She clapped her hands and jumped, which was another test for her ankle. She came down onto it without a second thought and I smiled to myself as she rushed into the bathroom. I could hear herself cleaning up while I pulled on a pair of pajama pants. Then, I made my way to the kitchen.
I didn’t have any smaller guns she could start out with. I only had my shotgun and my hunting rifle. I made us up some eggs and cheese grits before I started making some coffee and, the moment I heard her come into the room, I turned around.
She was in my clothes again and it made me smile.
“Mine are still dirty,” she said. “Wanna do laundry today?”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll put them in the washer in a bit.”
“Just show me where it is. I can do it.”
I sat the eggs off to the side as the grits continued to simmer. The coffee was still brewing and I was debating whether or not to fry up some bacon. I led her down the small hallway of the cabin and opened up the closet at the end, revealing the small washer and dryer set I’d had installed. She immediately began to take note of the stains before she started putting them into the washer.
I took a step back and watched her before I headed back to the kitchen.
The washer was going and we were on the couch eating breakfast. One of the things I really enjoyed about Whitney was that the silence with her was comfortable. There was no need to talk to justify the time I was spending with her. The sun was beating down onto the snow and I could already see it dripping from the gutters of the cabin.
At this rate, half the snow that dumped onto us would be gone by tomorrow.
I gathered up our dirty dishes as Whitney traipsed back down the hallway. I could hear her fiddling with the dryer while I rinsed all the dishes and she started it up just as I made my way to my room.
“Let me put on some decent clothes and we’ll head out,” I said.
“All I gotta do is slip on shoes,” she said. “If that’s okay.”
“Unless you wanna go shooting guns naked, that outfit’s just fine,” I said, grinning.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
I held her gaze for a spell before I broke it, sliding into my room and getting changed.
By the time I emerged, Whitney was standing by the door. I could tell she was excited and anxious at the same time. I held my shotgun in my hand while I stuffed my pockets with ammunition and, the moment her eyes connected with mine, they lit up with anticipation.
“Ready to learn how to shoot a gun?” I asked.
“You’re starting me off on that thing?” she asked.
“I don’t have anything smaller,” I said. “But don’t worry. The kickback isn’t actually that bad if you hold the gun right. I’ll teach you.”
I slipped on a coat before I handed her a sweatshirt. Then we left the cabin and started for the backyard. I walked us a bit into the woods before we came to a clearing where I’d set up my own targets to practice on “Okay, first, you have to hold the gun properly,” I said.
I handed it to her and watched how she naturally held it before I stepped behind her and started correcting her posture.
“You want the butt of the gun to lay right in the crook of your arm. Let the excess meat on your chest settle against the side of the gun.”
She giggled and shook her head and I grinned at her reaction.
“Hold your trigger hand like so. Then support the gauge of the gun with your other hand like this.”
I maneuvered her hands and fingers to where they needed to be so she could get a feel for what a gun felt like in her hands. I stepped back and let her point it at a couple of things so she could get used to the weight of the gun in her hands. Then, it was time for me to direct her on how to aim.
“Aiming down the sight of a gun gets a little trickier because everyone sees things a bit differently. Some people have to close one eye or the other, depending on how good their vision is, while others can keep both eyes open and sight a target just fine. But I want you to look down the barrel of the gun right here and tell me what you see.”
I helped her to align her head but, already, I could feel her arms shaking.
“This gun’s a lot heavier than it looks,” she said.
“You wanna take a rest?”
Even though she was beginning to tremble, she shook her head.
“Okay, what do you see down the end of that barrel?” I asked.
“I see the barrel but then there’s a mirror image. A picture of the gun that’s a bit fuzzier than the actual one.”
“Then close one eye and figure out which gun image is the one that’s less hazy.”
I watched her test it out until she figured out what I was talking about.
“That’s so weird,” she said. “Why does that happen?”
“It has to do with a lot of factors. Your vision. How far apart your eyes are. When you’re looking at an image, your eyes are coming at it from two different angles. Your brain fuses the two images together, calculates the average, then provides you with the picture you see now. But if anything gets distorted, then those two images split apart. The one that’s fuzzier is the image being interpreted by your less-dominant eye. That’s why you want to go with the one that’s not as fuzzy. Because that eye is going to be more reliable when it comes to aiming at a distance.”
She kept opening and closing one eye at a time as a grin spread across her cheeks.
“Too cool,” she said.
She finally allowed her arms some rest and I took the gun from her. She shook her arms out while I loaded two shots into the gun and, when she was ready, I handed it back to her.
“The safety’s on, for now, so just get yourself back into the setup you were in before,” I said.
I watched her get into position and I corrected a couple of things before I toggled the safety.
“Okay. Close your non-dominant eye and aim the barrel of the gun just below the target.”
“Just below?” she asked.
“Yep. Just trust me. Whenever you’re ready.”
I watched her take a deep breath before she pulled the trigger and the loud shot that rang out caused me to jump. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath before I heard Whitney cock the shotgun. Then, the second shot rang out before she dropped the gun from her shoulder.
I could feel the tremble starting at my fingertips while she cheered herself on.
“How was that?” she asked.
I opened my eyes and looked at the target. The shot was pretty scattered but that was to be expected. She hit the target right where I thought she would, which meant her aiming was pretty good for someone who’d never shot a gun before.
I looked over at her smiling face, her eyes anxious for what I had to tell her.
“Your aim’s actually pretty good and you cocked that gun like a pro,” I said.
“I’ve seen that done in movies,” she said. “I knew nothing else about this thing.”
“Let me reload it and we can go again,” I said.
I reloaded the gun and she popped off two more shots. One was a bit high and the other was still a bit low, but I just kept trying to encourage her. Even though I could feel the panic rising, I wanted to try and stay out here long enough for her to at least hit the middle of the target once.
I just had to keep a lid on it until then.
I’d shot my rifle to hunt and I shot my shotgun into the air once to clear a bear off my property, but there was something different about another person shooting a gun off so close to me. I wasn’t in control of it and that bothered me. I wasn’t the one holding the gun and wielding it and I could feel the sweat prickling the back of my neck. Whitney shot off two more shots. One was still low, but the next one hit as close to the middle of the target as she’d come yet.
And that was just going to have to be good enough.
“Look, Liam,” she said, smiling. “I almost got that one.”
I nodded and smiled before I took the gun from her hands.
“Your arms are trembling pretty badly and that’s a bad thing when holding a gun,” I said.
I watched the smile slowly slip from her face but she didn’t question it.