She lowers the camera. Pushes the goggles up. Those blue eyes are electric, adrenaline bright and completely unafraid.
"I've been smiling at things that could kill me since I was twelve years old," she says. "It's the only way I know how to stay alive."
The words land somewhere deep. In the place I keep Tyler Rawlings and every other thing I can't fix.
"That's not survival," I say. "That's avoidance."
Her smile fades. Not to anger. To something raw and honest that she clearly didn't expect me to pull out of her.
"Maybe," she says. "But it's kept me moving for seventeen years. I lost my mom when I was twelve. Cancer. After that, my dad remarried a woman who treated me like furniture, and we moved every eight months to a new base, a new school, a new set of people I'd never see again. So I learned to keep moving. Keep smiling. Keep looking for the next horizon because the one behind me always disappeared."
She stops. Takes a breath. Looks at me like she's surprised by her own honesty.
"Why did you just tell me that?" My voice is low. Not unkind. Genuinely asking.
"Because you asked me a real question. And because..." She pauses. Chooses her words with the precision I'm learning is as natural to her as breathing. "Because you look at me like you can see that I'm running. And no one has ever noticed that before."
The wind gusts hard enough to stagger her, and I reach out instinctively, my hand closing around her elbow to steady her. The contact is immediate and electric, even through two layers of fabric. She grabs my forearm to brace and we're standing on a rock ledge at ten thousand feet with a blizzard twenty minutes from swallowing us whole, and all I can think about is how close her face is to mine.
Her lips are chapped from the wind. Her breath comes in short clouds between us. Her fingers tighten on my arm.
"We need to move," I say. My voice is rough. "Storm's closer than I calculated."
She nods. Doesn't let go of my arm for another two seconds.
I release her elbow and shoulder my pack and we descend fast, racing the weather. The first flakes hit at twelve fifteen, fat and heavy, the kind that mean business. By the time we reach the treeline, the world above us has disappeared into white.
We make base camp at twelve forty-five. The wind is howling through the pines and the snow is falling sideways and visibility has dropped to about fifty yards.
I secure the equipment shed. Latch the student cabin shutters. Check the generator. Shelby is right beside me through all of it, no questions, just action, handing me tools, holding doors, moving with an efficiency that tells me she's been through enough emergencies to know what matters and what doesn't.
By thirteen hundred, we're inside the lodge with the door bolted and the woodstove blazing and the storm screaming against the windows like it's personally offended that we made it back.
Shelby peels off her outer layer and hangs it near the stove. Her base layer is damp with sweat from the descent and it clings to her body in ways I force myself not to catalog. The curve of her waist. The rise of her breasts under the fitted thermal. The way her chest moves with each breath as she catches wind.
She pulls the braid loose and her hair falls around her shoulders, damp at the temples, and she runs both hands through it and sighs with her whole body.
I turn toward the kitchen. "I'll put on coffee."
"Cory."
I stop.
"Thank you," she says. "For getting us down in time."
I look at her over my shoulder. She's standing by the fire with her hair loose and her cheeks flushed and her eyes soft with something that isn't gratitude. It's trust. The look of someone who just put her life in another person's hands and found those hands steady.
"That's what I do," I say.
Then I walk into the kitchen before I cross the room and put my mouth on hers, because that's what every cell in my body is screaming at me to do, and I haven't wanted anything this badly in years, and wanting things is exactly how people get hurt on mountains.
The storm howls. The fire crackles. And we're alone.
