Page 22 of Trade
I’m about to ask for a break when Dalton breaks from our westward track and leads us to a fast-running stream with a steep bank that hides it from view until you’re right on top of it. He must know the terrain well.
I duck off behind a tree to pee, and when I reemerge, he has climbed down the bank like a mountain goat to refill his canteen. I sink to my butt in the grass and comb my fingers through it as I watch him. The grass is thick and supple and soft. No drought stress here.
Dalton moves with that careless agility you lose at some point in your thirties when you become unpleasantly aware of the fact that you have joints. His heels slip in the muddy clay, but he’s not thrown in the least. He confidently surfs the mud until his feet find a rock and then bounds back up to solid ground.
It already feels surreal that his dick was inside me. When I think of him on top of me, my brain categorizes him as a man my age, but as he drops beside me, chugs from the canteen, then wipes the water he spilled with the back of his sleeve, I can’t see him as anything but one of the dozens of male interns I’ve worked with over the years whose energy vastly and dangerously exceeded their judgment.
He doesn’t seemyounglike them, though. He doesn’t look to me for approval or with any deference at all.
He watches me like I’m a hot meal behind the glass in the cafeteria line, and the server is taking too long to dish. It’s unsettling. Disorienting. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be.HowI’m supposed to be.
“Here,” he says, passing me the canteen. After his chugging, I’m surprised that there’s a lot left.
My mouth is parched, but he took the water directly from the stream. No filtration, no boiling, nothing. At least it’s moving water.
Dalton shakes the canteen. “You need to drink,” he says like he’s telling me something I don’t know.
“I know,” I snap.
He doesn’t like that. His perfect jaw flexes. I tense. He blows out a breath.
“What do you want me to do?” he asks, but not with anger or exasperation like Bennett would say it.
Well, what do you want me to do about it?That was always Bennett’s shorthand that he was done listening to me complain about problems he wasn’t willing to acknowledge or address. Conversation over. No matter how I answered.
But Dalton seems to be really asking, and I’m totally thrown, so I kind of babble, “I don’t want to get sick from the water. Microorganisms. E. coli. Salmonella.”
He nods, takes an orange bottle out of his bulging side pocket, and hands it to me. “It’s fine. I put one of these in the canteen while you were taking a piss.”
My face catches fire. I take the bottle and examine it closely to play it off. Everyone has to pee. It’s no big deal. And why should I be embarrassed with him? He has a shirt covered in his own cum tied to a strap of his backpack, I guess so his other stuff doesn’t get dirty.
I unscrew the cap and peer inside like I’m absolutely fascinated. “What are they?”
“Chlorine dioxide.”
“So it’s safe to drink?”
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s safe.” He’s sitting right next to me. Our arms are pressed together.
His bent knee is in my space. He smells like dirt and sweat and a whiff of the sex we had earlier, but that could be my imagination. Or the shirt.
I pass the bottle back, take the canteen, and drain it. The taste is weird, but sweet Lord, it hits the spot.
Dalton digs in his Aladdin’s cave of a pocket and fishes out a crinkled scrap of aluminum foil. He smooths it, taps a few pills out of the orange bottle, and wraps it carefully into a little pouch.
“Here.” He holds it out to me. What is he doing?
“You’re giving me something?”
His mouth quirks, and the hint of a sparkle lights up his deep brown eyes.
“Fuck the rules, Gloria,” he says.
I blink, temporarily thrown, and I look at him again, closer than I have yet. Who is he?
Upper levels don’t swear, not in public, certainly not in front of women. Sometimes a grunt from the lower levels will let a curse slip where they can be overheard, and they’re always quick to apologize. Some of the boys go through a phase in high school where they swear among each other, but by the time they enter a profession, almost everyone considers cursing déclassé. Bennett never went through the phase.
There aren’t levels out here, and Dalton’s clothes are worn, but he’s clean, and he doesn’t have a grunt’s deference—or the thinly veiled resentment that simmers in some of them. Again, my brain doesn’t know where to slot him.
