Walk of Shame (36 page)

I was up bright and early on
Saturday morning, waiting to see if Mike would come to get me for our run. But
I didn't hear a knock, and I saw no one outside. Goldie followed me as I crept,
past a sleeping Chloe, to the door and went out.

Goldie, getting entirely too used
to extra food handouts, started sniffing around for breakfast. I went over to
Mike's rig, seeing if I could find any evidence as to whether or not he'd
already left to go hit a trail. But all looked to still be set and quiet from
the night before.

All our rigs were circled around
the area we'd taken over, and I figured not all the guys were being particular
about locking their doors. I quietly tiptoed over and tried turning Mike's
doorknob.

It opened for me, and I climbed
inside to look around. It was your basic fifth wheel. Not overly long, all the
better for negotiating mountain passes and park roads with. It looked like his
furnishings were chosen for comfort and functionality. It had a small kitchen
and eating area in the middle. A small couch and a comfortable looking recliner
sat opposite a desk area. An entertainment center sat at the end of the space
with a TV big enough to be seen from anywhere in the open floor plan. At the
front end were two steps leading up to, what had to be, the bathroom and
bedroom in the gooseneck.

An accordion-style door separated
the two areas. I pushed it aside as quietly as I could and heard Mike's own
soft snoring. A door to the right probably led to a toilet and sink. To my
horror, a glass-doored shower sat open to the bedroom on the left. I hated
layouts like this, but mostly because I was used to having an occasional guest
along for the ride.

Mike was under the covers in the
queen-sized bed that filled the room. I wasn't quite sure what to do with
myself at this point. The guys had always come to me. What did it say that I
was sneaking into one of their rooms? And what was the best way to wake up an
ex-Army guy who'd been through combat? I didn't really want to jar him out of
sleep, but standing in the corner and staring at him until he sensed he wasn't
alone seemed like a good way to get myself shot.

I should have announced myself as
soon as I'd walked through the main door.

As it was, I backed myself up to
the entrance of the room and plastered on a smile. "Up, please!" I
announced.

The snoring stopped, but Mike
didn't move.

"Up, please!" I
repeated in as sweet a voice as I could muster.

His faced relaxed into a smile
before he opened his eyes. "I thought you were on strike."

"The strike is over and it's
a new day. The sun is shining and the birds are singing."

"When in the hell did you
turn into a morning person?"

"I didn't, I'm just faking
it. Come on, before I go out into the middle of camp and bellow out my need for
a running partner."

"Now why would you wanna go
and do that?"

"I'm curious to see who'd
volunteer."

"Who's your money on?"
he asked.

"My money was on you, that's
why I'm here. But I'm betting second place would go to Jared."

"All right, I'm getting up.
But you'd better go back out to the living room, unless you'd like to get an
eye full," he teased.

I laughed and shut the door
behind me when I left. I snagged two bottles of water out of his fridge and
five minutes later, we were out on a trail.

It turned out to be a long trail,
and by the time we were getting back to our base, we'd slowed to a walk.
"If I end up going home tomorrow," Mike said during a lull in the
conversation, "I'd like to thank you for keeping me this long."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "It's just
that, well, something about my weeks doing this has shifted some things for me.
I feel more... I don't even know how to say it, maybe... centered? I don't let
the leg get in my way, but... it's nice to feel valued and wanted by a woman. It's
nice to feel whole and looked up to for who I am now, and not just for who I
was. And you did that for me."

"Stop putting up that wall. We've
dealt with this before and moved past it. You're just bringing it up again as a
defense because you're afraid you might go home."

He raised an eyebrow. "Damn.
And here I was, trying to pay you a compliment."

"No, you were trying to put
a Band-Aid on your heart. I didn't seek you out this morning because I'm
gearing up to send you home. I sought you out because I never feel like I get
enough time with you. I like being with you, Mike. Deal with it."

He stopped walking.

