Water and Stone

She winked back at me. She looked a little cramped in the seat, but she was obviously used to it. My practical little car would probably be a cruel joke for her to squeeze into.

We eased onto the highway, heading towards the foothills. That had been my vague guess, but it hardly narrowed things down.

"So, " she said. "Maybe a three-hour drive. Not as far as all that in distance, but the last bit will be slow. Let me know if you need to get out at some point. Vala is trustworthy but not maybe the smoothest ride. And you may have found some of her sharp edges already." Alexa made fangs at me. "She still has a taste for my blood after all these years, usually when I'm rummaging around in the dark for something."

She sighed. "I'm already relaxing. Thank you so much for coming along. I hope the whole thing doesn't send you running too fast. If it does, too bad. BECAUSE THERE'S NOWHERE TO RUN."

"Funny," I said. "I was just thinking how perfect this weekend would be for discovering whether you were an axe murderer. Though your reveal might have jumped the gun there."

The miles blew by, and eventually we left the main highway. Alexa stopped to tank up, even though we didn't seem low. Probably force of habit for her on these trips.

We started working our way through smaller and smaller highways. I couldn't think of anything on a map in this direction, which was probably the point. Soon the pavement disappeared, and I really got a sense of how rough a ride Vala was. Glad I didn't get carsick.

Watching her GPS, Alexa made a turn onto something that didn't even look like a road at first. Surely we must be almost there, I thought. But we followed that trail, whatever it was, for a good 45 minutes. I watched Alexa edge expertly around substantial boulders, through stream crossings. She didn't seem to find the driving particularly difficult, as she chattered happily about some of her other recent trips. I could only imagine what would qualify as a difficult road for her and Vala.

Finally she pulled to a stop in a small clearing deep within a valley. She turned off the jeep, hopping out to pat it on the hood. I followed her out, groaning as I stretched my legs. Above the various sounds from the cooling vehicle cooling, I could hear running water.

The forest smelled amazing. The valley felt small, private, almost intimate. Just the right size for the creek I assumed we were hearing.

"What an amazing spot," I told Alexa. "This is already the best Saturday I can remember in forever."

She smiled, looking happy. And all of a sudden nervous.

"You haven't seen the best of it. Come on." She reached into the back and grabbed a towel. I started going to look for my own towel, but she waved me off and I half-ran to catch up with her.

An indistinct path wound its way out of the clearing. A few turns later, there was the creek. Smaller than I expected, but it had some big pools that looked good for swimming. The water looked astonishingly clear. Further upstream water poured in sheets and channels across nearly flat surfaces of smooth rock. There were a few tiny waterfalls. The air had a slightly sharp odor I couldn't identify.

I was gobsmacked. A small, perfect little piece of paradise. How had she even found this spot?

Alexa had a giant grin. "And here's the best part!" She walked over to a small shaded pool tucked against one of the steep rocky walls bordering the creek. She slowly stuck her hand in, and then motioned me to do the same.

It was hot. Perfect hot tub temperature. Alexa had by some miracle gotten us to a natural hot spring in the middle of nowhere. The chemical odor was stronger here, but not objectionable. A closer look showed the neat work of some forgotten stone mason to separate the pool from the river.

"Alexa," I started. I didn't know what to say. "I'm totally overwhelmed. This is amazing."

She was drinking up my appreciation, nodding vigorously. "I heard about this from a guy who does kayaking back here. I guess it's not much of a secret in their community, but most of the year is like it is now, not enough water to do the run. And I thought, hey, if there's an old wall, someone must have driven here once. Then it was just trial and error with my GPS and Vala. Took an entire day driving back and forth on these trails that disappear or go nowhere. But what a reward when I found it. Only made it back one other time, but this weekend seemed like a good occasion."

She sighed. "And now we're going to sit on the edge of the pool here and relax until I get up the courage to tell you a hard story."

She lay the towel down and took off her shoes, draping her legs over the lip of the pool and groaning happily with the hot water. I joined her and soon we were lightly splashing our feet and calves in the hot water. Almost too hot, really, given the warm day.

The silence here was a different quality from what I was used to. Burbling water, muted birds, an occasional buzzing fly. A bullfrog. Aside from one distant airplane, nothing of humans.

