Tracking Logan Foster

{8} Iris

My mind raced as I tried to figure out what to do, spinning in circles as if I could miraculously find the train. Logan cursed under his breath, lighting a cigarette before dumping the empty pack in a nearby trash can.

"Where are we?" I asked, starting to panic as I paced beside the railroad tracks, kicking up stones and pebbles with each step. Most of the snow had melted in the wake of the sun beating down on us in the cloudless sky.

Not knowing how we could've possibly missed the massive sign before, Logan pointed at a giant map as his face became ghostly pale.

"We're in Maine," he said in shock, "Practically in the middle of nowhere." He puffed out a cloud of smoke, momentarily obscuring himself from my view until it diminished.

My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach at our location. From traveling for two days straight, we had made it from Delaware to Maine.

"It looks like the tracks make a u-turn here," I said, meeting Logan's eyes, "We made it to the end."

He remained quiet for a few moments as he processed what this meant for us. "We'll have to wait for the next train," he decided.

"No, well yes, but that's not what I meant. Logan, we made it to the end of the tracks!" I said, emphasizing my point.

He turned to fully face me with a look of wonder and sincerity in his eyes as he asked, "Is it what you dreamed it to be?"

Spinning in a slow circle, watching as the naked trees seemed to dance around me, I realized this wasn't what I had expected the end of the tracks to look like.

In my dreams, I had found the end of the tracks like finding the pot of gold at the edge of a rainbow. I had been ecstatic, jumping up and down as I took pictures of the beautiful, lively landscape with wild animals roaming in the colorful trees and flowers.

Here, melted patches of snow that were more brown than white dotted the mud encrusted ground underneath bare trees that looked like creepy skeletons as they shivered in the harsh breeze.

Pulling Logan's leather jacket tighter around my shoulders, I admitted, "No."

"Nothing ever is," he just barely whispered. I hadn't even been sure if he had said anything at all.

"It's better than I could've ever dreamed," I said, and I meant it.

Logan's eyebrows scrunched in confusion, not quite understanding where I was coming from. A smile widened my cheeks, undoubtedly uncovering the dimples that had been in hiding for the past two days.

Logan looked taken aback and placed the bag of leftover fast food on the ground, but what he didn't realize was that he had changed my way of thinking.

I opened my mouth to expand on that previous thought when Logan bent down, scooping up a handful of dirtied snow before compacting it into a tight ball and giving me a mischievous grin.

I couldn't get past the fact that Logan Foster was actually smiling instead of brooding in strained silence while he relived torturous memories that I still knew close to nothing about.

Needless to say, when he drew his arm back and threw it forward in a playful manner, I hadn't been ready to behave as a target for the muddy snowball.