Page 113 of Everything Under the Sun

“What’s so funny?”

I pressed my lips together to tame my smile, and I shrugged.

Atticus looked down at himself—he looked ridiculous in only a pair of boxers and combat boots.

He pointed at me.

“Well look at you,” he said, trying to keep a straight face. “That dress really leaves nothing to the imagination, y’know.” He grinned.

My mouth fell open and my eyes grew wide. I looked down at my thin yellow dress, could almost see my breasts through the fabric, and I felt my face turn two shades of red.

ATTICUS

It drove me crazy to see her everyday parading around in that dress. Did she have any idea what she was doing to me? No, she didn’t, and that’s what got me the most. She never tried to be seductive—it nearly drove me over the edge. Her vulnerability. Her sweetness. Her seemingly inexperienced nature with all things intimate. She would smile at me and her eyes would tell me: You make me so incredibly happy, Atticus Hunt, and, Will you kiss me again? I love it when you kiss me. And sometimes they would tell me: Oh, Atticus, I trust you wholly—I know you’d never hurt me, or let anyone else hurt me. And sometimes, though on rarer occasion because Thais was so shy, her eyes would say without realizing: Please take me into your arms and fill me with every part of you. I wanted to do it, oh how badly I wanted to fill her with every part of me.

I stepped onto the porch. She stood to my chest, the top of her head just barely reaching the center of my clavicle. She was getting so skinny, I thought as my eyes swept over her.

“Thais,” I said, placing my hands on the sides of her neck, “if there’s nothing on the line or in the traps today, I’m going to have to go hunting.”

“But the gunshots,” she said, looking up at me nervously. “What if somebody hears them?”

“It’s been over two weeks, and no one has come through here—we haven’t heard gunshots, either. But you’re losing a lot of weight and I need to feed you.”

Her smile fled. She reached up and touched my chest.

“I’m just afraid,” she said in a far-off voice. “It’s been so nice here, us not having to run, just relaxing and…living for a change.” She raised her eyes to mine again. “I like it here.”

I cupped the back of her head with my hand.

“I know,” I said. “So do I, but we have to eat.”

There was no fish on the line, or small animals in the snare traps, and so I dressed more appropriately for travel and set out with a rifle over my shoulder.

“I’m going with you,” Thais insisted.

I didn’t like leaving her alone in the cabin, so I agreed to take her.

Four hours later and we still had no meat.

We saw an armadillo.

“Why not?” Thais asked when I refused to take a shot at it.

“I don’t want you getting leprosy,” I told her.

Five hours.

Six.

I often asked if she wanted to call it quits and go back to the cabin—Thais was drenched in sweat and discomfort—but she convinced me she was perfectly capable of enduring the same discomforts as me. Truth was, I knew she could endure it, I just didn’t like for her to.

She reached over as we sat together under the shade of a tree, and she pinched the flesh of my waist over the top of my shirt. “You’re losing as much weight as I am,” she told me. And we hunted another two hours before I finally spotted a wild turkey.

We took it back to the cabin, and I cut off its head and plucked its feathers and did the things to it that Thais never wanted to do.

“Would you ever do it if I wasn’t here to do it for you?”

THAIS & (ATTICUS)

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