Chapter 36
Alison
It took them several trips to carry all their gear down to the lakeshore. Finally, they had fishing rods, tackle boxes, his
camera and the two camp chairs set up.
It was cooler after the rain so they both donned their hoodies again. Over the next few hours, their conversation slipped
back into its normal, casual rhythm.
They each caught two decent-size trout, more than enough for their dinner. When they returned to their camp, he brought out
his two-burner camp stove and frying pan and cooked them up on one burner with butter and seasonings while preparing a packaged
rice pilaf on the other.
“Oh, man. That is so good,” she said, closing her eyes with appreciation as she took another bite of the flaky, delicious
trout. “That’s even better than you used to cook it.”
He grinned. “I’ve had some practice over the years. Giselle and I took the ferry system up to Alaska a few years ago where
we camped on the deck. We spent a month backpacking and hiking. It was amazing.”
“I know. I’ve watched the videos. They were beautiful.”
“Have you?” He looked surprised.
“Of course. I’ve probably watched every single one of those three hundred hours of content you have on your channel. Some
of them more than once.”
He looked pleased, if a little abashed. “There’s a lot of boring footage in there.”
“Not at all. It was so fun to watch you discover all these cool places around the world. I was jealous, if you want the truth.”
“Jealous of what?”
She couldn’t possibly tell him how much it had bothered her to see him having a great time with other women. She had felt
oddly territorial.
“You were meeting so many great people, having all these fun relationships and seeing all these fantastic corners of the world
while I was stuck in a law school library researching torts.”
“You can always travel now. What’s stopping you?”
“I’ve been in school since I was eighteen. Now I have to take the bar exam and open my law practice.”
“Why? I mean, I get that you have to take the bar exam. I’m all for that. But why do you have to jump right into your career?
Law isn’t going anywhere.”
She stared. “I suppose it’s not.”
“Some people have to start working right away to pay back their student loans,” he went on. “You’re fortunate enough that
you don’t. You have a trust fund that could certainly support you for a year or two while you travel around the world.”
“What about the ranch?”
“What about it? Pat Bailey ran The Painted Sky while your dad was alive and he can certainly go on doing the same thing. You
have your grandmother and Beck to look after the ranch, too. After you pass the bar, why not take a break? You’ve earned it.
Go out and see the world, Al.’’
She was stunned almost speechless at the idea. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
He smiled. “I can point you to three hundred hours of content that might help you come up with a decent plan.”
She had to return his smile. “Not a bad idea. It’s definitely something to think about.”
She liked the idea of traveling far more than starting up her practice right away. She knew it would be kicking the can down
the road, but perhaps some time away would help her be more enthusiastic about the career course she had set for herself.
“Maybe I’ll come join you on your travels and we can spend a year in India together.”
He grinned. “I can arrange that.”
She imagined all the possibilities while he took some video and stills of the sun setting over the lake in vibrant colors,
and then more footage of her leading the horses down to drink again and then taking them back up, along with buckets of water
to hold them overnight.
He carefully started a small fire in the camp ring they created from rocks, and they roasted marshmallows and talked while
watching the stars pop out overhead.
A shooting star arced across the sky and she gazed up, enchanted by the sheer unbelievable beauty of a night in the mountains.
“It takes my breath away up here at night,” she said. “How do I always forget the impact of seeing all those millions of stars
together, without any light pollution to interfere with the view?”
“It’s truly stellar, isn’t it?”
She made a face at his bad pun. “How does our Wyoming night sky compare to all the others you’ve seen on your travels?”
“It’s definitely up there. I haven’t been to many other places that compare to this. Maybe that time we went on a camel trip
into the Sahara Desert in Morocco might be close.”
She was again awestruck at everything he had seen and done.
“Tell me something funny that happened to you on your travels that you never put in one of your videos.”
He grinned. “Did I ever tell you the time I was attacked by a bee and nearly fell down a mountain?”
“No,” she said with a laugh. “I would have remembered that.”
“I was in this gorgeous village on the Amalfi Coast in Italy and thought I would shoot drone footage of me walking through a terraced vineyard at sunset and looking pensively off at the ocean. You know, something super cinematic. All was going great until a bee landed on my face. No big deal, right? Except this was the biggest bumblebee I had ever seen, and it would not leave me alone, no matter what I did.”
“I guess you must have smelled too sweet,” she said.
“Something like that. So there I was waving my arms like I was directing traffic in Naples, trying to look cool for the camera
while not being stung. The bee would not give up. He kept dive-bombing me no matter what I tried to do. And in my wild frenzy,
I tripped over a fence post and tumbled about ten feet down the terraced slope. And of course the drone kept recording everything—my
panic, my flailing arms, my graceless fall. It was all priceless. And my mic was still on, which recorded me pleading with
the bee to leave me alone and then a long string of swear words as I fell.”
