10. Jensen
JENSEN
We’ve been hiking for three hours. My lungs burn courtesy of the thin mountain air, and my shoulders ache from carrying the pack, and that’s without a tent adding extra weight.
I’m also one hundred percent certain my feet will never be the same.
I bet money my blisters have developed blisters of their own by now.
Don’t get me wrong. It might not be the most fun I’ve ever had, but I’m not complaining. And I wouldn’t trade being here for a month of Sundays with my feet propped on pillows and a cold beer in my hand.
Other than grunting out a begrudging thank you after I made breakfast this morning—protein oatmeal sprinkled with freeze-dried berries and slivered almonds—Sloane hasn’t spoken more than a few words to me.
Mostly variations of stop humming because it’s annoying.
However, she didn’t send me away, which is more than I expected.
Yeah, I busted ass up the trail and kept going after dark thanks to the headlamp I bought at a local sporting goods store in Billings, along with the rest of my hastily chosen gear.
But she didn’t ask for this. And if she’d demanded I turn around and haul my ass right back out of her life, I would have done it.
Thank fucking God she let me stay. At least for now.
Molly and Avah gave me their numbers so I could send updates, but I haven’t had cell service since mid-afternoon yesterday.
I can also imagine Sloane’s reaction if I whipped out my phone and started texting her protective circle of book club buddies.
I know she’s pissed they gave me any information about her route, but I’m forever in their debt.
And if I’m being honest, I’m kind of jealous she has so many people who care about her.
I can count my real friends on one hand.
One finger, actually—Ford Batterson, who I grew up with in Whisper Falls, where we spent summers raising hell and winters doing the same but with mittens.
There’s my younger brother, I suppose, but Jamie and I haven’t spoken in years.
He might want me in his life less than Sloane currently wants me in hers.
And that’s saying something, because she’s doing a bang-up job of pretending I don’t exist.
My boot catches on a root snaking across the trail, and I stumble forward, barely catching myself before I go down. She turns to face me with a deep frown, hands on her hips in a remarkably accurate imitation of every elementary school teacher I ever had.
Her nylon shorts show off the toned legs I can still remember wrapped around my waist in that Nashville hotel room.
The moisture-wicking, teal-blue T-shirt she’s wearing makes her eyes look impossibly bright, even shadowed by the brim of her hat that reads “I closed my book to be here” in white embroidered letters.
For a guy who’s not much of a reader, I’m oddly enamored of the discovery that the mysterious woman I met in that bar is so bookish.
Maybe it shouldn’t come as a shock since I know she’s a writer, or at least a journaler. I’d love to get a peek inside that golden notebook. I keep a journal, too. It’s for song lyrics, mostly. A humiliating amount of them are about her.
“I’m fine,” I say, even though she didn’t ask, and take a step toward her.
“You’re not fine.” Her gaze drops to my boots, then travels back up my body in a way that makes me wonder if she has X-ray vision that enables her to see every ache and pain assaulting me at the moment. “I don’t want to think about what your feet look like at this point.”
I can’t hide my grimace. I’m not sure the bloody, blistered nubs at the end of my legs qualify as feet anymore, but I manage a smile anyway. It’s muscle memory at this point, a curated mask I’ve deployed a thousand times on stage or in a recording studio when the show needed to go on.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not slowing you down.”
She rolls her eyes, just like she did at The Alcove that first night when I asked her to dance.
No coordination she claimed, but once we were two-stepping along with the crowd, she loved every minute of it, her laughter lighting up the whole damn room.
This could be fun, too, if she gave it a chance. And if my feet survive.
“Let’s stop for water and a snack.” Her fingers move to the buckle at her waist, and she slides the pack off her shoulders.
I shake my head, ready to protest. Convince her that I can keep going. I didn’t track her into the Montana wilderness to be the weak link dragging her down.
“You’re welcome to keep walking,” she says, her tone somehow both breezy and disparaging. “I’m sure I can catch up with you hobbling along. But I’m taking a break.”
“Praise the Lord,” I murmur.
She huffs out a laugh, and it washes over me like the first raindrops after a year of drought. I had that laugh—this woman—for two nights, but she’s already embedded into the very fabric of my being.
