Page 90 of Everything Under the Sun

After rummaging around inside one pack, I came back with the pants I’d taken from the farmhouse. I stopped in front of her and placed them in her lap. They looked a little big for her, but I was sure they’d fit.

“I got these for you,” I said. “I, uh, meant to give them to you yesterday, but I’ve been so preoccupied by everything else.” I raised my arm to the back of my head and scratched nervously. “Sorry.”

THAIS & (ATTICUS)

“Thanks.” I thought it a kind gesture, but it was the protective nature of the gesture I thought about the most; I felt my cheeks redden.

“Yeah well,” Atticus said, looking away, “you shouldn’t be running around like that out here, in a dress at all, much less one that short. Crazy, sick people out here.” He took up the backpack where he’d just placed the map and went over to the horses. “Every time you sit down you have to pull at it so it doesn’t ride up your legs—don’t know what possessed you to wear it in the first place.” He set the backpack down on the ground and adjusted the gear attached to his horse.

I just sat there watching him, smile still plain on my face, and growing, as I found his awkwardness so endearing.

“If you were one of my sisters,” he went on, not looking at me, still adjusting the gear, “I’d hold you down and force your legs into a pair of pants—now Tara, she would’ve blacked my eye, but you…” he glanced back at me, but not long enough to actually see me, “…holding you down wouldn’t be so hard—you’re not that big.”

“I’m also not one of your sisters,” I said.

His hands stopped moving against the paracord binding the gear. He seemed reluctant to look at me, but when his eyes met mine, I shied away, looking down at the dingy white cotton in my hands instead.

Why did I say that out loud?

Suddenly, I felt ridiculous. I knew nothing about men beyond what I had seen other women do with them, and how they acted around them. And the sounds I heard my father and Ms. Mercado make when they had sex; sounds my father never wanted his daughters to hear, and that I tried desperately to shut out.

I’m probably doing it wrong, I said to myself as I pressed my hands against the ground and stood up, fighting against the kinks in my muscles and bones from sitting in the same position for too long. And what am I even doing? It’s stupid anyway—I’m nothing like Petra was.

As I walked to the nearest tree, the pants hanging from my hand, I remembered Petra, how she so easily seduced the green-eyed soldier with her wanton behavior; how he visited her in the night; the awful, but strangely arousing things he did to her. I could never bring myself to do such things—I was too shy, and found even the possibility I could act that way toward Atticus, embarrassing. But the fact I was thinking of Atticus in that way at all made me question everything I thought I knew about myself.

Never did I think of men how I began to think of Atticus: mostly I imagined him bending to kiss me; I thought of what it might feel like to lie next to him; what his arms might feel like around me; what it might be like if his hands touched me—my face had never been so red!

Maybe it was seeing the way Rachel acted toward him that opened my mind, as though if I didn’t start seeing him in another way, someone else would. Or, if I didn’t act on how I already felt, then someone else would. I didn’t know, but what I did know was that Atticus was something more to me than just my rescuer, or my traveling companion. What exactly, would continue to eat away at my thoughts.

“Well just so you know,” I said as I stepped behind the tree to put on the pants, “this dress was the only one I had. In case you forgot, my wardrobe was chosen by crazy women.” I stepped into the legs, slipping my sandaled feet through the roomy material, and I dropped the dress over the pants. “So, before you start thinking I put it on to seduce you, or something ridiculous like that—think again.”

(Turning back to the gear strapped to my horse, I smiled to myself.)

31

THAIS

The restless whinnying of the horses, and the sound of feet shuffling through dead leaves woke me during the night. I sat bolt upright when a shadow darted past in my periphery, followed by whispering voices and the clatter of metal on glass on plastic.

“ATTICUS!”

He woke with a start on his cot next to me, knife gripped in one hand, gun in the other.

“Go! Go!” a man’s voice hissed in the darkness.

Atticus was to his feet in under two seconds; he vaulted past me, clearing my head and the quilt spread out on the ground without so much as grazing it.

The thief dropped a bag and ran.

“Shiiit, Billy, ruuun!” shouted the woman with a heavy southern drawl.

The woman had our heaviest backpack, but once Atticus went stampeding toward them, she also dropped her loot and tried to make a run for it.

Atticus speared the man from behind with his shoulder and they rolled several feet over dirt and leaves in a tangle of camouflage and grunts. The man hit the dirt with an oomph! and Atticus was on top of him in a blink, raining his fists down on his head.

“Don’t you touch him!” the woman cried, and she ran toward Atticus.

I raised my gun on the woman and she froze, arms shot up at her sides.

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