Page 11 of Beck & Coll
I took in her bandaged leg. “Better yet, let me have them deliver from the take-out menu.”
Less than an hour later, we received the bags filled with chicken, turkey, veggie, and steak wraps.
I watched as she celebrated with a hand clap with each item as I removed it from the bag.
“You really like wraps, huh?” I teased with a grin.
She returned the expression. “I do.”
“Good, because wraps are really good for helping the body replenish when you come off a hike. We didn’t hike too long today, but as the length of our hikes intensify you’ll need to know the best ways to recover.”
She nodded while taking in the plantain chips, nuts, and yogurt.
I handed her a travel cup with the resort’s logo on it along with a disposable straw. “This is a strawberry banana smoothie made with low-fat milk.”
She took in the abundance of food spread out on the small dining table. “Wow. I feel like you’re feeding me good.”
“Recovery is key. I don’t want you feeling like you were run over by an eighteen-wheeler later on tonight or tomorrow morning. When people have bad experiences with outdoor activities, they tend to never try them again. They write them off as something that they didn’t enjoy. Part of my job is to make the outdoors enjoyable. I have to teach you the proper way to begin and end a hike. Hopefully, when you get back home, you’ll want to hike some more.”
She took a sip of the smoothie. “Um, this is banana-heavy… not really my thing.” She took another sip. “Now, back to you and your ex.”
“It was bad,” I admitted as I swallowed a bite of chicken wrap. “She felt very betrayed by the fact that I wanted to leave D.C., and she let me know it. She implied that I strung her along… all of that.”
“You don’t agree?”
“I don’t. It wasn’t like I maliciously engaged her. I loved her. I had mad love for her. We were just different, and life is… you only get one shot at life. If you waste your shot living to make somebody else happy while making yourself miserable, you have to live with that choice.”
“Were you miserable in D.C.?”
“I was miserable not being able to be outdoors. I was miserable getting dressed in the morning and spending the entire day in an office building. I was miserable being surrounded by masses of people everywhere I went… everywhere I looked. We lived in a condo—a building with unitsfilled with people, stacked one on top of the other for twenty stories. I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe.”
We ate in silence for a little bit.
“When I told her that I felt like I was suffocating, she was surprised. The city gave her oxygen, so she couldn’t relate to the idea that it was stealing mine. She contemplated moving here. She knew she would be miserable, but she said that she saw me asherchance for the American dream.”
Collins nodded her head. “Well, I can’t say that I don’t see her point. I mean, you’re straight, and you seem to actually like and care about women. You’re probably stable. You’re hardworking. You’re knowledgeable about stuff.”
She gave me the “up-down,” which actually caused me to laugh aloud.
She giggled, too. “You’re handsome. She probably saw herself marrying you and having a couple of children. You messed up her fantasy with your selfish need to move back home.”
“Yeah,” I admitted with a shrug of my shoulders. “That’s exactly how she saw it. In her eyes, I was sabotaging everything.”
“How long has it been since you left D.C.?”
“Five years.”
“Have you spoken to her since? Is she doing okay?”
“She requested my friendship on Facebook about two years ago. I don’t get on Facebook often, so there’s no telling how long the request sat there. Finally, she reached out. I’ve had the same phone number since basic training. One day, she dialed it.”
“Was she calling to invite you to her wedding?”
I snickered. “Nah. I missed that. She was calling to apologize. I think. That’s what she did when she got me on the phone. She apologized for the way she acted with me.”
Collins cut in. “Was it a dramatic breakup?”
I shook my head at the memory. “It was. Every single day after I told her that I couldn’t stay in D.C., there was a meltdown. There was name-calling. There were accusations. At one point, she put her hands on me. She called the police and filed a report againstme. She was… enraged that I was screwing up some secret plan she had to get off the dating track and land a husband. We hadn’t even really talked about marriage, except to agree that we both believed in it.
