Don't Forget To Remember

How We Worked It Out

In retrospect, it had been a stupid move to try and sneak up on him. He hadn't been hard to find. I'd barely needed the easy trail his boots had carved into the scrub. I could have followed the noise he was making with my eyes closed. This guy was clearly not at home out here. Honestly, that's probably what made me bold enough to try for the stealthy jump scare. If he hadn't seemed so out of place I might have opted for pumping him for intel.

As it was, he gave the impression of a townie thrill seeker, some punk kid out there out of curiosity, or on a dare. That was one thing I did not need, so I figured to put the fear of god in him. That way he would get gone, and stay gone, and I could take care of business without a legend tripping high schooler getting underfoot. I really was way too cocky back then.

As stupid as it was, in retrospect, at the time I was determined to make that particular mistake, so I had drawn my Bowie, and trusting the noise of his own footfalls to cover whatever sound came from my own soft-soled moccs, I closed the distance between us with carefully placed steps.

I stilled my breathing as I crept in closer, almost close enough to pounce when he turned, gun in hand. I could almost have believed he'd pulled it right out of the air with the speed of his draw.

I froze midstride, looking down the barrel of shiny, cold death. The metallic click let me know it was cocked and ready. "Well," I found my voice, "that didn't go like I planned."

"I guess not," he replied, "lose the knife."

I ran a quick check of my options and reluctantly had to admit, I didn't have a lot of them, and the ones I did have were not good. I opened my hand and the blade hit the ground, sounding just like my stomach felt.

"You know," he said, keeping the weapon trained on me while his free hand motioned for me to step back from my own, "I'm usually cool with chicks following me. I mean, I can't really blame them, but..."

That was just too much. "Oh get over yourself." I snorted. It wasn't the brightest move I could have made, considering my situation, but I was fairly confident that even if he seemed quite capable of shooting me, that he wasn't going to actually do it without a good reason. I could still salvage this, get back on the case, and most important, get that damned gun off of me.

I took a slow deep breath, careful to keep my hands where he could see them, well clear of the throwers in my thigh sheath. "OK, let's just take a breath here. I'm just out here hunting." technically the truth. "I'll admit, I wanted to scare you off before all that racket you were making spooked the whole area." also true. "I wasn't really going to cut you."

Silence.

"Not even a little," I added hopefully.

He sounded neither convinced, nor amused when he said, "Right, you hunt with a knife."

My voice went cold, "When I have to."

My mind scolded me. That crack, in that tone, was not going to help my situation, but I was finding it hard to care at the moment. Down the road, swapping stories over beers we would both laugh over the fact that Dean had a way of cutting through my emotional control, straight to the worst of my nature from the second we met. Down the road, it would be freakin' hilarious, but at the moment, I was the idiot that had brought a knife to a gunfight, and apparently thought the best course of action while ten feet from the wrong end of a .45 was to give the cocksure kid holding it a reason to be nervous. I'm not sure why he didn't shoot me. I probably would have shot me.

On top of everything else, we were burning daylight. I really didn't want to get caught out there after dark with no idea yet just what it was that I was after. I needed to move this thing along. "Look kid," I forced myself back to a calm, measured tone, "at the risk of ruining whatever Brad Pitt, action adventure fantasy you're living out, you're not the first person to hold a gun on me, so unless you plan on being the last, how about we just write this off as the worst blind date ever, and go our separate ways?"