Into the Tomorrows (Bleeding Hearts Book 1) (7 page)

I
found
myself two days later standing next to Colin as he packed up his car.

“It’ll be fine,” he insisted, double-tying my shoelaces before turning away to load the gear. I wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince.

I watched as he secured a pack to the roof of his Jeep next, his arms long, wrapped with lean muscle.

“Hi,” a voice spoke beside me.

I jumped, surprised by the closeness of Jude, before peeking up at him. Because I hadn’t been this close to him when we’d met, I hadn’t realized just how tall he was, looming way over my five feet and four inches.

He stared at me with that intense focus again, and I was compelled to not continue the eye contact. It was strangely uncomfortable to have someone stare at you so intently. His soft, toffee-colored eyes narrowed when I didn’t say anything again.

“Hi.”

This time, he smiled, revealing a line of pearly white, straight teeth. If anything, him showing his teeth unnerved me even more. I found myself watching how smiling transformed his face, creating deep creases in his cheeks and small lines around his eyes. He stretched his arms up, flexing all those muscles right in front of my face.

“Ready for this?”

Swallowing, I nodded.

“You’ll want to put your hair up; you’ll get hot.” His arms came down and his gaze traced my hair.

“You seem to be an expert on hair,” I returned with a small nod back at him. “Since you have so much.”

He ran his hand over his scalp. His hair had been buzzed so short that I could barely tell his hair was brown. If it wasn’t for the brown in his beard, I wouldn’t have been sure.

“Yeah, I had a ponytail a couple weeks ago,” he said, “but it became too much maintenance.”

Giving him the side eye, I said, “Um… okay.” Because imagining him with a ponytail was hot and I didn’t need to be thinking that when I was dating the guy just a few feet from us.

With that, I turned away from Jude and closed my eyes briefly, willing myself to stop thinking about mountain man Jude and his beard and his tattoos and start thinking about Colin.

I shouldn’t have to remind myself of Colin, I knew. But I thought of what Ellie had said about him, how his attention was always changing, how he didn’t give anyone that type of singular focus. So it was natural to be put off by Jude and all his intense masculinity. Colin didn’t give anyone the limelight in his life.

We climbed into the Jeep, Colin driving with me shotgun, and headed up to the trailhead where we would meet another five guys for the hike.

As we headed up to the trailhead, Jude began prodding me with question after question.

“How do you know one another?” I asked after a while, in attempt to get him to talk about himself.

Colin spoke first. “Our moms are friends. They kind of organized our group of friends, actually.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Like, playdates?”

Jude laughed and it warmed my chest. “No. Our moms met and introduced us is all,” Colin said.

Jude added, “A bunch of the guys you’ll meet, they’re in our little group.”

“Oh.” I looked out the window, passed dozens and dozens of trees. The further we drove, the fewer signs of human life I saw. There was something meaningful about escaping the world that humans created and venturing into a world that grew naturally from the earth, uninhabited by people.

When Colin pulled the Jeep into the parking lot at the trailhead, I felt the nerves. I’d grown up with one friend really; a group of people was something foreign to me. But I watched as Colin and Jude hopped out and embraced several of the other guys with smiles and dude hugs before I worked up enough courage to climb out of the car myself.

I stared up at the trail we were to take and wondered how this would go for me. Colin, who claimed to know me, didn’t. I didn’t know me. I wasn’t sure I would know who I really was until I’d spent a few days on this mountain.

The one person I believed knew me was dead, I reminded myself. Oh how I wished I’d asked her who she saw when she looked at me.

Colin came back and wrapped an arm around me as he introduced me to the handful of guys who’d be joining us for the three-day hike. I smiled politely, awkwardly, and then watched as everyone pulled on their packs and applied sunscreen.

They were all fit and tanned and I was neither. I wondered what they thought of me, my bright, bleached hair and pale skin. I looked down at my brand-new hiking boots, my socks scrunched at the tops. I wore leggings that Colin had said would help wick the moisture from my body. I wore shorts over them, a tank made of the same material as the leggings, and a lightweight jacket. All of my limbs were covered and still, I was naked in my inexperience.

Colin helped strap me into my pack and then placed his hands on either side of my face. “You good?”

I nodded. “Definitely,”
not
, I added.

I looked towards the trail and gulped. There was one path cutting through rock and brush as it wrapped around a large rock formation. Colin took the lead with a guy I knew to be Teddy and the rest fell in line, two-by-two.