Alexa broke the silence.

"Freakishly tall, skinny, no boobs, no butt. Ugly. That was me. All those Nordic genes and not even an athlete. No volleyball or basketball to redeem my sins against womanliness, though god knows I tried for a while."

"I saw girls who didn't seem to care what guys thought of them. That was what I decided I would be by high school. But those girls had the luxury of choosing, didn't they. Sure, there were a few people who treated me all right. They were just humoring me, though. The nastiest jokes always came from people I had thought were being nice."

I felt myself tense up. Shh. Her story.

"Things looked a lot better in college," she said. "People grow up. The cruelty to my face went away. I started figuring out how much I liked chemistry and geology. I found a couple other misfits and we got along all right. I even dated a little, with poor results. But it seemed like something I should do. And maybe I wouldn't be alone my whole life.

And then I met him. Spring of my junior year. Taller than me, a novelty. A little bit athletic, pretty good-looking. Smart, if a little lazy. We were in a chemistry class and started studying together. He told me how struck he'd been by me the first time he even saw me. It was probably true. He believed all his bullshit, which is what made it worse.

He was kind to me, and he wasn't doing it as a joke. I was completely inexperienced, and he didn't seem to mind. We started fooling around, and he started to teach me what I didn't know. He didn't seem in a particular rush. A gentleman, I thought. My body never seemed quite into it, but I figured it would eventually work out."

She coughed and stopped. I tentatively reached for her hand but she shook her head. I was getting a sense of what was coming and my raw anger was frightening me.

She took a breath and went on.

"As we got near finals, a day came when I woke up longer a virgin. I'd wanted it so much the previous night, even if my body didn't seem to be interested. It hadn't been comfortable, but I knew it was supposed to get better. We moved in together at the beginning of the summer."

"Living with him full time certainly took the shine off our relationship. He was selfish, lazy. We'd had sex now, and surely I would get more comfortable with it. He'd been more than patient. I tried so hard to please him. Only much later did it occur to me that he never did the same for me."

"If I couldn't be a perfect partner that way, at least I could do the housework. With a lot of trial and error I learned to cook. I was playing at being some horrible '50s stereotype. I don't know where all this stuff bubbles up from, the bargaining, the self-delusion. And then one day he said something directly cruel to me, something small. I can't even remember what it was. But instead of his usual passive-aggressive bullshit, it was something like what I'd been hearing since elementary school. And I walked out. Grabbed a few clothes, my laptop, got in my old beat-up Civic, and started to drive."

"I had enough money from work. Stopped for gas and convenience store food, slept in my car. I just had to keep running and it would be OK. And I kept running, across most of the fucking country."

Now she took my hand.

"I couldn't think. I needed space, but I couldn't find it even when the road stretched forever both ways, nothing but fields. I wasn't really anywhere. Just an arrow launched. A tiny bit of my brain realized I was in serious trouble."

"Later I worked out that I left the highways somewhere in western Colorado. I was thinking just clearly enough to fill up the car with gas and horrible snack food. After that it was all instinct. Pick the road less traveled, keep driving. I could go forever and just maybe disappear. Night came, and then I hit a rock. In retrospect I guess that was a hell of a lucky thing, but all I knew was the car wasn't moving and I was drowning in myself. Out of the car I went, stumbling, running down the road in complete darkness. But no, not really complete. The stars were out, and there was the Milky Way stretching gloriously across the sky, better than I had ever seen it. I was starting to see the road just by starlight, and there was something ahead. Too many stars. A small lake reflecting the sky. I fell down on the gravelly beach and finally started to cry."

"I must have fallen asleep for a little. The stars had shifted when I looked up, and I'd slipped through the glass into a mirror world. The real sky was in the lake and I was looking up at its reflection. Before I knew it I was taking off all my clothes and sliding in. Warm enough water. Not exactly a womb, but something better. An interface between worlds. A place I could go anywhere, be anything, connect anything. My freakish arms and legs just let me touch more places and things than other people could, draw them all together to meet in my own body and mind. I wasn't an aberration. Nothing about me was broken. I was the mother of everything on the planet, and it had only taken the planet twenty-two fucking years to bother mentioning it."

