Love Not at First Sight by Sarah Ready
5
Veronica
Life definitely knowshow to throw twists and turns. This morning I was running from the idea of my soul mate coming to town, now I’m just praying that I make it out of this cave alive. I want to get back to my friends, be there for the birth of my goddaughter.
I couldn’t care less about Frederick Knight.
I look over at the soft glow of blue light surrounding Sam. I wonder for a second if fate pulled a number on me and knocked me into this cave with my soul mate, but the man I’m with isn’t Frederick Knight. This man’s name is Sam and you can learn a lot about someone when put in a survival situation. So far I know he’s level-headed, he risks himself for others, and although he was reckless coming into the cave, he doesn’t strike me as someone who is careless. He seems decent and I think…I can trust him. I know I can. He saved me. Pulled me from the water when I passed out and kept me from hypothermia. My motto has always been love makes you weak. I usually extend that to not depending on men. Because they’re all players or wanna-be players—ad nauseam. Except…none of that seems to apply here. Nothing in my past relates to a situation where I’m lost in a dark cave with a man I don’t know and have to depend on. And who doesn’t seem like a player or a wanna-be player at all.
“There’s a draft coming from the right,” he says. He holds his hand in front of the tunnel entrance.
I feel it too. A slight pulling of air up and away from us. I don’t know whether that means it leads to an exit or farther into the cave. I think I remember some cavers telling me that it could be either, that drafts aren’t a reliable indicator of an exit. Cavers love to sit around drinking beer and reminiscing about caving. I sometimes run into them on my longer hikes. Right now, I’m wishing I paid more attention.
“I think…” I pause. “Can you hold your light over the ground? Look to see if there are any signs of humans or animals coming through before us?”
“Good thought.”
He squats down and holds his watch over the ground. I bend down and scan the earth as he moves the light over the dirt and rocks. The only sign of life is our own footprints. No other markings. No rubble, or grooves, or tracks, or anything. Nothing to guide our decision.
“Well, there goes that thought.” I squint at the ground. The cave is mostly limestone, a dull yellowish tinged white. The ground is a mix of dirt, some loose rocks, and solid stone. Already, everything looks the same. It will be so easy to get turned around in here. I bend and grab some of the smaller stones.
“I’m going to make a cairn. I don’t want to get turned around.” I start stacking the rocks at the entrance to the tunnel on the right.
“Right. I’ll make an arrow pointing back the way we came.”
We take a minute to stack a noticeable cairn, and a rock arrow pointing back to the pool. When we’re finished I stand and smack the dirt from my hands.
We decide that we should leave something at the pool in case rescuers rappel down. After a quick hike back and a discussion we leave a rock message stating Sam and Veronica, the date, and an arrow pointing the way we went.
Back at the fork we take the tunnel to the right. Sam leads. Before long we’re both stooped over and using our hands along the walls to pull us through the tight confines. The wet rock is cold and slimy and my hands slip over the stone. The air smells strongly of mineral, like you’ve held up a handful of gravel after a rainstorm and stuck your nose in it. Every so often, the soft glow of Sam’s watch hits a stalactite and it looks like a face, or an animal, or in one case, a fried egg. The only noise is the scrape and the echo of my boots and his shoes against the ground and our labored breathing.
This tunnel feels as tight and confined as a stone coffin.
The thought scrapes down my skin and lifts the hairs on my arms.
“Talk to me,” I say.
Sam stops and I pull up short behind him.
“What?”
I shake my head. “I don’t…” I pause, “I think it’ll be easier if we talk.”
“Alright.”
I pull in the mineral-tinged air. “Let’s make an agreement,” I say. “Nothing’s off limits. We can say anything. No judgments. Talk about anything we want. And then, if we ever make it out…I mean, when we make it out, what we said stays in the cave.”
“You have a lot of secrets?” he asks, and I hear the smile in his voice.
“No,” I say. I shrug. “I just don’t want to, okay I don’t think we’re going to die, but if we do, I don’t want to be with a stranger when I do. I want…I’d like to be with someone I know and trust. Someone I like. So…”
“I’m a computer geek,” he says suddenly.
And he says it in such a way that I start to laugh. “What?”
“I love computers. Programming, app development, the beauty of a perfect line of code. I used to sit in front of a computer for hours on end and go so deep in the code that I forgot to eat. Forgot the time and whether it was day or night.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s pretty awesome.”
“It’s…what?”
He sounds surprised. I can just make out his head turning quickly back to me.
“It’s awesome that you love something so much. Lots of people don’t have that.”
He’s quiet for a moment, then, “You’re right.” Again he sounds surprised.
Then he starts moving forward again. I follow after him. He keeps talking, his voice echoing back to me and filling the darkness.
“I let some people convince me otherwise.”
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody.” He pauses. “That’s not true. No secrets, right?”
“Exactly,” I say. I stoop lower. My breaths grow shorter. I’m not naturally claustrophobic, but the walls closing in are starting to get to me.
“We’re going to have to crawl here,” Sam says. I hear him lowering to the earth. I drop down onto all fours and crawl forward. Suddenly, I feel tears at the corners of my eyes. We crawl forward and all I want to do is turn around. What if the ceiling caves in, we’ll be trapped, we’ll die in this rocky coffin. A tear slides down my cheek.
“Who was it?” I ask desperately. “Who made you believe that?” I need to hear his voice.
“I don’t remember when it started. I guess at school. I was awkward intelligent, not the kind that teachers like or kids admire, but the uncomfortable, socially unacceptable kind.”