“It’s not that bad,” Jude said, as if he sensed my apprehension, lifting his pack up higher on his back. “Just one or two dozen miles.”

Just a couple dozen miles. My stomach dropped so fast that I was sure it had dislodged a ball of vomit because I clamped a hand over my mouth before I spewed it all over the person in front of me. That would certainly make an impression … just not the one I was going for.

“You okay?”

I nodded and clamped my lips tighter as I removed my hand. “Yeah. Just not used to the altitude.” A lie.

“Where are you from again?” Jude flanked my right as we moved up the trail, stayed just a foot or two behind me. He was bringing up the rear, and I knew he was making sure my slow pace wouldn’t leave me behind everyone else.

“Wyoming.”

“And you came all this way for Colin?”

The way he said it made my skin prickle. Did he know we weren’t okay? Could he see my lies more clearly than Colin could?

“Why don’t you ask me why I left?”

He stopped short behind me so I turned to face him. He blinked once, twice, and then asked, “Okay, why’d you leave?”

The answer came quickly and slipped through my lips with the honesty I had, “There was nothing to leave.”

He was silent a long while after that.

W
e managed
seven miles the first day, setting up camp in a small clearing in the middle of the woods. I struggled with my tent, cursing myself as I tried to set the poles together.
Probably should have practiced setting this bad boy up, Trista
, I thought with mild annoyance.

Colin had taken off to fetch sticks for a fire. When I’d looked between him and the tent bag with significance, he’d smiled. “I know you can do it.”

But you don’t, Colin
, I’d thought.
You don’t know anything about the girl you say you’re in love with
. And I knew this to be true ten minutes and four F words into setting up the tent.

As I struggled with the tent, I regretted coming on the trip to begin with. My feet were aching so badly that I wasn’t completely sure they would remain attached to my legs. The sweat around my head had cooled in the evening temperatures, making me wish for a warm hat. And Colin hadn’t spoken to me the entire hike except to ask how I was doing once, before quickly engaging in conversation with someone else.

“Need some help with that?” Jude asked, his boots crunching the pine needles as he approached. I looked up at him in between strands of sweat-soaked hair hanging in front of my face, loose from my ponytail.

“Well?” Jude lifted an eyebrow, holding out his hands for help. I was reminded in that moment of his sheer size—at least ten inches taller than me. In addition to his height, I couldn’t help but smell him. He smelled, for lack of a better word, woodsy. Warm. Spicy. Like juniper. I wasn’t sure what kind of cologne he wore, but the bottle probably said, “Sex in the Mountains: Guaranteed.”

“Yeah,” I said, brushing the back of my hand over my forehead. I wiped the sweat on my leggings and winced as I bent to pick up the tent poles again, my muscles exhausted. I rubbed at my lower back, where my pack had dug into skin and felt the sting of skin rubbed raw.

A laugh from behind me alerted me to my boyfriend’s return. I turned, seeing Colin come through the trees, his face lit up from the fire that Teddy had started. Colin’s voice was warm, welcoming as I was feeling the first twinges of regret. I waited for him to help us set up the tent, but he began tinkering with his portable stove and I gritted my teeth.

“He’s, like, a pro at setting up tents.” Colin pointed at Jude.

“Yeah,” Teddy said with a laugh. “Sommers is the tent guy.”

Giving up on Colin helping, I turned to Jude. “Sommers? Tent guy?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Sommers is my last name. Teddy thinks we’re still in high school sometimes.” Jude shook his head.

Laughter ensued and Jude gently took the poles from my hands. “Work with one pole at a time,” he said. I looked up just in time to see lips quirk up in amusement.

“I usually do,” I muttered, walking around the other side of the tent. Jude slid the pole through the pocket in my direction, at the opposite corner of him.

“Stick it in that metal piece at the bottom – the bar.”

“’Kay,” I said, pushing it into the metal piece.

We spent the next few minutes putting the tent together under Jude’s patient direction. When he hammered in the stakes at the corners, I sat back and looked at Colin, who was intently listening to the guy who had taken lead with him on the trip.

“Thanks,” I said to Jude. I whipped open the collapsible chair and plopped into it. “Ah,” I murmured, letting my head fall back.

“Are those boots new?”

I opened one eye to look at Jude. “Yeah. Never been camping, remember?”

“How do your feet feel?”

I took a long sip of the water and then capped it. “Fucking phenomenal.”

“Thought so,” Jude said, clearly seeing through my sarcasm. “Yo, Colin.”

