Into the Tomorrows (Bleeding Hearts Book 1) (24 page)

After slicking on some lip balm and a little bit of sunscreen, I closed the visor and finally looked out my window. We were driving over a bridge that stretched across a narrow river. The clouds reflected off the deep blue water, and there were a few rapids rushing over rocks that were set in the middle of the river.

He drove until we came to a pull off area. I attributed the many empty parking spaces to the fact that it was just eight in the morning, early for most people.

“This is the canyon,” Jude said, parking the car. “We’ll check out the falls and then hike down Uncle Tom’s trail, to the lower falls.”

I followed him to a wall of rock, a railing just above it. My eyes widened as they traced the view laid before us. The canyon was wide, filled with trees and rocks in yellows and oranges and pinks. A wall of bright green evergreens lined the top of the opposite side of the canyon, making the lighter of the canyons a sharper contrast.

We were silent for what felt like an hour as we looked over the canyon below. When Jude spoke, his voice was a whisper. “’Its beautiful tints were beyond the reach of human art,’” Jude said. “That’s what a painter said when he visited this area. And it’s the only way I can think to describe it.”

“He was right.” It looked like someone had just scooped up a jagged line of earth and left it exposed. At the very bottom ran a river, curving around the jagged valley below. My hands curled around the cold metal railing and my stomach went weightless. “Wow,” I said, leaning back a little because my hands trembled. “I shouldn’t lean over.”

“No, you shouldn’t. I’m not going over after you—sorry.”

I laughed. “You’d be crazy if you did. The sign said this is twelve-hundred feet deep.”

“And it’s twenty-miles long. You’ll be able to see it from the top of the mountain tomorrow.”

All I could think as I gazed upon the canyon was how magnificent it was. After living in cities my whole life and never being out in the wild, I felt like I was experiencing a sensory overload. “What causes all the colors?” I wondered aloud, understanding Jude’s need to understand, to know, about the places he visited.

“Those are mineral stains, from hot springs and steam vents within the walls. The fluids moving upwards through the rock have caused chemical alterations—rusting them.” He swept a hand in front of us. “The yellow is thanks to iron. Well, most of it.” He pointed to a pillar rock near the middle of the canyon, standing high among the rock, and the mess of twigs on top. “Do you see that? It’s an osprey nest.”

“I’ve never seen one before.”

“Neither had I, until I came here. They almost exclusively eat fish. It’s pretty incredible to see them living in a canyon.”

I turned my head right and saw the waterfall that fed the river below. “Is that the lower falls?”

“Yep. And we’re going to hike to the base.” He touched the back of my upper arm. “Ready?”

Every time he said that word, I got a little, irrational shiver. I wasn’t sure what it was for. But like the first time he’d said it, as we’d taken down my tent, I got that feeling of knowing something more. I just didn’t know what that
more
was.

I followed him to a brown sign that read “Uncle Tom’s Trail.” Looking at Jude, I asked, “Three-hundred and twenty-eight steps?”

He must have sensed my anxiety and he placed a hand on my shoulder. “It’s about five-hundred vertical feet. No sweat. That’s how large the hill you nearly fell off of was.”

“Yes, but at least I wouldn’t have had to walk it.”

“Yes, true. But this way, there’s no death involved. Which,” he held up his hands, his eyebrows lifted in a comical way, “is a lot more fun, right?”

I don’t know why it was so easy to smile around Jude. I did it so often, that I didn’t mentally catalogue it anymore. It just happened, as easily as breathing. The laughter that was born in my lungs was beginning to feel normal, too. “I suppose so.” I read through the rest of the sign, gulping at the parts that cautioned just how difficult and steep this climb would be. “This trip is definitely not recommended for those suffering from heart or breathing problems.”

I followed behind him, down a couple switchbacks and then to a steel staircase. The trail was built right into the mountain, descending while surrounded by trees. While the walk down was easy itself, the sense of dropping many feet in just a couple minutes got to my head at one point, causing my stomach to flutter up my chest and my arms to grip the rails.

“Hey,” Jude said, grabbing me and pulling me to the side as a handful of people walked up the left side of the staircase.

“It’s just a lot,” I said, taking in a breath through my nose and exhaling out of my mouth. “So high up.”

“I know. Come on, there’s a bench over here.”

