Chapter Fourteen
Carson
I didn’t even know why I said it.
“Sienna, we need to talk.”
It slipped out before I had a plan or a point or even the faintest idea of what I thought I was about to accomplish by opening that door between us.
I wasn’t good at talking. Not the real kind, the kind that acknowledged things.
The kind that led to admissions or feelings or truths I’d spent years learning how to hide.
I stepped inside her tent, and she looked over at me with a mixture of curiosity and nervousness, and suddenly the words hung in the cold air between our sleeping bags.
She pushed herself upright, zipped her coat higher, and waited.
She didn’t rush me. She just watched me.
I sat up as well, trying and failing to organize my thoughts into anything coherent.
“We should talk about today,” I said finally.
Her eyebrows lifted slightly.
“Which part? The bear? The wolves? You catching me every five minutes?” She paused. “Because I swear that’s not normal for me. I’m usually coordinated like a mountain gazelle. Very majestic.”
“You’ve mentioned that.” I laughed. “But you’re coordinated.”
She gave me a look. “Don’t lie to me after I tripped on air. It’s not a good look on you.”
“Air can be dangerous.”
“No. No, you do not get to make slipping on nothing sound noble.” She smiled. “But thanks.”
The corner of my mouth twitched despite my best efforts. I ran a hand over the back of my neck.
“But that’s part of it,” I said.
She frowned. “What is?”
“You keep acting like today was… embarrassing.” I searched for the right word. “It wasn’t.”
“Carson. I ran into you. Twice.”
“I noticed.”
“And I didn’t exactly take the sight of wolves with Olympic-level grace.”
“You handled it better than most guides I’ve worked with.”
She blinked, surprised. “Really?”
“Really.”
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, though she didn’t seem aware she’d done it.
“You were calm when you needed to be,” I said. “Focused. You stayed behind me even when it scared you.”
“It didn’t scare me.”
My eyebrow lifted.
She sighed. “Fine. It scared me. A little. Ugh. I hate that.”
“Why?”
“Because.” She gestured vaguely. “In my family, I’m the fearless one. The one who dives into frozen lakes for fun and climbs things nobody asked me to climb. Fear isn’t my brand.”
“You’re allowed to feel it.” I knelt.
She grimaced like the idea personally offended her. “Unacceptable.”
I shook my head and leaned back on my hands.
“I also wanted to talk about… earlier,” I said, trying again to steer us toward something resembling clarity.
“Earlier, earlier? Or ten minutes ago? Because there were about five embarrassing situations, and I need you to be specific before I spiral.”
“The part where I,” I hesitated. “Where I moved away from you.”
“Oh.” She straightened. The humor in her expression faded. “That.”
“You noticed,” I said quietly.
“Hard not to,” she said. “I thought maybe I’d said something weird or done something wrong.”
“No.”
“Or that you secretly hate me.” She paused. “I would accept that. It feels very on-brand for my life.”
I frowned. “I don’t hate you.”
“I know.” She toyed with the zipper of her coat. “Okay, fine, I know you don’t hate me. I just… I don’t know. Things felt different for a second. And I thought maybe I imagined it.”
“You didn’t imagine it.”
Her breath caught faintly.
I didn’t allow myself to look at her fully. I kept my eyes on her sleeping bag instead.
“It’s not you,” I said.
“Well, it’s definitely not the bear,” she muttered.
I exhaled. “I stepped back because I needed space.”
“From me?”
“Yes.” I paused. “Not in a bad way. Just… space.”
She let that sit for a moment. The wind creaked through the high branches overhead. I could hear her shifting slightly in her sleeping bag, trying to find some meaning in my non-answer.
“So, you don’t want proximity,” she said finally. “Got it. Easy fix. I have lots of space. I am made of space. Consider me the night sky.”
“Sienna.”
She looked over, eyes bright and frustrated. “What?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Well then, maybe use actual words because I’m trying not to overthink this and failing spectacularly.”
Her honesty startled me, but not in a bad way.
“I needed space because… this is new for me,” I said.
“This?”
“You,” I corrected softly.
She froze, breath suspended as if the air had crystallized around her.
I regretted the words instantly because they were too raw and revealing.
“I mean,” I said quickly, “guiding with someone like you.”
“Like me.”
“Someone I…” I stopped. The sentence thinned and died in my throat.
She leaned in slightly. “Someone you what?”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does.”
“No,” I said quietly. “Because we’re working. And I’m trying to keep this professional.”
She sniffed out a humorless breath. “Professional. Sure. Fantastic. Great idea. I love professionalism.”
“Sienna.”
“No, seriously,” she said. “You’re right. We need boundaries. Healthy, rigid, absolutely inflexible boundaries. I’ll build a fence, a metaphorical one, with barbed wire.”
“You’re deflecting.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
Despite everything, I felt the corner of my mouth lift again.
She squinted at me. “Stop half-smiling like that. It ruins my ability to be stern.”
“You’re not stern.”
“I can be stern.”
“Show me.”
She puffed up her cheeks, narrowed her eyes, and tried to look intimidating. It lasted three seconds before she burst into laughter.
I did too.
And for a moment, the tension loosened, dissolving into something warmer. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. “So… you needed space because this is new.”
“Yes.”
“And new equals dangerous.”
“Yes.”
She tilted her head. “You know that’s not normal logic.”
“It is for me.”
She studied me for a long moment. “Why?”
I didn’t answer immediately. The fire popped sharply outside.