I follow her to an outcropping of boulders a few yards off the trail, flat enough to sit on and positioned to give us a view of an alpine lake in the valley below.
It’s pretty if you’re into breathtaking nature vistas, but not inspiring enough to pull my attention from Sloane for any length of time.
Sloane takes a granola bar and a water bottle from her pack.
I do the same, my fingers clumsy on the zipper because my hands are starting to tremble from the pain I’m bracing for with every step.
I have a regular gym routine, but between the altitude and the new shoes, I feel like a complete wuss, especially compared to Sloane.
Then she rifles around in a side pocket and produces a small white bottle, taking off the lid before holding it out to me.
“Ibuprofen might take the edge off.”
“You aren’t relishing my suffering?” My thumb brushes hers on the bottle for half a second before she pulls back.
The eye roll she gives me could best be described as aggressive, and I kind of love it.
“That would mean I care one way or the other. I don’t. You’re like any random person I might befriend on the trail.”
I down the tablets with a long pull of water. “So you admit we’re friends?”
“Did you miss the part where I called you a random stranger?”
“Who you want to be friends with,” I insist, releasing a long exhale when she laughs again. The sound does more for me than any painkiller could. I could get addicted to that laugh and the way her face transforms when she lets her guard down for even a second.
I can almost see her trying to shore up her walls as we chew our bars in companionable silence.
It feels normal. Just two people having a snack break on a backcountry trail.
Only nothing about my inability to stop obsessing over a woman who ghosted me after two nights together is normal.
I’d rather not focus on what that reveals about me.
“Tell me about this trip.” I don’t want to waste the potentially limited time I have before she decides she’s done with me again. “What kind of quest are you on?”
“My friends didn’t give you the hot goss?” Her words are a verbal eye roll as she takes a sip of water, her gaze fixed on the lake below us instead of on me.
“They told me enough to find you. Not enough to understand why you’re hiking alone through bear country.”
She picks at the wrapper of her granola bar.
“I’m guessing it has something to do with the cancer?”
Her fingers stop their fidgeting, and her shoulders draw up, defensive armor sliding into place. “So they actually told you more than how to find me.”
“I talked to Mariel and Joel Johnson after the caregiver camp concert.” I keep my voice relaxed, like I’m not still wondering how the good luck I’d boasted about as she was leaving my hotel room after our second night together turned to complete shit the moment the door closed behind her.
“They were happy to share all about your brother and how your situation motivated him to get involved. But I want to hear your story from you, Sloane.”
In the silence that follows, the wind moves through the pine branches above us, and I hear the distant call of a hawk or an eagle.
Or maybe that’s my imagination trying to fill the space between us.
I expect her to stand and announce we’re done with the break—to shut me down the same way she did in her bookstore office.
Instead, she draws in a breath and begins to speak.
“I was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia last summer, about a month before I met you in Nashville. I was there for a second opinion, treatment planning, meetings with the specialists my brother moved heaven and earth to arrange.” It sounds as if she’s reciting someone else’s medical history rather than her own.
“I did the first two rounds of chemo in Colorado, then went to Vanderbilt around Thanksgiving for a stem-cell transplant.”
The timeline I’ve been piecing together in my head slides into place.
The scant details she gave me, not to mention the fake name, and the fact that she left before sunrise after two of the best nights of my life, and never came back.
I was a distraction from the havoc a cancer diagnosis was about to wreak on her life.
And I get that. Except it was more than a fling, at least for me.
“You could have told me,” I say quietly.
“Sure, sure. Makes perfect sense to confide in a stranger I met in a bar about my malignant white blood cells.” She meets my eyes for the first time since she started talking.
She’s daring me to make this—us—into something bigger than she’s committed to keeping it.
“I wanted to be Sutton for a couple of nights, not Sloane the cancer patient. Telling you would have turned me into someone who needed sympathy, and I’d already had enough of that to last a lifetime. ”
She bites down on her lower lip like she doesn’t want to say anything more, but continues anyway. “I saw your photo on the volunteer board of the oncology unit and heard about why you give your time there.”