"I said I read that you should never eat near your tent because of bears."
"That's car camping."
Silence. Then: "So there are bears."
"Black bears. They're not interested in you."
"That's either reassuring or insulting."
I get the fire started. She comes out of the tent with different socks and a fleece and her hair has escaped whatever clip she had it in and she's pushed it back from her face with both hands and left it approximately where it landed. I look at her for longer than I need to and then at the fire.
She sits on the flat rock I always use. Pulls her knees up. Looks at the eastern ridge.
The sun is going down behind us and the light on that ridge goes from white to yellow to a deep amber that changes every few minutes, and she watches, not reaching for her phone, notnarrating it, just watching. Her face goes quiet. The thing she's been carrying since the trailhead this morning doesn't go away, but it shifts. The effort of it relaxes. Whatever exhaustion and anger she’s been hiding comes closer to the surface.
She looks young. She looks real.
I have a rule about clients. It's a good rule. I've never broken it. And, as beautiful as she is, there’s no way I’m stopping now.
I put more wood on the fire and shake the thought of what her kiss would be like from my mind.
"How long have you been doing this?" she asks.
"Guiding? Twelve years."
"Full time?"
"Since I was twenty-four."
She considers this. "So you just decided on the mountains. That's the plan."
"That's the plan."
"There was no other plan?"
There was. Engineering. Two years of a degree I finished in my head and never finished on paper, in a city that never once felt like the right size. I don't say any of this. "No."
She nods slowly like she's doing the math on something. "I envy that."
"What."
"Knowing. Just knowing what you want and doing it."
"You don't know what you want?"
She laughs ruefully. "I knew what I was supposed to want. I was very good at that."
I look at her across the fire. She's looking at the coals, not at me, and the amber light is doing something to her face that I notice in a detached, factual way, the way I'd note the temperature or the direction of the wind. She's beautiful, when with mud on her cheek that is smeared but not successfully wiped off.
"You'll figure it out," I say.
She looks at me for a moment. The ruined edge of the laugh is still there but something warmer is next to it now. "How do you know?"
I look back at the fire and shrug. I don't have an answer that belongs in the guide-client category, so I don't give one. I reach for the camp pot instead. "Hungry?"
"Desperately."
I make dinner. She sits on the rock and watches and at some point the watching turns into the comfortable version, which is different from the polite version people do in the first hour when they don't know what to do with their hands. She asks what's in it and I tell her and she makes a sound of genuine interest when I say the chilli flakes are from a woman at the Silver Ridge market.
