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Chapter 10: Questions
~E L L I O T~
I have to wonder what he could possibly be thinking as he watches us take barrels from the pile next to the shed. He’s impossible to predict. The Captain stands like any other soldier would. His hands are crossed behind his back, his feet are shoulder width apart, his neck straightened out, and his chin slightly tilted upwards. The two white lines on the left shoulder of his uniform glow in the bright sunlight. The light overhead deepens the shadows on his face. The darkness cast by his brow hides his eyes.
“Elliot.” I tear my gaze away from the enigmatic Captain at the sound of my name. Davie smiles anxiously at me. “Do you want to share a tree?”
I attempt to smile back. “Sure.”
The barrels are much heavier than they look. Davie and I tow two of the barrels over to one of the many trees. The orchard is actually quite pretty. Speckles of sunlight bleed through the dense canopy onto the dark earth. The wooden hut and the dirt path makes it all very picturesque. And then Harry stands in the middle of it all, his narrowed eyes, his gleaming gun and his slick forehead. He looks like footage straight out of a war documentary.
“I think if we take off our shoes we could climb easier,” I say, turning my back to Harry and looking back up at the tree.
Davie nods, grazing his fingers over the bark. “Sounds like a good idea.” Removing my shoes, the soil feels cool under my feet. I wiggle my toes as I search for a place to start climbing.
I’ve seen Davie around the clinic in Norton. When he was little he was always a bit jittery. My parents were friends with his until my father and both his parents got recruited. He began living by himself at only fourteen and it all went down hill from there. He’d come by the clinic every week complaining about some ache that didn’t exist. Jade told him he wasn’t allowed to work with guns because of how jumpy he was, and is. He’s just one of those people who is strung up so tightly he’s affected by the tiniest things. This really isn’t the best situation for him to be in. I’m surprised he hasn’t had a heart attack.
I fall out of the tree a couple times. My thighs burn from the run yesterday and my biceps protest from the stretch. Finally, I get a good hold on one of the branches and heave myself up. I move to a different branch so that Davie can lift himself into the tree. The smell of apples is intoxicating.
When I was little, Oliver and I used to go out into the woods and climb trees all the time. More than a few times we got a bit rough and one of us would end up falling. When we were about ten Oliver came up with a game where we would duel with sticks on one branch. The loser is the first to fall off. In the beginning, I would win most of our duels. The two of us would come home covered in scratches and bruises. I even have a scar on my elbow from scraping it against the trunk. As we got older, Oliver grew taller and stronger and I began to lose more often. Wanting to prove myself, I said that we should be able to shove each other and not just hit each other with sticks. I thought that with being shorter, this would prove to my advantage. But I underestimated his strength and ended up with a broken nose and a scar above my eye to show for it. Oliver refused to duel with me after that.
“So you work in the clinic right?” Davie intervenes on my reminiscing. It’s probably for the best. I shouldn’t get too nostalgic anyway.
“Yeah I went to the clinic a lot when I was little and I think Luna took a liking to me.” I smile to myself as I reach for another apple. I’ve made a cradle with my shirt to hold the fruit, exposing my midriff. I take trips to deposit the apples to my barrel below when I can’t hold anymore. We’ve been in the tree for about an hour and I have surprisingly filled a little more than half the barrel.
“Is she alright? Luna?” he asks.
I don’t look at him. “Yeah, I think I’ve seen her around.” I don’t think I have.
“How’s Blair?”
“She’s here.”
“Alright?”
“I think so.”
I drop the apples into my barrel, not really caring if they get bruised or not. My muscles are already worn. I refuse to get in and out of the tree for the sake of fruit.
“Summer?” Davie had always asked so many questions.
I sigh again. I feel like I sigh so much. “I think my Mum is a bit shaken up about everything. You know how she is.” I look over my shoulder at Davie. His hands shake violently. He clings to the branch with one hand and grabs apples with another. He throws them in his own barrel, one at a time.
“So your whole family is here?”
“They made it.” I don’t know whether to sigh in relief or not. They have made it, but was that a good thing?
“Oliver too?” I think for a moment that these questions would be insensitive if they hadn’t made it, but I brush it off because they have and I’m thankful.
“I think it is because of him that we made it.” I climb a little higher in the tree. It’s a bit hard one handed. I get a glimpse of Harry in my peripheral vision. His neck is craned to watch me climb. I quickly look away and I climb higher.
“And how are you?”
This feels like such an odd question to ask. But it isn’t at all. We are making small talk and he is asking me how I am. A man, threatening to kill us if we don’t do enough work, is watching us with a gun and a pay check and he is asking how I am.
“I’m well.” How am I? Am I well? I suppose I am. I guess I have to be. We are making small talk in our graveyard.
“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” Davie rasps somberly. His gaze is dark and dejected.
