Page 7 of Blazing Mountain Man

“We came up together—guiding, climbing, the whole thing, for ten years. He was better than me on rock and I was better than him on snow, so we split it down the middle, and we were never wrong about each other, not once.” My gloves are off and my hands don’t have anything to do, so I look at them. “Four years ago, he took a solo up a couloir on a day I couldn’t go. Routine. He’d done it fifty times. A rock came off the wall and took his leg out, and he went down thirty feet and couldn’t climb out.”

Her gaze shifts to my forearms. The flame ink, wrist to elbow, both sides. People assume things about a man with fire on his arms. They assume wrong.

“They’re for him,” I say, before she asks. “Craig. He’s the reason for them.” I turn my arm so the light catches the work. “You spend enough cold nights on a mountain, you learn the only warm thing up there is the one you carry in with you. He was that. Loud, warm, the guy who kept everybody’s blood moving on a bad bivy.” My throat does something. “After, I put the fire on where I’d see it. So I’d remember I was warm once. So the cold wasn’t the only thing I came down that mountain with.”

She reaches out and lays two fingers against the ink, light, like she’s checking whether it’s hot. “You carry him with you everywhere you go.”

“Everywhere. Every mountain.” I close my hand over the ink like I can hold the heat in. “Everything else, I leave before it can cost me. Him, I keep with me.”

“Cash.”

“He was alone. That’s the tough part.” I make myself look at her. “He had no partner and no radio, because it was a milk run and he didn’t want to bother anybody with it. By the time he was overdue and I went up after him, it was hours too late, and the weather was on him. I found him. I carried him down. I did every single thing right, and it didn’t matter, because the thing that killed him already happened the second he decided to go up there by himself.”

She doesn’t reach for me. She doesn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault, which is what everyone does, and which I’ve never once believed. She just holds still and lets it be as big as it is.

“So you stopped staying,” she says.

“I stopped roping anybody.” The truth of it is easier out loud than I thought. “Day-trips. Moving groups. Men whose names I don’t learn. I go from mountain to mountain, and I never let anybody’s weight get on my line, because I already know what happens when the line goes and you can’t hold it.” I turn my hand over. “You want to know what I went back to when you mentioned the Saddle? I went back to standing in a rig about to break my one rule. And then I broke it anyway, because a downed man takes two to carry, and going up there alone tonight was the exact thing that killed my best friend.”

“And you let me come.”

“I let you come.” Here’s the piece I haven’t said, the one that scares me more than the mountain. “And halfway up that slope, with you in my boot prints doing exactly what I told you, I realized I wasn’t scared you’d fall. I was scared I’d let you matter. That’s worse. That’s the one I can’t outrun with a truck.”

The heater ticks. Outside, the storm keeps on, indifferent, and inside it’s just her face turned up to mine in the dash light.

“I do the same thing,” she says. “You know that, right? You figured it out in the office before I did.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“There was a girl. My best friend, since we were kids.” I watch her decide to say it. “Rae. We had it all planned—everywhere, all of it, the whole wall of postcards. We were going to hand the desk to somebody else and just go. She had the maps, and I had the nerve, and we were going the summer after graduation, both of us, no matter what.”

Her voice stays level as she continues.

“And then that spring, she just went. Took the trip without me. Met people, kept moving, sent a postcard from somewhere I’d never heard of, then another, and then they stopped coming. She got the whole world. I got the desk she left me sitting at.” She wraps her arms around her knees. “So I stayed. I told myself somebody’s got to hold the board so nobody gets stranded. That’s the lie. The truth is, I stopped letting myself want the horizon, because the last time I wanted it, the person I wanted it with left to go get it alone.”

“You stay so nobody can leave you.”

“And you leave so nobody can be taken from you.” She almost smiles, but it doesn’t reach anywhere good. “Same wall. We just stand on different sides of it.”

I’ve spent four years being certain I was the only man alive who understood exactly this, and she just said it back to me from the driver’s seat of a stranded rig like she’s had it written on the inside of her all along.

“Come here,” I say.

She doesn’t ask what for. She unfolds off the seat and crosses the space the heater’s been holding between us, and I get a hand into her hair, cold at the ends and warm at the root, and I stop where I said I’d stop so she can be the one who closes it.

She closes it.

Her mouth finds mine, and it’s nothing careful. Four years, one bad plan, and a whole night of almost—all of it landing at once.

She makes a sound against me, and I feel it go all the way down. I’ve kissed people to pass the time. I’ve kissed people so I wouldn’t have to talk. I have never once in my life kissed anyone I wanted to stay for. But I’m kissing her, and I want to stay.

“Elyse.” I get it out against her lips. “I’m not going anywhere tonight. The mountain made sure of that. But I need you to hear it isn’t the mountain.”

“I hear you.” Her hands are fisted in my jacket, pulling, certain. “Stay anyway.”

“I’m staying anyway.”

The kiss deepens, her mouth opening under mine like she’s been waiting for permission she already decided to give herself. I drag her across the console into my lap, the seat creaking under us, and the heat of her thighs straddling mine cuts straight through the cold still clinging to our clothes.