Unbound: (InterMix) (2 page)

Chapter Two

She was a water nymph. A weightless, ethereal goddess of the loch.

A mattress of undulating coolness under her back, sunshine heating her breasts and
belly and face. With her ears submerged, her pulse became the very heartbeat of the
earth, the cascade of her hair dancing in the gentle waves. She was more spirit than
flesh, a wisp of pure energy to be blown where the breeze wished to take her . . .

But the cold got her first. Her feet found the smooth stones and mush, bracing autumn
air clenching her back muscles. Weightlessness going, going, gone as she sloshed to
shore.

The water nymph was no more, and she was just Merry. Same old Merry, still thumbing
through the owner’s manual for this body she couldn’t yet call her own.

The breeze pebbled her dripping skin as she tiptoed between the sharper rocks to her
towel—a towel that was in desperate need of a good machine-washing after more than
two weeks’ trekking.

As she dried herself, she took in the landscape, thinking she’d never felt this small
before—a smallness that had nothing to do with her dress size or body mass index.
Those measures felt so abstract now.

The valleys of northwest Scotland were sweeping, the craggy black mountains grand
and ominous, the loch long and wide, wavering like old glass under a vast blue sky.
She was well off the popular Great Glen Way route, and the only sign of humanity she’d
spied in the past several days had been the ribbon of white smoke rising from the
chimney of a holiday cottage she’d passed early that morning.

Once dressed in her hiking pants and a zip-up, she perched on a boulder to tug on
thick wool socks. The rock poked rudely into her butt, and she nearly missed her old
padding. Two weeks’ backpacking had probably rounded up her total weight loss since
the previous summer to a tidy hundred pounds.

She’d fantasized about the day she’d hit that lovely round number. One hundred freaking
pounds.

In her imagination, she’d risen at a pious hour just after dawn, stepped on the scale,
clasped her hands with rapturous delight, then skipped down the hall to celebrate
the accomplishment with exactly three-quarters of a cup of high-fiber cereal and exactly
one-half cup of soy milk, a breakfast that—in her fantasy—she’d magically come to
find both palatable and satisfying. 220 calories. Write that down. 220—that’s sixteen
minutes on the treadmill at 6.2 miles per hour. That’s twenty-one minutes on the elliptical,
excluding warm-up, at 115 strides per minute at a 7.5 resistance.

Fucking numbers.

In her imagination, after said breakfast she’d head to work. She’d take a long lunch
break that day, and under the flattering lights of the J. Crew changing room she’d
discover she did indeed fit into a pair of size eight jeans. Jeans for which she’d
pay ninety dollars—more numbers, always numbers—smiling as she signed the receipt,
dutifully not thinking about the working conditions of Cambodian children.

Reality looked nothing like her expectations. The past two weeks’ journey had changed
all her perceptions, finally plugging her into an authentic model for qualifying all
these changes. Dozens of miles she never could’ve hiked in her old body. Steep hills
she never could have scaled and views she’d never have glimpsed from their peaks.
The feel of the wind or the weak autumn sun on her naked skin. This sensation of perfect
solitude. This mirrorlessness, with no one’s eyes on her body, not even her own. To
relate to her physicality from the inside, through what she could do, not how she
looked.

The numbers didn’t matter. The numbers were just markers people used to convince themselves
how much better or worse they were than others, to calculate their relative human
worth.

In no time at all this trip would be over, and in no time at all, Merry might be back
to giving a shit about the markers. Those rituals may have whittled the equivalent
of a fifth grader from her frame, but that compulsive level of vigilance wasn’t sustainable.
Plus Merry had tasted of the bacon-wrapped scallop, the fried pickle with ranch, the
brownie batter never to see the inside of an oven. She’d been tossed too many years
ago from the garden where there grew only carrot sticks and hundred-calorie packs
of pretzels, and there was no readmittance. Her mouth had lain in sin with too many
Reubens.

For now, no food diary. No logging her day’s cardio session. For as long as she was
out here, the numbers could go fuck themselves.