Alexa sniffed and wiped off a tear, then leaned against me.

"Basically," she said, "I was high out of my mind on sleep deprivation, Cheetos, emotional trauma, and the transcendent glory of everything that is. In any case, that night saved my life."

"I wish I could say it was really that easy, though. I slept on the beach and woke up around dawn, naked and freezing near a pile of damp clothes. So far a decent birth story for a goddess, but my body felt the same as always, and I didn't see evidence of godhood streaming from my orifices, though I admit I didn't check every one of them. Not then anyway." She giggled nervously.

"So, I put on my shoes, walked all the way back to the car, managed to find mostly dry things to dress in. Ate more Cheetos and experienced zero revelations except that I was likely to turn orange. And then I set about starting to undo the idiot situation I'd put myself in. No phone of course, and no idea where I was. It didn't look like the road got much use. The tire was flat, but that was the least of the problem, since the front of the car was stuck. I was uncomfortably clear-headed now. The air was warming up too quickly. Sure, I had a runty little artificial lake a long walk away, but there was no shade, and a non-trivial chance I could die waiting too long where I was. And suddenly I didn't feel like dying quite so soon. I had no idea what to do, but all the motivation in the world.

"Thus commenced history's least safe use of a car jack in combination with some small boulders. Half a day later, I had managed to extricate the car and get the spare tire on. It was flat too, but just drivable. And so the car and I limped back. I just did the reverse of what I'd done on the way in: take the better road each time. And finally I hit pavement, and eventually a tiny little town with an auto shop."

She sighed. "The rest was slowly picking up the pieces. I took a semester off, kept as far away from that asshole as possible. I didn't have anyone to talk to and most people who had known me before had gotten used to thinking of me just as that tall girl who went crazy. And then finally I got into grad school and my real life began."

She fell silent, apparently finished.

"Wow," I said. "You are the toughest person I've ever met."

Alexa didn't seem to believe that.

"I have two other things," I said. "First, I have never been as upset at anyone as I am at that asshole. I want to grind him into tiny pieces. If it's possible to do that in a nonviolent way, because I hate violence."

She laughed a little.

"And second: I have been thinking you were a goddess nearly from the first day I saw you. The way you move, the way you carry yourself. All of you. As though you're more real than everyone around you. I had no idea I'd hit it so right."

This time she sighed.

"I wish I could say I've maintained that overweening pride about my place in the cosmos. But at least the sense of belonging has stuck. I'm too chicken to try drugs and not dumb enough to eat Cheetos ever again, so I keep coming back to places in nature where I think I'll just belong."

We splashed out legs in the pool a while longer. I was really starting to get warm even in the shade, and the creek was beckoning. But I was also hungry.

"OK," said Alexa. "I know that was a lot to unload on you. I hope it makes a little more sense of things. Truthfully, though, you just got the quick version of the me that was born fifteen years ago. Everyone grows up and I'm no exception. But I had to spit out those sorry details for you to make any sense of the other things I'll probably blurt as we get to know each other."

"Also," she said, "I'm getting hot and it's lunchtime. Which means time for us to hang out together and say profound things about how amazing running water is."

We dried ourselves on the towel and headed back to the jeep.

"We need to keep all the food in the cabinet back there," she said, pointing to something that looked like a heavy built-in refrigerator. "Bears aren't interested in us but they will destroy anything they can to get our peanut butter. Speaking of which: your favorite!"

I groaned as she pulled out a giant jar of peanut butter and then began to make both of us her classic PB & J. I begged off when she tried to make me a second one as well.

"I admit my camp cuisine leaves something to be desired," she said. "Luckily I just met this guy who's an amazing cook ..."

"Hiding in there, " I mumbled, "is an interesting assumption that I'll survive on your food to do any of this again."

It wasn't really so bad, though, and Alexa had brought a whole selection of fresh fruit and vegetables in a cooler. "The stuff you can get away with for a day or two, " she said as I munched appreciatively on a peach. We'd found a rock just outside the clearing where you could see a little of the creek. Good enough replacement for our bench.

