Page 35 of Love in the Wild

They lingered in the water, their limbs tangled and breaths shared as they recovered. Her legs stayed wrapped around his body, her fingers were still dug tightly into him as if she too didn’t wish to let go. Life was ever a battle of clinging with desperation and letting go with longing. It was a lesson of the jungle, one he’d learned so often, but never so bittersweetly as he did now while holding Eden in his arms. He wanted to mate with her forever, and yet he feared the moment that it was over, because then it would be one second closer to when he would lose what he was beginning to love more than anything else.

Cold water drizzled across their bodies from the nearby falls, chilling their heated skin. Eden finally relaxed; her legs slid down off his hips, and her grip on him eased, but she didn’t let go. Sweat still clung to their skin, and he playfully dipped them both beneath the surface of the water. Her trust in him, so instinctive now, made him want to roar with leonine pride.

All around them the jungle was quiet, and a stillness settled over the world as birds sang soft symphonies against the crash of water into the pool. There were no warnings in the air. All was well in the jungle tonight. He could rest easy.

When they finally exited the pool, dripping and smiling, Thorne enjoyed watching Eden put on her strange skins. He memorized everything about her body. She belonged to him now, just as he belonged to her. Yet part of him knew it could not be that easy. The world of men was nothing if not complicated.

“Thorne, how did you learn English? Is it what you remember from your parents?”

“A little.” He pulled his deerskin loincloth back onto his body and tied the leather straps in place. “More comes from Bwanbale.”

“Bwanbale?” Eden repeated. “What’s a Bwanbale?”

“He is human. A male. He is my friend.”

Eden’s eyes brightened with interest. “A human?”

“Yes. Enemy first, then friend later.”

Thorne did his best to explain his first sighting of a human since he’d been rescued by Keza, and how Bwanbale had stayed with him for a time in the jungle before returning to his village, which was half a day away on foot. Many times Bwanbale had come back to visit him, meeting him in the savanna meadow where Thorne had shown Eden Tembo.

“So by the time you met him, you were around twenty years old.”

Thorne shrugged. Time didn’t seem to matter here in the humid evergreen jungle.

“He taught you English?”

Thorne nodded. “English and Swahili.” They began the walk back through the jungle toward the mango trees.

“Wait, you know Swahili? Then why didn’t you respond when we first met? I was speaking Swahili then.”

His face flooded with heat. “I was scared to speak.”

“You’ve come pretty far in the last couple of days.”

Her praise filled him with pride. “I remember more of how my parents used to talk. The more you speak, the more I remember.”

“That’s a good thing.” Eden rested one hand on her bag, which held what she called her camera, the object that took pictures.

“Tell me more about Bwanbale.”

“He lives in a village with his mate and a child. I have not seen them, but he’s told me many stories of them.” He shared with Eden as much as he could remember of the world Bwanbale had described all those years ago. Then it had seemed like Bwanbale’s stories were too impossible to be true. He also told her about the way Bwanbale had showed him how to use tools to refine his home, to make cups, and other things.

Eden climbed over a fallen tree with his help. “Are there a lot of poachers here in the jungle?”

“Many, but south. Not here.”

“Do you think the men who ...” Eden’s voice trembled, and her hand tightened around his. “The men who killed everyone were poachers?”

“Yes. Or men who look for gold,” he added, thinking of the men who had brutally murdered his parents. Those men had been looking for gold. Eden had explained the value of it to him, how men and women for thousands of years had placed immense value on the shiny hard metal. Thorne thought it was madness to care for such a thing. One could not eat it or use it as a weapon or for shelter. It served no purpose. And yet it called to him as well. He had brought some of it to his home, had copied the symbols he’d seen onto his walls. The past spoke to him, cried out to him sometimes.

He knew that the people who often came to him in his dreams—the ones where he saw other humans, ancient ones, building homes in the trees—were the ones who’d made the gold and who’d found the glittering stones. Diamonds, as Eden had called them. Whatever belonged in the cave belonged to those long-gone spirits who spoke to Thorne. He and Bwanbale had spoken once of the gold and the cave, and Bwanbale had said that it must be kept secret, it must be respected.

Eden was silent a long moment. “Thorne, we have to find the police. Tell them what happened. The people who died, the other tourists like me, they have families who need to know what happened.”

Thorne didn’t immediately respond. Every time she brought the subject up, it filled him with fear. If she left the jungle, she would leavehim.

“We can’t leave them there.” Eden tugged on his hand, and he turned to face her. “It’s the right thing to do.”

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