Zaria Joseph let herself be held, feeling some of the tension leak out of her body. After a few minutes, she pulled herself away and scooted to the other side of the tent. Gu Cheng stayed where he was laying, his arm draped across his abs to hold in the warmth left behind by her body. His eyes followed her flight across the small space, and a gentle smile sat on his lips without his realizing. Zaria saw it, though, and scrambled from the tent to escape it. Her shoes came off the line, and she slid them on still damp.
"Stay," she called to Gu Cheng when he came out of the tent and began to pull on his boots as well. "I need to walk."
When he looked as though he was going to argue, Zaria reached around him into the tent and pulled a small pink box from an inside pocket in the messenger bag. "It's not raining today, I can use this outside. I'll be fine," she announced and then walked toward the stream and away from the pressure of his regard.
Zaria stayed along the edge of the stream, looking for footprints or pawprints that might spell danger. When she was just beyond a bend that took the little clearing that housed her tent out of sight, she found a large rock only partially sticking out into the water and sat down. The stone was warm from the sun's rays, and she felt herself heat up from above and below.
While she was sitting on her perch, she watched little grey birds hop along the ground, pulling worms from the muddy bank on the other side. Worms did not sound appetizing, but it did make her think about her current food situation. She acknowledged how she was lucky that her food had not gotten destroyed or used up. One of the few advantages of staying in the manor was getting a small meal a couple of times a day, so she did not need to use her reserves. But she had not expected it to take so long for the pendant to charge, and if it took another month she was not sure that there would be enough granola or jerky to keep two adults going. She would need to figure out a way to get more food for them, so she could save as many of the stable items as possible to give Gu Cheng a fighting chance if the pendant took him somewhere else on the way back to his world. It had to be done without telling him the reason, though. His expressions and desire for contact since waking up was a clear warning sign that he was not put off by anything that had happened to him in the last week. He would be expecting to take her back home, and she couldn't let him sacrifice his life like that. Zaria swore in a quiet voice, but vehemently. The little birds rose into the air, settling on branches overhead.
"Would it be so bad to go with him? Back to his world? There really is nothing left for me in my world," She thought to herself, tilting her head up to watch the little birds hop along the branches. "But his world isn't mine. All the stories of his world that I have read there is a perfect person meant for the male lead, and it is not some short girl with a big butt from British Columbia. What if that is part of the magic in his world, pulling people together? And then I show up, and I mess up his whole perfect future?"
The tiny voice at the back of her head whispers, "And what if he realizes that he is mistaken about what he thinks are feelings?"
Zaria pulled on the hem of her shirt, pulling the two sides apart and watching it catch on the lowest button and then pressing the sides together again. "Not like the stories I think came from this world were spot on." She muttered under her breath, dropping the hem on her lap. Poor cursed duke who falls in love with the saintess sent to help take away his pain, or the little maid that cures him with her spunky attitude and can do spirit. Never had she read of a saintess that would throw the little maid under the proverbial bus so she wouldn't have to touch the duke, or of a saintess and duke working together to turn the maid into a baby farm. Maybe those didn't sell as well, though, and they just never made it onto her recommended reading list.
Chocolate brown eyes dropped their gaze down from the low hanging branches and stopped when they caught an odd shape through the trees ahead. Zaria stood up and brushed off the butt of her cargos. With a little hop, she was on the other side of the stream and pushing past the bushes growing by the treeline. A minute or two of walking, and she could make out what looked like a loafing shed against the edge of a large field. A solid wall on one end and the other three open like a picnic shelter at one of the park's near her grandma's house. The roof was rotted through, as was the back wall, the wood never meant to be exposed to rain every minute of every day. She wondered how long it had stood there, forgotten near the tall grasses and scraggly shrub of the massive field.