“What does that mean?”
“The kind where you don’t fit. By the time I was eight I was reading college textbooks and building my first computer. I was bored in school and teachers didn’t know what to do with me. I got terrible grades and was labeled a troubled student. My parents didn’t understand how I could understand books on quantum computing and build databases but barely pass third grade.”
“It’s because you hated it.”
“I hated it.”
I follow his slow pace through the tunnel and keep moving forward, following the sound of his voice.
“So you were picked on.”
“You could say that.”
I can tell from the guarded sound of his voice that he was more than picked on.
“I wasn’t good at sports. I wasn’t good-looking. I was painfully shy. Just picture the stereotypical Brainiac in teen movies and you have me pegged.”
I have a picture of him in my mind now. He probably wears glasses for reading and working on the computer. I bet he doesn’t care about fashion or keep up with trends. He has a confident voice so I think he’s not bad-looking, but also not gorgeous like…ugh, Frederick Knight. No, I bet Sam has a pleasantly average face. With intelligent eyes and a steady expression. I like the picture I have of him.
“You weren’t bitter though. Or spiteful,” I say. I get the feeling that it may have hurt at the time, but he’s long over it.
He laughs. “No. I was too busy working on my programming ideas to be bitter.”
“So who made you ashamed of flying your freak flag?”
He snorts. “Do you have a freak flag?”
“Obviously. I have a two-year supply of food and resources all ready for the apocalypse. It’s all in my DIY fallout shelter. Man, if only I had a tenth of those supplies right now.”
“That’s incredible.”
“We’re not talking about me,” I say. “Who was it?”
“Me.”
“What?”
“It was me. Nobody can make you believe anything without your consent. I chose to believe it.”
I’m so surprised that I stop crawling for a moment. I’ve never known anyone to so calmly state that fact.
I pull myself over a rough section of rock. The tunnel is only about two and a half feet tall now. I’m not sure we could turn around it we wanted to. If this dead ends we’ll have to back out.
Sam grunts and I hear rock scraping. “It’s tight here,” he says. He kicks at the ground and keeps going. I hold my breath as I squeeze through the narrowing. Then, the tunnel opens up a bit and I’m able to stoop again instead of crawl.
“I got married in college.”
“Yeah?” My voice is high, and I realize that I hadn’t thought of him as married. It strikes me as wrong.
“Louisa. She was the first and only girl I dated before marriage. I didn’t have any experience and I thought…”
“What?”
“I started a company with my roommate. He was my best friend. The company was successful. I developed the software, he sold and marketed it. We were on top of the world.”
Oh no. I can see where this is going.
“But he and my wife had been sleeping together since before the wedding. I found out about the affair and they declined to stop. So, she got the company in the divorce settlement and I got my side business.”
They were players. I feel anger for him.
I adjust my image of him. He’s a comfortably average-looking, techy entrepreneur who is struggling to make a living after receiving a heavy blow.
“So…you stopped doing your computer thing?”
“You could say that.”
“Because you believed she cheated on you because you were a computer prodigy?”
“Sounds pretty idiotic when you say it that way.”
“I hope you know that whatever she said to you to blame you or make the affair look like your fault, none of it was true. When people have affairs they reach out and grab ahold of any excuse they can for what they did. Just as long as they don’t have to say, I did this.”
“So, are you telling me,” he says, and there’s another smile in his voice, “that she didn’t cheat because I love computers and am a super geek?” I can feel the laughter coming off him.
“I guarantee it,” I say.
“I like you,” he says.
I grin, and the dark doesn’t feel so scary.
“I like you, too,” I say. I have to amend my statement from the other day. There are three types of men, players, wanna-be players, and good men. Like Sam.
Up ahead, there’s the sound of rocks sliding, then Sam drops out from in front of me.
“Sam?” I call.
I hear him climb back up. I reach forward and feel the top of his shoulders. They’re solid and muscular.
“It’s another cavern,” he says. There’s excitement in his voice. He grabs my arms and pulls me down. I slide against his side and drop to my feet. I stay in his arms, pressed tightly against him. It feels good to stand and I don’t want to step away from him. After so long crawling through that tunnel, separated by the dark, I need to feel the heat of him.
He squeezes me to his side and I hold him.
Then he lights his watch and holds it high.
“Oh…wow,” I say.
It’s unbelievable. It’s…
“Is that the only way across?” I ask.
“I think so.”
We both look at the edge of the light. It spreads from his watch in a weak beam and traces the white limestone.
“It’s a bridge,” I say.
He brings his hand down and pulls me closer. His arms tense around me and I can tell that he’s worried. For me.
“I’m alright,” I say.
It’s a natural stone bridge, an arch that hangs above a dark chasm. If we want to keep going we have to cross it, an unknown, that extends beyond what we can see.
“We can turn around,” he says. “Try the other fork.”
“Alright. Yes, let’s turn around.” The metallic taste of panic is overwhelming.
He lifts me up and I start to scramble back up to the tunnel. But because of our previous passage, the displacement of rocks, or the echoing of my climb back up, something shifts the rocks in the tunnel. There’s a loud crashing noise, a rumble that shakes the tunnel, then the whole thing collapses. Sam yanks me down right before a section of the roof falls. He drops to the ground and throws his body over mine. A rush of dust shoots out of the tunnel and gravel sprays over us.
Finally, the noise and dust settle.
“I don’t think,” I say, “that we’re going back that way.”
