Unbound: (InterMix) (25 page)

“I’m sure they spent a lot of time together,” he went on, “talking about how things
were, what to do. Once the pain had faded . . . I know those two. And I know that
what happened, it happened innocently. My wife may have hated me by the end of it
all, but if anyone would go out of his way to keep from hurting me, it was my brother.
What they found must have been real. And strong. More than I ever offered her. I hope
I never see either of them ever again, but I wish them well. Sincerely.”

After a thoughtful silence, Merry said, “I can’t imagine you that way. Being a man
who could drive a woman away like that. I’ve never seen even a glimmer of that temper,
or callousness, or whatever it was.”

“I’m different out here. Pacified.”

“Still . . . Was it because of your sexual wiring?”

“There was always that. And like I said, I’d stuffed myself into this mold, shaped
like the man I’d thought I wanted to be. I wound up bitter and resentful and . . .
and mean. I drove everyone anyway. I felt . . .”

She waited as he found the right words.

“I felt angry. Really angry.”

“At?”

“At all these people who cared about me. Because they cared about that man I was pretending
to be, whose shoes I never felt at home in. I resented my wife every time she begged
me to get help so I could go back to being the man she’d married. Because that man
had only ever been an act. She’d never even met the me you have, let alone loved him.”

Any trepidation Merry had begun to feel fled as he spoke those words. They came from
a deep well of emotion, echoing audibly with truth. She’d felt those things, too,
even if she’d never articulated it to herself. All those friends who’d turned to cheerful
people-pleaser Merry in their darkest hours, but never returned the favor and asked
to meet the mess she’d been so obviously burying in food all those years. Not even
Lauren, who’d been doing the same thing to herself.

“I resented that,” Rob said, “because I knew they wouldn’t like the man I really was,
if they met him.”

“Because of the fetish, or . . . ?”

“I just knew. I was a strange child, and teenager. Something about me just put people
off. Like there was a rotten smell on me, something that told them, reflexively,
Stay away
. I didn’t come to recognize that until I was at university.”

“What happened then?”

He kept his eyes on the ground. “Change of scenery. Being away from home, and my mum.
Learned to drink.”

“Ah, yes. I remember those days well.” The thrill of young adult freedom, the promise
of reinvention spiked liberally with economy vodka. “Now I follow.”

Rob didn’t reply, except to let her hand go and reach for the cashews. Much had been
said, and it seemed both of them could use some time to process it all. They ate in
silence and replenished the water supply at a stream, then resumed the hike.

Merry was finally beginning to understand how Rob might’ve become the person who’d
exiled himself. How he might’ve ever been anyone other than the man she’d come to . . .
to love? Could you love a person, having only seen one facet of them? Only seen their
“after” shot? She hoped so. Much as the old Merry had made her the woman she was now,
she didn’t want to be seen as that person anymore. Some sad girl who’d settled for
codependence and a dead-end romantic life, who’d lived so vicariously, for so long.
Like her life was some unremarkable show flashing by on TV.

She took Rob’s hand. He looked surprised for a breath, then wrapped his fingers tightly
around hers.

“Would you say I’ve met the real you?” she asked.

“I hope so . . . The ideal me, anyhow. The man I feel I am, under the right conditions.”

“Well, I don’t get a rotten smell from you at all. You were a bit prickly at first,
but not repellant, certainly.”

“I’ve found some balance since I left England.”

“Maybe you could still go back and mend your bridges.”

His brows knitted, attention on the rocks and grass. “Even if I could . . . I’m meant
to be here. In this life.”

She couldn’t argue with that . . . though she wanted to. She wanted to magically convince
him he might like it in a small town. A town on a railway line, so she could visit
him easily. So she could spend time with him in restaurants and coffee shops and at
concerts, or watching fireworks. Things that she enjoyed, much as she’d enjoyed this
adventure. Everyday things.

This
is
his everyday,
she reminded herself, taking in the forbidding landscape.
He designed it himself, and he’s happy with it.

She was dumb to be trying to imagine a way to make this work. Dumb and lust-drunk,
starry-eyed.

If ever she’d met a man who’d found his place, it was Rob. She was hoping for the
very sorts of things that had made him miserable enough to abandon society—to change
him into someone he wasn’t. Someone easier. Someone who
fit.