I turned around to face him from five
steps down the trail. "I keep telling you, I like
you
. If that leg
is the biggest obstacle you see us having, then we have no obstacles. I know
you've had to make certain adaptations and things might take you an extra
minute or two, but I don't care. I don't give a damn about the fact that you
only have a leg and a half."

"Maybe that's been my
problem. Maybe I keep looking for an obstacle, for the thing that's going to
keep us apart. And since I can't find any, I dig into my own
insecurities."

"Do you want to leave?"

He started walking toward me. "No,
sweetheart." He lifted me off my feet, turned, and backed me against a
tree. "I don't want to go anywhere," he whispered, and then kissed me
so intensely that I forgot to be annoyed by his defenses. "I don't want to
go anywhere where you're not," he whispered into my ear.

I turned my head and kissed him
quickly. "I care about the kind of person you are and how you live your
life. And I can't find anything about you that I don't like."

"You like my rig, too?"
he joked, leaning his forehead against mine.

"No. I hate the layout of
your rig. But I sure do like the guy who lives in it, and the toys he hauls
around."

He laughed as he released me so we
could go around the final corner before our camp area come into sight.

Phillip was waiting with a picnic
breakfast for me, to take out on a paddleboat.

Handing me off from one man to
the next might be an awkward thing, but the guys were good about it. Though
that didn't stop Mike from giving my butt a squeeze before I stepped across the
campsite to go grab my shower so hair and makeup could have a quick go at me
before I joined Phillip.

Once we'd paddled out into the
middle of the lake, and Phillip pulled out the fruit salads he'd packed, he
said, "I think I may have screwed up with taking you to tag that
grizzly."

I sighed. "It took me by
surprise, that's for sure."

"We did it to track him.
We're making strides in bringing them back from near extinction. This is
something we do in order to save them."

"I know."

"You knew I worked with
endangered species."

"Yeah, I know. It's just
that you creeping through the forest with a gun is not a picture I even had in
my mind."

"You imagine me in a kitchen?"

"Not always. Sometimes I
imagine you saving furry little woodland creatures. And maybe
butterflies."

"What about tigers,
leopards, and rhinos?"

"We're on the wrong
continent for them. You don't go stalking them in zoos do you?"

"Sometimes my work takes me
to zoos, to check on our captive populations. And when I do, I either go in the
cage with them, or we tranquilize them from the fence line."

"Zoo animals, who are used
to having humans around and occasionally getting shot from behind the fence,
seem a lot less dangerous than hunting them down in the wild."

"I'm not killing them. I'm
trying to help them."

"I know, but they don't
understand that. And it can't be pleasant for them to be hunted, surrounded,
and shot. They don't know they will wake up later and be fine."

"You think we traumatize
them?"

"I think maybe some of them
feel traumatized. I feel traumatized from watching it."

"Em..."

I put a hand up to stop him.
"This is why I don't do what you do for a living. It's my hang-up to work
through, not yours."

"But I want to know you'll
get there."

"I have to adjust my
preconceived notion of your life, that's all."

"I should have taken you to
a zoo that has baby pandas. You'd have a whole other kind of image in your head
if we'd gone into an area with baby pandas to wrestle with."

"Yes, I bet I would. But I
still needed to see the grizzly. I need to understand that not only do you save
little endangered species, you're also the kind of guy that can strap on a
rifle and hunt down big game."

"It's not like that."

"Yes, it is. You're not
looking for a meal or a trophy head. But you still hunt them and raise a weapon
to them. And if they charged you, or something went wrong, you'd switch rifles
and shoot them for real. Sure, you'd use the body for research or whatever, but
I just didn't picture you as that kind of guy. Do you know, at all, what I
mean?"

"You had a much gentler
picture of me in your head."

"Yes."

He nodded. "I almost feel
like I've betrayed or lied to you in some way."

I shook my head. "Nope, it's
not you. I'm the one that made assumptions off what I thought I knew about you.
It's not like you were hiding it. You told me what your profession was. And
you'd never really had a chance to show me any of that before now."