I looked across the fire at Colin as Jude spoke to him.

“Are you going to take care of her feet before she bleeds through her boots?”

Everyone turned to me and I imagined myself sinking further into the seat so they wouldn’t keep staring at me. My inexperience was like a tattoo; an embarrassing reminder how I didn’t fit in with everyone else.

Colin stood up and motioned for me to follow him. “Got any tape?” he asked Jude.

I heard the roll of duct tape whistle through the air before Colin caught it and led me down the hill to the stream below, arm around my shoulders.

I shrugged out of Colin’s arm even though I enjoyed having him pay me some direct attention. “I can take care of myself.” But I didn’t even know what I should be doing. “What’s the tape for?”

“We need to wash your feet and then cover the hot spots with the duct tape, or else your feet will be covered with blisters.”

“Oh.” I hated the fact that I needed to be cared for. “Go back up, I can do this.”

“I’m sure you can, but I should stick close in case there are bears.”

I hardly suppressed a shudder at the thought. “Great.”

Putting my feet in the cool stream did a lot to settle my nerves as well as to alleviate some of the pain I was feeling. It was particularly cold on the backs of my heels, which was how I knew exactly where to apply the tape after pulling my numbed feet from the water.

Colin crouched nearby, waving his hand through the grass. Night was falling around us quickly, and if it wasn’t for the moon, I wouldn’t be able to see how pensive he was.

After I’d put on my socks and boots, I stood up and stretched my sore back muscles. “Do you regret bringing me along?” I asked when he wordlessly joined me and we ascended the hill again.

“Do you regret coming along?”

“Not sure yet.” And I wasn’t just talking about camping.

He stopped us just outside of the camp, where the fire flickering through the trees was only slightly louder than the voices surrounding it. “I didn’t think you’d like it,” he said, making me feel like a child.

“I didn’t think you’d ignore me,” I returned.

“I’m not ignoring you.” His voice grew frustrated. “We’re hiking. That’s why I didn’t think you should come along. This isn’t a time for romance.”

“I wasn’t asking for romance, Colin.” I sighed, feeling the exhaustion of the day calling to me. I thought of all the times Colin would give me a tiny bit of attention before focusing somewhere else. “It would be nice if you’d remembered who I was from time to time.” Even if I didn’t want romance, I could stand for a little acknowledgement that we were still—at the very least—friends.

“I know who you are,” he said.

I thought of the cheesecake. “You’re right.”

* * *

A
s the dark came closer
, I was the first person to bow out for the night. I’d shared a can of soup that Colin had warmed on his mini stove, but I’d lost my appetite shortly after Colin had made a point to sit far away from me around the fire.

I climbed into my sleeping bag and—childishly, I knew—scooted it to the other side of the tent, far from Colin’s. I hoped he’d take the hint, because I didn’t need his body that close to mine, reminding me just how far he was from me in reality. I’d spent the last three years being alone, but I’d never been lonely until my boyfriend had taken me camping and promptly ignored me. It was a tough pill to swallow, another reminder of the love that didn’t exist despite Colin’s insistence.

It was easier in Wyoming, when we were far from one another. I never got jealous, even when girls would tag him in photos from parties he attended. His arms around their waists and their eyes locked. He looked happy. And I never wanted to take that from him, even if it meant he wasn’t being entirely faithful.

I’d never asked him, of course. Not because I was afraid of what his answer might be, but because if he had, I wouldn’t have been all that upset. And I should be, as his girlfriend. But since I didn’t, I just played ignorant.

So why the hell was I sleeping in my boyfriend’s tent without my boyfriend, listening to him laugh harder with them than he ever had with me?

All around me, I heard the sounds of the evening: between the unknown insect noises, the pitter of pine needles falling from the trees above and onto my tent. I pulled the top of the sleeping bag up to my chin as the cold crept in and I told myself that the mountains would be good—I’d figure out what I needed. Maybe I’d learn a little bit about who I was.

When Colin unzipped the tent and climbed in, I pretended to be asleep.

“Trista?” he whispered. But I remained still. I wasn’t sure if sex in tents was a thing, but I was too cold and too sore and too bereft of feeling to want that kind of touch.

The sound of a sleeping bag swishing along the tent floor startled me and I blinked before shutting my eyes and feigning sleep again. I felt his warmth at my back as he cuddled against me with his sleeping bag. I don’t know how long I lay there awake, but I knew he was awake too.

I knew it was going to be a very cold, very long, very lonely night.