We walked in silence. I didn’t know where he was leading me, and I didn’t care. The ground crunched beneath my shoes. The smell of trees, grass, dirt and clean air was intoxicating. It wasn’t the same air as LA. You had to breathe through the layer of smog there. Some days it was so thick, you couldn’t even see the mountains. Totally gross. But in Texas, the fresh air made me long to spend time outside even in spite of the heat.
We reached a sharp drop. I glimpsed the rocky bed below us. “The creek?”
“Yep. We’ll get heavy rains in the winter and spring and it’ll fill up for a while, but by summer it’s always dry,” he said. “Want to go back or climb down?”
Caves pocked the wall on the other side of the creek bed. One of them looked large enough for someone to live in. Shadows filled its