I sat on cold metal, but I refused to look out in front of me. I hadn’t expected the descent to affect me this much, rendering me a mess of nerves and shaking hands. The cold metal through my hiking capris was a shock itself, making my face go cold from the riot of sensation.

“Drink some water,” Jude offered, handing me his bottle. I just held it in my hands, trying to calm the shaky beat of my heart. A droplet of condensation slid down the bottle, over my knuckles. I watched it intently, watched how it became smaller and smaller until it was nothing.

When all it left was a wet path, I looked at Jude who was crouched in front of me.

“Are you scared?”

What a weighted question. I nodded. And answered the easy part. “Hiking is still new. And this is such a significant drop. I just need a second.”

“If you don’t want to keep going, we can turn around.”

“No.” I put the bottle to my lips and took a long sip. “I’ll be okay. I’m sorry.”

“If you didn’t have a little bit of fear for something you’re unfamiliar with, I’d be surprised.” He wrapped his hands around mine on the bottle. The juxtaposition of his warm hand and the cold bottle made me shiver. “I’ll be right next to you on the way down.” He tilted his head toward the rest of the stairs. “Going down is easy on the limbs, but heavy on the eyes. Going up is the reverse.”

“Okay.” I gently pushed the water bottle toward him, allowing him to drop his hold on me and take the bottle back. Standing up was easier than I expected—without any kind of crippling vertigo. So, I followed.

Three-hundred plus steps sounds easy, and I wish I could say I made it the rest of the way to the base of the waterfall with little trouble but more than once I had to pause on the steps to hold onto the metal railing and stare off into the woods.

And every single time, Jude put an arm around me, reassuring me without words that he was beside me. Because Jude didn’t need words. He was constant, in action. Words could be pretty and tell lies but action was the ultimate. And Jude was a man of action.

More than once, I felt my legs tremble when I looked over the side of the canyon wall we were walking along, seeing just how steep the drop would be if we hadn’t had these stairs under our feet. The stairs curved around the towering rock, and I focused on that—not on the fact that we were walking five hundred feet down a canyon. Or the fact that if I looked down, between the soles of my hiking boots, I’d see the many drainage holes in the stairs and a clear view of my doom should the staircase detach from the canyon wall.

No, I didn’t think about that at all.

At one point a child ran up past us, toward the top. She cared little that she bumped me hard enough to be shoved into the side of the staircase—but Jude steadied his hands on my shoulders and rubbed a thumb along the column of my neck.

I hoped he didn’t see the way my hair stood on end at his touch.

But I pushed on, and was rewarded with a view right down the side of the canyon, right by the toppling waterfall. I braced my hand on the rock to my left as I stared at the rainbow that formed just over the mist, across the canyon walls. The roar of the waterfall had been steadily growing in volume, but seeing it up close, the power of it as it spat water over the edge, was truly magnificent.

“We’re close to the viewing platform,” Jude assured me, placing a hand on my shoulder and squeezing.

And just a few minutes later, the stairs ended at a platform with benches, overlooking the falls as they met the river. Where the mist rose off the water was another rainbow, stretching across the canyon walls.

I pressed a hand to my ribs, feeling my lungs working overtime and my head thumping powerfully inside its cage.

“It’s breathtaking.”

“It is.” Jude coughed and sat hard on one of the benches, hunching over and putting a hand on his knee.

“Are you okay?”

He lifted his head, gave me an easy smile. But his face was red, and his chest seemed to be heaving heavily. “I’m just a little winded. Do you mind if we have a snack here before we climb back up?”

I shook my head and grabbed the sandwiches out of the side pocket of his one-shoulder pack. We ate slowly, leaning against the railings to look at the view.

“Look at that,” Jude said, pointing above the falls. “We walked down that far.”

“The walk up is going to be a bitch,” I whispered and we laughed. I found myself standing close to him, our arms aligned and lightly brushing against each other. And the longer we stayed in silence, looking out over the waterfall, the more I longed to lean into him.

So I did. Gently.

Jude did nothing at first, but didn’t move away. There was something companionable about what we’d just done, and how he’d wordlessly supported me the whole way down. And now that we were two bystanders to the beauty around us, I felt a connection to him that I couldn’t explain except to say that we shared a moment.

