Page 11 of Wild Hope
Me and Quentin always had bikes growing up, and she’s ridden with her brother before. But this is the first time I’ve felt Kendra on the back of my bike. Her thighs pressed against mine cause my nerves to go into overdrive.
She holds the side of the seat, and I pry them off and place them around my waist.
“Hold onto me. It’s safer.”
Which is bullshit, but if she’s on my bike, her arms are around me.
We head onto the road, and it’s pure bliss. The sun on my face, the bike humming beneath me, and Kendra on the back. Life doesn’t get much better than this.
The road snakes uphill into the mountains. On one side, the cliff falls away to a canopy of trees and the commercial pine forest below. On the other side, it’s a steep bank and wild forest.
After about twenty minutes, I take a dirt road that leads to one of my favorite walks on the mountain. Five minutes later, the dirt road doesn’t end as much as peter out, the track giving way to undergrowth and scattered bush.
There’s no one else here, and that’s what I like about this spot. Most tourists go to the other side of the mountain where the town of Hope is. It’s close to the lake and the ski fields and numerous hiking trails.
On the Wild side, we’ve got the sawmill and the forestry that feeds it, and beyond that pure wilderness.
The path isn’t sign posted, and you won’t find it on a tourist map. It’s an old tracker path that only the locals know about.
Kendra slides off the bike and tugs the helmet off her head. She tosses her hair and runs her hands through it, letting the gold and pink locks fall back into place.
I must be staring, because she takes a strand of the pink and twists it in her fingers, making a face. “Pink seemed like a good idea in Kentucky.”
“I like it.”
I take the strand out of her fingers and tuck it behind her ear, loving the way she looks up at me all wide-eyed.
“Come on. The path’s this way.”
We set off through the undergrowth, and I pick up the faint track. As we walk, I probe Kendra about the last few years. I’m curious as to what she’s been doing all this time and why she stayed away. As far as I know, Quentin’s only seen her a handful of times when he visited her in whatever small town she was currently living in. I worried about her as much as he did.
“What were you doing in Kentucky?”
“Waitressing, mostly.”
When I last saw Kendra, she had big dreams. She was going to go to college. She was going to study literature.
“What happened to college?”
“Life happened.” She shrugs, and my heart breaks for her. For the innocent girl who’s been through such pain.
We walk in silence for a while, listening to the noises of the forest. When Kendra speaks, she’s so quiet I can barely hear her.
“After the accident, I couldn’t focus. I didn’t want to be away at college. It seemed so stupid, studying classic literature. What was the point? And all the stupid sororities and the drinking. I did one semester and gave up. I just didn’t want to be there.”
I can understand that. It was the same for me after the first tour in Iraq. When I came back and went into a bar and there were plenty of guys my age, young men getting wasted on tequila shots. It seemed so frivolous.
“You ever thought of going back to college?”
I want that for her. I want her to have her best life, not one that she fell into because of grief.
“Maybe, but not to study literature.”
“You don’t enjoy reading anymore?”
Kendra always had her head buried in a book. Romance mostly, judging from the bare-chested men on the covers.
She laughs. “Are you kidding? Reading has been what’s gotten me through the last few years. But I want to do something more meaningful than write romance.”