Worse than that. Someone who fit into her idea of a happy life.

Selfish.

She forgave herself in the next breath.
You’re in love with him. And a lightning-strike, illogical love at that. Go ahead
and wish.
She’d wanted to feel this for someone for so long, it was a pain she could nearly
wallow in.

You’ve loved now. And soon you’ll have lost.

You’ll be missed by a man, and that’s an awfully sweet pain to bear.

Chapter Fifteen

“I can’t believe my feet went so soft in just five days,” Merry said the next afternoon,
feeling blisters ripening between her pinched toes. “I thought I’d earned all the
calluses I was in for that first week.”

Still, they were in the final stretch—so close they were hiking beside the motorway
now, the cold, hard hills and rolling meadows having given way to civilization in
these final few miles. The street signs were so colorful and . . . geometric. Rigid
squares and rectangles, unnaturally round circles. The cars and their radios sounded
so loud. They passed bits of trash now and then, the plastic wrappers striking her
as downright pornographic after the pristine perfection of Rob’s forgotten world.

Any tension she’d felt following the previous day’s conversation had been gone by
the time they’d crawled into her tent, burned off by exertion or exhaustion. She’d
let herself question who her companion was, but once she’d closed them in their little
cocoon, smelled his skin, tasted his mouth . . . She
knew
him. No confession could change that, merely inform it. Enrich it.
Who he was then made him who he is now. And you love who he is now, so be thankful
for the struggles that shaped this man.

They’d been back to joking today, though the closer they got to Inverness, the heavier
things felt; the realer and more inevitable their good-bye became.

Rob hadn’t said much the past couple of hours, not since signs of humanity had begun
presenting themselves. He wasn’t upset, she didn’t think, just edgy. And she’d known
he would be.

She’d sensed it in his character and heard him admit as much in words. Only one thing
for it—stay calm and positive, and show Rob that no matter how different and overwhelming
a city might feel to him, what they had together couldn’t be changed.

She took his hand, a habit she’d grown quite fond of these last two days. He squeezed
hers in return, just as a sign came into view down the road.

“Inverness. One mile to go,” Rob announced. “You’ve nearly done it.”

“Shall I carry you the final mile? Just to be extra butch about it?”

“I’ve lifted your pack—I think you’re doing just fine in that department.”

In no time at all they were at the city’s edge, their journey having gone from grass
and granite to highway shoulder, to sidewalks. So many buildings and signs and
people
. So much noise and human energy.

They took the main road, crossing the beautiful, lazy, broad River Ness just as the
sun began its descent in earnest. That gave them perhaps an hour of daylight to find
a hotel vacancy, and hopefully enough time leftover for Merry to find condoms before
the stores shut for the evening. She grinned to herself. Worn out from the journey,
they’d fallen asleep just as they’d crossed second base the night before, but not
again—not on the eve of her departure, their final few hours together, for months
or a year or more, perhaps forever.

They reached the far bank and what felt like the city center, and Merry checked her
map. Back in San Francisco, she’d marked likely-looking lodging with numbered stars,
and she aimed them toward her top pick. “We’re close. Maybe four blocks.”

“Luxury place?” Rob asked, gaze jumping all over the street. If this was sensory overload
for Merry, God knew what it must be like for someone who’d not set foot in a city
in over two years.

“Nothing too swank,” she promised, scanning every restaurant they passed. “Pretty
old, it looked like, but not too pricey. Oh God.”

Rob stopped when she did. “What?”

She paused to ogle the menu posted on a restaurant’s front window. “Indian food. Man,
this could be it.”

“I vote we get cleaned up first.”

“And I second it.” She continued their stroll. “This will be a first, though. Tonight’s
dinner.”

“How so?”

“This,” she said proudly, “will be the first time in as long as I can remember when
I’ll be able to go into a restaurant, order whatever I want, and not feel guilty about
it after I leave.”

“Ah. You’ve not have the easiest relationship with dining, I take it?”

“Never. When I was overeating, the pattern went: Enter with good intentions. Blow
them on an appetizer, then eat a huge entrée, two glasses of whatever, plus dessert.
Always dessert, even if it made me feel sick. Which it always did.” She couldn’t say
why she was admitting this—perhaps the weariness had stripped away her filters—but
she did know it felt good.

