The Memory Thief (6 page)

He looked so sheepish, it was my turn to laugh. He looked puzzled, and the more puzzled he looked, the more I laughed. What kind of ridiculous day was this? It just kept getting better, too. No wonder he'd found my incident with the log so hilarious. I considered it an act of supreme balance if I walked the morning's first cup of coffee across the room without spilling it, and here he was, feeling embarrassed because he hadn't made it to the top of the tallest mountain in the world. If there was ever a sign that two people were mismatched, this was it.

The look of puzzlement on his face began to fade, morphing into something else. It took me a moment to realize that I'd hurt his feelings with my little laughing jag. I put real effort into trying to stop, and wound down into giggles. When I could speak I said, “I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing at myself.”

The eyebrow again.

“No, really. I have no sense of balance at all, like you might have noticed.” I gestured at the journals in my bag, and then outside, in the vague direction of the trail where I'd run into him earlier. “I can barely walk uphill. If I tried to make it up one of the little mountains around here, I'd fall halfway down in about a second.”

“No you wouldn't,” he said. “I would never let you fall.” He sounded offended.

“You haven't done a great job thus far,” I snapped before I could help myself.

This time he lost it. He laughed with the same abandon he had before, wild and contagious, until I was laughing, too. “You're right,” he said. “Our first expedition, and I totally suck as a guide. You don't owe me a thing.”

I considered his fantastic laugh, twisted sense of humor, and good looks, and surrendered. “You win,” I said to him.

“I win what?” he said, wiping his eyes.

“Dinner. I'll go to dinner with you.”

That sobered him up. “You will?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay,” he said. “Great.” He loaded my laptop into my bag, succeeded in taking it from me this time, and held out his arm. I stared at it. “What's that for?”

“You,” he said, looking at me as if I were just a little bit dim. “There's a bunch of steps between here and the dining hall, not to mention some uneven terrain, and like you said, balance isn't your strong suit.”

At a loss for words, I simply looked at him.

“I promise not to let you fall again,” he said. “Scout's honor.”

And so I took his arm.

It couldn't have been more than a hundred yards to the dining hall, but that was more than far enough for me to feel ridiculous. More than anything, I wanted my arm back. For one thing, it seemed absurd to be making my way toward dinner with my arm threaded through his. He was a virtual stranger, and it's not like we were on our way to the opera or something. Furthermore, I wasn't so physically handicapped by my own clumsiness that I couldn't walk the length of a football field without falling over. I didn't need my own seeing-eye human to watch out for stray tree roots and crevices. Well, maybe I did, but I certainly didn't want the world to know it. And then there was the matter of his physical presence. I was hyperaware of all the places where his skin touched mine, which, given the warm weather and our attire, was plenty. Every time I stole a glance at him, my stomach lurched, and from the smirk that was playing around his lips, I had the feeling he wasn't immune to my discomfort.

Yes, I wanted my arm back all right. I also wanted to rescind my agreement to his dinner invitation, closet myself in my room, and snack on my considerable stash of granola bars for the remainder of my stay. But I couldn't figure out a graceful way to make any of this happen, so I kept on walking.

The more uncomfortable I get, the quieter I become. Aidan was the opposite—either that, or he was as comfy as he could possibly be. The whole way to the dining hall, he made an alarming amount of small talk, mostly about the flora and fauna we passed along the way. After he'd pointed out three kinds of edible mushrooms, one kind guaranteed to give you considerable intestinal distress, and mountain golden heather (on the federal endangered species list, planted here deliberately), I recovered enough to give him the eye.

“Are you a closet botanist?” I demanded, interrupting his latest observation about how beautiful the Devil's walking stick was in the fall.

He shook his head. “Nope. I just like nature.”

I chuckled.

“You don't?”

“I'm not anti-nature, or anything. I just haven't seen enough of it to have an opinion. I was raised in the city.”

“What city?” he inquired, guiding me around a large gray rock that protruded from the path.

“New York City. Brooklyn, to be exact.”

“Brooklyn has nature,” he said. “What about the Botanic Garden? What about Prospect Park?”

“Let me amend that. I haven't seen much—how should I phrase it?—uncontrolled nature. Which this definitely counts as, in my opinion.”

“This is uncontrolled nature?” Again with the eyebrow.

“To me it is.”

“Hmmm,” he said, compressing his lips into a thin line. He seemed to be trying to hold back laughter.

“You say tomato,” I muttered, staring at the ground in an attempt to wrest back some control over our progress. I was about to step onto a pile of moss when he stopped abruptly, then pulled me behind him. He kept a tight grip on my wrist.

“Hey,” I complained, trying to twist free.

