4. Dawson
four
Dawson
I take the detour at the junction without explaining it.
She doesn't ask. She just watches me angle left onto the narrower trail and follows, and I feel the specific quality of that — the trust in it, or maybe the curiosity, or the fact that she's three days into trusting the mountain to hold her and has extended that trust, without negotiating it, to me.
I have a rule about clients. I've had it for twelve years and I've never needed to think about it twice.
The trail going right leads back to the trailhead.
Eight kilometres, mostly downhill, and she'd be back at the hotel by early afternoon with cell service and notifications and the full weight of the world she came here to escape.
The trail going left is the start of the northern traverse. The one I don't take clients on.
I'm not taking her on the traverse. Just the first section, up to the high meadow, which is a full day's walk and makes tonight's camp impossible anywhere except the shelf above the snowline where I know the ground is flat and the wind is blocked by the north ridge and the stars, on a clear night, are enough to make you believe in a higher power.
I should have turned right.
I turned left.
The trail narrows in the first hour. I can hear her breathing behind me and the particular cadence of her footfall that I've learned over three days without meaning to.
She's found her stride now. Day one she was fighting the mountain.
Day two she was negotiating with it. Today she's just walking at peace.
Around midmorning we hit the first stream crossing.
Last week's snowmelt has the creek running thigh-high and fast, white over the rocks, cold enough to be dangerous if you go down. I cross first, find the footing, turn back.
She's standing at the bank looking at it with the expression of someone doing rapid calculations.
"Okay," she says. "How…?"
"Give me your hand."
She reaches across and I take it. Her hand is smaller than my grip and I close around it and step back through the current, watching her feet, watching the water, keeping the line between us taut.
She makes it across in four careful steps and when she clears the last rock and lands on solid ground her hand tightens in mine for a half-second before she lets go.
She looks up at me. Her hair is escaping its tie. There's colour in her face from the cold air and the effort and she's looking at me with an expression I don't examine.
"There are more crossings," I tell her.
"How many more."
"Three."
Something moves through her eyes. She looks away first. "Lead the way."
The second crossing is wider and I take her hand before she can reach for it.
The third one requires her to step up onto a midstream boulder and she wobbles and I get both hands on her waist and hold her there until she's balanced, her hands coming down to cover mine for one moment before she steps to the far bank and I let go.
The scramble comes on the approach to the high meadow. A short technical section — fifteen feet of exposed rock, good holds, nothing that requires rope, but enough that you have to think about your body. I go up first, find the line, look back down at her.
"Left foot on the ledge. Right hand on the horn above your head."
She does it. Gets the first two moves cleanly and then the third one throws her — the hold she reaches for isn't where she expected it and she presses into the rock face for a moment, recalibrating.
"Look left," I tell her. "Six inches."
She finds it. Pulls up. On the last move I reach down and get her forearm and bring her up onto the ledge beside me, and then she's standing a foot away, catching her breath, and we're on a rock shelf barely wide enough for both of us with the valley dropping away below and her face is right there, tipped up, and her eyes are bright and I am very aware of my own hands.
"Okay," she says, a little breathless. "That was excellent."
"You were good."
"Was I." She's still looking at me. Still right there.
"Technically sound," I say, and step back onto the trail.
I hear her exhale behind me.
The high meadow earns everything.
That's why I come back. Two kilometres of flat alpine grass above the treeline, ringed by peaks, a tarn at the centre that reflects the sky so cleanly it looks like a hole in the ground leading somewhere better.
The light at this elevation in the late afternoon has no business being that colour.
I've been coming here for years and I've never tried to explain it to anyone.
She goes quiet when we come over the rise and it spreads out in front of us.
Completely quiet. She just stops and looks at it and after a moment she sits down right where she's standing, on the grass at the edge of the meadow, and puts her hands in her lap.
I sit beside her, closer than necessary, if I'm being honest with myself, which I've been trying not to be and we watch the light move across the tarn for a long time.
"You took the wrong trail at the junction," she says eventually. "The other one went back to town."
"Yes."
She's quiet for a moment. "I wasn't going to say anything."
I look at her. She's still facing the meadow, her eyes glittering with emotion that I know all too well. The awe of it brought me to tears the first few times as well.
"Last night of the trip," I tell her. Which is not an answer. She knows it's not an answer.
"Is it?" she says.
I look back at the tarn.
We sit there until the light goes.
Camp is just below the snowline, on the shelf I knew was here. I set up the tent while she collects deadfall for the fire and comes back with an armload that's better sorted than I'd expect, which shouldn't surprise me anymore.
We make dinner. We eat. The fire does what fires do and the dark comes in and above us the stars are extraordinary, the kind of clear that only happens at altitude with no light pollution for fifty kilometres in every direction.
