Chapter 7: The Visitor

Blaine walked up the ridge path ahead of Perry and tried not to think about the fact that he had just spent an hour inside him.

It was not working.

His thighs ached in a way he liked, his shirt smelled of creek, and every part of him that had touched Perry was still humming.

He had not planned for this.

He was thirty-one years old and had read rock for a living for a decade.

He could look at a cliff face and say what had happened to it.

He had never once been able to read himself.

At the clearing a stranger stood talking with Dad.

He was about thirty-three, lean, with a sunburned nose and a hiker's pack at his feet.

He stood easily, with his weight on one hip.

"There you are," Dad said. "Boys, this is the postdoc from the hydrology lab I told you about. He walked in over the washout."

"The culvert's a mess," the stranger said cheerfully. "Best part of my week."

He shook Blaine's hand, once, brisk and dry.

Then he turned to Perry, and Blaine watched the handshake go on a second longer.

"You're the ecologist," the postdoc said. "Your dad says you've got the best plot data in the department."

"My dad is biased."

"Is he? I read your paper on the riparian transects. It's the cleanest design I've seen in years."

Perry laughed.

It was a real laugh, surprised and boyish, the kind Blaine heard maybe twice a year, and it went into him sideways.

He stood there with his hands in his pockets and ate it.

Dinner was beans and rice under the cook shelter's tin roof.

Blaine pushed the beans to the edge of the plate, because they had been cooked with the wrong kind of onion, and nobody noticed.

Keep reading free with an account. Start One Tent My Forbidden Stepbrother from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.