“Shhh,” he said, his eyes fixed on the ground.

Annoyed, I complied nonetheless. He began backing away down the trail, pushing me with his body. I felt like a cow being herded, and opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again as he came to a halt about ten feet from where we'd started. “Whew,” he said, tugging me again so I stood next to him.

I'd had it with being led around like a farm animal. “What the hell was that about?”

Wordlessly, he pointed down the trail. I looked but saw nothing out of the ordinary. “What?” I asked. Maybe he really was crazy, on top of everything else. That would be just my luck.

He still had hold of my wrist, and this time he pulled me so I stood in front of him. He put one hand on my shoulder to keep me steady and, lifting the hand that had hold of my wrist, he pointed again.
“Agkistrodon contortrix mokasen,”
he said. “Northern copperhead, to the uninitiated.”

I gulped. “Oh,” I said. Peering closer, I saw the brown and gray body slithering across the path, almost indistinguishable from the twigs and leaves in its path. Its wide head lifted to look at us, and even from this distance I could see its forked tongue dart out, tasting the air.

Our bodies were only a few inches apart, and he had a good grip on me. His quiet laughter shook both of us. “Maybe you were right about the whole uncontrolled nature thing.”

“I told you so,” I said.

“They're usually nocturnal. Maybe this guy's lost,” he mused as we watched the copperhead reach the other side of the path and disappear into the trees. He sounded concerned for the snake's safety, which made me smile.

“Thanks for rescuing me,” I said, imbuing my tone with enough sarcasm so that he knew I wasn't the helpless-maiden type.

“You do need a guide. You would have stepped right on the freaking thing if I hadn't stopped you.” I couldn't see his face, but I would have been willing to bet he was smirking again.

I dug deep and came up with something I'd seen on the Discovery Channel during a snowed-in weekend in the Adirondacks with my parents. “They're venomous, but their bite isn't fatal, right? So I would've suffered for a while, but everything would've turned out okay.”

He spun me to face him like we were dancing. “You know more than you let on. Are you a closet herpetologist?”

I could give as good as I got. Tilting my head, I ran my free hand through my hair, letting it cascade over my back. “If you're asking me if I have a nasty venereal disease, the answer is no. Not that that's any of your business, on a first date. And speaking of which, would you mind letting go of my wrist? You're hurting me, and it's a little too early in our relationship for S&M.”

He dropped my wrist like it was on fire and let his hand fall from my shoulder. “That's too bad,” he said, his voice a few notes lower and his blue eyes locked on mine. “The second part, not the first. The first part is purely good news.”

Jesus, how did he
do
that? The few inches between us suddenly seemed like way too much—or not nearly enough, if I wanted to hang on to any semblance of dignity. I stepped a full foot back. “Whoa, captain,” I said.

“Sorry,” he replied, not looking the least bit apologetic.

I don't know what I would have said in return if a full complement of my students hadn't appeared, making their way down the trail to dinner. “Hey, Ms. Maddie,” they singsonged as they passed me, ogling at Aidan as they went. One of them even went so far as to walk backward down the trail and give me a thumbs-up.

“Oh, that's just great,” I said to myself. Aidan was laughing.

“Come on,” I told him, sounding every inch the bossy schoolteacher.

“Yes, ma'am.” He gave me a little salute and started walking again. This time he kept his hands to himself.

We made it to the dining hall without further incident, although we were somewhat late—most of the folks already had full plates of food, my students included, and were busy eating. Luckily, this meant that although plenty of people glanced up when we walked in, and a few waved to us, none of them felt compelled to offer us a seat.

I tried to serve myself, but Aidan was having none of it—”This is a date,” he said, rolling his eyes—so instead I went to sit down, as far from my fellow faculty members as possible. Several of them turned their heads to follow my progress as I made my way to a corner table.

I amused myself by imagining what type of gossip would be circulating among the cabins tonight; then Aidan arrived, balancing two heaping plates like an experienced waiter. “Here you go,” he said. “I didn't know what you liked, so I got everything.” He set my plate in front of me with a flourish and settled down on the bench seat across the table.

“You are truly nuts,” I said, staring down at my overfull plate, on which collard greens, ham, sweet potatoes, biscuits, macaroni and cheese, and something that looked suspiciously like Jell-O salad all jostled for their fair share of space.

“You're welcome,” he said, spreading his napkin on his lap and handing me mine. He reached for the pitcher in the middle of the table and filled our water glasses, then lifted his in a toast. “Here's to not stepping on that copperhead. And to our first date,” he said, grinning so widely that I couldn't help but smile back. I lifted my glass and touched it to his. We could have been anywhere, that was the crazy thing. While he was looking at me, I didn't hear the noise of the dining hall or notice any of the other people eating. It was just me and him, and it was freaking me out.

