helpful.”
She smiled, stepped to the side, and put her arm over his shoulder. “My hero,” she drew out in a thick, Southern drawl.