3. Nyla
three
Nyla
I wake up on day two unable to move my legs.
Not paralysed, but every muscle below my hips has lodged a formal complaint overnight and is now refusing to participate until management addresses their concerns.
I lie in my sleeping bag and do a quiet inventory.
Calves: no. Thighs: absolutely not. The specific muscles on the outsides of my hips that I didn't know existed until approximately right now: genuinely furious.
I also have no idea what my hair is doing but I can feel it from the inside, which is never a good sign.
Outside the tent, I can hear Dawson moving through camp: the soft knock of the camp pot, the creak of the fire ring grate, the particular quiet of someone who's been awake for a while and has no complaints about it.
I lie there and listen and my body slowly remembers that it agreed to this, and after a while I find my hair elastic by feel, drag everything up into something I commit to calling intentional, and unzip the tent.
He's crouched by the fire with a mug in both hands, and the morning light is doing something unfair to him — catching the line of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulders under the worn jacket, the easy way he holds himself even at rest. He looks like he was built for this specific landscape.
Like if you removed him from it something would be missing from the view.
He glances at me. Takes in whatever my face is doing. "Coffee."
"Please," I say, with everything I have.
He pours without ceremony and holds it out and I cross the camp to take it, close enough to feel the warmth coming off the fire, close enough that when our fingers overlap on the mug for a half-second I feel it more than I should at six in the morning.
I sit on the flat rock and wrap both hands around the mug and I breathe.
There is no mirror in a forty-kilometre radius. My hair is doing whatever it's doing. I have trail dust in my eyebrows and I slept in my fleece and yesterday's socks and I am currently being observed by another human being in this condition, and the thing I notice is that I don't care.
I test this feeling carefully, the way you test ice. Press on it. Wait.
It holds.
I don't care.
I sit with that for a moment. Four years of curating the right angle, the right caption, the right version of my face for the right platform, and now I'm sitting on a rock at six thousand feet with yesterday's socks and a man who looks like that watching me from across the fire.
I genuinely, measurably do not care. It feels less like freedom and more like putting down something heavy that I'd stopped noticing I was carrying.
I look up. He's watching me with that steady attention he has. Fully, quietly present in a way that should feel like pressure and somehow doesn't.
It's been a long time since anyone looked at me without wanting something from it.
"I forgot to care what I look like," I tell him, because the morning and the altitude and two days without a signal have apparently removed my filter entirely. "Three minutes and it hasn't occurred to me once. That's the longest streak in four years."
He considers this seriously. "Good."
"Is it?"
"Seems like it costs you something," he says. "Whatever it is you usually do."
I think about the ring light Tyler kept by the window. The habit I'd built of checking my reflection in my phone screen before we went anywhere. The particular exhaustion of always being slightly on.
"Yeah," I say. "It does."
He nods once and looks back at the fire. The ridge goes pink to gold while I finish my coffee. I let myself look at him the way I haven't let myself look at anything in a long time. The line of his profile. The way his hands hold the mug. The scar along his jaw catching the early light.
He doesn't catch me looking. Or he does and doesn't comment, which with Dawson amounts to the same thing.
The trail on day two is harder and more beautiful in equal measure.
He takes us higher, onto an exposed ridgeline where the wind has opinions and the views are frankly unreasonable.
My legs stage their protest through the first hour and then surrender, and somewhere in the second hour I notice that the usual noise has quieted — not gone, not resolved, just turned down.
I still reach for my phone twice before I remember.
I still feel the pull of it, the phantom weight of an inbox I can't check, a comment section I can't monitor.
But there are longer stretches now where the trail just takes over.
Where the only thing to think about is the next footfall and the cold air and Dawson's shoulders moving up ahead of me, and those stretches keep getting longer.
"Do you have a favorite?" I ask, during one of the talking stretches. "Route, I mean."
He thinks about it. "There's a traverse north of here. Three days in. Nobody takes it."
"Why not?"
"Technical. And it doesn't go anywhere obvious." A pause. "Just goes somewhere good."
I want to ask more. I don't. Some things you can feel are not for asking about yet.
Yet. I let the word drift past.
He takes me to the overlook at noon without telling me it's coming.
We angle off the main trail and the path narrows to suggestion and we scramble up a short rock face — and then his hand is around my wrist, warm and sure, guiding me up the last hard move, and I am acutely, suddenly aware of every point of contact.
His grip. The steadiness of it. The way he holds on until I'm stable and then lets go so cleanly it almost feels like a question.
I don't look at him when we reach the top because I'm fairly certain my face would answer it.
The view takes care of that. The peaks go back in layers, each one a shade lighter than the last, a lake below throwing the sun back in a long white line, an eagle leaning into a thermal like effort is optional.
I stand there and my caption-brain surfaces for half a second and then dissolves.
I don't want to translate this into something for someone else.
I want to stand here and let it be enormous and real and not do a single thing about it.
Dawson is slightly behind me and to the left. Close enough that I'm aware of the warmth of him in the cold air. He doesn't speak. Doesn't move. Just gives me the view like it's something he wanted me to have, and the giving of it feels like its own kind of thing.
We stay until the eagle disappears over the ridge.
When I finally turn to go, I almost walk into him.
He's closer than I thought, close enough that I have to look up to find his face, and he doesn't step back, and there's a moment, brief and charged and full of something that doesn't have a name yet, where we're just standing there.
"Ready?" he says.
His voice is low and even. His eyes are very dark.
"Yes," I say, and I'm not entirely sure what I'm answering.
That night, I tell him about Tyler.
I don't plan to. We're sitting either side of the fire and the dark has come in close and the stars are unreasonable and he asks, in the quiet way he asks things, how long it was.
And I've had two days of altitude and no signal and his hand around my wrist on the rock face, and whatever I've been holding together just… unravels.
"Two years," I say. "He has a following.
Lifestyle content. And I became part of it gradually, without ever really deciding to — we were the couple people followed.
And then we weren't, and he posted about it the way he posts everything.
Three minutes of Tyler in his car being very measured and very I care about her so much.
" I look at the fire. "Two hundred thousand views. "
Dawson doesn't fill the silence and I find I have more.
"The comments aren't the worst part. The worst part is that I looked at myself through all of it for so long that I don't know which parts were real anymore.
I built this whole version of myself for an audience and now the audience is gone and I look in the mirror and I genuinely don't know who's left. "
The fire pops. The dark sits with us.
I wait for him to say something well-meaning that misses the point. I'm already composing the polite response.
He's quiet for long enough that I look up.
He's leaning forward slightly, elbows on his knees, hands loose around his mug. The firelight catches the scar along his jaw and the steadiness of his eyes and the fact that he is watching me with complete, unhurried attention. Just here. Not pity, just concern.
I look back at the fire. I'm aware of him in my peripheral vision. The warmth of him across the small space between us. The silence, which should be uncomfortable and isn't, which should feel like absence and feels instead like pressure, like being held in place by something that hasn't touched me.
"You're the woman," he says, "who stood on that ridge today and didn’t take a picture. I think whatever social media addiction you think you have, isn’t as bad as you think. You just needed a little space."
I open my mouth and close it. He looks back at the fire, unhurried, like he said a thing that needed saying and that's all.
I think about his hand around my wrist and the moment on the overlook where he didn't step back, and I think about the traverse that goes somewhere good instead of somewhere obvious, and I think: I am in a significant amount of trouble.
I don't reach for my phone in the dark. I don't need to. There's already something else to think about.