Let Me Be the One by Christa Maurice

for thousands and thousands of miles. All of them hunting and eating and living and dying, never knowing that their time was short.”
    Her bright eyes stared through the leaves. The way she talked, he could almost see the trees and the giant bugs and the jungle steam, too. She turned back to him. Her lips parted, and her breath shortened. Her hand tensed on his arm.
    Brian’s groin tightened. She was so damned alive. He wanted to bottle that and take it home so he could nip at it when he felt down. He wanted to lean down and kiss her. She might wrap her arms around his neck and pull him tight. She might also scramble up the mountain to tell Logan, Jason, and everyone what a letch he was.
    Yanking her hand away, she squeezed her eyes shut and shook herself. “I am getting way too big for my britches.” Suzi stood up. She squeezed her shirt. “But apparently you can take parts of the stream home with you. What do you think? Should we forge ahead down the stream or turn around and go back up?” She tucked the rock into the rear pocket of her cutoffs.
    Brian surveyed both directions. Up meant going back to the studio to listen to fighting and being asked his opinion when he didn’t have one. Down meant a whole lot more time with Suzi. “I vote down. We already know what’s behind us.”
    “Oh good, another adventurer. Onward and downward!”
    Suzi led the way for a long time, occasionally stopping to examine a rock or show him something. Brian followed, running scenarios in his head about what might have happened if he’d kissed her back there. Most of them came out ugly. The best he could hope for was a little embarrassment. At worst, she would leave, and that was too high a price to pay.
    She stopped. “Houston, we have a problem.”
    Brian stepped up beside her. The stream tumbled down a steep, jagged cliff face into a pool at the bottom. The rocks were wet but not submerged on either side. Beyond that, mud and the occasional stubborn tree edged the cliff. “We can get down that,” Brian said.
    “We can?”
    “Sure, there’s lots of handholds.” He nodded to help himself feel more confident. “We’ve done harder ones.”
    “And when they find our lifeless bodies in a month because we fell and broke our legs and nobody knew where we were, can I say ‘I told you so’ then?”
    “You’ll probably say that for a while when we’re dying. I’ll go first. I have longer reach than you.” Brian lowered himself over the edge and then decided he needed to be facing the rock. He climbed back up and turned around.
    “Sure about this, are you?” Suzi asked.
    “Yup.” He lowered himself again, this time facing the rock. Feeling for the next foothold, he decided the double suicide might be a nice way to go out. “There’s plenty of places to hang on. Come on down.”
    She shook her head, turned, and started down, giving him an uninterrupted view of her rear. The daily running regimen worked. Every morning for the past month he’d gotten up at eight so he could stand at his bedroom window and watch her walk to the top of the steps, stretch, and jog away. She used four different routes without any pattern. After about forty-five minutes, she returned. At first he’d told himself he was just curious. After a while, he started to feel like a peeping Tom watching her through the curtains, but by then the habit was ingrained, and he got up every morning without fail to watch her jog away and then jog back before breakfast.
    “This is an easy climb. It looked worse from above,” she said. Then the piece of slate she was standing on snapped.
    Brian tightened his grip on the stone just in time for her to slide into his arms. He held perfectly still, not even breathing for a few seconds. She hadn’t made a peep the whole time she was falling. The only sound around them was the chatter of the stream and bird song.
    “Or not.” Suzi glanced over her shoulder at him with wide, black eyes.