I forgot about the people around us, clicking their cameras and chatting. Because it was just Jude and me, and the gift he’d given me by bringing me to Yellowstone.

Feeling the pressure of his body against mine made me tingly, my heart beat a little faster. My left hand grasped the railing beside his and I stared at our hands, millimeters apart.

When he lifted his pinky to graze the back of my hand, I never thought I could be so rattled by such a light touch.

And then someone bumped into me from behind, causing me to turn away from Jude—away from our moment.

“I should get a few photos,” Jude murmured, pulling his camera out of his pack. “For the blog.”

“Right.” I backed up to give him room, but his hands on my shoulders stopped me and he held me still. I met his eyes, and they were steady on me—that’s what Jude was: steady. So very steady.

Once again, he needed no words to communicate with me. I found myself reflected in the lens of his camera as I heard it click a couple times. All the while, I stared at him as my lungs expanded in my chest.

My eyes traced over his fingers as he twisted the lens and the wind picked up then, sending my hair flying in front of my face.

Quickly, I tried to push the strands away but they clung to my face, in my mouth, and I couldn’t help but laugh as I tried to untangle them from my face.

When I finally broke free, Jude was handing his camera to someone and then striding beside me, with the falls at our backs and his hand on the center of my spine. I felt everything then, the way the pads of each finger pressed inward—just slightly. I relaxed into his touch, tried to remember to smile, but I was so focused on the way Jude’s thumb traced a brief line down my spine that I couldn’t remember to do anything but breathe.

When the stranger smiled at us and handed the camera back, Jude stepped away from me and began to snap more photos: of the rocks, the waterfall, the people around us and then the rainbow.

And still, I just stood there, breathing.

O
n the way back up
, it was Jude who had to stop several times. Each time, his face was bright red, and his lips were stretched in a rueful smile. “Sorry, I’m slowing us down.”

“I don’t mind taking breaks,” I reassured him, feeling much more secure now that we were ascending the mountain and I wouldn’t have to watch as the bottom of the canyon came closer and closer. We sat on the bench and smiled at the people who passed. A myriad of languages passed our ears, and I craned to see if I could tell what they were as Jude rested. It became a game for me—was it Italian? Spanish? Portuguese?

Jude remained quiet the entire time, just taking small sips of water as he caught his breath. He made an off-hand remark about having asthma as a child, and thinking he’d outgrown it as an adult.

“The sign clearly said not to climb this if you have breathing problems, Jude.”

He gave me a look, his mouth pinched. “I know.”

“But you did it anyway. Are you going to be okay tomorrow?” I asked, remembering the fact that we were going to be climbing a mountain in the morning.

“Oh yeah.” Jude waved a hand and then braced both on his knees. “That’s a steady incline. This is like a roller coaster—straight up and straight down.” But I remained unconvinced and wondered if Colin and Mila’s worry about Jude traveling solo was more due to his asthma than his shoulder.

“Remember,” Jude asked, “I did just fine when we all went hiking. I can take breaks. And it’s not so steep.”

“I’m surprised you’ve stayed in a high altitude environment with your asthma.”

“Yeah, well, Mila is in Colorado. My parents too. That’s where my life is. Besides, I’ll always climb mountains. I just need to get used to it.”

I nearly snorted. “I’m no doctor, but I can’t imagine any doctor saying that all your asthmatic-afflicted lungs would need is a lot more exertion.”

He laughed lightly and then pushed to standing, tucking his water bottle in the side pocket of his one-shoulder backpack. “Yeah, that was a stupid thing to say.” He reached a hand toward me and I placed mine in his without any hesitation.

His eyes softened when I did that, and I wondered if he felt it too—this inching along toward a place we both hadn’t talked about or planned for, but seemed to go along for the ride anyway.

As if I was testing him, I kept my hand in his longer than I would have. And with my eyes on his, I kept holding it as we ascended the next section of stairs.

His palm was warm, dry, and he cradled my hand in his in the gentlest way. He wasn’t trying to push me into anything more than this—our hands aligned with one another, his callouses pressing against my softer flesh. Once again I experienced a strange tingle that ran like cold water down my spine.

We moved out of the way for a couple that was stopped in the middle of some stairs, separating so we didn’t bump into them. Our hands came apart, and I tucked mine into the kangaroo pocket on my thin sweater, to keep it warm.

