She's not comfortable with the quiet. I notice that. Some people settle into camp silence easily — they've been waiting for it all day. She's not one of them. She reaches for her phone twice out of habit, both times remembering before she gets it out, both times redirecting her hands to her bowl or her sleeve or the middle distance. The third time she catches herself she makes a small noise of irritation and tucks both hands under her thighs like she's solving the problem architecturally.
I don't say anything. It's not my business.
I hand her the bowl and she wraps both hands around it and says, "Thank you, Dawson," with her full attention on the meal, and I go back to my side of the fire.
My rule is a good rule.
I don't look at her again for the rest of the night.
I don't need to. I can already tell it won't help.
three
Nyla
Iwakeuponday two unable to move my legs.
Not paralysed, but every muscle below my hips has lodged a formal complaint overnight and is now refusing to participate until management addresses their concerns. I lie in my sleeping bag and do a quiet inventory. Calves: no. Thighs: absolutely not. The specific muscles on the outsides of my hips that I didn't know existed until approximately right now: genuinely furious.
I also have no idea what my hair is doing but I can feel it from the inside, which is never a good sign.
Outside the tent, I can hear Dawson moving through camp: the soft knock of the camp pot, the creak of the fire ring grate, the particular quiet of someone who's been awake for a while and has no complaints about it. I lie there and listen and my body slowly remembers that it agreed to this, and after a while I find my hair elastic by feel, drag everything up into something I commit to calling intentional, and unzip the tent.
He's crouched by the fire with a mug in both hands, and the morning light is doing something unfair to him — catching the line of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders under the worn jacket, the easy way he holds himself even at rest. He looks like he was built for this specific landscape. Like if you removed him from it something would be missing from the view.
He glances at me. Takes in whatever my face is doing. "Coffee."
"Please," I say, with everything I have.
He pours without ceremony and holds it out and I cross the camp to take it, close enough to feel the warmth coming off the fire, close enough that when our fingers overlap on the mug for a half-second I feel it more than I should at six in the morning. I sit on the flat rock and wrap both hands around the mug and I breathe.
There is no mirror in a forty-kilometre radius. My hair is doing whatever it's doing. I have trail dust in my eyebrows and I slept in my fleece and yesterday's socks and I am currently being observed by another human being in this condition, and the thing I notice is thatI don't care.
I test this feeling carefully, the way you test ice. Press on it. Wait.
It holds.
I don't care.
I sit with that for a moment. Four years of curating the right angle, the right caption, the right version of my face for the right platform, and now I'm sitting on a rock at six thousand feet with yesterday's socks and a man who looks like that watching me from across the fire. I genuinely, measurably do not care. It feels less like freedom and more like putting down something heavy that I'd stopped noticing I was carrying.
I look up. He's watching me with that steady attention he has. Fully, quietly present in a way that should feel like pressure and somehow doesn't.
It's been a long time since anyone looked at me without wanting something from it.
"I forgot to care what I look like," I tell him, because the morning and the altitude and two days without a signal have apparently removed my filter entirely. "Three minutes and it hasn't occurred to me once. That's the longest streak in four years."
He considers this seriously. "Good."
"Is it?"
"Seems like it costs you something," he says. "Whatever it is you usually do."
I think about the ring light Tyler kept by the window. The habit I'd built of checking my reflection in my phone screen before we went anywhere. The particular exhaustion of always being slightlyon.
"Yeah," I say. "It does."
He nods once and looks back at the fire. The ridge goes pink to gold while I finish my coffee. I let myself look at him the way I haven't let myself look at anything in a long time. The line of his profile. The way his hands hold the mug. The scar along his jaw catching the early light.