She doesn't reach for her phone. She hasn't since yesterday morning, and the not-reaching has changed something in her face — some tension that was there on day one, a held quality around her eyes, has gone.
We don't talk much around the fire tonight. We don't need to.
At some point she looks at me across the fire and says, "Thank you. For the left trail."
"Don't thank me yet," I say. "You still have to walk out tomorrow."
I put the fire out and we go to our separate sides of the tent.
I've been awake for an hour when I hear her move.
The zip between our sleeping bags comes open. Slow. Deliberate.
Her hand finds my arm in the dark.
I pull her in and kiss her before she can say anything else. She opens for me immediately and I take my time with her mouth, learning it properly, my hand in her hair tipping her head back the way I want her. She makes a sound low in her throat and grips my jacket in both fists.
I strip her layers off without rushing. Jacket.
Fleece. Base layer over her head. She's bare from the waist up and I pull back to look at her in the thin grey light coming through the tent wall.
She's beautiful. I tell her that and she starts to say something and I put my mouth on her breast and she stops talking.
I learn her. Take my time doing it. She wants pressure — wants my hands firm on her, wants my thumbs working her nipples until she goes tight, and when I use my teeth lightly she makes a sound that goes straight to my cock.
I work my way down her stomach and she lifts her hips to help me get her pants off and then she's bare everywhere and I sit back on my heels and look at her laid out in the sleeping bag in the dark.
"Dawson."
"I'm looking," I say.
She makes a sound that might be impatience. I run both hands up the inside of her thighs slowly, not touching where she wants, and she pushes toward me.
"You've been patient for three days," I tell her. "You can wait two more minutes."
She exhales hard through her nose.
I smile in the dark where she can't see it.
I get my mouth on her inner thigh. The other one.
I work my way in slow and she's already wet when I finally put my tongue on her, already wanting it, and I settle in and give it to her properly.
Long strokes, then focused, reading her the way I read terrain — pressure here, angle there, and when I find the right place she grips my hair hard and her whole body goes still before it goes loud.
I keep her right at the edge. Back off when she gets close.
Return when her breathing levels. She's shaking within a few minutes, her hips moving against my face, and she's past managing the sounds she makes — past the careful version of herself she arrived at the trailhead with three days ago, all of that stripped away by altitude and silence and now this.
"Please."
I give her what she's asking for. Work my tongue against her clit steady and direct until she comes against my mouth, thighs clamped around my head, her whole body clenched and shaking. I stay through all of it. Every second.
When she loosens I kiss my way back up her stomach, her ribs, her chest.
She reaches down and wraps her hand around my cock before I've finished moving. Strokes once, slow, base to tip. My arms lock.
She does it again. Watching my face.
I let her work me. I've got patience built into me like trail muscle and I use it, lying there while she takes me apart — her grip confident, her pace deliberate, like she's paying attention to what lands. She is paying attention. I feel that attention now like a physical thing.
“Fuck,” I grunt. It feels so good. I can’t remember the last time anything felt as good as her soft hand on my cock. When I'm close enough that stopping is an act of will I wrap my fingers around her wrist.
She makes a sound of protest.
"Not yet," I say. “I want to be inside of you.”
I get between her thighs and push them apart and line up and push inside her in one long stroke.
She exhales like something has finally been resolved.
I stop there, fully seated, my forehead dropped to hers, and feel it.
The specific reality of her. This woman at six thousand feet who told me the true thing about herself at the fire and didn't look away after.
Who followed me down the wrong trail without asking where it went.
Long and slow to start, feeling her open around me, and she wraps her legs high around my waist and tilts her hips and takes more of me and I drop my head and work.
I find the angle that breaks her breathing and I stay there.
She digs her fingers into my back and I feel the pressure of it, the specific wanting in it, and I give her more.
"Right there," she says. "Don't stop. Don't!"
I get a hand between us and press my thumb against her clit and keep moving.
She clenches around my cock immediately, tight and getting tighter, and I work her at that angle with my thumb steady on her and watch her face come apart in the thin light.
Nothing held back. Just her, open and real and gripping me like she's not letting go.
She comes with her whole body. Thighs locked around me, back arched off the sleeping bag, my name in her mouth like the only word she has left.
I push deep and follow her. Hold there and let it take me apart.
She goes soft and warm afterward. I pull her in and she tucks her face into my throat and her breathing slows, evens, and I lie there in the dark holding her while the mountains hold us and outside there is nothing and nobody at all.
I stay awake.
I think about twelve years of choosing these mountains over everything that wanted to pull me back down to the valley. That choice always felt like the obvious one. The only one.
It doesn't feel that way anymore.
I already know I'm taking the slow route out in the morning.