He doesn't catch me looking. Or he does and doesn't comment, which with Dawson amounts to the same thing.
The trail on day two is harder and more beautiful in equal measure.
He takes us higher, onto an exposed ridgeline where the wind has opinions and the views are frankly unreasonable. My legs stage their protest through the first hour and then surrender,and somewhere in the second hour I notice that the usual noise has quieted — not gone, not resolved, just turned down. I still reach for my phone twice before I remember. I still feel the pull of it, the phantom weight of an inbox I can't check, a comment section I can't monitor. But there are longer stretches now where the trail just takes over. Where the only thing to think about is the next footfall and the cold air and Dawson's shoulders moving up ahead of me, and those stretches keep getting longer.
"Do you have a favorite?" I ask, during one of the talking stretches. "Route, I mean."
He thinks about it. "There's a traverse north of here. Three days in. Nobody takes it."
"Why not?"
"Technical. And it doesn't go anywhere obvious." A pause. "Just goes somewhere good."
I want to ask more. I don't. Some things you can feel are not for asking about yet.
Yet.I let the word drift past.
He takes me to the overlook at noon without telling me it's coming.
We angle off the main trail and the path narrows to suggestion and we scramble up a short rock face — and then his hand is around my wrist, warm and sure, guiding me up the last hard move, and I am acutely, suddenly aware of every point of contact. His grip. The steadiness of it. The way he holds on until I'm stable and then lets go so cleanly it almost feels like a question.
I don't look at him when we reach the top because I'm fairly certain my face would answer it.
The view takes care of that. The peaks go back in layers, each one a shade lighter than the last, a lake below throwing the sun back in a long white line, an eagle leaning into a thermal like effort is optional. I stand there and my caption-brain surfacesfor half a second and then dissolves. I don't want to translate this into something for someone else. I want to stand here and let it be enormous and real and not do a single thing about it.
Dawson is slightly behind me and to the left. Close enough that I'm aware of the warmth of him in the cold air. He doesn't speak. Doesn't move. Just gives me the view like it's something he wanted me to have, and the giving of it feels like its own kind of thing.
We stay until the eagle disappears over the ridge. When I finally turn to go, I almost walk into him. He's closer than I thought, close enough that I have to look up to find his face, and he doesn't step back, and there's a moment, brief and charged and full of something that doesn't have a name yet, where we're just standing there.
"Ready?" he says.
His voice is low and even. His eyes are very dark.
"Yes," I say, and I'm not entirely sure what I'm answering.
That night, I tell him about Tyler.
I don't plan to. We're sitting either side of the fire and the dark has come in close and the stars are unreasonable and he asks, in the quiet way he asks things, how long it was. And I've had two days of altitude and no signal and his hand around my wrist on the rock face, and whatever I've been holding together just… unravels.
"Two years," I say. "He has a following. Lifestyle content. And I became part of it gradually, without ever really deciding to — we were the couple people followed. And then we weren't, and he posted about it the way he posts everything. Three minutes ofTyler in his car being very measured and veryI care about her so much." I look at the fire. "Two hundred thousand views."
Dawson doesn't fill the silence and I find I have more.
"The comments aren't the worst part. The worst part is that I looked at myself through all of it for so long that I don't know which parts were real anymore. I built this whole version of myself for an audience and now the audience is gone and I look in the mirror and I genuinely don't know who's left."
The fire pops. The dark sits with us.
I wait for him to say something well-meaning that misses the point. I'm already composing the polite response.
He's quiet for long enough that I look up.
He's leaning forward slightly, elbows on his knees, hands loose around his mug. The firelight catches the scar along his jaw and the steadiness of his eyes and the fact that he is watching me with complete, unhurried attention. Just here. Not pity, just concern.
I look back at the fire. I'm aware of him in my peripheral vision. The warmth of him across the small space between us. The silence, which should be uncomfortable and isn't, which should feel like absence and feels instead like pressure, like being held in place by something that hasn't touched me.
"You're the woman," he says, "who stood on that ridge today and didn’t take a picture. I think whatever social media addiction you think you have, isn’t as bad as you think. You just needed a little space."
I open my mouth and close it. He looks back at the fire, unhurried, like he said a thing that needed saying and that's all.
