She ended up flying United because Southwest didn't fly to Wyoming. And Trish talked her into flying out first thing in the morning instead of that night. That way she wouldn't be waking him up when she went over to see him because they both knew that was basically exactly what she was going to do as soon as she got off the plane.

Adina called Cady as soon as the plans were finalized, she'd meet her at the airport in Gillette and drive her back to Durant. By the time they'd gotten back to her house she'd picked the hem of her sweatshirt out completely and Cady's car had a hundred tiny ripped threads in the passenger floor board.

When they parked Adina wiped the stray threads from her lap and looked sheepish, "I'll pay to have your car detailed, I'm so sorry."

Cady smiled and it was kind, "That's not even the worst thing someone's done in my car this week." She furrowed her brow, "Do you want me to go with you?"

Adina shook her head, reaching for her keys. "I don't think so, I appreciate the offer. I think we're all just freaking out because he's usually so unflappable, you know?"

Cady made a face and laughed shortly, "Yeah, I definitely get that." She got out of the car and helped Adina unload her carry on and her laptop bag. "Text or call me or something to let me know everything's okay?"

"I will," Adina put the laptop in the back seat of her Jeep and slammed the door shut, tossing her purse across the driver's seat to the passenger seat and climbing inside.

"You sure you don't want to at least go inside and shower or nap or something? You've been traveling for like six hours." At the look Adina gave her Cady rolled her eyes and stepped back, "Yeah, I wouldn't either. Okay, just drive careful."

"I will," Adina started the Jeep. "Cady?" Cady ducked her head back in toward the open driver's side door. "Thank you for everything."

Cady grinned, "Be safe!" She said, stepping back so Adina could shut the door and pull away from the curb. Adina beeped the horn twice as she pulled away, feeling at once more in control just being behind the wheel of her own vehicle.

888

She drove out to his apartment and wasn't even a little surprised he wasn't there. She used her key to let herself in and was a little shocked at the state of the place. It looked like a frat house. She was shocked he'd been able to do this much damage in three days, but then, she supposed in an apartment this small it wasn't so shocking. She used the facilities and locked the door behind her on her way out.

Against her better judgment Adina's eyes strayed to Gail's apartment. The five gallon bucket and the aluminum chairs were still outside. Her feet went to stand in front of the windows. She peered through the glass and felt like she'd been punched in the gut, Half of the apartment was already packed away. The walls were stripped bare. There were open packing containers in various stages piled everywhere.

She backed away, feeling as though she'd seen something intensely private that she shouldn't have seen. It had only been three days. She wondered if Gail had any family. Or if that was Mathias's doing. Or the landlord's. She felt tears welling, for all the old lady's salty ways, she was sweet and Adina would miss her. She realized she was starting to hyperventilate and practically fled back to her vehicle.

She couldn't lose it now. Later, but not now. Now wasn't about her.

She squeezed her eyes shut and started her car, picturing Gail in her mind. The crow-caw laugh. She said a mourner's kaddish on the way to the police station for her. It wasn't usual by any means, but then, Adina figured if nothing else it would amuse the old woman's spirit wherever she was. And God would understand the words helped her focus on something other than grief.

She pulled into the police station parking lot and parked, not caring she was half out of the space. Not even bothering to grab her purse. She shut off the Jeep and jumped out, wiping her face surreptitiously to catch any stray tears or anything that would make her look worse than she already did. Someone was walking out as she was walking in and she forced herself to make eye contact, to smile and nod even though she'd reached the point where she mainly just wanted to grab people and shake them until they gave her what she wanted.

Cady was right, she probably should have taken a nap.

Kenny looked up from the computer when she walked through to the reception area and did a double take. Adina almost laughed. "I must really look like shit," she said, "Is he here?"

He shook his head, "He hasn't been in today."

"Is he at least responding to your phone calls?" She winced, that sounded bitchier than she meant it to. "Sorry, I haven't gotten much sleep."

"It's okay," Kenny shook his head then reached for a pile of papers on his desk, "Gina and I talked last night. There's place he liked to go when we were kids. We think he probably went there. It's pretty easy to find...If you want to wait, my shift ends in a few hours, I can take you there-"

"Do you have a map? Just show me where, I can find it," she put her hands on the desk and leaned over it, craning her head to see the folded map he was going for.

"Are you sure? I mean this isn't a national park, the trail isn't, like, state maintained, you know?"

She bit her lip to keep from laughing in his face. "I'll be okay, Kenny."