We stopped five more times on our way to the top, but I was ready for breaks then, too. Over three hundred stairs … that had to be, what, thirty-stories? I couldn’t imagine hiking up thirty stories with any kind of quick pace.

Once we were to the top, Jude wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer, under the guise of keeping us out of the way for the growing number of tourists that had collected around the viewpoint at the top. But it still warmed me, thinking that maybe he just wanted to be close to me once again.

We got back on the road, heading north. The car was silent as he drove, the windows down and the wind whipping through my hair. The scenery changed, revealing a valley and mountains off in the distance. Jude pulled over at a lookout point and when he got out of the car, I followed him.

“See that mountain?” he asked, pointing off in the distance.

I looked in the direction he pointed, where there were white streaks across the rim of a mountain. It was long—not pointed upwards like the sharp, shark-tooth like Teton mountains were.

“That’s our mountain, tomorrow. The one we’re going to conquer. Mount Washburn.”

“It looks…big,” I replied lamely.

“Well, it is a mountain.” I ignored his smile and stared at the mountain we’d be climbing in the morning. “Do you think it’ll take a while?”

“A good chunk of the day. I want to get going early, so that we’re not stuck up there in the dark—you don’t want to be up there in the dark.” He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “And there are afternoon storms, so it’d be great if we were up at the fire station by then.”

“Oh, climbing a mountain when there are storms—sounds safe.”

“Well, to be honest, you’re probably more likely to be charged by a bear than lightning, so if we want to get technical here,” he paused and cleared his throat, “climbing a mountain that is home to bears—sounds safe.”

I rolled my eyes at his high-pitched mimic. “Well, I’m not afraid of bears,” I said, crossing my arms. “You’ve assured me that you can wrestle them.”

“Touché.”

“So why haven’t we seen any wild animals, besides the elk?”

“Well, I’ve only seen bears further north. And you’re going to see a ton of bison when we venture southeast—they’re especially prevalent near Old Faithful. We might get lucky and see foxes or coyotes, but the only big predator I’ve ever seen in this park are bears. Mountain lions are reclusive, and wolves typically travel in packs so I am not particularly desperate to find myself surrounded by one.” We walked back to the car and he paused just before sliding in. “But if you want, I can get a hold of some of my contacts here, see what they know. A lot of them have passes and come here often enough that they can tell me where we’re most likely to see the animals.”

I nodded, feeling a little giddy at the prospect of seeing wildlife so close.

“Okay, we’ll do the top loop and then head back to camp for the day.”

* * *

T
he rest
of the drive was full of spectacular sights. Jude slowed the car as we passed alongside a cliff. There were carvings low, near the road, that looked like perfectly etched rectangles into stone. I peered up through the skylight in the car, at the top of the cliff above and imagined what the view must be like from there. Every few miles, there was a pull off for people to get out and stretch their legs while they took in the view, but Jude and I didn’t stop, by an unspoken agreement.

My legs were starting to burn from the hike up the falls and I was content to take in the views from the car. But when we reached the Mammoth Hot Springs, Jude coaxed me out of the car. “Hot springs,” he said. “But these ones are different than the southern ones.”

I followed him across a parking lot where we were immediately both stopped by the sight of a handful of elk grazing on the grass. “Holy crap. They’re … right there!”

Jude grabbed his camera and snapped a couple photos over my shoulder before pulling me along to what he called the lower terraces, a collection of geysers strewn out over flat land, with a wooden walkway built over top. These geysers looked different than the ones we’d seen the day before. They were white, unlike the riot of colors near the lake. “Pretty cool, right?” I nodded, watched as the elk ate freely on the grass. They didn’t seem the least bit afraid of the people milling around them, just kept eating like we didn’t exist. “Now we can drive around the Upper Terraces, which I think are even more incredible.”

He didn’t let go of my hand, just pulled me along with him back to the car. He eased the car onto a one-way side road and then rolled his windows down. Along the mountain were stair-like levels that looked perfectly flat, with water bubbling over their straight edges and steaming up the air around them.

“These look different,” I said, acknowledging what Jude had told me earlier. “They’re not pools, in the ground.”

“The hot water flows here through limestone. Pretty wild, right? The pools we saw yesterday were completely different.”

It looked like something out of an
Ice Age
movie, with the white thick rock—that Jude informed me was travertine—and the way it flowed down the mountain.

