Chapter 1 #3
“I’m good,” I say. I wring out my braid.
I smile because the alternative is letting these two worry about me, and I am not, on day two of my vacation, becoming someone else’s emergency.
I do not get to be the emergency. I am the one who handles the emergency.
Those are two different job descriptions and I have only ever held one of them.
Kai is back at the stern. Paddle in hand. Guiding us downriver.
He watches me for the rest of the trip.
I know because I can feel it. Not the way you feel someone staring.
This is subtler than that. It’s a constant, low-frequency awareness, like a monitor running in the background with the volume turned down.
Every time I turn my head, he’s looking at the water or adjusting the paddle or scanning the bank. He’s never looking at me.
But when I look away, the awareness comes back.
He’s watching.
At the take-out point, he pulls the raft onto the gravel bank with efficient motions. He hands Marissa her dry bag. He coils the throw rope. His hands are steady and capable and they are the same hands that wrapped around me in the river and held my wrist and pressed warm against my lower back.
I am not cataloging his hands. I am collecting my wet gear.
“Thank you,” I say. Because I was raised right and he did pull me out of a river. Even though I was already swimming to shore. But I’m letting that go.
He looks at me. The corner of his mouth shifts. Not a smile. The ghost of one. “You had it handled.” Then he turns back to the equipment.
I look at Marissa. She’s watching me watch Kai with an expression I have seen nine years’ worth of times. It’s the expression she wore at Jules’s birthday when I said I wasn’t interested in the bartender. She said “mmhmm” in a tone that meant she’d already picked out a venue.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were arranging something in your head. I can see it in your face. Your orbicularis oculi are doing the scheming thing.”
“My what?”
“The muscles around your eyes. They contract differently when you’re planning something than when you’re just thinking. I have four years of clinical observation and I’m telling you, you are scheming.”
“I was thinking about dinner.”
“You were not thinking about dinner.”
“I was thinking about dinner and also about how Kai Denmark just dove fully clothed into a river to get to a woman who was ten feet from shore.”
“Fifteen feet. And I was actively swimming.”
“He counted your pulse, Tori.”
“Standard field assessment.”
“He’s still looking at you.”
I don’t turn around. I don’t need to. I can feel it. That same low hum.
“He takes his job seriously,” I say. “That’s a professional quality, not a romantic one.”
“Mmhmm.”
There it is. The venue tone.
~~~
That evening I sit on the back porch of Marissa and Levi’s place with a glass of wine and my hair drying in loose waves over my shoulders.
I took out the braid because the river wrecked it and because I am on vacation and on vacation I am allowed to have hair that doesn’t need to fit under a surgical cap.
The mountains are turning gold. The river is a distant sound.
Levi is inside making something that smells like garlic and good decisions.
Marissa is next to me, reading on her phone, letting the silence exist without filling it.
She knows I need the quiet. She’s giving it to me. This is why I love her.
The wine is good. The air is warm and smells like pine and cut grass and the last heat of the day lifting off the hills. This is what I came for. This exact thing. A porch. A glass. Nothing beeping, no one crashing, no decisions that have to be made in three seconds or someone doesn’t make it home.
I take a breath and my shoulders release another fraction of an inch.
And underneath the quiet, there’s the new thing. The thing I don’t want to name.
Kai Denmark is somewhere on this mountain right now. Putting away gear, driving home, eating dinner. Not thinking about the woman who fell in the river. Because that’s a normal day for a river guide. People fall in. You pull them out. You move on.
Except I read people for a living. I have been reading vital signs and stress responses and body language for four years, and the man who pulled me out of the Wylde River today was not having a normal day.
His pulse was faster than his respiratory rate justified.
His hands were steady but the muscles in his forearms were locked tight, the tension pattern of a man exerting significant effort to appear calm.
And the way he looked at me when I said I was fine was the look of a man who heard every word I said and did not believe one of them.
I’ve seen that look. I’ve given that look. It’s the look you give a patient who tells you they’re fine and everything in their presentation tells you they’re not.
He was reading me the way I read everyone else.
I drain the wine. Set the glass on the armrest.
Over a week left on this mountain.
I’m used to being the one who watches. I am not used to being on the other side of that.
That’s going to be a problem.