"I don't know if I'm comfortable-"

"I have a knife in my purse. My phone has an internal GPS, a compass, and a full battery. If you want, I'll take a radio with me. I know how to tell if a snake is poisonous and to avoid bears. The weather is clear and it's not going to be dark for another five hours yet." She she let out her breath slowly, "I can't think of anything else, but let me tell you truly-I have traveled to far, and have been awake too long- nothing short of an act of God is going to keep me from that man, so show me the map, Kenny."

"Show her the map, Kenny," Gina stood in the doorway, a bottle of water in her hand. Something like grudging respect on her face. Adina straightened to look her in the eye and she nodded at her, walking into the reception area and around the desk to sit in the other seat behind the desk. "Took you long enough."

"My flight was delayed," Adina said sourly, "Fucking United."

"Mm," Gina sipped her water. "Kenny's a drama queen, you're not going to be scaling a cliff side. You're just going to drive a little and then walk maybe a mile. Two tops, I forget." Kenny shot her a dirty look and she looked affronted, "What, you know it's true." She pointed to a place on the map, "See there? Circle that. That's where you want to go. If you don't see him right away there's a little cave he used to like to hole up in, but he got too big for it when he turned eleven so now he just puts his cooler there."

"Thank you," Adina circled the place on the map carefully and then marked the place where they were currently. "I went by his apartment. It looks like a badger den."

Gina snorted, "He's only ever been like this maybe once before." She made a face and it was pained. Kenny grabbed her hand and she gave Adina a long look. "He does the thing where he thinks he has to take care of everybody and then he takes it personally if something happens. I want it just to be a temper tantrum, you know? But it's more than that."

"Yeah," Adina said softly. She moved to fold the map and Gina grabbed the edge, holding it pointedly.

"Don't go out there if you're gonna fuck him up," she said quietly.

Adina's eyes flashed, "I'm not."

"You sure?" Gina pulled the map towards her chest the barest inch, "That's my brother, white lady."

She held her gaze for a long moment, Adina lifted her chin, arching her eyebrows. Gina's face didn't change. Adina nodded once, swiftly.

"Good," Gina released the map. She reached down into the cooler at her feet and brought out a liter bottle of water. "Take this. Just in case. Kenny give her the station's number."

Adina took the water and Kenny scrawled the number on the edge of the map. Adina nodded a goodbye and left as quickly as she'd come. When the glass door whooshed shut behind her Gina breathed a sigh of relief, surprised that she actually felt better. About more than just the current situation. Kenny was giving her an odd look. She raised her head and twitched her fingers in a 'tell me' gesture.

He shrugged, taking a noisy slurp of his Big Gulp, "Women are scary, man."

888

Adina parked the Jeep on the edge of the clearing and was more than a little relieved to see his vehicle on the opposite edge of the clearing. Of course, she was assuming it was his vehicle. It was a Tribal Police SUV. She got out of the Jeep and grabbed the map, her phone, the knife, and the bottle of water. She locked the Jeep and took a second to pull her hair up into a high ponytail, tie her sweat shirt around her waist and shove the phone in her pocket. It'd been a long time since she'd gone essentially hiking on her own.

Although Gina had been right so far, this place was only a twenty minute drive from the station. She walked across the clearing and peered into the SUV. There was a travel coffee mug and takeout wrappers and other detritus accumulating in the passenger seat. Badger, she thought, it must be his. She pulled out the map and took off.

The last time she'd done something like this she'd been backpacking in New Zealand. She snorted, so yeah, she TOTALLY knew what she was doing. At least the walk was pretty. As she went up the side of the hill she thought that chuck's were probably the opposite of the shoes she should have been wearing for this.

Oh well, she rolled her eyes, she was pretty sure there was a proverb or a folk tale somewhere about a woman proving her devotion by walking up a staircase of a thousand steps barefoot or something. This felt like that. Except she wasn't going to throw herself off of it when she got to the top.

She thought of all the times she'd called him over the past few days. The texts. The worry. She realized she was starting to get pissed off. She told herself she was just tired, but no, she realized she'd started to get a little pissed off when Gina had said "temper tantrum". She stopped to check the map and wiped her forehead. It wasn't hot-hot by any stretch. She'd just come from a city of soup, so really, it was small wonder she wasn't wearing the sweatshirt and shivering, but the pace she was going wasn't slow, and she was going uphill.

