Dirty Little Secrets(113)

Robin shook her head and looked at me with those black eyes of hers, which I swear are hypnotizing. “You’re a guy, it’s different for you. Besides, I like your smell.”

Lifting my arm up, I took a quick sniff of my armpit, and I shook my head. “There’s pheromones, and then there’s that,” I objected.

Seized by a sudden burst of childishness, I tore off my clothes until I was down to just my boxer briefs that I was wearing under my long underwear. Running across the grass, I was tempted to leap into the water, but I knew it was pretty shallow, so instead I ran in quickly, the frigid water shocking me into a high-pitched bellow that I don’t think I’ve made since I got a basketball in my nuts by accident back in high school.

I’ve taken showers in colder water, but not much colder, during my deployments. I knew the drill, rubbing my body as furiously as possible to try and get as much of the dirt and grime off as I could before hypothermia set in or my balls shriveled to the size of raisins. Ducking my head, I let the water stream through my hair and down my neck and started wading toward the shoreline.

I saw that Robin was waiting for me with a shocked expression on her face as she held the t-shirt she had used to dry off with when she washed up. I waved it aside, instead going near the fire and jumping up and down, letting the water flow off of me naturally while the exercise and the fire warmed my body somewhat. When I was what Rebekah calls “drip-dry,” I took the t-shirt and rubbed myself all over until my skin glowed pinkish. I finished off by rubbing my hair dry, then sitting down on top of our sleeping bags to wipe as much of the dirt from the bottom of my feet as I could, while Robin pulled out a spare set of clothes for me.

“Thanks,” I said, pulling on the fresh underwear and thermals. “I forgot how damn cold doing that can be.”

Robin laughed and grinned. “Well, it was quite a show, even though it may have been the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And you forgot to use soap.”

I could tell she was joking, but I played along, reaching for my top and pulling it up my torso. “Well, if I gotta do it again . . . ”





Chapter 8





Wes




It was another two days before we made it to Williston Lake, which was the largest of the chain of lakes I had been walking us down. The only problem was the size of the thing. I don’t know exactly how the lake came to be, although on the map I saw a dam, so I guess it’s not entirely natural, but Williston Lake is huge, at least a hundred and fifty miles long. My map didn’t have any sort of details as to what was around the lake, but I knew we had to reach some sort of civilization by the end of it, if anything at the dam itself.

“Just a bit further,” I said, trying to put a brave spin on things. The pure math was, we could walk another five days just on the lake itself before reaching the dam if we had really bad luck. We had only two ration envelopes left, and the snake meat gave out the day before. I was starting to feel the effects of slow starvation and Robin looked even worse. Her body was nowhere near as prepared for this as I was, and her normally lean, sexy figure was becoming a bit gaunt. Her cheekbones, which I had always thought lent her a bit of an air of aristocracy with their high, rounded curves, now stood out even more and had taken on a sharpish angle.

It was all the exercise, I knew. Back in the plane, I had lied to Robin when I said that we could get by on only one ration pack each with supplementation from foraging. That would have been true if we had been able to follow our first plan, where I had us staying by a lake shore and just relaxing, going on five or six mile nature walks and a lot of lounging around. Instead, we were hiking twenty to thirty miles a day, wearing packs, and sleeping out of doors constantly. Our bodies were going through calories at a very high rate, plain and simple. We should have been eating two, maybe even three rations a day, and even with supplementation we weren’t eating half of that.

I had tried my best to keep Robin as strong as possible. I don’t know if she noticed, but when it came time to divvy out the rations, I made sure she got the tastier ones, and a lion’s share of the foraged food. Also, whenever I set aside parts of my ration for the next day’s breakfast, I made sure she ate at least half of my share as well as all of what she had set aside. I had a bit more experience with the conditions we found ourselves in and could keep going longer. Still, both of us were starting to show the signs of our slow starvation, and I wanted to get attention as quickly as possible.

“All right, let’s take a break,” I said, looking around. I wanted to see the lay of the land, and see if there were any potential sites of civilization closer than just hoping and staying on the same side of the lake we started on. Also, I wanted to find some food. “Ten minutes?”