Cody turned his head toward me, smiling in the dim glow. “See? Cozy.”
I clutched the edge of my sleeping bag like a shroud. “If the Beast of Bray Road comes for us in the dead of night, I want it on record that this wasyouridea.”
“What the hell is the Beast of Bray Road?”
“It’s a local legend down in Elkhorn. A werewolf with glowing red eyes that stands on two legs and scratches on doors. We don’t even have a door to scratch on!”
He chuckled. “If he turns up, we’ll just have to cuddle closer to stay safe. Actually, werewolves are kinda hot. Maybe we’ll invite him to join us.”
I groaned. “Dear god. Camping reallyisporn.”
To my utter amazement, dinner was edible. More than edible. It was positively delicious.
Instead of the charred hotdogs or ash-flavored beans I’d been bracing for, Cody unwrapped a foil package to reveal a golden, buttery chicken and leek pie—procured, of course, from Pascal’s. He’d even thought to tuck a little tub of spiced relish into hispack, and we warmed the pie over the fire until the pastry flaked beneath our forks.
“This,” Cody declared, lifting a bite as steam curled upward. “Is camping done right.”
“This,” I corrected. “Is not camping. This is smuggling haute cuisine into the wilderness like a culinary outlaw.”
“Outlaw, huh?” He winked. “I can live with that.”
When the last buttery crumbs had been brushed from our laps, Cody folded the foil wrapping into a neat square, slipped it into a zip-lock bag, and tied it tight before hanging it from a tree branch well away from camp.
“I heard you had black bears,” he said by way of explanation.
“We do?” I panicked.
“You really don’t get out much, do you? Relax, we’ll be fine.”
Cody clearly wasn’t concerned. He leaned back against a log with a satisfied sigh. He patted the ground beside him, gesturing for me to join him.
I did, partly because he looked so damn handsome in the glow of the fire. Also because if a bear was going to jump out of the bushes, I needed someone to hide behind.
He wrapped one of his big arms tightly around me, pulling me close.
The forest hummed with unseen things—crickets thrumming, the distant falls crashing and splashing, leaves shifting high above. The flames crackled, throwing sparks into the dark. The shadows beyond the circle of light shifted and stirred, and I had the uneasy sense that at any moment something big and scary would come lurching out of the trees.
I needed a distraction. Any distraction.
“So,” I said, clearing my throat. “A travel writer… What makes a person want to be a travel writer?”
Cody smiled. “That’s a short question with a big answer. Do you want the long version or the abridged edition?”
“I’d prefer the longest possible version, actually. Something that lasts until sunrise.”
He chuckled, poking at the fire with a stick. “Fair enough. Honestly, I guess it started when I was a kid. I grew up on Magnetic Island with my parents. My dad was constantly coming and going, working in the mines, while Mum worked two jobs, one at a café in the morning, the other at the local pub at night. We didn’t have much. But sometimes, if she got home early from a shift, she’d read me the travel sections from old magazines she picked up at the café. I’d sit there staring at those pictures of mountains in Peru or markets in Morocco and think,I’ve got to see this for myself one day.”
He paused, eyes reflecting the fire, and shrugged. “So, when I got older, I saved up for a one-way ticket to Istanbul. I promised myself I could find my way across Europe with nothing but a few bucks and a whole lot of determination. I hitchhiked, I swindled my way onto a few trains, I even walked parts of it. In Budapest I washed dishes for three weeks for a little cash. I picked olives in Tuscany for a local farmer and polished shoes in a train station in Berlin for a whole month. A year later I made it to London and submitted a bunch of stories to a local magazine. They published all of them, one week after another. They even gave me my own column after that. But staying in one place was no longer an option for me. So I kept moving. I’d land somewhere, pitch a story, write it, sell it, and use the money to get the next plane out. I was officially a wanderer, a citizen of the planet, and I never wanted to stop seeing things, writing about things, experiencing everything the world had to offer.”
I tilted my head. “But doesn’t it ever get… lonely?”
His grin flickered in the firelight. “I’ve still got my own place on Maggie. I use it as a base every now and then. I know all the islanders, and they know me. But I never really stay long.” He paused for a moment; he’d avoided my question. With a sigh henodded. “Yeah, it gets lonely sometimes. You meet people, you say goodbye. Sometimes you fall for someone, and you’ve got to keep walking anyway. But the road becomes its own sort of companion, you know? There’s always something new around the corner.”
I studied him for a moment, the way his voice had dipped softer, the way the lines around his eyes deepened.
“I don’t think I’d like that,” I admitted. “Always leaving. Always losing people.”
He squeezed my shoulder. “That’s because you’re a roots guy, Brooks. You build towers and bookshops. I chase horizons. Doesn’t mean one’s better than the other. Just… different ways of living. Who knows. Maybe someday I’ll stop walking away. Maybe someday I’ll meet someone I never want to say goodbye to.”