“These hot springs shift so much that every day, the flow changes. See those?” Jude pointed out his window to an area that looked dried up—dead almost. “It flows over there too—but today it’s flowing here. Science is crazy!”

I laughed, because Jude was so animated and I couldn’t help but be interested too—in how unique these formations were to the ones we’d seen just the day before.

When we left Mammoth Hot Springs, Jude informed me that we were now heading south and we’d cut across to go back to Canyon Village, where our campground was.

As we traveled south, the landscape changed. It was more plains, with mountains just off in the distance. Once in a while, a cluster of trees would sprout up along the road. There was something uniquely beautiful about seeing so much unspoiled land. Apart from the road and a few points of interest, the land was free of human interference as far as buildings and power lines went. The air coming through the windows felt fresh, and for miles all we saw were trees, grass, and blue sky.

At one point, Jude handed me beef jerky and our hands grazed each other’s, but it didn’t feel strange. It felt fine. Normal. Comforting.

In fact, I was so comforted by the drive that I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, Jude was squeezing my hand and whispering for me to wake up.

As my eyes opened, I took in his face. His long, beautiful face. He was inches from mine, his brown eyes nearly honey colored in the dying light of the day. His lashes were long, dark, and his nose was straight and fit perfectly over his lips.

I lingered too long on his lips. I knew, because he leaned in. He was close enough to kiss me, but he wasn’t kissing me. He was passing air between our lips, and from my lips to my chin I felt his warmth and wanted more.

It would take just a slip of my lips, just an inch, and we’d be kissing. But I’d told him I wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t. So I just stayed still, breathing and exhaling against his mouth.

His juniper scent filled the confines of my seat and I waited, my heart like thunder in my head, for Jude to take that extra inch and kiss me. But probably because he remembered what I’d said, he didn’t.

He pulled back and ducked his head out of the car, like he was recoiling from the shock of our close proximity. I didn’t understand the sudden change in him, and it took me another few seconds before I could climb out of the car and follow him to the picnic table, where he’d already set the cooler and a bag of the food we’d purchased.

“I was going to cook hot dogs, if that’s okay.”

I didn’t say anything, a little shocked by what had almost happened between us. So I assembled a small salad from the greens we’d purchased and watched as he turned the skewers of the hot dogs over the rake on the fire.

This time, I fished in the cooler for a root beer and gave one to Jude before I handed him the paper bowl of salad. “Thanks,” he said, putting the root beer into his cup holder and taking a bite of salad. The smell of the hot dogs was permeating the air, making me only slightly concerned that a bear might smell it and come hunting. But Jude assured me once we’d eaten them and the smoke had burned off the scent, a bear was unlikely to come moseying through a campground.

“Make sure you drink a lot of water,” Jude reminded me. “I have two clean thermoses; we can fill them with water that way you can drink them in your tent tonight.”

“Well, I don’t want to drink too much in case I need to use the bathroom. Because bears.”

“Go before you go to bed and you won’t need to as badly. We did a lot of walking today, and your muscles will need all that water anyway. Dehydration can hit you fast, especially when you’re not used to all this activity.”

I picked up my root beer and held it up. “Okay. So, cheers to making it down a canyon and not dying?”

Jude smiled, but I could barely see it as the sun set down around us, making it all dark and quiet as the other campers settled down. “Cheers,” he said, clinking our bottles together.

Once we’d eaten the hot dogs and finished our root beer, we both chugged a bottle of water and played a game of Uno on the picnic table next to the lantern.

“You know,” I said as I placed a card down, “I haven’t looked at my phone once today. And I have no desire to.”

“Me neither. But even if you did, it’d be surprising if you had great signal out here.”

I shrugged. I didn’t feel the need to spoil my trip so far with a possible message from Colin. As far as I felt, Colin and I were done—there was nothing left to say to one another. Nothing left to figure out. Once I returned to Colorado, I’d need to make a new plan—one that didn’t involve living with Colin.

Suddenly I realized that leaving Colin meant leaving Jude, and the fact that I was more bothered by leaving Jude than Colin scared me a little. I’d known Colin six years. And I’d known Jude a few weeks.

As if he could tell I was lost in thought, Jude flicked at the card I was holding. “Are you going to play that, or what?”