Page 36 of Wild and Wrangled

“All good,” I huffed. “So do you do this a lot?”

“Hiking?” he asked.

I nodded, but then realized he couldn’t see me, so I called up to him. “Yeah.”

“A fair amount,” he said. “There’s not always a lot to do around here, you know? And even when there are things to do, it’s normally stuff that you’ve already done at least once.”

“But if you do this a lot, isn’t this just another one of those things?”

“Yeah, but it’s different every time you do it—I could hike up this trail every day and see or notice something new.”

I took a second to look at the scene around me. I couldn’t see that much on the trail—tall trees surrounded us—but we had to be pretty high up, considering we’d been walking for at least an hour.

It was beautiful, but I wasn’t really sold on the whole hiking thing yet. I had homework to do.

“How much longer?” I asked.

Dusty laughed. “Like fifteen minutes. I thought you’d like this.” I liked being with him. “Aren’t you all about hard work and outcomes?”

“I like to see the outcomes,” I said. “All I see are trees.”

“Has anyone ever told you to enjoy the journey?”

“No,” I answered honestly. “No one’s ever said that to me.”

Dusty stopped walking and turned around. I stopped when I was only a step or two away from him.

He looked down at me. “Well,” Dusty said, as he brushed my cheek with the back of his knuckles, “enjoy the journey.”

I rolled my eyes, and Dusty grinned when they came back around. “Let’s keep walking so the journey doesn’t take two more hours,” I said.

“Fair,” Dusty said as he turned and continued to lead the way. I also didn’t know how long the person whose driveway we parked in would be okay with Dusty’s Bronco in front of their house. I hoped they wouldn’t mind if we parked there for a long time because the house mesmerized me and I wanted to explore every inch of the property when we went back to the car. When Dusty and I first pulled up, I immediately fell in love with the blue exterior, the way the house was surrounded by plants and trees. I can’t explain it, but it felt like it had its own soul, like it was a living thing.

Dusty seemed to love driving me around, showing me new things. The first time I rode in his truck this past fall, I was kind of terrified. I wasn’t used to cars that were that big or loud or bumpy.

Now, I’d count down the minutes until the next time I was in his passenger seat. I’d even made him a mix CD to listen to while he was driving because his radio was trash at picking up stations without static.

He had to drop me off down the street from my house when he would give me rides home, though. I didn’t need my parents to find out about him or his loud Bronco. They wouldn’t approve of Dusty or our friendship.

Because that’s what Dusty and I were—friends. Good friends. He was probably my best friend, but I’d never had one of those before, so I couldn’t tell for sure.

But it also felt like he was more.

I mean, we hadn’t even kissed, but when he touched me, my stomach always flipped. I thought after a while, it would stop—that I would get used to it, the way he would cup my face or brush my hair behind my ear or hug me after we’d been apart for a while, but I didn’t. My stomach somersaulted every time.

He came to almost every soccer game in the fall and we didsomething nearly every Saturday that he didn’t have to work—even in the dead of winter. In the colder months, Dusty bagged groceries and bussed tables at the diner. When it got warmer, he kept both of those jobs and bailed hay at Rebel Blue Ranch. Wes was one of Dusty’s friends, so I knew about Rebel Blue, but I’d never been up there. Maybe he’d take me soon.

Unlike me, Dusty had a lot of friends, so being around him was good for me, I think, because it also meant that I was around other people. I didn’t know if they were my friends, too, but I had Dusty, so I didn’t feel like I needed more than that.

“I can hear you thinking back there,” Dusty said. “What’s rattling around in your head?”

“You,” I said honestly.

“Anything good?” Dusty asked.

“Not a single thing,” I lied. “All bad. Totally and completely bad.”

“Liar,” Dusty said. I could hear the smile in his voice. We walked a little bit longer, and the trees started to clear. There was a steep incline for a few minutes, and my lungs were working overtime, but we kept trekking.

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