Chapter 5
Gemma
Iwake up sore in the good way and hungry and still wrapped around Decklan Moore.
He’s on his back, one arm behind his head, eyes open. Watching the tent ceiling like it’s done something interesting. He doesn’t look surprised to find me here. He looks like a man who woke up an hour ago and has been thinking very hard about something he’s not going to say.
“Good morning,” I say.
He looks down at me. “Morning.”
“Are you always this chatty first thing?”
“Usually I’m alone first thing.”
“How’s this by comparison?”
He brings his hand up and tucks my hair back from my face. Deliberate, like he’s been thinking about doing it. “Better,” he says.
It takes me a second to breathe past that. I stay very still so I don’t scare it away.
He makes coffee on the camp stove while I sit in the door of the tent wrapped in a sleeping bag and watch him.
He does it without measuring—just knows how much to use, where the temperature should be, when to pull it.
He’s graceful in a way I didn’t notice at first, too distracted by the sheer fact of him.
It comes through in the backcountry especially—he moves through this environment like there’s no friction.
“What was the pack like?” I ask.
He doesn’t look up from the stove. “Which part.”
“The part you left.” I wrap my hands around the mug he passes me. “You said it was a disagreement with the alpha. You didn’t say which alpha.”
“His father.” A pause. “He stepped down. Nate has it now. The oldest son.”
“But you left because of him.”
He pours his own coffee. Sits down across from me on a flat rock. For a long time he doesn’t say anything and I don’t push—I’ve learned that silence with Decklan is not the same as absence. He’s here in it. He’s thinking.
“He wanted me to run enforcers,” he finally says. “Two packs were developing a conflict. He wanted to escalate it. I thought escalation was going to get people killed.”
“People being wolves.”
“Wolves, yeah. And people in the packs who aren’t wolves. Mates. Families.” He wraps both hands around his mug. “I said no. He said do it anyway. I left.”
“And you’ve been up here since.”
“Three years.”
I look at him over the rim of my mug. He looks back. “Do you miss it?” I ask.
He thinks about that. “The running,” he says, finally. “Running in a pack is different. You feel—bigger. Connected.” He shakes his head a little. “The politics aren’t what I miss.”
“Just the running.”
“Yeah.”
I nod slowly. He’s watching me do it. “What are you thinking,” he says. Not a question exactly.
“I’m thinking you gave up a real thing to keep your principles,” I say. “And I’m thinking you don’t seem like someone who makes decisions and then goes back on them.”
“I don’t.”
“Which means you’ve been up here for three years and you didn’t intend to stop.” I look at him. “And then I showed up in your parking lot.”
He says nothing. He looks at me with those amber eyes and says nothing, which I’m starting to understand means yes, and I don’t know what to do with it.
“I wasn’t going anywhere anyway,” I tell him. “Before you—before two days ago. I was doing my trip and going back to Spokane and figuring out the next contract. But I want you to know that I didn’t have a plan I was attached to.”
“What kind of contract?”
“Event planning. Freelance.” I wrap both hands around my mug.
“I coordinate corporate events, weddings, product launches—whatever pays. You’re always at someone else’s venue, someone else’s timeline, and then it ends and you move.
” I look at the fire ring, the ash from last night.
“I’ve been moving for two years. I told myself it was freedom. ”
“Was it?”
“Parts of it.” I look back at him. “The part where I book a solo backcountry trip to avoid thinking about it—that part maybe not so much.”
He says nothing. He does the thing where he just stays present in the silence and waits.
“Why does it matter?” he asks eventually.
“Because I don’t want you to think you derailed something.” I set my mug down. “You didn’t. My life has been between things for a while. This doesn’t feel like between things.”
He stares at me. His face goes careful. “You’ve known me three days.”
“You knew me in a parking lot,” I say. “Your wolf did, whatever that means. I’m saying I’m not in a hurry to argue with it.”
A long silence. Wind moves the tent behind me.
Somewhere above us a bird does its rising whistle—the varied thrush, I know that now—and Decklan tilts his head toward it without thinking, tracking it.
I stop with the mug halfway to my mouth.
This is what he is. This man who knows every bird and every creek and every wind shift. Who listens to everything.
He’s been listening to me for three days and I don’t think he knew how much he needed someone to listen back.
“Tell me more about the pack,” I say. “Not the conflict. Just—what it was like. Running with them. What it felt like.”
He holds my eyes, quiet, weighing it.
Then he starts talking.
He talks in his way—measured, slow—about what it feels like to run in a wolf pack, how the pack bond is something you feel, how you know where your packmates are the way you know where your hands are.
He talks about the timber operation and the land and a man called Eli, who was the closest thing he had to a friend in the years before he left, and who he hasn’t spoken to since.
He talks about the mountains in winter in wolf form, which he describes as “the only honest way to experience winter”, and I understand what he means even though I’ve never run as anything other than a human.
I don’t say anything for most of it. I listen. I drink my coffee. The morning warms around us, and he talks until he seems to realize how long he’s been talking. Then he stops and looks at me like he’s not sure how that happened.
“You’re good at that,” he says.
“Listening?”
“Getting people to talk.”
“I talk a lot so it balances out.” I stand up and stretch. Every muscle in my legs protests. “Also I’m just very interested in you specifically, which probably helps.”
He looks at me. I look back.
“Hardest section today,” he says finally.
“I know.”
“You going to be able to?—”
“I’m going to be fine.” I take his mug, stack it with mine, hand them back to him. “I’m sore, not broken. Let’s go.”
He takes the mugs and he’s packing things up before I’m done lacing my boots, and when he shoulders both packs I don’t argue. I’m going to let the man carry things. I’m not an idiot.
At the trail he waits. He doesn’t tell me where to walk today. He just starts and leaves room beside him, on the wide sections, and I slot in there without it being said.
We do the hardest section. He’s right—it’s harder than anything we’ve done.
A long switchback with loose rock and a drop on the south side that I don’t look at on purpose.
He keeps pace with me the whole way up, and twice he touches my elbow—not helping, just presence—and I don’t stumble either time.
At the top he stops and I stop beside him and we look at what we climbed.
“Good,” he says.
I’m breathing too hard to answer. I give him a thumbs up. He almost smiles again.
We make camp at the high site for our third night.
It’s colder up here—he adds layers to the sleeping bag without being asked, and I don’t comment on the fact that he brought enough for two even though this was supposed to be a solo client trip.
He doesn’t comment either. We eat. I talk less than usual, which he notices, and he doesn’t ask why.
The why is that there’s one full day left.
Four days in the backcountry and then we walk out, and the walking out is the part I can’t look at directly.
I haven’t figured out what that means yet.
I know what I said—I know I told him I’m not going back.
But saying it on a mountain is different from what “not going back” actually looks like in practice.
Breaking things into steps is my job. I know how to run a timeline when the finish line isn’t clear.
I don’t know how to apply that to this.
He’s watching the fire. I can’t look anywhere else. Tomorrow will figure itself out.
He’s not going back to being alone. I’ve made up my mind about that.
I’m not going to tell him yet. He’ll figure it out.