Not trusting the beams holding up what remained of the roof, Zaria climbed up a tree nearby with large, evenly spaced branches. About four meters up into the air, she wiggled her way around the tree until she was on the side facing the field and turned so that she was facing outwards while straddling a stable branch. The little shed sat near the corner of the field, and she could not see the ending of it as far as her eyes could make out. Maybe once it had been a farmer's field, growing wheat, or corn. If that were the case, she couldn't see signs of it underneath the ocean of wild growth that swayed in the gentle afternoon breeze.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The view was so peaceful that she let herself sit up there for some time, just watching the great expanse of nothing ahead of her. As the sun began to drop below the treeline, she heard the crack of a branch nearby and tore her eyes away to see what was coming. Gu Cheng emerged from behind her trunk,his eyes trained on the ground, sweeping back and forth before moving up the trunk of the tree she was sitting in and landing on her.
"I'll be down in a moment," she said without her customary polite smile. She was tired of forcing smiles to make others feel better. When she placed her second foot back on the ground, she moved past the frowning man with his arms sternly crossed in front of the fatigues that once more graced his body. His nicely muscled, chiseled from stone, everything in the perfect place body...Zaria shook her head and averted her eyes to scan the ground around the shed. There were no buildings anywhere for kilometers as far as she could see,and if there were any roads leading out of the woods, they were so small as to be almost invisible. To need coverage on the edge of nothing then...
"Yes," she whispered when she finally made out an odd patch of things growing on the opposite side of the wooden beams. She walked around Gu Cheng, who turned to follow her, his body rigid and disapproving.
"What is it?" He asked her in a low voice, his eyes scanning the area around them for wovles or whatever else might be willing to visit them to take a bite.
"An overgrown garden," she answered, just as quietly. "I thought it didn't look like a corn field or anything systematic like that. But this shelter would have been a great place to provide protection for someone who was out monitoring a herd when they were moved to these fields for grazing. A place to get out of the sun or rain while still being able to see the animals. I don't know. It could have been for something else. But it was probably abandoned when the rains came and didn't stop, and all the things growing in the garden just kind of...did their thing on their own."
Zaria picked up a large stick and whapped it down around the messy area to scare away snakes and things that might be lurking and then pushed around some familiar looking vines. "Cucumbers. Those and zucchini will grow even when left alone, choking out other vegetables in their path. I wonder how long this has been growing. Maybe animals have been keeping it thinned out, using it as a source of food." She pulled a few that looked healthy out and handed them to Gu Cheng. "Who knows? These might be good and give us something besides carbs and protein in our belly. I will look at them better when we get back to camp."
"Is there anything else useful?"
She could tell that he was trying to project calm, but he was obviously angry with her. "I can't see. It's getting dark in this area. Maybe I will come back and check tomorrow if we don't end up puking out our guts from food poisoning."
"I will try it first," Gu Cheng said, his words coming out clipped and cold.
"Why." Zaria rolled her eyes, the inflection in her word making it obvious that she wasn't so much asking him as telling him he better have a good explanation.
"Because you were mistreated and have lost a lot of weight from not eating well enough." He glared at her affronted expression when she whirled around to face him. "Your waist is so small that you have tugged your pants up twice just since I found you. A few days ago, you almost died from dehydration and malnourishment. You are just getting the energy to walk around and climb trees, if you start vomiting everything that you eat, it could set you back to where you have to stay laying down all day."
"Okay," she countered, hands on her hips so that her pants would stop sliding, and she could pretend he was wrong about that. "You spent days being ELECTROCUTED, you could have internal damage, and I doubt you were eating steaks while in your cell. And it doesn't matter who goes first because for all we know, our digestive systems evolved differently and these cucumbers might make you barf your good looks right on the ground while I emerge great and with a full belly!"
The two people stared at each other, neither moving as they fought for wild vegetable dominance. Gu Cheng was the first to break the stalemate. "Do you really find me attractive?"
"What?" Her hands slid off of her hips and her pants slid a centimeter lower. "Where did that come from?"
"You spoke of me 'barfing my good looks out'." He continued to glare at her but she could see that his shoulders were not as tense.
"I don't think I said that. You are completely not my type-"
Zaria wanted to believe it was the low light or the shadows, but when she blinked, he was directly in front of her, his arms wrapping around her waist. She could feel his breath, hot and ragged against her neck, and if she had not pushed him away she was sure he would have tried to kiss her again. She scowled at him before spinning away, but she was flustered and she managed to step right in the middle of the narrow stream as she escaped. He didn't arguing with her about being her type, and she was worried about why. Was he too confident, or did he agree?