The numbers back home said Merry’s daily calorie budget was 1,450. She smiled, opening
a bag of cashews, eating them by the handful as she watched the breeze rippling the
loch. She’d surely blast past the 1,450 mark on these alone, inside five minutes.
Yet she’d burn them off by noon, humping her forty-pound pack over hill and dale,
tugging up her too-big hiking pants when they slipped low and chafed her recently
excavated hip bones.

Out here, her body wasn’t a collection of desirable parts and shameful ones, a thing
to be tricked and punished and outsmarted, outwilled. It was merely a vessel for food
and water and sunshine, a structure of muscle and bone, a capable and ready thing.
A machine primed for this trip—170 miles on foot, nearly three weeks to ponder all
this natural beauty and appreciate her success. Numbers that qualified her efforts
instead of tallying her female value.

She wrapped her hair in the towel and lay across a smooth stretch of grass, surrendering
to the smallness. Leaving her body behind as she shut her eyes and welcomed the sun’s
heat.

Two hours later, the cramps started.

***

It began as stabby pangs just beneath her ribs and a roiling in her stomach. She’d
had to scrap the day’s miles, hiking at a staggered pace back to the loch, lest she
get stranded too far from a water source. The pains were followed by a long night
of taunting half-sleep, of unsettling, looping dreams, twisted by a growing nausea.

Merry longed to vomit—surely it’d make this hounding dizziness go away—but that mercy
never came. The crisis moved to her bowels by dawn, and that didn’t quell the queasiness,
either.

The cramps sharpened and a headache grew, and no matter how much water she drank,
thirst dogged her. When her bottles were empty, the simple effort of crouching and
pumping the filter made her muscles ache and her limbs tremble.

Something was seriously wrong, and it probably wasn’t just the too-many dried apricots
she’d had for lunch the day before.

The little crofter’s cottage she’d passed the previous dawn couldn’t be far—two miles,
tops. Sadly, the route was uphill, and her pack felt as though it were filled with
cinder blocks. It hurt where the straps bound her, so badly she felt she must be bruising.
Dehydration made her light-headed, lining her mouth with cotton and chapping her lips.
She focused on each step, trying to lure her mind off the discomfort.
Right, left. Right, left.
She hummed cheery pop songs, punctuated by low moans each time a cramp twisted her
guts.

“Fucking
fuck
.”
She hugged her middle, gnashing her teeth through the latest pang.

Perhaps a mile up the hill, she dropped to her knees, toppled by the weight of the
pack, muscles too spent to catch her. Her palm found a rock and was rewarded with
a bloody scrape. The impact had barely hurt at all. And that didn’t feel right.

She made it to her feet, reeling.

Not even a hundred yards on, she fell a second time, tripping on a sharp outcropping
veiled by the wild grass. This time it was her head that found the rock.

White flashed. The pain didn’t follow for five seconds or more, but when it did, she
cried out. As the dancing spots blinked away, Merry lurched onto her side, fumbling
with shaking fingers to unsnap the buckles at her waist and chest. The pack tumbled
aside, feeling like half a ton of dead weight. She touched her temple. Her fingers
came away red and slick.

That’s not good.

I’m going to die out here. And I’ve never even been in love.

God, that was too pathetic. Too pathetic to accept, frankly.

For a time—a minute, an hour, a day, who knew—she stared into the hard blue sky and
listened to the river rushing, waiting for her limbs to re-materialize and her brain
to quiet, for panic to make room for calm. When it did, she struggled to her knees
and detached the plastic whistle fob from her backpack and gathered a water bottle
and compass. Before striking out from Glasgow she’d bought a GPS tracker, a clip-on
device that she now moved from her bag to her pants pocket. It wouldn’t do much aside
from lend her a vague sense that she was still tethered to some human being, someplace.
And if she perished out here, well, they might just find her before the crows did.

With that cheerful thought, she started back up the hill.

Yesterday the cottage had seemed no more than forty-five minutes’ hike. She should
have come upon it by now, surely. Or was panic making a snail’s pace feel like a sprint?

But finally, after seeming hours—stone walls, red door. A tiny house no bigger than
her apartment appearing beyond the rise.

“Thank you thank you thank you . . .”

