It could have been minutes, or even hours, but eventually they picked their way leisurely through the dense copse to the clearing in the woods close to where Eric had left his car.
"Why did you take me here?" Eric asked, breaking a comfortable silence that cocooned them; born from the magnitude of emotions they had both experienced earlier where they had been rewarded by a glimpse into each others' souls.
Their linked hands swung gently between them and she stopped as they were several feet away from the Cruiser.
He turned to her, a question in the slight arch of his brows.
She had turned a little away from him, though her hand was still in his, and when she turned back to face him, she had an almost indecipherable look on her face.
"I took you here because…," she trailed off, searching for the right words to cement feelings. It wasn't long before she found them. "Because… I wanted to create a new memory."
She looked slowly around the quiet and peace of the area, closing her eyes and breathing in the piney scent of the trees.
"A new memory," she repeated, nodding absently as if to confirm a realization. "I wanted a new one, to replace the old ones that I've had… I've always loved this place, because… maybe because being up here made me feel like I was leaving the… the weight… of the town below me. It made my thoughts clearer and put things in perspective and I would start to feel that everything would be okay again."
Eric brought her hand to his mouth, gently rubbing her knuckles against his lips. "Go on," he said.
"So I had thought then, that it would be the best place to take Steven out on our first date ever," she finished with a tinkling laugh.
It was a clear sound with no hint of bitterness or regret.
Turning her head to the right, she gestured with the fingers of that hand and Eric noticed that they had stopped by the gnarled trunk of an imposing tree.
"Give me your knife? The one that you use for whittling?"
He nodded, reaching into the right pocket of his jeans and pulled it out. He flipped it open and handed it to her hilt first. "Careful, sweetheart, it's sharp."
She took it from him, turning it around in her hands and smiled as memories assailed her. It was a beautiful knife, given to him by Morathi, the handle made from pure African Blackwood with a grain so fine it was barely visible. Under certain light, a deep brown would appear in the rich black of the wood and Eric had told her once that it reminded him of the color of her hair.
It took her maybe an hour, even two, to which she refused all manner of help from Eric, though she admitted that things could have gone along a lot faster if he didn't stop her so often to kiss her or rain kisses up and down her neck. He teased her non-stop throughout, trying to wrestle the knife from her and at one point reminding her in a lofty tone that he was the one with all the carving experience here.
But two hours later, she stepped back proudly with sweat glistening against her temple and wood shavings in her hair, and all over her hands. She turned towards Eric, suddenly shy, hoping that he would like it.
What remained of the crude outline of a heart that once housed the initials "JB & SH 4Eva" was now gone.
In its place lay another heart, nearly perfect and almost symmetrical in shape. Jackie had painstakingly scraped away the rough and textured bark inside the new heart, revealing pale, smooth wood underneath, and right in the middle she had carved "Jackie" and "Eric" and between those names rested another heart.
He reached out long fingers and touched the heart, feeling the grooves and lines where she had chipped and scraped and scratched away to ingrain their memory into a tree.
"You got good," he said softly, moved by words that she could not say, but poured forth and could be seen so clearly in her every action, in her very touch, with her body, and in each and every smile that she gave him.
Jackie sniffed, turning her nose up in the air. "I've watched you do similar with wood a million times. Some of it rubbed off." The effect was ruined when she gave a mighty sneeze, and rubbed at her nose with the back of her hand, leaving a smudge of dirt across the tip.
He chuckled and pulled her close.
She sighed, nestling into his chest and looking at her work in satisfaction. "There. See? Now it's set in stone. Or bark. Whatever."
"What is?"
"You. Us… Memories of you." He felt her lift slender shoulders beneath his arm. "Comfort… for… when you… leave again."
"Jackie…"
She shook her head, and turned to lean her forehead in his shoulder. "It's okay. I know this, Eric. That… you and I… we're not meant to last." Her fingers danced up the buttons of his shirt and she followed their path to meet his eyes.
"Maybe that's why it took me so long. To gather the courage to tell everyone." She lay the pads of three fingers against his lips, smoothing over them gently. "To even acknowledge what we have."
She was quiet for a while, and he was content to just have her in his arms.
"I heard you the other night…," she began tentatively, breaking the silence. "On the phone at your apartment."
He opened his mouth but she continued before he could speak. "You thought I was asleep, but I woke when you left the bed to answer it."
"Jackie…," he started to say again.
"No, it's okay," she repeated, and this time her eyes were damp. She forced past the awful ache in her heart, the sense of loss and desperation so deep she didn't know how she would ever claw her way back out of it if she allowed herself for one moment, to fall.
"It's a great offer, you should take it, you shouldn't have… shouldn't have told Jen you'd think about it." She smiled a watery smile, "The UN doesn't offer jobs as readily as you would think. And for you to continue on in Kenya? Doing what you love? Close to the people that you love? The land that you love."
Her chest rose as she leaned back in the circle of his arms, hands tracing the line of his shoulders, loving the feel of him. Loving him.
She looked up bravely, selflessly, and with all that she felt in her soul for him, she smiled another smile and whispered, "Take it, Eric, it's a dream come true and you know it."
He stared at her wordlessly, wondering if she knew how hard it was for him to leave her. But this town, this country, could no longer house the spirit that he was now, the person that he had become.
Jackie knew this, had always known this. Unlike the girl that she had been before, before life and Eric had made her the woman she was now, she would never ask him to choose; to stay with her and give up something that she knew was as essential to him as breathing itself.
The words came out quietly, so quietly he wondered if it was because he was afraid to know the answer.
"Will you come with me?"
Similar words, said at a different time, in a different lifetime, to a different her, danced across her memory.
She kept quiet, allowing them to sink in, and for several moments, threw away all that she was certain about, all that she had painstakingly built for herself there, all that she had made herself and for herself, and allowed herself to entertain the thought of that possibility with him; the uncertainty of that possibility with him.
Her eyes found his; searching them, reading them, dreaming together with him.
And then her lips parted and her lashes swept down and she took a deep breath as her eyes closed.
He kissed her forehead then, almost reverently, a ghost of a smile on his lips. "You're not leaving."
It came out as more of a statement than the actual question he wanted to ask, but it would have made no difference to the answer he knew he was going to get.
He belonged in Africa.
Just as much as he knew she belonged in America.