Page 13 of Embers

He takes a quick, thick breath but doesn’t say anything or move even a muscle.

“Is it too cold?” I ask. “Or does it itch you? Sorry. I’ve almost got it done.”

Not even a grunt in response this time.

It doesn’t really surprise me, and I try not to take it personally. He simply doesn’t like anyone touching him.

I rub my hands back up to his neck since I hadn’t gotten lotion there earlier. The muscles beneath his skin are so tight I can feel knots in them. “Why are you so tense?” I use both hands to massage his shoulders and the back of his neck for a minute. I’m not sure why I do it. I’ve never had that sort of impulse before. But I’m aware of a weird tension below my belly, and I want him to feel better.

He sucks in another ragged breath.

“You okay?” I ask very softly, putting a little more lotion on my hands and rubbing them down his back again to make sure I got everywhere.

Cal doesn’t answer.

I don’t really expect him to.

As I get the skin at the small of his back, my eyes linger on the waistband of his old jeans. It’s sliding down farther than it should. I like how his back looks as it tapers down toward his neatly curved ass. I like that his pants are riding so low I catch a glimpse of the top of his butt crack.

I pull my hands away from his body and step back.

“Thanks,” Cal mumbles, grabbing the undershirt he picked up before and then striding back outside.

He doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the evening.

* * *

Things are back to normal the next morning.

We had such a good haul on our trip that we can stay put for the next couple of weeks. The chickens have been laying well, and we’ve actually got quite a few edible tomatoes and zucchini out of the garden this summer. We do some cleaning, and we organize our supplies, and we wash our bedding and let it dry in the warm air. Overall, it’s a pretty good week.

During the second week, Cal gets restless and announces one morning that he’s going to hunt. Since I don’t have anything better to do, I go with him.

For the first year or so, Cal would periodically shoot deer in the woods, but he doesn’t anymore. Most of them have been killed off by hunters or are barely surviving on the depleted foliage. We do see them still occasionally, but Cal won’t kill them. He says if we don’t give those remaining a chance, they’ll die off completely.

So we don’t kill the deer or the occasional rabbit or wild turkey we roust. Instead, we look for boar. There are more of them than anything else in the woods now. According to Cal, they’re domesticated pigs that have gotten free and gone feral. They are apparently able to return to the wild more successfully than other animals, and they can survive on almost anything.

We spot a few of them moving together in the afternoon. Cal could have taken one out at any moment, but he lets me be the one to shoot it. He’s always saying I need more practice than he does.

I do a good job. I get it in the head so it dies immediately and doesn’t suffer. I don’t have a problem killing animals for food we genuinely need, but I hate the idea of any living thing suffering, especially at my hand.

Cal ties it up and hauls it back to the cabin. There’s a huge, disgusting mess as we carve it up, but it’s worth it. We cut up a lot of strips of the meat so we can dry it for jerky, but for the next few days we’ll have pork chops and tenderloin.

The day after that is the hottest one yet, and between the heat and pig carcass, I’m feeling kind of icky. So after lunch I tell Cal we need to go to the waterfall to bathe.

It’s not a very impressive waterfall. It’s not much more than a creek streaming down over a small wall of rock. But in the summer I like to go at least once a week because it feels almost like a shower, and we can get cleaner than we can from basins of our well water.

If it was closer, I’d go every day in warm weather, but it’s a hike to get there, and Cal won’t let me go alone.

Cal stands watch with his rifle, his back to me, as I strip off my clothes and step over the rocks and get under the pleasant fall of cool water.

“It’s not even very cold today!” I’m happily squeezing the water through my long, thick hair to get it all the way wet.

“Don’t dillydally.”

“I’m not dillydallying,” I grumble, pouring out shampoo and lathering up my hair. “No one ever comes around this way anyway.”

“Always a first time.”

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