Authors: Ever McCormick
"You did," Adam said. "You killed your fear."
*
Venturing back to the cabin, I was lost in a daydream as neit
her of us had spoken in a while when Adam grabbed my hand in his. His was rough and calloused and all-encompassing. My own hand felt tiny, bony, and fragile in his.
The action felt meaningful to me.
I glanced up at his eyes, but he wasn't paying much attention to our hands together. He was intent on walking forward up the steep, rocky trail ahead of us. The terrain was choppy and unsafe. Several large rocks came loose when I put my weight on them and Adam squeezed my hand tighter. It didn't take me long to figure out that this bout of hand-holding was more about keeping me upright than making me swoon.
But I swooned anyway.
8
Without discussing the whys of what we were doing, Adam and I began spending more time together. My stack of paperbacks sat unread in my cabin gathering dust. My new journal still lacked any epiphanies about my future. Roadsie still ran free, but the longer he went uncaught, the more relaxed the radio announcer seemed to be about it. I hadn't experienced an irrational fear in days.
Adam
taught me things—how to get a fire going, where to find the endless blueberry and raspberry bushes. He also showed me spots on the mountain I might never have discovered on my own. Some of the most difficult trails on the mountain seemed unsafe—at least for an amateur hiker like me. The shifting rocks and steep grades cut through brush that had been just barely cut and was already growing back. I'd wondered a few times why some of them were even considered trails, but what I was slowly learning was that the most difficult trails had been etched into the road not for their ease, but for the strategic way they allowed hikers to see the most amazing views of the nature.
One lookout sat so high up, hikers crawled out across a boulder that stretched out of the mountain so they could swing their legs off the edge and let them dangle into the abyss below. Adam helped me across, clinging to my hand the whole way. From there, I could survey the valley below.
A waterfall crashed into the river, giving off a constant dull roar that must have been deafening close up but from here just sounded like a TV left on fuzz in another room. The treetops covered the rolling mountains in lush, dancing leaves. As I surveyed the land for miles, I was struck by how vast and empty it was.
Having the world spread out before me like that always got me thinking about the big picture. We get so caught up in details we forget to think about how details are just brush strokes in a larger work.
Silently, I asked myself the question I'd written on that first page of my journal: What am I going to do with my life? I'd been sidetracked by strange noises and sexy landlords, but I needed to start re-focusing my thoughts if I wanted to figure this out. The last couple of weeks, the lack of any interest from employers as I sent out wave after wave of resumes, came back to me. The remembered disappointment must have shown on my face.
"Don't like the view?"
"No, it's not that. The view is great. It's just got me thinking about my big empty future."
"Anything you want to get off your chest?" he asked, looking up to meet my eyes.
"After this trip," I tried to quickly think about how I wanted to frame my problem. I wanted advice, but I didn't really want to go through the whole story again. It was too embarrassing. "Well, I guess this is my last hoorah. After this, I have to buckle down and grow up."
"That sounds horrible." He sh
ook the pack off his back and set it on the ground, bending next to it to unzip it and take out a plastic container and two waters. He made his way over to me and sat on the other side of the rock, looking in the opposite direction, so we were back to back. I kept picturing all those rocks on the trail slipping away under our feet, and I wondered if this giant boulder could give way too. I didn't let the fear ruin my experience though. I was getting better at that. Plus, I didn't think Adam would ever steer me into something unsafe, and he seemed to know this mountain as if it were a part of his own body.
"
Do you spend all your time out here? I mean, do you leave here to go to work everyday?"
I felt him sit up straight
. I could tell by the change in the sound of his voice that he was turning his head to talk to me. I turned my head too and saw he was handing me a bottle of water.
"This is my work," he said nodding to the rolling valleys of meadows and trees. "I do all right, and I'm happy. I leave this mountain as little as possible, drive only when I must."
I opened the bottle of water he was holding out and took a drink. The ice-cold water sizzled down the desert of my throat. I hadn't realized how parched I was. He popped the top of the container to reveal a brightly colored fruit salad with two wooden forks sticking out of it. I shook my head in surprise. He was like Paul Bunyan and Martha Stewart rolled into one.
"D
id you always know exactly what you wanted to do?"
"No, I tried a few different things before I found where I fit. You don't need to know where you're going before you get there. Sometimes, it's best if you keep an open mind and let your direction change as you do." He took a fork full of fresh fruit, so I took one too. It was cold like the water and sweet and ripe. It was the kind of fruit salad that taught you how people could be vegetarian.
"Did you ever screw up royally?" I put my fork down in the salad. If I was going to tell him about this, I didn't want to be ingesting food at the same time.
"Oh, yeah." He laughed. I didn't think there'd ever be a day when I'd be able to laugh at my huge mistake. "Everybody screws up."
"Yeah, but there are levels."
"True." Maybe sensing my anxiety, he stuck his fork back in the fruit and set the lid back on the container. "What'd you do?"
"To graduate, I had to write a final thesis, a paper on my career philosophy."
"You bombed a paper? Who cares?"
I felt a tingle on my forehead where a lone, tiny raindrop fell from the sky. The leaves hanging high above us blew upside down in the breeze.
"No, the paper was pretty good, actually. I poured my heart and soul into it. I said what I'd always thought since I was a kid."
"Doesn't sound like a mistake."