She checked her phone in relation to the map. It looked like it was going to be closer to two miles than one. Oh well. She was making good time. When this was over she was going to take a helluva nap. And a bath. Oh god was she going to take a bath in that garden tub in her house. She took a long sip of the water, she needed to calm down before she got to where she was going or she was going to happily murder him, she realized.

She closed her eyes, trying for yoga breathing. Fairly certain Gail would find this turn of events positively hilarious. She took off on the trail again. What was it ma would say when she was angry? Migulgl zol er vern in a henglayhter, by tog zol er hengen, un bay nakht zol er brenen.

Roughly translated: He should be transformed into a chandelier, to hang by day and burn by night.

Oh yeah, she was getting punchy, she hadn't thought about yiddish curses in a long time. They were incredibly specific. Also, incredibly poetic. She smirked as she rounded a bend. Her grandmother's favorite: Got zol gebn, er zol hobn altsding vos zayn harts glist, nor er zol zayn geleymt oyf ale ayvers un nit kenen rirn mit der tsung.

God should bestow him with everything his heart desires, but he should be unable to use his limbs and have no tongue.

The trail ended. It didn't so much end, as the cliff face fell off and the trail didn't have anywhere to go so it just stopped. Adina grabbed a tree to stop herself from propelling forward. She cursed herself. If she'd been paying attention she'd have seen she needed to veer left. There was an open place that must be where she was going because he was sitting on an outcropping of rock, his back to her, a red cooler open next to him. A breeze ruffled his hair and Adina rolled her eyes. "The least you could do is say hello," she called.

She started toward him and made the mistake of glancing down the cliff side. Vertigo had her head spinning.

"I know you knew I was here," she said, sitting down the water bottle to take a second to breathe.

"Why, because of my mystical powers of observation?" he called over his shoulder and she narrowed her eyes, wanting to deck him.

"No," she called sweetly, "because I've been talking to myself for the past twenty minutes and I haven't exactly been quiet."

He laughed in spite of himself and ambled to his feet. When he turned to face her the sight of him was such a relief she nearly fell to her knees. Her fingers itched and she wanted to grab him. She walked slowly to the outcropping of rocks and untied her sweatshirt from her hips, letting it fall on the cooler. She closed her eyes when the breeze touched her bare skin and enjoyed it for a moment.

When she opened her eyes she turned her head to look at him. "Hey you," she said softly.

He smirked, lifting a finger to brush her cheek bone, "You're back early," he answered.

"Gina called." She watched his face shutter closed and inwardly she said something foul. "She had Kenny tell me about Gail." He turned away from her even as she reached for him, "Mathias-"

"You shouldn't have come out here by yourself, it's dangerous," he stepped away from the outcropping to go pick up the bottle of water she'd left at the little clearing's entrance.

Adina closed her eyes and pressed two fingers to her forehead just above her right eye. She was getting a headache there. "You really are having a temper tantrum, aren't you?" She said softly.

He made a bland face so she figured he didn't hear her. She wasn't going to repeat herself. He took her elbow, steering her gently away from the outcropping of rocks and more onto the dirt. Adina let him until she realized he was steering her back to the trail itself. Then she stopped. He shot her a reproachful look, "You should head back down, it'll be dark in a few hours. You don't want to catch cold up here."

Later, when the story was being retold, Adina would say she presented him with a well-thought-out argument that contained all the rational reasons why he was being a little difficult, as well as some suggestions for ways he could process what was likely some intense grief and frustration. The reality, as with most things, was a little different.

The first thing she did was shove him as hard as she could. Then she called him a juvenile idiot. Then she told him he had a tribe full of people who were more than willing to be there for him if he'd let them, starting with his sister, if he'd let them, but he was too busy fucking off doing that walk into the wind shit and sit cross-legged on a rock and feel sorry for himself to notice. Also, he was living like a badger and his apartment smelled like burnt corn chips. At some point she started punctuating her points with smacks. She told him he wasn't the only one who missed Gail, here she sobbed, then kicked him to prove her point. She told him he was an asshole for not calling her immediately. That there was nothing on this planet that would have kept her away the second she knew, up to and including an amazing airline delay, and if he honestly thought propelling her back down the mountain like everything was fine was going to make her ignore the fact that he was obviously hurting then he wasn't just an idiot, he was a damn idiot.