I’ve never been good at comforting people. I can barely comfort myself. When my Dad got recruited, my mother spent most of her time crying. I left at the crack of dawn and didn’t come back until curfew. And when I came back, I slept. Sometimes I think my mother resents me for my lack of empathy during those times.
Completely out of my element, I simply stare at him. His statement hangs in the air. The solemn mood becomes suffocating.
Without responding, I decide to climb a little higher. I can feel the blisters forming on my palms as my skin moves against the bark. A gentle breeze brushes against my exposed stomach. The air feels much clearer from twenty feet in the air.
If I were to fall I would hurt myself. The thought is strangely thrilling as I lift myself onto the next branch. Unable to use my other hand that is holding the apples, climbing is difficult as the branches grow thinner near the top. The movements become almost mechanic as I move higher and higher, branch to branch.
I clutch the branch above me and use a notch in the trunk as leverage. I almost get a steady grip when my foot suddenly slips. Frantically, I drop my shirt and throw my arms around the branch. My chin bangs painfully against the wood and blood pools in my mouth when I accidentally bite my tongue. Several apples tumble through the branches, narrowly missing Davie’s head and landing on the ground. My legs dangle helplessly.
There is a couple moments of silence. I’m able to look down to see Davie pressed against the trunk with his hands covering his head. He whimpers into his knees and hesitantly looks up. When he sees me clinging to the branch he lets out a sigh of relief.
“You okay?” Always questions.
I don’t answer him as I flail my feet around in search of proper footing. I try the notch again but my foot slips from it, leaving a small cut on my heel. I find a branch but after putting weight on it the weak limb snaps. Davie lets out a startled yelp.
“Stop breaking branches. They’re going to hit me,” I can barely see him fearfully hugging the trunk.
“All right genius what do you suggest I do?” I snarl breathlessly. As I talk, my chin that is pressed against the bark stings. My foot brushes against a bough but it is just out of reach. I try to calm my breathing and clutch the branch tighter. The bark scrapes against my neck.
He sighs. “Try lifting yourself up.” I mock his voice in my head. My childish side coming out of my frustration. Try lifting yourself up. Shut the fvck up Davie.
Despite my agitated thoughts, I attempt his idea anyway. Unfamiliar to this much physical exertion in so little time, my chest aches from my pounding heart and panicked lungs inside my ribs.
First, I try to lift myself up onto the branch using only my upper body strength. This proves unsuccessful very quickly when I become closer to falling out of the tree than gaining balance.
“Do you need any help?” Davie calls up to me.
“No,” I retort briskly. I would do this myself.
Next, I try to swing my legs over the branch to straddle it. This probably would have worked had it been the first thing I tried but the slipping of my body from previous attempts makes this tactic difficult. So I’m left panting, suspended from the tree.
I hang there for a moment. I try to figure it out myself, the damsel in distress not at all my type of gig. I try a few more faint-hearted attempts to find near by branches or push off the trunk but they were all useless. I exhale heavily through my nose.
“Davie will you come up here I need help,” I mumble reluctantly.
“What?” I swear to God if my arms weren’t holding me up I would shove him out of the tree.
“Come up here and help me,” I bark impatiently.
Davie is neither limber or intuitive. So climbing trees turned out to be a very difficult task for him. I had to guide him branch-by-branch. My arms ached by the time he was able to climb up. He is standing behind me, hugging the trunk.
“Why did you get up so high?” Questions.
“Davie!” I bite down on the inside of my cheek.
“Well what do you expect me to do?”
I kick my legs out exasperatedly. “I don’t know,” my voice comes out more distressed than I had intended. But my arms feel weaker and weaker and the reality of the potential injury becomes more and more real. “Just help me!”
“Okay okay.” He finally seems to recognize my agony. But his tone of voice tells me that he’s about to tell me to calm down and that only makes me angrier. “I need you to breathe deep–“
“Davie please. Just help me. That’s really all I ask.” I squeeze my eyes shut and cling tighter to the tree. My chest feels tight and it gets harder to breathe.
“Okay let me try this.” I hear him shuffling around behind me. When I feel him fist the back of my shirt my eyes spring open. He starts pulling me backwards slowly and my arms start to slip.
“Davie stop stop stop stop.” At the sound of my frantic yelping, Davie suddenly releases the back of my shirt. The momentum of my body swings me forward and I let out a cry of terror when my arms almost slip.
“Hey!” I can barely pay attention to the voice coming from down below as I grasp the branch in a panic. “Get down here!”
“She–she can’t sir. She’s stuck sir. I am– I’m trying to help her sir,” Davie anxiously calls back.
“Well you can get down can’t you?” The speaker replies sarcastically. My calmed brain allows me to process the voice and recognize it as the Captain.
“Yes sir.” And without a word to me, Davie begins scrambling down the tree. He certainly got down much quicker than he came up.