A spasm of nausea curled her body. She groaned until it passed, sucking desperate
breaths through clenched teeth. Her arm ached as she dug the whistle from her pocket
and brought it to her parched lips. She blew. Barely a wheeze at first, but she puffed
into it with every step, the cottage growing closer, closer. She’d make it. She might
have to crawl, but she’d make it.

The blowing triggered a head rush, and a hundred paces from the little home, she fell
to her knees again. Her temple wailed as she got back up, but something else screamed—anger.
Panic. Frustration, that no one had heard her and opened the door. Had she imagined
that smoke?

No, someone maintained this place. The thatch on the roof was too tame, a broom leaning
against the doorframe not weathered enough to have been abandoned here. It must be
a holiday cottage. Please don’t let its renters have picked yesterday to head home . . .

“Hello?” she shouted, staggering the final few yards. Her fist thumped the heavy wooden
door with a rattle, compounding the ache in her arm. She pounded and shouted, the
impact as weak as her voice. “Hello! Please! I’m hurt.”

An aluminum sign was hung to her left, the kind you might buy at a hardware store.
No Soliciting.
Too exhausted to make sense of it, she put her lips to the whistle and mustered a
mighty breath just as the door swung in.

The man clapped his hands to his ears, wincing. Merry was so startled she let the
fob fall from her lips. Blue eyes widened, aimed at her bleeding head.

“Hello,” she said dumbly, feeling drunk, stabbed in the guts at random intervals by
the cramps, stabbed in the temple by her throbbing cut. “I may be dying. I’m not sure.”

The door opened wider. A dark-haired man was steering her inside, around a corner.
Something hard slammed into her butt and legs—a chair seeming to rise up from the
floor to collide with her body. She gripped the seat at her sides with both hands,
convinced it was floating, that she’d flip over and tumble off if she didn’t hold
tight. She wanted to lie down. On the nice, solid floor, where maybe the world would
stop rocking this way. She tried to slide her butt from the seat, but the stranger
stopped her, pinning her shoulders.

“No, no. Stay put.”

“I need to lie down.”

“You can’t. You’ve had a nasty knock on the head.” He crouched before her, hand still
clamped firmly to her shoulder. Gently drawing back the skin above and below her lids,
he peered at her eyes. “You’ve not got double vision, have you?”

“No, just a terrible headache. And everything’s spinning. And I’m nauseous.”

He continued to scan her eyes with his blue ones.
Gray-blue like the lochs, and the autumn sky just before dusk,
Merry mused, still feeling drunk. Cold like slate, hard and sharp. His overgrown
hair untamed, like the wild heather.
Whoa, deep.

The man covered her eyes with his warm hands, then took them away. “Your pupils are
good.” The scent of tea sweetened his breath. God knew what hers smelled of.

He’s hot,
she thought idly, a thought so inappropriate given the circumstances, she chalked
it up to the head injury.

Some clarity returned as she caught her breath, and the room slowly ceased tumbling.
She managed to accept a mug of cold water and emptied half of it. It seemed to douse
the steam fogging her brain, though the nausea and piercing headache remained.

The man took the mug and set it on a small table at her side, crouching once more.

“Hold still.” He pushed back her hair to examine whatever damage the fall had done.
She studied his face as he assessed her injury, trying to make sense of him after
all these days of perfect isolation.

His stubble was flirting with beardhood, black save for a patch of silver below his
lip, and she guessed he was about forty. He had a deep pair of creases between his
brows and another set bracketing his mouth—stern and steely things. There was less
gray in his dark hair, but a healthy streaking at his temples. His expression was
hard, but whether it was his typical look or merely one he reserved for shrill, bleeding
hikers who barged babbling into his cottage . . .

No matter how stern or scowly he might be, no matter if Merry was concussed, it didn’t
diminish her initial assessment. He was hot. Strong nose, distrustful blue eyes. Sort
of down-and-out, rugged hotness, like a sexy, desperate fugitive. Which might explain
the whole living-in-the-middle-of-nowhere thing. In any case, he didn’t look like
a man on vacation.

But definitely hot.

Maybe he’ll rip his shirt to pieces, to make bandages for my head.

Oh shit, I am so hard up.

“Stay there.” The man stood and disappeared into the next room.