“Don’t argue, just do it.”
She let out a huff but took my hand.
I crossed first because the upslope side was easier to land on than to leave from. I turned around and held both her hands when she stepped across, and she didn't need both of mine, but she took them both and didn't let go. Crossing took two seconds and we both stood on the upslope side.
I should have let go, but I didn't. Neither did she. She looked up at me with expectation in her eyes. I knew exactly what I wanted to come next, but I let go of her hands instead and kept walking.
The high meadow stopped her. I'd known it would. I'd only brought one other person up here in nine years. Gibson hadn’t been impressed and asked whether I'd ever fished the upper creek. But Soleil walked into the meadow and stopped. She didn't even take her sketchbook out.
She walked into the blooms… paintbrush and columbine and the small white pearly everlasting growing out of the rock at the south edge. Then she reached out and traced the edge of a petal with one finger, standing so still for so long that I almost said something. I didn't. Biscuit came up next to me and sat down. Even he understood that some things weren't his to interrupt.
After a while, she crouched. After another while, she pulled the sketchbook out.
She worked for almost an hour, and I stood there and watched, telling myself I was keeping an eye on her for safety reasons. The creek could flood. The weather could change. A bear could wander through. The truth was I had walked into the high meadow on more mornings than I could count and I had never once looked at it the way I was looking at it now.
When she stood, she came over to where I sat on a flat rock with the empty coffee thermos by my side. She sat down on the ground in front of the rock and leaned up against it, her back resting next to my leg, close enough to touch.
“Have you always lived this quietly?” she asked.
“For the most part.” It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. Before Soleil showed up on my ridge, my life had been one long silent stretch followed by another, and I’d liked it that way. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“Why?”
“I like things simple.”
She thought about that for a minute. “Hidden things are still there. Even if no one talks about them.”
She wasn't looking at me when she said it. She was looking at a purple bloom.
I didn't answer. Couldn't. The line had landed in the same wrong part of me thatcarefulhad landed. I was sitting on a flat rock in my own high meadow with a woman leaning against my leg and a dog sleeping at my feet and I had no defense against any of it.
After a long beat, she got to her feet. “We should head down. The sky looks weird.”
I looked up. She was right. The west edge of the sky had gone a color I knew, the kind of color that meant we had maybe forty minutes before it got serious. I'd missed it because I'd been watching her work.
“Storm’s coming. We need to head out.”
She closed her sketchbook and slid it back into her pack. We made it as far as the old lookout on the descent before I knew we weren't going to make it home.
The bench was still there. I'd built it four years ago when I'd been overstocked on cedar and undersupplied with reasons to be in town. I'd set it on the flat at the lookout and bolted it intothe rock because the wind up there could throw a free-standing bench into the next county. The bench had a good view east on a clear morning, and it had absolutely zero shelter from anything moving in from the west.
But the bench was the marker. Half a mile past the bench was the old miner's cabin. It wasn’t much, but it had a roof, four walls, and a fireplace that still worked. I'd ducked into it twice over the years when weather had come up fast. It was the closest thing to shelter between the high meadow and home, and the way the sky was moving, it was the only option we had.
Soleil sat down on the bench while I checked the runoff channel on the north side of the clearing. She set her hand on the wood and slid it along the underside of the seat, the same way she'd touched the side table in the workshop.
Her fingers stopped. She didn't look at me, just sat with her hand resting on the underside of the bench for a long beat, her thumb moving slow and light. The carving was a columbine, a two-inch bloom with five petals and the spur on the underside that columbines have. I'd done it on a slow afternoon four years ago and I'd never come back to look at it because there was nothing about looking at it that would have been useful to me.
But she'd found it. Instead of acknowledging it, she stood and gave me a small, easy smile like nothing had happened. “Ready?”
I picked up my pack and turned away. I didn't trust my face or my voice to not give away what I was feeling inside. I'd been letting her see the carvings for weeks and now she'd found the one I hadn't shown her on purpose.
I wanted to kiss her. Standing right there by the bench with the wind blowing and a storm coming in, I wanted to kiss her so badly I could almost taste her lips. Fuck, I couldn't have any of that.
The wind shifted. The sky cracked open about thirty seconds later. The first drops hit my pack and then the temperature dropped ten degrees in twenty seconds.
“We’ve got to get to the cabin,” I said. “It’s half a mile. Run.” I grabbed her hand and didn't let go this time.
Biscuit was ahead of us, smart enough to know where shelter was without being told. Soleil kept up as pea-sized hail fell around us. The cabin came up on the left. I slammed the door open with my shoulder. Biscuit was already inside.