“Then when I was into my big overhaul period,” she went on, “I either avoided restaurants
altogether, or stuck to soup or salad while everyone else ate whatever they wanted.”

“That must have been rough.”

She made a face. “A bit . . . But I was determined. Maybe too determined, since I
kind of replaced one compulsive behavior with another.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, I was a compulsive eater for my whole life; then I flipped some switch, somehow,
and turned into a compulsive calorie-counter.”

“We’ve all got some cross or other to bear. Some area to monitor.”

She nodded, thinking of Rob’s fetish and how defective it had clearly made him feel,
and for so long.

“The worst part of the whole change is how my best friend ribs me about it when we’re
out and I’m policing what I order. I get that it’s probably annoying to watch, but . . .
she always has to say something. Like, ‘Oh great. Now the rest of us get to feel like
Caligula. Thanks, Mer.’”

“She doesn’t sound like much of a friend.”

Merry sighed, stopping before a candy shop to admire its pretty window display. “I
don’t even know, anymore. We had really good times together, for ten years—and we
were roommates for three of them. But she’s heavy too, and she’s treated my weight
loss like a personal betrayal.”

“Like you broke some pact with her?”

“Exactly. I hope she gets over it. I’m being as patient with her as I can. Because
I mean, I totally know how it feels, that exact flavor of insecurity. But if it keeps
up this way, I’ll probably have to let it all fizzle.”

“That’s how it goes,” Rob said, his attention on the bright yellow hard candies suspended
on fishing line, like bumblebees frozen mid-flight. “People change. Sometimes for
the better. If the ones you love stay in one place, or head off somewhere else . . .”

“Yeah. She and I got very used to staying in one place together, though. A very comfortable,
delicious place.” She eyed the outrageous lollipop garden sprouting from a lawn of
shredded paper grass, beside a watering can bursting with gumballs. “Man, I love this
store.”

“You have a sweet tooth, I take it.”

“Not even that. Just the whole look of it.” She put her fingertips to the old glass,
one of a hundred diamond-shaped panes separated by black leading. It was a funny building—big
granite bricks, three stories, and narrow—squished between two broad neighbors.

Rob pointed to a sign hanging above the display. “Going out of business.”

“Oh, what a shame. If I were a millionairess, I’d buy it myself.” It looked fairly
new, though—the business, not the premises. Highly improbable that this place had
sold candy when her mother had still lived here. Very few of these businesses had
likely existed those forty-plus years ago. She was about to go in and buy them a treat
for after dinner, but the shop was shut for the day. “Closed. Darn.”

As they resumed their trajectory, Merry said, “I daydream about owning my own little
store sometimes.”

“Oh? And what do you sell?”

“Clothes, of course. My own designs. Like twenty or so showroom items per season,
that I can make to order for my customers, in any size. Like,
any
size. Skirts and little jackets and dresses . . .” She’d fantasized about such a
thing for hours—at work, through mindless chores, at the gym, on long walks, in the
shower. She’d fantasized about it for so long, she could remember spacing out to those
daydreams way back in her freshman lectures.

“Have you ever done that?” Rob asked. “Sold your own work?”

“A bit, online. I’ve dabbled.”

“And you enjoyed it?”

“Oh yeah, it’s fun. And my stuff did well. But it was a
lot
to cram in, on top of a full-time job. But if I woke up filthy rich, that’s what
I’d do. Run a cute little shop with a studio in one corner, just sew and sew and sew
until someone came through the door.”

He smiled. “That sounds peaceful.”

“That’s why I love clothing, I think. Sewing. It’s that one thing I’ve found that
can really, like,
occupy
me. That one thing that can absorb me for hours. It’s the only time I get hypnotized
enough by an activity to look up and realize, whoa, I forgot to eat lunch. Sort of
like it makes me manic, but in the most joyful, productive way.”

He nodded, looking touched by the thought. “Everyone should have a hobby that offers
that.”

“Wish my day job gave me even a taste of it . . . What’s yours? Your hypnosis-hobby?”

“Archery, I’d say. Fishing, hunting. Good long swim.”

