Savage Hearts

We’ve been together since the rape but we haven’t had sex since I knew about it, and I’ve spent a good amount of time since last summer beating myself up for not reading the signs and knowing something was wrong. I would have been so much more careful if I’d known. We could have gone slow, checked in more, made sure it was the polar opposite of what happened at that New Year’s Eve party and stopped the second she felt scared or uncomfortable.

I’ve wondered that too—was she scared when we were together but hiding it, the way she hid so many other things?

She seemed to enjoy making love, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t know anything for sure except that I can’t keep her waiting. I don’t like the thought of her out in the jungle alone, even here on the compound where we’re surrounded by a bunch of nature nerds, hippies, and health nuts more into sunset yoga than grabbing a few beers after dinner.

I meant my promise today—I’m never going to let anyone hurt her again. I’m going to stick to her like glue and be there whenever she needs me.

After changing back into my mostly dry board shorts, I tuck my cell phone and cabin key inside my pocket, grab a pair of pajama pants and a tee shirt from Sam’s bag, in case it gets cooler and she decides she’d rather walk back to the cabin in something more than a swimsuit, and head out.

I start down the trail, passing the monkeys in their tree on my way.

These three are part of a larger capuchin group that live near the waterfall where the adventure tours break for lunch. They’ve become so accustomed to the people on the compound that they sometimes roam close to the boundaries, looking for food. I was warned not to open my windows too wide or they’d find their way in, clean out my mini-fridge, and let themselves out through the front door. This particular species is so smart that they rub herbs on their fur for medicine and use simple objects as tools and weapons. Paola said she once watched a mother capuchin beat a snake to death with a stick to keep it away from her baby.

Animals have no moral issues with killing the predators among them. I can’t say I’d enjoy being a monkey—the social structure of the white-headed capuchin sounds pretty messed up if you’re anything other than an alpha male—but I envy them their moral simplicity.

And lack of law enforcement worries.

With that thought in mind, I tug my phone from my pocket, doing a Google search for American arrested in Costa Rica on drug charges while I walk. There’s only a one line mention on a local news station’s website, but I know the twenty-two-year-old arrested by National Police today at the airport is Scott.

One down. The easiest one, but still, the ball is in motion and once we come to a firm decision on what to do with J.D. and Jeremy, things are going to move fast.

All the way to the hot spring, my mind is churning, brainstorming and discarding various ways to get Todd’s followers out to our pit without leading them there myself. But then I reach the turn off to the pool and see Sam’s bikini top hanging from a limb—the sign that the spring is in use and anyone hiking by should come back later—and thoughts of anything but the woman waiting for me vanish.

I duck under the low-hanging leaves shielding the pool from the trail and tread carefully through the ferns covering the ground. I’m wearing my tennis shoes without socks instead of sandals, out of respect for the snakes that might be coming out to play now that the light is fading, but a bite on the ankle could still send me to the hospital.

Though at this point, I’d probably try to put it off for at least half an hour.

After all, what’s a potentially deadly snakebite compared to the possibility of seeing Sam without her top on?

Chapter Twelve

Danny

“This is the true measure of love:

when we believe that we alone can love,

that no one could ever have loved so before us,

and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.”

-Goethe

* * *

I hold my breath as I round the curve in the trail and the river comes into view.

The spring fed pool is tucked into a rock formation above the riverbed, between a bluff pock-marked with mysterious looking caves and the finely pebbled bank. The runoff from the spring warms the water for several hundred feet downstream, increasing the growth rate of river algae until it looks like a dark green, underwater shag carpet.

I have to wade through a particularly slimy patch to get to the spring, slogging through the shallows in my waterlogged tennis shoes before I start the climb up the rocks. I’m halfway to the top when Sam’s curly head pops up and her blue eyes peer down at me over the edge of the dark stones.