Something Wilder

“I don’t care if you look.” Lily tugged her sopping shirt up and over her head, feeling weak and unsteady. Socks were peeled away to expose pale, waterlogged feet. After a brief hesitation and a glance up at him—he was still looking studiously away—she unlatched her bra and stepped out of her underwear.

“Okay,” she said quietly.

“Here.” With his eyes closed and face turned away, he moved to hand her the rolled-up bundle of his spare clothes. “Put those on.”

His neck was red, cheeks splotchy with heat. A vein in his neck pulsed.

“Okay,” she said again once she was dressed. “I’m decent.”

Leo stepped forward, draping the sleeping bag around her shoulders. And then he bent, picking up the pile of her wet clothing and his T-shirt, and moved several yards away to spread them across a flat stone still warm from the quickly setting sun. He pulled her tent and sleeping bag out of their straps, laying each out on warm rock surfaces. He lined up their hiking boots, dug into her bag, and showed her that although the beef jerky was wet, the phones, gun, and notebook—packed wisely in the middle of everything—were still safely dry inside the Ziploc bag.

“Thank God,” she said quietly.

“Yeah.”

Lily watched as he unselfconsciously stripped his pants and socks off and placed them beside everything else. She should have been more surprised by the sight of his skin, or by the fact that she was suddenly looking at so much of it. His broad shoulders, tapered waist, thick thighs were all bared to her; smooth and defined. Leo was more muscular in this grown-up body. But his body was still his, and looking at him now—especially with the panic wearing off—made a yawning ache grow inside her.

He left his boxers on as he gingerly stepped barefoot around their makeshift camp, going back to collecting branches, twigs, dried grass.

Once her legs were working again, she moved to his pack—the dry one—and pulled his tent free.

“We’ll have to share this, I guess,” she said.

“I’ll set it up.” Leo grinned at her from where he was crouching over the kindling, holding the flint. “Your job is to sit there and watch me.”

Heat flooded her cheeks and she tried to figure out if he was teasing her for getting mad at him last night or implying that it was a hardship somehow to have him doing a rugged mountain-man routine in nothing but a pair of wet black boxer briefs.

And then she decided she didn’t care. Lily settled down on a rock, allowing herself this tiny window to enjoy watching him. Carefully, he started a fire, surrounding it with a small ring of stones. Once it was going and he was satisfied it wouldn’t fizzle out, he sat across from her, holding his hands out to warm them.

“Want this?” she asked, meaning the sleeping bag.

“No, I’m good.” He met her eyes, adding, “Really.”

It was still probably in the high sixties, and without a breeze the air wasn’t bad at all. But although her body had stopped the violent shivering, she still felt mildly feverish. Lily pulled the sleeping bag tighter around her shoulders.

“Would you like a protein bar or a protein bar for dinner?” he asked, laughing.

She bent down to dig into his bag. “Luckily we have seven hundred of these.” She pulled out a couple of bars for each of them, tossing his one at a time over the top of the quickly growing fire.

He caught them and gave her a playful wide-eyed look of disbelief. “Living on the edge.”

“You know me. Almost died, nothing can shake me now. What about you? You got pretty banged up yourself today.”

Leo ripped open a wrapper and took half of a bar down with a single bite. He looked at the cuts and scrapes. “I’ll heal.”

“I’m sorry I dropped my pack in the river.”

He shook his head, finishing the protein bar. “You’re alive. That’s just stuff, and it’ll dry.”

“Not by bedtime.”

Leo leaned forward, poking at the little fire. “We can share my sleeping bag.”

As he stared at the flames, Lily stared at him. Can we? she wondered. He was always so calm, always adaptable. She realized, watching him, that he met challenges as if they were an expected part of his path. By contrast, she resented every tiny roadblock.

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt her to try to enjoy the adventure rather than quietly burning up over the possibility that her father hid treasure from her. She couldn’t change the past, after all.

“Are you really okay?” she asked. “Not too sore?”

Now that he was practically naked, Lily could see some scrapes on his left arm and a bruise blooming on his ribs.

He nodded, smiling at the fire. “That was one crazy fucking day.”

This made her laugh, and he looked up at her, pleased at the sound. Her heart tugged. Lily could simply look at him and know how he felt. How wild that, in this way at least, they hadn’t changed at all.