She looks at me for a long moment. "And I think I want to stay. I just don't know if that's real or if it's the altitude talking."
"Stay," I say. The only word that has been true since the rock ledge, since her face a foot from mine and her eyes bright and I stepped back and told myself that would be enough. "Not forever. Just.. stay a while. Be here. See what this is." I pause. "With me."
She looks at the mountains. Then her mug. Then back at me. She looks at me over her mug with the full warmth of it and says, "Okay."
"Okay?"
"I'll stay." A beat. "For now. And then we'll see."
For me, that's everything.
seven
Nyla
Thewalktothecabin takes twenty minutes through town and up the forestry road, which I now know the way I know the trail — by its sounds and its particular quality of light through the trees and the way the air changes as the road climbs. Dawson’s cat Cashew appears from nowhere about two hundred metres out, as he always does, materialising from the treeline like he's been tracking my approach and has decided it's time to escort me in. He's carrying a pinecone in his mouth, which he drops at my feet with the solemn offering energy of a Labrador who has brought you the ball. I pick it up. He looks extremely satisfied. We walk the rest of the way together, him at my heel, the pine cone now apparently my responsibility.
Dawson's truck is in the yard.
He opens the door before I knock. He looks at me in the doorway and then at Cashew, who walks past both of us into the cabin with the confidence of an animal who has already decided this is his home and is merely tolerating our presence in it.
"He walked me," I say. "I had no say in the direction."
"He does that. I’m pretty sure he thinks he’s a guide dog." Dawson steps back to let me in.
The cabin settles around me. That's the only way I can describe it — the way a good fit settles, the way camp felt on the second morning when the soreness was real and the air was cold and I didn't care about any of it. Small and solid and built by someone who knew what he wanted. Maps above the door. The bench with its half-repaired strap, something always waiting. The south window with the valley behind it. The smell of woodsmoke and coffee and pine resin that I have already, without meaning to, come to associate with safety.
I look at him in his own space and something shifts and settles in me too.
"I deleted all of the apps this morning," I say.
He takes that in the way he takes things — giving it proper weight, not minimising it, not performing a reaction. "How does it feel?"
"Light." I think about it. "Like the first morning at camp. When I realised I didn't care about the mirror."
"Good," he says.
"I don't know what I'm doing next," I say. "For work. For — any of it. I have no plan. I'm figuring it out." I look at him. "But I know I want to be here while I'm figuring. Here in Silver Ridge."
"Okay," he says.
"Here in this cabin," I say. "Specifically."
Dawson crosses the room and frames my face in both hands and kisses me, and I put my palms flat on his chest and feel his heartbeat steady under them, and then he walks me backward through the bedroom doorway and stops.
He looks at me for a moment. Then his hands go to the buttons of my shirt and he undoes them one by one, unhurried, his eyes on his hands. Pushes it off my shoulders. Reaches around andunhooks my bra and takes that too. Steps back and looks at me in the lamplight with the full weight of his attention and I feel it everywhere.
He turns me around without a word.
His mouth finds the back of my neck. My shoulder. He gets his hands on my breasts from behind and I lean back into him and feel exactly how much he wants this pressed hard against me. He works my nipples until I'm shifting against him, until my breathing has changed, and then he turns me back around and sits me on the edge of the bed and kneels in front of me and takes my jeans off, then my underwear, and looks up at me from the floor with that dark patient attention.
Then he puts his mouth on my inner thigh and I grip the sheets.
He takes his time. Works his way in slow, mouth on my thigh, the crease of my hip, everywhere except where I need him until I make a sound that is not patient at all. He finally gets his mouth on me and I stop thinking. I sink my fingers into his hair. He stays. He eases off and I make a frustrated sound and he comes back and does it again, slower, and I am going to lose my mind.
He slides two fingers inside me and works them in a slow curl while his tongue stays steady on my clit and I come so hard my thighs clamp around his head and I have to turn my face into the pillow.
He stands. Strips his shirt off, the rest, and I watch him and don't pretend otherwise and he lets me look, unhurried, and then he comes down over me and I reach between us and get my hand around his cock. Stroke once. His arms lock.