"This is so lovely," Alexa said. "Having you here, seeing what all this is like through someone else's eyes -- just what I needed."

"I couldn't be happier," I said, and it was true. Almost. "Uh, I just realized I need a bathroom break. Any special wilderness rules?"

"Oh, damn, I forgot to go over that. Also, this isn't really a wilderness. Can't drive into those. So, #1 or #2?"

I was confused for a second. "Oh," I said, embarrassed. "Just #1."

"Well, that's easy enough for you guys. Just pick a spot a decent distance from camp, away from the water, and have at it. Don't try to go so far that you'll get lost. There are sanitary wipes and gel in that box over there. I'll go over the more complicated stuff when you get back. Though I guess it's time for me too."

For a confused instant I thought she was going to follow me, but she split off a different direction as we headed away from camp.

As I watered the side of a tree, I realized I was starting to understand Alexa's comments about privacy out here. I didn't think I was fundamentally prudish, but it felt strange to be suddenly so relaxed about stuff like this.

When we got back, Alexa took out a trowel and showed me the basics. I kind of hoped I didn't need to practice this time, though I guess I'd have to if we took longer trips.

"OK, " said Alexa, "let's put up the tent and figure out how we want to spend the afternoon."

The tent was immensely easier than the one I remembered my cousins and me struggling with. Soon we had a really cozy spot in the shade, with two sleeping bags and pads. I was slightly relieved: there was lots of room in there for us. I wasn't going to be accidentally spooning with her all night. Not that that didn't sound nice. God, I must be really lonely.

"I have a very long, complicated set of choices for activity, " said Alexa. "1. Pools in the creek. 2. Hot springs. 3. Sunbathe. 4. Hiking up along the ridge. 5. Hot, steamy sex in the jeep. 6. Uh, playing backgammon in the tent ..."

"Wait, what now?"

"Sorry Kevin, just seeing if you were listening. Hah! I've never been able to make jokes like that. I must really be feeling comfortable."

"Ok, well, go on then," I said.

"What?" She spluttered.

"I mean, what else is there to do?"

"Oh. No, the real choices were 1 to 4. I started making things up."

I thought. "I vote creek, then. I feel like being lazy all afternoon."

She smiled and I started to head off for my towel and suit, but she stopped me.

"Wait, Kevin, let's talk for a second first."

"I didn't say this before because it needed all that context I gave you this morning. So, here's the thing: when it's just me, I always swim naked. It started with that amazing night and trying to recapture it. But it turned into more than that for me."

She looked down at her clothed body.

"Do you know I didn't use to look in mirrors, ever? I didn't even really know what my body looked like. I didn't want to know. Everyone else was telling me loudly or quietly what the problems were."

She sighed. "Spots like this are where I learned to see myself as I really was. After all this time they're still almost the only place for it. I may not really like my body, but we're on speaking terms out here."

I nodded.

"So here's the point, I guess," she continued. "I want to do this the way I usually do because that's me, as important as a lot of other things out here. It's not a sexual thing, just a body thing. Not something for you, but for me, and you just happen to be in my world. But then there's this other awful reality: no one has even seen me naked since, well, you can guess. And you think I'm beautiful, and how could I not be flattered and both a little less and a little more nervous?"

My brain was failing to engage in this conversation.

"... OK?" I said.

"So, given all that," she said. "What a mess this probably is for you. Do no harm is the first rule, so I would never pressure you to do something you don't want to. I don't even own a bathing suit, but I'm perfectly able to pick a shirt and underwear. And it goes without saying you can do whatever you like with yourself. I will be really happy in any case."

I took a deep breath. I could handle this, I thought. I'm an adult. And I wasn't a prude, even if I'd never been naked with someone who was just a friend.

"I'm so flattered, really," I said. "Yeah, I'll join you, no clothes. I'm as flustered as anything though. Please tell me if I'm rude or staring too much or whatever."

"You too," she said, nervously smiling at me. "It will be fine."

We grabbed our towels and I followed her down. My brain was feeling turned inside out, little sparks of desire and guilt popping incoherently. She had amazing legs. Slim, muscular. I concentrated on them as we went down. Legs were safe. Maybe.