She laughed hard, imagining the scene vividly. “You have to show me that footage. I hope you didn’t erase it.”
“I still have it. I’ve been thinking about posting a blooper reel.”
“What else would be on it?”
While the fire crackled and the stars continued to gleam above them and the breeze rustled the leaves of the aspens, he told
her story after story about his experiences. Some of them were poignant, but most were so funny, she laughed so hard she almost
couldn’t breathe.
“We’ve had very different lives the past three years, haven’t we?”
He rose to add another small piece of deadfall wood to the fire. “Mine isn’t necessarily better. Only different. I’ve been
deeply lonely at times when I’ve been traveling.”
“You have?”
“Yes. Even with technology connecting you to the world, there are times you simply long for home.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
“For the past three years, all of my relationships except a very few have been transitory. I haven’t had the chance to make
many deep friendships.”
“Were you in love with Giselle?”
As soon as the words were out, she couldn’t believe she had asked them.
He looked away. “I wanted to be. I tried to be. I cared about Giselle. Still do. She is funny and smart and adventurous. She’s a writer, like your dad. She was working
on a novel the entire time we traveled. A fantasy epic in the vein of Game of Thrones. I have no doubt that one day it will be just as well-known.”
“Why didn’t things work out between you?”
He faced her, that unreadable look back in his expression. “I didn’t love her. Not the way she deserved to be loved. And I
knew it wasn’t fair for me to keep her on the hook, preventing her from finding someone better who would finally deserve her.”
She could only imagine how devastated Giselle must have been by their breakup. Ali had seen in their videos together how much
the woman had cared about Xander.
“What about you?” he asked. “You broke up with that medical resident last year. Any regrets?”
She thought of Jamal Walker, a brilliant resident at the University of Utah Medical Center whom she had dated for two years,
until they both decided by mutual consent to break things off after he received a job offer to work in his hometown of Chicago.
“Sometimes I get lonely, too,” she admitted. “I do have good friends and my grandmother, but I miss my dad so much sometimes
I can’t breathe.”
They had both moved their camp chairs together, out of the direction of the smoke, and Xander reached for her hand and gave
it a comforting squeeze.
It seemed perfectly natural for her to lean her head against his shoulder, and they stayed that way for a long time while
the flames flickered and a spectacular full moon rose above the mountains.
She didn’t know if she moved first or if he did. It didn’t matter. They were looking at each other one moment, the next his mouth was on hers, his hands gripping her face. She felt the warmth of his palms against her skin, fingers threading in her hair, and every sensation was magnified by the stillness of the night around them. The cool air from the lake whispered against her back, a stark contrast to the fire now building between them.
His lips were soft yet insistent and she tasted the faint hint of the pine trees and the wild air. There was no hesitation
in him, no uncertainty. It was as if all the years of friendship, the long talks, the shared experiences, had been leading
to this—right here, under the star-soaked sky.
She leaned into him, her hands sliding up his chest to his shoulders, the strength of him grounding her in the surrealness
of the moment.
After long, delicious moments, something must have jerked him back to awareness of what they were doing. He eased away, muttering
a harsh word that would have gotten him in big trouble if his great-aunt had heard him.
“I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?” Her words came out husky and low.
“I don’t want to ruin things between us. You’re too important to me.”
She tried to process that, but couldn’t seem to make her brain work right.
“I wanted you to kiss me. Does that matter?”
He gazed at her, the fire reflecting in his eyes, then he finally shook his head. “I still shouldn’t have kissed you.”
She released a long breath, feeling cold suddenly despite the puffy coat she had brought along and the heat from the fire.
“Fine. It was a mistake. We can both forget it happened. We’re here alone in the mountains with a sky full of stars. It’s
undeniably romantic. Wouldn’t it have been more strange if we hadn’t kissed?”
He didn’t answer. He only rose and started putting out the fire, dousing it then using a shovel to bury dirt over any embers. Apparently, their night was over.
“I’m going to hike up to that small lake south of here in the morning to catch the sunrise. It’s pretty rugged terrain, probably
too tough to take the horses. You’re welcome to come if you want.”
Maybe some distance between them wouldn’t be a bad thing, she thought. “I think I’ll try to catch a few more fish for breakfast
in the morning and then read my book.”
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll try not to wake you up when I leave.”
“Okay. Be careful.”
Something told her she was not going to be sleeping much that night. She was going to be tossing and turning, remembering
that kiss and wondering what Xander would do if she unzipped his tent in the night and climbed into his sleeping bag with
him.