Payback

137

Dean climbed up the small rise from the stream and gazed in the direction of the narrow clearing where the huge buck had appeared a few days before. He brought his binoculars up, scanning the nearby woods carefully, hoping he would see the buck again.

“You’re not really quitting, are you?” said Lia, trudging up behind him.

“Ssshhh.”

“You can’t leave.”

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about it.”

“Mr. Rubens is going to get that girl from Peru a job. He thinks he can find something in the non-secure section of the agency. Or over at State.”

“That’s good.”

“I know you’re not leaving,” she added.

“Maybe not,” Dean admitted. “This is where I saw that buck I told you about.”

Lia took out her own binoculars and examined the woods. They stood there for five, ten minutes, neither talking. Dean had suggested they come here after the mission was over. Rubens had called yesterday to tell them that the president wanted to honor them as heroes; Dean had told him, not with much diplomacy, that he’d prefer to stay in the woods.

And Lia said she wanted to be with Dean.

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you when you came to help me,” Lia told him now, putting down her field glasses. “I–I thought that being helped meant I was weak. All my life, I guess, I’ve thought that.”

“It doesn’t.”

“I don’t like being scared, Charlie Dean.”

He turned and looked down into her face. “It’s not the worst thing.”

“What is?”

“Being scared for somebody else when you can’t do anything about it.”

“Being alone is worse, I think. Not on a mission — really alone. I think that’s really what I’m afraid of. That’s the real fear. Everything else — it’s a reaction to it.”

“You’re not alone.”

As he bent to kiss her, he thought he heard something moving in the woods. How perfect it would be, he thought, if the big buck appeared now.

He straightened and picked up his glasses. Lia did the same. But they saw nothing, and though they stayed on the knoll for more than an hour, the big buck never came.