“No wonder you love it out where you are. Surrounded by nothing but your favorite,
most fulfilling activities. And none of the BS—no working just to make sure you’ve
got health insurance, no pointless meetings, no commute.” She envied his life with
a new pang, a deeper one than she’d felt before. Framed like this, she finally felt
she understood him, and the choices that had taken him so far from other people. A
life that made no room for the bullshit.

She looked around them, spotting a souvenir shop a half block down the street, its
sign a field of tartan. “I need to run a quick errand before the stores close.”

“Sure.” He panned the street. “I might buy a coffee, to keep from passing out before
dinner. Would you like one?”

“Oh, please. With cream, if they do that here. If not, with tons of milk.” She fumbled
for her wallet, stashed in the side pocket of her pack, but Rob waved it away.

“My treat.”

She smiled at that, recalling all the ways in which she’d treated him this past week.
“I’ll meet you back here in ten minutes.”

For a moment he merely pursed his lips, shy as she’d ever seen him, but then he leaned
down and pressed a kiss to her forehead. She felt foggy and dim and happy as he stood
up straight.

“See you in ten.”

***

Rob waited at the corner with a hot takeaway cup in each hand, watching the bustle
of the city and trying to keep himself separate.

Too many people. Too many voices trying to draw his head in too many directions.

Caffeine probably wasn’t the wisest idea, but they’d established this tradition—coffee
to celebrate new achievements—and Merry had certainly earned a cup, having completed
her epic journey across a good two-thirds of Scotland. If this land were a heart,
she’d hiked right up the gulley between the two lobes, straight through its wild,
pulsing, muscular core.

She found him shortly, her eyes drawn to the candy shop once more, with its quaintly
garish window display. He liked the way she looked at it, eyes alight with a child’s
hungry wonder. So very Merry.

“I got you a latte,” he said, holding out her cup.

“Perfect.” She failed to suppress a smirk, and he knew exactly why—she was trying
to square the man she’d met a week ago with one who’d ever be found in a café ordering
a latte.

There are quite of few sides of me you’ve yet to meet.
And never would, if Rob had anything to say about it. Though he was proud he’d at
least told her about one of them. He’d told her about his marriage, if not the full
truth of what had poisoned it.

“Here,” she said, and handed him a flat paper bag. He set his cup on top of a covered
rubbish bin and slipped his hand inside to withdraw two postcards—each with a photo
of Inverness, one day and one night. Airmail stamps already affixed, and Merry’s address
printed neatly. He smiled.
San Francisco, CA. USA.
Goodness, they really were from different worlds.

“Drop one of those in the mail, the next couple times you venture into a village for
supplies,” she said. “Let me know how you’re doing. That you survived the winter and
weren’t devoured by wolves.”

He laughed. “I will.” He looked up just as her smile wilted.

“If only I could send you something,” she said. “A care package.”

If only. It’d be nice to wake to find a chocolate bar or a letter waiting on his doorstep . . .
Or a bottle of something.
That whiskey she’d felt he’d been lacking for their coffees, or the champagne missing
from their picnic. Wouldn’t that be the sickest turn of events, if alcohol did somehow
manage to find him, all the way out past Great Glen . . .

She shrugged. “I’ll just have to come laden with goodies next year.”

Next year.
Tell her.
On the off chance she did actually come back. On the off chance it didn’t come up
tonight, or if he chickened out.

I could tell her in one of these postcards. In passing. “Hope to see you again soon.
If you do return, please don’t bring alcohol.”
No explanation, even. Let her infer, and even if she did jump to the right conclusion,
well . . . They could have that discussion in person. This trip, he’d sprung a fetish
on her, and the broader strokes of his failed marriage. Next time, an addiction.

One massive character flaw at a time, son.

“Well, caffeine—check.” Merry looked down the block. “Next up, find a room, ditch
the packs, take a hot shower, and go out in search of some dinner. Anything except
cashews and turkey jerky. Sound good?”

“Sounds like heaven.” He followed as she led the way. They sipped their coffees and
pointed out interesting shops and people, mused over the oddness of all the activity
and vehicles and noise after so much time spent sequestered in the hills—three weeks
for her, and a month and a half since Rob’s last trip into a village.

Inverness was a circus. So full of colors and smells, simultaneously too ordered and
too chaotic. He tried to keep his anxiety externalized, like a piece of baggage he
was stuck toting, but needn’t be toppled by.