To be honest, she wasn't entirely sure everything she said. By the third smack, he started yelling back. He told her she was an arrogant bitch who didn't know the first thing about his life. He said he knew damn good and well he could talk to people if he wanted to, but there was nothing any of them could do so what was the fucking point of it all. That he had to come out here and sit on a rock because he didn't trust himself to be on flat land within driving distance of the little shit who killed Gail. Here he took her by the shoulders and shook her hard. He told her the damn dog was still at the vet's and would likely pull through but would need to have a leg amputated and that seemed like the greatest injustice of all, didn't it? That he couldn't even protect a blind, one-eyed dog. He told her he was sick to death of the law, of following someone else's law when that law didn't do a damn thing to help his people and everyone knew there was no justice anymore out here anyway and the longer he spent up here the more he was convinced he should just say screw it.

Adina reared back, breathing hard. He stared down at her, there was a roaring, sawing sound and he realized it was his blood pounding. Adina shook her head, slapping him hard across the face. He stared down at her, his jaw clenched hard, his cheek smarting even if he wouldn't admit it.

"You do not get to go be batman," she said, her cheeks were red, her eyes were shining. "That is the easy way out and you are better than that you selfish prick." An angry tear tracked down her cheek and she ignored it, poking him in the chest with her finger. "You care too much about right and wrong to go down that road and you know it. You wouldn't be able to live with yourself. And I love you too much to watch you go there."

She sobbed once, hard like it hurt her chest, and she put a hand to her diaphragm for a moment to steady herself. When she lifted her head she wiped her eye with the heel of her hand and almost laughed at the gobsmacked expression on his face. He reached for her and she stepped back, lifting her other hand to stop him.

"I love you, Mathias. Kenny told me about Gail and the only reason I didn't come back last night was there wasn't a flight. I promised you once I wasn't going to leave and I meant it." She sighed, "You stay up here as long as you need to. I'm going to go to the vet to see Useless."

Three steps was as far as she got before he grabbed her, spinning her around and kissing her hard. Adina groaned against his lips and he backed her against a tree. She twined her fingers in his hair and let him lift her legs, wrapping them around his waist. His fingers wrapped around her ponytail, angling her head up so he could blaze a path down her jaw to her neck. All pretense of gentleness gone. His lips and teeth were bruising, her fingers were hard on his skin.

He jerked her shirt over her head and she made a noise that was almost a snarl. Adina's fingers tore at his tee shirt, pulling it from his jeans and his fingers left her long enough to pull it over his head. He sank slowly to his knees, easing her down the tree trunk until they were on the ground. Her lips and teeth found his chest and she pushed him back, urging him onto his back on the dirt. She stood up, standing over him to jerk her pants and underwear over her hips and kick her shoes off.

She bent over him, tenderly lifting his head to place her jeans beneath, then her lips quirked into a challenging grin and she moved to straddle his shoulders. She looked down the line of her body, between the valley of her breasts to his face, "I love you," she said and it was a command. He closed his mouth over her and she moaned, her hips rolling with him. She slid her fingers in his hair and his lips and teeth and tongue were insistent,

He let her ride him, working to help her find the crest of her orgasm as his fingers went to the belt of his own jeans. Just as she was about to climax she abruptly slid away from him, she crawled down his body to his waist, jerking his jeans and his shorts just far enough down his hips to expose his erection. She straddled him again, this time taking his hands and guiding them to her breasts, still encased in the bra. Adina slid against him, teasing him. He moaned beneath her and she made a sound of pleasure above him. Only when he was begging, and not before, did she guide him inside her and then her pace was punishing.

She rode him hard, falling back on her hands fisted on his thighs. His fingers found her clit and he played with her until she orgasmed hard around him. Her cries were long and hoarse and loud. It was glorious fucking her out here like this. The sun lit her hair so it was fire around her. When he came it was on a shout that echoed off the rocks. Adina shivered above him and collapsed slowly down to his chest. Her breath was cool against the drying sweat. He held her, his fingers curled under the band of her bra.

"I'm glad you're back," he said quietly.

"Me too," she said, her fingers reaching up to run idle lines through his hair.

"I can take you to see Useless if you like," he offered, one of his hands sliding down to cup her ass.

She smiled against his chest, "Maybe later," she lifted her head enough to look him in the eye. "Have we adopted a dog?"

"Someone had to," he said, reaching up to curl a tendril of her hair around his finger. "You know what this means, don't you?"

"No, what?" She rested her chin on his bare chest, her lips pulling back into a lazy smile.

His finger traced her cheekbone, then down the line of her nose, then the curve of her lip. "I think you're awfully pretty."

~Fin~