“I’ve spent a lot of years avoiding things,” I said finally.
“Things like…?”
“People. Crowds. Towns. Staying in one place too long.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Should I be worried?”
“No.”
“Because it does sound a little serial killer-y.”
“It isn’t.”
“Should I ask if you own a basement?”
“I don’t even own a house.”
She grinned. “Good answer.”
“I just mean…” I exhaled slowly. “I stay away from civilization when I can. It’s easier. Cleaner. Predictable.”
Her expression softened. “Why?”
“I don’t know how to be good at normal life,” I said simply. “But out here? I know what I’m doing.”
Her gaze held mine. “You’re good at normal life more than you think.”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” she said, voice unexpectedly gentle. “You just don’t know it because you keep running from anything that resembles connection. You’re great at ordering coffee at coffee shops and organizing garages. You’re totally normal. But I get the connection part. It’s easy to be a zombie.”
I didn’t like how much that landed.
“How would you know?” I asked quietly.
“Because…” She hesitated. “Because I do it too.”
That surprised me.
She shrugged. “I pretend I’m fearless. I pretend nothing scares me. I pretend I don’t need anyone except maybe Mortimer the moose. But when something real starts happening, something that feels like it matters, I freak out.”
I stared at her, and she stared back.
Something tightened and eased inside me at the same time.
She wrapped her arms tighter around herself. “Anyway. Maybe we’re the same amount of dysfunctional.”
“Maybe.”
“And maybe that’s fine,” she added. “As long as we survive the next forty-eight hours without getting eaten by anything.”
“A solid plan.”
She shivered—barely, but enough that I saw it. The cold was settling in. The temperature had dropped fast now that the sun was gone.
“We should get inside the bags,” I said. “It’s going to freeze hard tonight.”
“Right.” She forced a cheery tone. “Because nothing says romance like two people freezing separately in nylon cocoons.”
“We’re not the honeymoon couple.”
“Thank God,” she muttered.
She zipped her bag the last way, and I left her tent.
“Goodnight, Sienna.” I glanced at her and smiled.
She paused in the glow of her headlamp. “Goodnight, Carson.”
I stepped into my tent and zipped it closed.
I lay back on my sleeping pad, staring at the dark nylon ceiling while the cold pressed in around us.
She was ten feet away.
And I had never felt farther.
Or closer.
And if this kept going like it was going, I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be able to pretend that distance was the smart choice.
Outside, the wind whispered over the ridge.
Inside my tent, my heartbeat was the loudest thing I could hear.
And sleep refused to come.
I lay still, listening to the rhythmic whisper of wind moving between branches, the quiet pop of the dying fire outside, and, faintest of all, the sound of Sienna shifting in her tent.
The fabric rustled every few minutes. A sleeping bag zipper tugged, then stopped. A sigh followed. Then silence again. She wasn’t sleeping either.
I should have rolled over and ignored it. Should’ve focused on steady breathing and counting heartbeats the way I usually did when camping with clients or other guides.
But this wasn’t like other guides.
This was someone who had slipped past my guard without asking permission. Sienna was someone whose laughter kept replaying in the back of my mind. She was a woman who made the wilderness feel different than it ever had before — sharper in some places and softer in others.
I closed my eyes.
Ten seconds passed.
Twenty.
A quiet voice floated through the thin wall of nylon between us.
“Carson?”
It was soft and hesitant.
I exhaled once, quietly. “Yeah.”
Another rustle. “You’re not sleeping.”
“Neither are you.”
She gave a tiny huff, the smallest laugh. “My brain is doing that thing where it replays all the stupid things I said today.”
“You didn’t say anything stupid.”
“Lies,” she said, but there wasn’t heat behind it — just tired humor. “I practically told you we had to keep a dry hump schedule for guests.”
A smile tugged unexpectedly at the corner of my mouth. “Dry run.”
“Don’t remind me.”
I shifted slightly, folding my arm under my head. “It wasn’t a disaster.”
“It was,” she insisted, softer. “But thanks for pretending.”
Silence settled again, gentler this time.
The temperature dropped another few degrees. I felt it even through the tent's walls.
“Carson?” she said again, even quieter. “Today scared me more than I expected.”
“You handled it well.”
“But I didn’t handle the feelings well afterward.”
I hesitated. “What feelings?”
“The ones that show up when you think you’re completely in control, and then life sends a bear and a pack of wolves just to prove you’re not.”
I stared at the nylon ceiling. “That’s normal.”
“Is it?” she asked.
“For people who aren’t afraid to admit they feel things.”
She went silent for several seconds. I thought maybe she’d retreated behind those walls again.
I wouldn’t have blamed her.
But then she said, softer than anything she’d spoken all day:
“I don’t think I’ve been very good at letting myself feel anything lately.”
I swallowed. That hit too close.
“You don’t have to be good at it,” I said. “You just have to let yourself exist without pretending you’re invincible.”
“Did you just accuse me of pretending?” she asked, but her voice carried no defense, only self-awareness.
“I don’t think you need to pretend around me,” I said.
The breeze shifted outside. Snow slid from a branch in a soft thump.
Then she whispered, barely audible:
“That’s the scariest part.”
Something tightened in my chest, not fear or recognition but resonance.
Before I could speak again, she said, “Goodnight, Carson.”
I closed my eyes. “Goodnight, Sienna.”
The distance between our tents remained the same.
But the distance between us?
That had changed completely.