Unable to see what’s going on with my temple pressed tightly to the branch, I listen carefully. Harry sternly tells Davie to watch the other trees.
“You see anyone trying to escape you better call up to me, understand?” the Captain snarls at the Typo who I’m sure is shaking like a leaf.
“Yes sir.” Davie sounds scared enough for all of us.
“If anyone escapes I’m putting it on you.”
Davie responds politely and timidly to everything Harry says. I hear more shuffling, some grunting until finally I hear someone pull themselves into the tree.
Harry climbs much quicker than Davie did. Before long, he appears in my peripheral vision. He breathes heavily and leans against the trunk. He stands on a fairly wide and sturdy branch behind me. The limb could easily fit the both of us. But it is just out of my reach.
I watch him look over the situation and pray that he thinks faster. He rolls his lips over one another. His brow comes together as he frowns. He seems to come up with a solution, rubbing his hands together, and testing his balance.
His next movement makes me yelp in surprise. He launches the front of his body across the gap. His hands clasp the branch on either side of my head, while his feet stay planted on the bough behind me. His jaw collides with the top of my head, pushing my chin further into the bark. He’s stretched out between the two branches, his longer body able to close the gap. He lets out a breath, as if he is surprised the plan worked.
Another squeal of shock when one of his hands leaves the branch for his arm to loop around my front. My back is pressed closely to his chest. My breathing accelerates at his proximity. His scent– sweat, cotton, and something strong– encases my senses.The bicep of the arm still pressed against the branch bulges as he takes on my weight.
“I need you to let go of the branch.” I feel his breath on my arm.
“No way.” I grip the wood tighter.
“When you let go of the branch I’ll push us back and we’ll be on the other side. Then we can climb down.” His hand shifts next to my head. His long fingers spread across the bark.
“You’ll drop me.”
I feel his thumb lightly trace over my forearm. “I won’t.” He pulls me tighter to his chest as if to prove his point.
“You’ll drop me,” I repeat stupidly.
Tighter. “I can either drop you or you can fall yourself what’s it gonna be?” he rasps, exasperated.
I try to think of my options. Surely, there has to be another way then to put my safety into the hands of the man who threatened to kill me just an hour ago for fruit. But do I have any other choice?
I release a sigh of defeat, loosening my grip on the branch.
“On three,” he breathes, seeming to sense my submission. “One.” He swallows. “Two.” I let out a breath. “Three.”
He tightens his grip as I let go of the branch. His single arm surges against my temple as he pushes back. The air wisps past my ears and my legs swing until my bare feet connect with bark.
He is breathing heavily when I suddenly find that I am balanced. My ear is pressed to his chest and my arms are wound around his torso. One of his hands grasps the trunk. His other arm is slung across my shoulder blades to rest on my hip. The front of my body is pressed to his and heart beats steadily in my ear.
His arm constricts around me and he gives my hip a light squeeze, almost as if he were hugging me, before he lets me go. Thrown off by the affection — if I can even call it that — I almost fall again.
“Steady,” he mumbles, grabbing my forearm. I look up at his eyes and we lock gazes. I catch a whiff of anger or maybe concern. I can tell he’s a bit put off by my eye contact. It’s not common for a Typo to look a Corrector in the eye. It’s impolite. At this thought, I quickly look away.
“Let’s get down,” he says.
I follow him down the tree, sometimes having to alter my route because of my shorter legs. Davie stands at the bottom, quivering nervously as he observes the surroundings. Typos in other trees have paused their picking to watch as Harry and I drop from the branches.
Harry dusts his hands off on his pants. “Okay from now on you have to pick your apples from the ground,” he tells me as he picks up his belt from the foot of the tree. He must have taken it off before he climbed up.
Once he clips the belt around his waist he looks at me expectantly. “Who, me?” I point to my chest.
“You shouldn’t be falling and I don’t need the headache of watching you all the time,” he retorts.
“It won’t happen again. I’m not an idiot–“
“You were idiotic enough to get yourself into the situation once. I have more important things to do than saving your a.ss every five minutes.”
“How am I supposed to pick eight barrels worth if I have to do it all from the ground?” I question incredulously.
“You’ll do it.”
“And if I don’t?” I snap. Davie gasps, most likely at my tone.
Harry doesn’t respond. He stares at me with such a blank expression and I know the answer. A moment ago he was holding me and helping me and now he’s back to threatening me. He’s completely unpredictable.
Harry stares for a few more heart beats before he looks down at his watch. “You have seven hours.” He looks at my half filled barrel and looks back at me. “You can do it.”
The Captain spins on his heel and kicks at one of the fallen apples as he continues his surveillance of the other trees.
Blake Riley♥
dedicated to the lovely Izzy for taking the time to read my story. You are fantastic, my friend.
I am moving next week so if it takes a little time for me to reply to your comments that's why. I read every single comment and I love all of you.
Until next time.