Face flaming, I take care of business behind a stand of pines and splash icy water from a Nalgene bottle on my cheeks until I lose that plugged-into-a-light-socket feeling. By the time I get back, Jensen is out of the tent and crouched over the camp stove, boiling water for coffee. He’s changed into a fresh shirt under his puffer jacket, his boots loosely laced.
“How are your feet?”
“Better, actually.” He glances up, the gratitude in those gray eyes catching me off guard. “Thank you again.”
We eat instant oatmeal and guzzle coffee in companionable silence, then he cleans up the dishes while I break down the tent. I watch him out of the corner of my eye as I roll up the rain fly. He’s definitely not limping as much as yesterday, and he doesn’t wince every time his boots meet dirt, which means the bandages and the ointment did their job.
It’s weirdly satisfying to think my ministrations worked, and nice not being the weakest link for once. He’s not monitoring me for signs of fatigue or checking my pallor or whatever my friends track when they think I’m not looking.
Of course, the term weak has no business in the same zip code as Jensen. Hell, he hauled a forty-pound pack up a mountain on feet that looked like they’d gone through a wood chipper. Didn’t complain once. But for a little while, he needed me. And I helped.
I like it more than I should.
The clouds stay low for most of the morning, wrapping the trail in a gauzy silver light that makes everything feel more intimate. As if the whole mountain range has shrunk to the size of our two bodies moving through the mist. Every one of my senses is dialed up to eleven.
I experienced something like this during chemo, although not at all the same. Every strange smell made me want to hurl my guts up, while any sort of clang could trigger a headache that lasted hours. That was when I’d started using lavender-scented everything: lotion, candles, dryer sheets. Sometimes I’d bury mynose in a sleeve just to get some relief from whatever ordinary part of life my body had decided was an enemy that day.
Now I want to bury my nose in the crook of Jensen’s neck where he’s warm and spicy. No person has the right to smell that good on a backcountry hike.
And the sound of his breathing behind me. God. The man makes an automatic bodily process feel like foreplay. Every steady exhale is timed with his footfalls, and I’m acutely aware of all of them.
“This weather makes me wonder if we’re going to find Brigadoon around the next corner,” he says from behind me. “Or maybe a band of weary hobbits.”
I snort-laugh, which is not my prettiest habit.
“Are you having some kind of hallucinogenic reaction to the ibuprofen?” I glance back at him. “I get the hobbits. The mist and trees are very Middle Earth-y. But what doesBrigadooneven mean?”
His answering laugh rolls over me, and I swallow against the far too appealing pleasure left in its wake.
“Brigadoonis a classic musical. It’s a village in the Scottish Highlands that appears for one day every hundred years.” He gestures at the fog-wrapped trail like it proves his point. “Two guys stumble into it, and one of them falls in love. Gene Kelly was in the 1954 movie.”
“Okay, Grandpa. Did you pay a quarter to see it on the big screen?”
“Fifty cents,” he counters. “Way before 50 Cent.”
I grin at the joke and the fact that he doesn’t get offended when I tease him about our age gap. As if I care about the decade plus two years that separates us. And then, without so much as a clearing of his throat, he starts to sing.
It’s just a few bars about heather on a hill, but it’s so warm and rich, I feel like I’m sinking into a hot bath at the end of a long day. His deep baritone doesn’t just vibrate in my ears. That would betoo basic. I feel the resonance in my belly and spine. The backs of my knees. And I have no defense against such a full-body assault.
“I’m not that much older than you,” he says when the last note is carried off on the breeze.
“Twelve years,” I remind him, trying not to sound like I’m panting. He must be used to women panting over him. I won’t be one of them. “You probably remember life before the iPhone.”
“Maybe, but Pa didn’t drive the horse and buggy down to a one-room schoolhouse.”
Another embarrassing snort-laugh bubbles out of me, and I pick up the pace. Because being amused by Jensen is another crack in a dam I can’t afford to let break. “The country music legend has a secret show tunes fetish?”
“I like all music,” he says simply, letting me know, in not-so-many words, that the categories people put him in have never fit. I get that. I really do. “What do you listen to?”
“Pop, I guess. Old-school hip-hop.”
Without a doubt, this man has made it his personal mission to destroy me, because he croons a line about not chasing waterfalls and sticking to familiar rivers and lakes. The ones I’m used to. I nearly trip over my own boots.
I whirl around to face him. “How did you know I love TLC?”
What’s a word beyond smug? Because that would best describe the expression on his face.
“Lucky guess,” he offers with a one-shoulder shrug. “I told you I was lucky.”
