Except that “nothing” felt like a whole lot of something, and my dick is getting hard again just thinking about it.
I take a cold shower and go to breakfast.
Lila’s at a table by the window with coffee and a plate of scrambled eggs, fruit, and some Belgian waffles. Her sketchbook is open beside her. She looks up when I come in. Her eyes are warm and careful simultaneously.
“Hi,” she says.
“Morning.”
After pouring myself a cup of coffee, I take a seat across from her. She’s wearing a soft-looking sage green sweater. Her hair is loose. There’s a small smudge of pencil graphite on her wrist from the sketchbook.
I want to wipe away the smudge for her. I want to gather that silky loose hair between my fingers and tug her towards me for a kiss. I want to see that sweater on the floor of our bedroom because I tore it off her.
“How was your run?” she asks.
“Good.”
She looks at me for a moment. Then back at her sketchbook.
Once again, I wish I was better with words. I’m not Walker, who makes millions off stringing perfectly-chosen words together into a song. I’m not a silver-tongued devil like Tanner, a man who could sell sand at a beach.
I don’t know what to say to make this awkwardness between me and Lila easier. I apologized for touching her without asking, without meaning to, and she seems okay with it all, but I don’t know where we go from here.
So I decide to just take the idea literally: we’ve just got to keep moving.
“There’s a trail,” I say. “North face. Resort map says it goes up to a ridge with views of the whole valley.”
She looks up. Her expression brightens. “You want to go for a hike?”
“If you want to.”
“Yes,” she says, favoring me with a luminous smile I don’t deserve. “Let’s go.”
The trail starts easy. Wide and well-marked through the pines, the ground soft with fallen needles, the air cold and bright. Lila walks beside me when the trail allows it, behind me when it narrows. She’s wearing hiking boots and a cozy fleece. Her pink hair is braided and she’s wearing a little hat with a tuft of fur on top. Her cheeks are pink from the cold and she looks so fucking cute I can’t stand it.
She asks about the trees. The birds. The tracks we cross in the mud. Elk, I tell her, probably last night. She crouches down to look at them and I watch her and look at the sky.
The sky is… going wrong.
It was blue just an hour ago and now it’s getting leaden. Heavy with moisture, a damp chill sinking into the air. The clouds are moving faster, the wind picking up and bending the tops of the trees. No doubt about it—storm’s coming.
I check my watch. We’re forty minutes out from the resort.
“We should turn back,” I say.
Straightening up, Lila looks at the sky, then at me. “How bad?”
“Don’t know yet. But I’d rather not find out up here.”
She doesn’t argue. We turn around.
We don’t make it ten minutes before the sleet hits.
It comes fast the way Montana weather always does. One minute cold and clear, the next the wind is driving ice crystals horizontal and the trail is gone under a sheet of grey. Lila pulls her fleece tighter. I pull my jacket off and put it around her shoulders.
The storm is a nasty one, and I have to get us to shelter. I have to protect her.
“There’s a supply shack,” I say. “Quarter mile east. I saw it on the trail map this morning. Come on.”
