Cheryl Strayed - Wild

A moment later, Jonathan appeared and led me to his car, an old Buick Skylark he called Beatrice.

“So how was work?” I asked. Sitting beside him at last, I didn’t feel nervous the way I had when I’d been in the bar and he’d been watching me.

“Good,” he said. As we drove into the darkness beyond Ashland, he told me about living on the organic farm, which was owned by friends of his. He lived there free in exchange for some work, he explained, glancing over at me, his face softly lit by the glow of the dash. He turned down one road and another until I had absolutely no sense of where I was in relation to Ashland, which for me really meant where I was in relation to Monster. I regretted not having brought it. I hadn’t been so far from my pack since I began the PCT, and it felt strange. Jonathan turned in to a driveway, drove past an unlit house where a dog barked, and followed a rutted dirt road that took us back among rows of corn and flowers until finally the headlights swooped across a large boxy tent that was erected on a wooden platform and he parked.

“That’s my place,” he said, and we got out. The air was cooler than it had been in Ashland. I shivered and Jonathan put his arm around me so casually it felt like he’d done it a hundred times before. We walked among the corn and the flowers under the full moon, discussing the various bands and musicians one or the other or both of us loved, recounting stories from shows we’d seen.

“I’ve seen Michelle Shocked live three times,” Jonathan said.

“Three times?”

“One time I drove through a snowstorm for the show. There were only like ten people in the audience.”

“Wow,” I said, realizing there was no way I was going to keep my pants on with a man who’d seen Michelle Shocked three times, no matter how repulsive the flesh on my hips was.

“Wow,” he said back to me, his brown eyes finding mine in the dark.

“Wow,” I said.

“Wow,” he repeated.

We’d said only one word, but I felt suddenly confused. We didn’t seem to be talking about Michelle Shocked anymore.

“What kind of flowers are these?” I asked, pointing to the stalks that blossomed all around us, suddenly terrified that he was going to kiss me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to kiss him. It was that I hadn’t kissed anyone since I’d kissed Joe more than two months before, and every time I’d gone that long without kissing, I’d become sure that I’d forgotten how to do it. To delay the kiss, I asked him about his job at the farm and his job at the club, and about where he was from and who his family was, and who his last girlfriend was and how long they’d been together and why they’d broken up, and all the while he barely answered me and asked me nothing in return.

It didn’t matter much to me. His hand around my shoulder felt good, and then it felt even better when he moved it to my waist and by the time we’d circled back to his tent on the platform and he turned to kiss me and I realized I still did, indeed, know how to kiss, all the things he hadn’t exactly answered or asked me fell away.

“This has been really cool,” he said, and we smiled at each other in that daffy way two people who just kissed each other for the first time do. “I’m glad you came out here.”

“Me too,” I said. I was intensely aware of his hands on my waist, so warm through the thin fabric of my T-shirt, skimming the top edge of my jeans. We were standing in the space between Jonathan’s car and his tent. They were the two directions I could go: either back to my bed under the eaves in the hostel in Ashland alone, or into his bed with him.

“Look at the sky,” he said. “All the stars.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, though I didn’t look at the sky. Instead, I scanned the dark land, punctuated by tiny dots of light, houses and farms spread out over the valley. I thought of Clyde, all alone under this same sky, reading good books in his truck. I wondered where the PCT was. It seemed far away. I realized that I hadn’t said anything to Jonathan about it other than the bit I’d shouted into his ear over the music the night before. He hadn’t asked.

“I don’t know what it was,” Jonathan said. “The minute I saw you, I knew I had to come over and talk to you. I knew you’d be totally rad.”

“You’re rad too,” I said, though I never used the word rad .

He leaned forward and kissed me again and I kissed him back with more fervor than I had before, and we stood there kissing and kissing between his tent and his car with the corn and the flowers and the stars and the moon all around us, and it felt like the nicest thing in the world, my hands running slowly up into his curly hair and down over his thick shoulders and along his strong arms and around to his brawny back, holding his gorgeous male body against mine. There hasn’t ever been a time that I’ve done that that I haven’t remembered all over again how much I love men.

“Do you want to go inside?” Jonathan asked.

I nodded and he told me to wait so he could go in and turn on the lights and the heat, then he returned a moment later, holding the door flaps of the tent open for me, and I stepped inside.

It wasn’t a tent like the sort of tent I’d spent any time in. It was a luxury suite. Warmed by a tiny heater and tall enough to stand up in, with room to walk around in the area that wasn’t consumed by the double bed that sat in the center. On either side of the bed there were little cardboard dressers on top of which sat two battery-operated lights that looked like candles.

“Sweet,” I said, standing next to him in the small space between the door and the end of his bed, then he pulled me toward him and we kissed again.

“I feel funny asking this,” he said after a while. “I don’t want to presume, because it’s fine with me if we just, you know, hang out — which would be totally rad — or if you want me to take you back to the hostel — right now, even, if that’s what you want to do, though I hope it isn’t what you want to do. But … before — I mean, not that we’re necessarily going to do this — but in case we … I mean, I don’t have anything, any diseases or anything, but if we … Do you happen to have a condom?”

“You don’t have a condom?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“ I don’t have a condom,” I said, which seemed the most ridiculous thing ever, since in fact I had carried a condom over scorching deserts and icy slopes and across forests, mountains, and rivers, and through the most agonizing, tedious, and exhilarating days only to arrive here, in a heated luxury tent with a double bed and battery-operated candle lights, staring into the eyes of a hot, sweet, self-absorbed, brown-eyed, Michelle Shocked — loving man without that condom just because I had two palm-sized patches of mortifyingly rough skin on my hips and I’d vowed so fiercely not to take my pants off that I’d purposely left it behind in my first aid kit in my backpack in the town that was located in God-knows-what direction instead of doing the reasonable, rational, realistic thing and putting it in my little faux purse that smelled like white gasoline.

“It’s okay,” he whispered, taking both of my hands into his. “We can just hang out. There are a lot of things we can do, actually.”

And so we recommenced kissing. And kissing and kissing and kissing, his hands running everywhere over my clothes, my hands running everywhere over his.

“Do you want to take your shirt off?” he whispered after a while, pulling away from me, and I laughed because I did want to take my shirt off, so then I took it off and he stood there looking at me in the black lace bra I’d packed months before because I thought when I got to Ashland I might want to wear it and I laughed again, remembering that.