Free Unbound by Olivia Leighton

another forty-five minutes of daylight. Still, I gathered some scant firewood, liking the simplicity of the task and that I was doing it by myself.
     
    When the time came to build the fire, I looked at the map one last time, wondering if there was some shorter way back home. The walk today had been great and refreshing, but if I could shave an hour or so off of tomorrow’s hike, I’d be a happy man. The map made me think of Mac once again.  She was quite beautiful, even in her every-day sort of clothes.  Cute face, glossy black hair… and her body.  I especially loved the way her jeans hugged her legs and ass.  I tried to remember the last time I'd been with a woman and found myself drawing a blank.  It might have been a waitress from a film location... maybe.  I sighed. 
     
    “Way too damned long,” I muttered to myself.  It was time to make a change.  I decided to visit The Pine Way again as soon as I could. I wasn’t sure if I’d ask her out (hell, I didn’t even know if she was married, dating, or what), but there was only one way to find out if any avenues were available.
     
    I folded the map back up and when I slid it back into the backpack, I saw for the first time why Catchman’s Overlook had gotten its own little listing on the trail map.
     
    As the sun set, it looked like it was literally melting into the ocean. There was a perfect gradient of colors, from red to orange, to yellow, that looked like it had been painted specifically for this part of the world. It danced and shimmered over the ocean in a way that made it hard to see where that portion of the horizon ended and the sea began. It was like a living painting, and it was hard as hell to look away from it.
     
    I watched the surreal scene in front of me until the last rays of the sun were overtaken by dusk, the water becoming a murky sort of purple as the night came in. Realizing that I had wasted fifteen minutes by simply staring at the sunset, I put together a small, amateur campfire. Once I had the fire going, I encircled it with stones I found nearby to keep any stray flames from getting away, and then sat down for dinner.
     
    Dinner was a bit more extravagant than the lunch I’d had. I ate two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I made at the cabin before leaving, as well as a banana and a few grapes. I washed it down with a bottle of water and then pulled out the flask of Jameson.
     
    The flask, like the clothes and camping gear, had all been purchased after the move to Sitka. The night I left New York, I had taken nothing with me except the clothes on my back. A week after getting into the cabin on Moose Hill, I’d called my apartment manager in LA and told him to have my clothes shipped to a random address (which I had not yet visited to pick up my packages)and to feel free to sell the furniture and put the apartment up for lease.
     
    I’d dipped pretty heavily into my personal savings to get my life in Sitka started. It didn’t bother me much anymore, though.  As I sat under the moonlight in the forests, sipping from my flask, I started to care less and less that someone—be it Adam or Aubrey—might eventually find me here in Alaska. Still, I didn’t necessarily want to invite that sort of headache, either. I was pretty sure I knew how I could get to the money in my primary account… the one with more than eight million dollars in it.
    I was going to take a chance and give it a try. I think it was the damned blue plane that helped me muster up the motivation. I was excited to once again use the pilot’s license I’d acquired during some down time during my basic training. Looking out to the forest cloaked in darkness, I thought it would be a pretty lucrative business to be able to fly adventurers and weekend warriors out into the Alaskan wilds. After a while, once I became more familiar with the place, maybe I could also act as a tour guide of sorts.
     
    Suddenly excited about the future, I crawled into my tent