Aidan wasn't nearly as oblivious to our surroundings. “People are staring at you,” he told me.

“Uh-huh.”

“Why is that, exactly?”

“My incredible charisma, for one thing. And my amazing grace.”

One side of his mouth twitched upward in a smile. “Oh. I see. Any other reasons, or is that it?”

I poked the Jell-O salad with my fork. “Those are the other people who teach in this program with me. I usually sit with them. They're probably taking bets on who you are and why I'm over here with you.”

“Does that bother you?” he said, peppering his macaroni.

“Not really. I mean, I don't date—I haven't for a while—and they're not used to seeing me with a guy, so that's part of it. And then they're just gossipy, by nature, and they've been up on this mountain for a week with only each other and the kids for company, so they're getting pretty desperate.”

He absorbed this. “Why don't you date?”

“I got out of a relationship about a year ago and I've been taking a break. It's not that I don't date,” I said to clarify. “It's more like I've been on hiatus.”

“I guess I should be honored then.”

“Something like that.” How the hell we'd found our way into this territory so soon after we'd sat down was beyond me. I stabbed morosely at a forkful of collard greens.

“They're still staring,” he remarked.

“Big surprise,” I said to my plate.

“Want me to give them something to stare about?” His voice was mischievous, and I looked up to discover that he'd turned the full force of his eyes on me. God, his eyelashes were long. I'd never seen eyes quite that color before, such a powerful, arresting blue.

He cleared his throat. “See something you like?”

Blood rushed to my cheeks, and I dropped my gaze—not much use, given that I wound up staring at his full lips instead. Figuring that I might as well resign myself to having a completely humiliating day, I forced myself to raise my head. “No to the first,” I said. “And yes to the second, if you must know.”

There was a full beat of silence, and then he laughed. “Good,” he said. “I do, too.”

“Glad we got that out of the way,” I said.

“Yep. Now let's eat. I'm starving.” He buttered a piece of bread from the communal basket and handed it to me.

When I'm nervous, eating is the last activity that appeals to me. I took a bite of bread and chewed it gamely. It sank to the pit of my stomach like a large pebble and sat there. Aidan, on the other hand, was spearing one forkful of food after another. I'd never seen someone eat so fast and not choke in the process.

He swallowed a giant mouthful of sweet potatoes and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Tell me about yourself,” he invited.

“Um. What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you want to tell me. Where did you grow up? What do you like to do? And do you hate everything I put on your plate? Because you're not eating.”

“The food is fine. I'm just not very hungry.”

“I could get you something else,” he said, looking worried.

“I don't see how. I think you've put the entire contents of the kitchen on this plate. Besides, I'm not hungry. I'll eat later.” I prayed that he'd drop the subject; I truly did not want to explain to him that he made me as jumpy as a cat. He'd dine out on that one for weeks.

“Okay,” he said. “If you're sure.”

“I'm sure. I'm fine. Really.”

He gave me a skeptical look. “All right, then. So, since your mouth's not full, you've got no excuse not to talk. Give it up.”

“I'm from Brooklyn. I think I already told you that.”

“But now you live here?”

“I live in North Carolina, but not here in Little Switzerland. I live in Durham, which is in the middle part of the state, in the Triangle.”

“What brought you down here, then?”

“I went to school at Carolina, for journalism and creative writing. And I liked it, so I stayed.”

“And now you teach.”

“Well, yeah. That, and I write.”

“Novels? Articles? What?”

“Articles, mainly. Some newsletters and brochures, and things like that, for nonprofits. I'd like to write a book one day, but I guess I just haven't been inspired by the right subject yet.” I swallowed a mouthful of water and wiped my face with a napkin, feeling a little bit more at ease now that we were in familiar territory. Plus, I was beginning to get used to his good looks, and the focused way he regarded me whenever we were talking; it was still unnerving, a little bit, but not so much so that I was afraid I was going to drop my water glass right into my lap. “How about you? Where did you grow up?”

“Me? Oh, everywhere. My dad was in the military, so we traveled—Germany, Alaska, Florida, you name it. We were all over the place. Some good spots, and some that I wouldn't much care to revisit. At least it was interesting.”

“Did you have a favorite place?”

He mulled that one for a minute. “Alaska, I think. It's where I learned to climb, anyhow.”

“I've never been there. What's it like?”

“It's beautiful.”

“So where do your parents live now?”

It was the wrong question; I could tell that from the way his lips compressed into an even line before he answered me. “My mom lives in Florida. And my dad, I have no idea.” On the surface, his tone was light, but I could see I'd ventured into dangerous waters.