"No one's asking you to go
tag bear. You don't ever have to come out and see me like that again."

"That's not the point."

"I'm still the same
guy."

Except, he wasn't. Not in my
mind. I'd put Jared and Liam into the toughest of men categories, because of
their jobs. Mike was up there, too, but at a slightly less level because he
wasn't out there alone all the time, he had a team. Stephen and Phillip were my
least dangerous souls, then ones who wouldn't get themselves trapped, caved in
on, or eaten at work. Stephen and Phillip were my two choices for not having to
worry about them. The only 'safe' one left now was Stephen.

To track an animal was one thing,
to go after it and confront it was another. Maybe the contradiction wouldn't
bother me so much, if I hadn't felt so blindsided by it. I mean, I thought I'd
had these guys generally figured out. And now, with Phillip at least, I felt
like I knew nothing about him.

Phillip and I walked back into
camp and Liam extended his hand to me.

I shook my head. "I have to
use the bathroom and change out of these ridiculous shoes."

He dropped his hand down to his
side and nodded.

I knew I was still miked when I
went inside, and I proceeded, very purposefully, to rant aloud. "Why
anybody thinks that heels are a good idea in a state park is beyond me. I'm
short, I just am. Get over it. I'm putting on sandals. Not cute little strappy
ones, real ones. So all of you just deal," I muttered.

Liam grabbed a backpack when I
came out and gestured for me. I grabbed a bottle of water and joined him. He
took me by the hand and led me to a clearing where a helicopter awaited us.

"I made you get up a
mountain the hard way last time. I thought you'd like the easy way for a change,"
he said.

The chopper landed us on the
tallest mountaintop around. Some thought had been put into this one. Two very
comfy outdoor recliners were waiting, along with a portable grill and a couple
umbrellas.

"So, what are we doing up
here?"

"We're just going to stay up
here for awhile. We're going to have a couple nice, quiet hours, where the
world can't intrude. We can cook lunch, relax, talk, whatever. Some people
would do the whole stranded on a desert isle thing, I prefer stranded on a
mountaintop. I wanted to do this sooner, but it's been too windy up here. As it
is, those umbrellas are severely weighted down and will probably be used more
as windbreaks than for creating shade."

"Just us and our camera
crew, huh?"

"I want to see if we can
just be with each other. No agenda, no rushing, no technological intrusions,
just us."

"A small taste of life with
you?"

"Without the work
obligations, yes."

"Are you the type that would
camp up here and be perfectly happy to do it?"

"I've camped on mountains
like this before."

"Have you climbed
Everest?"

"Yes."

He'd said it so matter-of-fact
that I think my mouth dropped open a little. I shouldn't have been surprised,
but how did I not know this by now? How had it not come up?

"I think that's
amazing," I said. "I think I'm a fairly daring girl, but roughing it
for a week to climb a mountain... I hope that's not something you would have
expected me to do with you. Writing a book is such a long-term project that
when it comes to fun, I enjoy things I can go and get done in a day."

"I don't expect you to like
everything I do. Nor do I expect to like everything you enjoy. I just hope that
we wouldn't stand in the other's way of going and doing the pastimes that we
like so much."

"Perfect."

Liam cooked and we ate lunch, we
had several more conversations as we got to know the more relaxed side of each
other. By the end of our time, I was feeling pretty good about Liam again. He
was just so good at the 'this is me and this is you, let's just be ourselves,
but together' thing. We'd started sharing childhood stories and found the whole
time to be very easy because we'd hit a point where we stopped checking and
balancing ourselves against the other's reactions and we were openly ourselves,
up there with the clouds.

Liam packed up his backpack and
stood to get ready for the helicopter. He waved me back into the chair when I'd
tried to stand. "You're staying here."

"Okay," I said.
"But if I get stranded up here for real, your ass is out tomorrow
night."