"I was the rising star of the business department at my school, and I wrote a paper about Honesty in Advertising
—how we needed to forgo our allegiance to the mighty dollar in the name of improving humanity. See, it was all about how I see marketing as a way of making people aware, of making society better. I criticized all the mind games in the name of profit." I shut up for a second and scanned the view again. He sat up straighter. There was so little room on the rock I could feel his back muscles tightening and I leaned up against him, relaxing against his strong body. Without saying anything, he compensated for my weight, seemingly not minding at all that I was using him to prop myself up for the time being. I felt grateful for the support.
"It didn't go over well?" he said. His voice sounded compassionate, not judgmental or jokey.
"It went over great. All of my professors—total idealists like me, mind you—supported it, said 'we need more humanitarians like you in the field of advertising.'" I leaned on him a bit more—I was totally slouching now. He turned to his side and pulled me down into his lap so that I was staring up into his face while he looked down at me. God, it was so safe there. I could feel how much he wanted me to open up to him.
"Somebody posted it online," I told him, "in an advertising forum. People either loved it or hated it. The people who hated it said I was an idiot
—a shining example of naive idealism. It went a little viral among the marketing community—not that the marketing community is everything, but for me it was. My name became synonymous with this national debate about honesty in marketing."
"Where's the mistake?" His eyes were wide and welcoming, so pale and deep and 150% focused on my story and my face. He really didn't see the problem
. We were staring into each other’s eyes again, and I suddenly felt so lucky to have found him here—my personal therapist in the wild.
I smiled
—a sarcastic, bitter smile. "It's one of those things marketing people say they support, but try getting an entry level job at a marketing firm when you're known all over as an anti-marketing hero." My hair blew across my face and he brushed it back into the wind. My eyes widened at the heat he left on my skin. He grinned.
"You're not entry level. That's the problem."
"I should never have written that paper," I whispered. "There are some things you just don't say out loud, and definitely not in print."
"Sure you do. You say them, and you don't regret it." He turned his head to t
he side. "A world where we use the power of influence to help each other instead of rob each other blind? I agree with you. That would be my kind of world." He moved his hand to my waist and his large hand grasped my hip. Goosebumps spiked across my skin. The action felt decidedly erotic, yet he didn’t keep moving. Was he waiting for my approval? Was I ready to give it?
We looked at each other wi
thout saying anything, and my lips curved up just the slightest bit on one side, which sounds like not much, but my cheek felt like that small half grin took a lot of muscle strength, like inside I was doing some intense resistance training with a large weight.
"In six months I have to start paying back my student loans, and I don't have a job yet."
"So?"
"
I don't know. That stresses me out."
He shook his head and stared out at the view all around us and then at me.
"I don't know what to tell you, Ina." I loved when he said my name. The other side of my smile turned up. Talking about it was making it easier to lift the weight inside. "Stick to the choices that feel right and try not to judge them by their immediate consequences. It might look like the fakes get all the breaks, but in the long run, it's not like that. Even when you lose, in a bigger sense you win."
I considered that and closed my eyes. I concentrated on the feeling of cool wind on my damp skin, my hair blowing away from me horizontally, the back on my head resting on Adam's muscular thighs.
Right now felt amazing, even if I was unsure of every step, even if it was temporary.
"Where was Michael during all of this?" he asked, shaking me from my momentary bliss.
I didn't answer because I realized I needed to think about it. In all my memories of crying, researching firms I'd never heard of in hopes of possibly landing a last-minute job offer, ducking out of party invites because I didn't want to talk about my paper anymore, where
was
Michael?
I felt another tingle, this time on my stomach in th
e stretch of skin between the bottom of my shirt and the top of my pants. And then another on my chest. Adam looked up into the sky and opened his mouth. I went to sit up, but that arm of his still lay across me and it wasn't budging.
"What are you doing?" I asked him.
"Tasting it."
I saw the tip of his tongue reaching out into the air. I felt a few more tingles
—on my belly, my forehead. The wind whipped my hair harder than before. I stuck out the tip of my tongue, and as if he sensed it, Adam looked down and grinned. It tasted like air, dirt, nature, sky. A few drops of rain landed on my outstretched tongue and I closed my eyes and let myself go completely limp in his lap. The rain drops multiplied, gained force, grew even colder than they'd been. If we stayed out here much longer, we’d be soaked through, but neither of us budged.
I thought of all the goofy stares I'd been the center of during my entire senior year fiasco, the eyes rolling when people thought I didn't notice. I thought of my role as the class star that faded before she'd even risen. I tried to form those thoughts into a tight cloud in my lungs and then I exhaled it into the valley and imagined it dissolving into the air
, getting diluted and washed away by rain.
I'd been
so focused on the immediate consequences of my final paper that I hadn't allowed myself to be proud of the fact that I stirred up debate in an industry that had become grimy and seedy over time. All in all, I had to admit that if I disregarded the consequences, I was proud I’d been true to my own beliefs. But I hated being blacklisted from HR offices all over the damn place. The consequences were real.
I thought of Adam out here in the wild having nothing to do
with any of it. Could I do that too? I had majored in marketing so I could fix it, so I could help wake people up from the consumer culture, believe it or not. I had gone into the belly of the beast—and I'd been digested.
But maybe that wasn't so bad. Maybe I didn't belong in marketing anyway. Even now when I was desperate for a job,
I didn’t want to trick people into buying stuff they didn’t need. Maybe it was okay the industry didn't want me—certainly better than going against my own instincts.
When I opened my e
yes, he was studying my face.