"You were good."
"Was I." She's still looking at me. Still right there.
"Technically sound," I say, and step back onto the trail.
I hear her exhale behind me.
The high meadow earns everything.
That's why I come back. Two kilometres of flat alpine grass above the treeline, ringed by peaks, a tarn at the centre that reflects the sky so cleanly it looks like a hole in the groundleading somewhere better. The light at this elevation in the late afternoon has no business being that colour. I've been coming here for years and I've never tried to explain it to anyone.
She goes quiet when we come over the rise and it spreads out in front of us.
Completely quiet. She just stops and looks at it and after a moment she sits down right where she's standing, on the grass at the edge of the meadow, and puts her hands in her lap.
I sit beside her, closer than necessary, if I'm being honest with myself, which I've been trying not to be and we watch the light move across the tarn for a long time.
"You took the wrong trail at the junction," she says eventually. "The other one went back to town."
"Yes."
She's quiet for a moment. "I wasn't going to say anything."
I look at her. She's still facing the meadow, her eyes glittering with emotion that I know all too well. The awe of it brought me to tears the first few times as well.
"Last night of the trip," I tell her. Which is not an answer. She knows it's not an answer.
"Is it?" she says.
I look back at the tarn.
We sit there until the light goes.
Camp is just below the snowline, on the shelf I knew was here. I set up the tent while she collects deadfall for the fire and comes back with an armload that's better sorted than I'd expect, which shouldn't surprise me anymore.
We make dinner. We eat. The fire does what fires do and the dark comes in and above us the stars are extraordinary, the kind of clear that only happens at altitude with no light pollution for fifty kilometres in every direction. She doesn't reach for her phone. She hasn't since yesterday morning, and the not-reaching has changed something in her face — some tension that was there on day one, a held quality around her eyes, has gone.
We don't talk much around the fire tonight. We don't need to.
At some point she looks at me across the fire and says, "Thank you. For the left trail."
"Don't thank me yet," I say. "You still have to walk out tomorrow."
I put the fire out and we go to our separate sides of the tent.
I've been awake for an hour when I hear her move.
The zip between our sleeping bags comes open. Slow. Deliberate.
Her hand finds my arm in the dark.
I pull her in and kiss her before she can say anything else. She opens for me immediately and I take my time with her mouth, learning it properly, my hand in her hair tipping her head back the way I want her. She makes a sound low in her throat and grips my jacket in both fists.
I strip her layers off without rushing. Jacket. Fleece. Base layer over her head. She's bare from the waist up and I pull back to look at her in the thin grey light coming through the tent wall. She's beautiful. I tell her that and she starts to say something and I put my mouth on her breast and she stops talking.
I learn her. Take my time doing it. She wants pressure — wants my hands firm on her, wants my thumbs working her nipples until she goes tight, and when I use my teeth lightly she makes a sound that goes straight to my cock. I work my way down her stomach and she lifts her hips to help me get her pants off and then she's bare everywhere and I sit back on my heels and look at her laid out in the sleeping bag in the dark.
"Dawson."
