feel dead inside, you know? Eventually it struck me that I was holding back with the vets I was working with, and that wasn’t fair to them, or even helpful, so I decided to get away from everything. Try to find the parts of me that seemed to have gotten either gutted or worn out.”
He pivoted as he squatted, and looked at her over his shoulder. His expression was kind. “You picked a good place to refresh. Well, except for Buddy.”
“Yeah, there is that.”
He turned back to the cooler. “You spared no expense, I see.”
“I figured since you were kind enough to offer me lodging for a few nights, a mini banquet was the least I could do. I hope it’s possible to cook on that stove, though. For all my military training, I never got much past heating an MRE.”
He laughed and rose. “Trust me, nobody can outcook me on a woodstove or open fire.”
“Show me how?”
“With pleasure.”
But something had changed, and she was quite certain she was responsible for it. She had caused him to grow cautious with her shutdown, and now that she had she wished she could backtrack and be more open. Yet she didn’t know where to start. There was a lot of her past she didn’t want to look at, and working with vets had made her more of a listener than a talker. So what now?
What now proved easy with Craig, though. He walked her through cooking chicken breasts with some of the Marsala wine she had brought to drink, boiling pasta in a small pot, roasting some yellow squash and zucchini on a flat pan. “Not a whole lot of spices to work with, but we’ll manage.”
She wondered if she was going to remember any of his tutelage at all, because her awareness of him as a man seemed to be overwhelming her thoughts. Each accidental brush of their hands or arms made flame leap to her nerve endings. A deep ache was trying to grow between her thighs, and it seemed far more important than how to cook on a woodstove.
While they ate, she managed to suppress the longings he awoke so easily, or at least bank them like the fire in a stove. All the while, she knew they were apt to burst into flame again. Desperate for a different line of thought, she tried to bridge the gap again. “Did you always want to be a forester?”
His gray eyes twinkled in the lamplight. “Well, I can vaguely remember wanting to be a fireman, then a policeman. Or maybe it was the other way around. At one point I was determined I was going to be a truck driver.”
“When did that change?”
“I was about twelve at the time. We were on a vacation, Oregon I think, and I saw clear-cutting for the first time in my life. Don’t ask me why, but that offended me at such a deep level I mentioned it, and my dad responded that they’d plant new trees.”
“But?”
He shook his head. “I looked at the big old trees, and those huge swaths of scars over the mountainsides, and thought about how long it was going to take for those big old trees to grow back. I’d be an old man, I figured. Then I started wondering about what all the wildlife did after the loggers came through. The birds, the bears, the raccoons, the beavers, all of it. Then it began to rain as we were driving through one of those cuts, and I watched soil start to wash away.”
She put her fork down and studied him. “You were very aware for a twelve-year-old.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I just know by the time we finished that trip I was into it. Researching everything I could find about the effects of clear-cutting and so on, and before long I’d made up my mind I was going to save forests.”
“That’s wonderful. Truly. But how did the marines fit in?”
“Military family all the way back. Tradition. Every son must serve. Frankly, it never occurred to me to do anything else. It was how I was brought up. What about you?”
“Much more mundane. I needed a job, my father wasn’t well and the army seemed like the answer as well as a place where I could do something really useful.”
“Some answer. Did you always want to paint?”
She picked up her fork again. “This chicken is really good, Craig. Thanks. As for painting...” She looked back over the years. “I guess