Free Gone Wild by Ever McCormick

intense.
    "What if someone tries to hurt you?"
    I nodded and watched him rifle through the knapsack he'd let fall to the ground. I wondered what he was looking for. He pulled out a single orange. Then he walked over to the clearing where a few slats of wood had been messily built into a shelf. Th e squirrel seemed to sense he didn't want to stick around. He hopped into the brush. Adam knocked a couple of shot-up beer cans from the ramshackle shelf and placed the orange directly in the middle. Then he walked back to my side.
    "When you pull t he trigger," he explained, "the gun’s going to jerk. Keep it steady as you can, but expect it. Hold on tight. Don't let the sudden intensity scare you."
    "What's that orange ever done to you?" I joked.
    "That orange is threatening your life," he said. "It's you or that orange."
    I nodded and concentrated as he explained how to use the sigh ts to center my aim. I flinched when he laid his hand on my shoulder, but then relaxed when he squeezed the muscles I didn’t realize I had clenched so tight.
    "I'm going to keep my hand right here," he said in a calm voice. "I'm not scared of you being in control of a gun, and I don't want you to be either."
    His words boosted my confidence. I aimed for the navel.
    "Once you have it in your sights," he whispered, "don't hesitate. Hesitation kills."
    When the tip of the sights finally came together at the navel, my finger slipped in and squeezed the trigger fast. Prepared for it, I absorbed the resulting explosive buck of the gun into my forearms. It was much louder than I anticipated. My heart beat franticly despite the fact that all I had really moved in the last few seconds was a single finger.
    "Did I hit it?" I whispered, scanning the top of the shelf for the orange. It wasn't there. Adam's hand still gripped my shoulder. As promised, he hadn't m oved it from me during the shot, but I had stopped feeling overwhelmed by his touch.
    "Let's see," he said. I handed him the gun as we walked to the s helf. The smell of burnt orange lingered in the air, and I started to locate the pieces of rind and torn orange that had been blasted all over the ground.
    " Wow," I whispered. "We did it."
    "You did," Adam said. "You killed your fear."
     
    *
     
    Venturing back to the cabin, I was lost in a daydream as neit her of us had spoken in a while when Adam grabbed my hand in his. His was rough and calloused and all-encompassing. My own hand felt tiny, bony, and fragile in his.
    The action felt meaningful to me. I glanced up at his eyes, but he wasn't paying much attention to our hands together. He was intent on walking forward up the steep, rocky trail ahead of us. The terrain was choppy and unsafe. Several large rocks came loose when I put my weight on them and Adam squeezed my hand tighter. It didn't take me long to figure out that this bout of hand-holding was more about keeping me upright than making me swoon.
    But I swooned anyway.

 
     
    8
     
    Without discussing the whys of what we were doing, Adam and I began spending more time together. My stack of paperbacks sat unread in my cabin gathering dust. My new journal still lacked any epiphanies about my future. Roadsie still ran free, but the longer he went uncaught, the more relaxed the radio announcer seemed to be about it. I hadn't experienced an irrational fear in days.
    Adam taught me things—how to get a fire going, where to find the endless blueberry and raspberry bushes. He also showed me spots on the mountain I might never have discovered on my own. Some of the most difficult trails on the mountain seemed unsafe—at least for an amateur hiker like me. The shifting rocks and steep grades cut through brush that had been just barely cut and was already growing back. I'd wondered a few times why some of them were even considered trails, but what I was slowly learning was that the most difficult trails had been etched into the road not for their ease, but for the strategic way they allowed hikers to