Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
ELISE
Trip complete. As if fourteen days across a country with Jaxon Mills can be summarized by two words and a check mark.
We haven't spoken since breakfast, which consisted of instant coffee from the farmhouse kitchen, toast he burned and I scraped without comment, and a silence so loud it drowned out the toaster.
He held the door for me on the way to the truck.
I said thank you. He said no problem. We sounded like strangers at a revolving door.
Last night was a mistake. Not the things I said, because they were true.
We are going to different places. His life is here, in the mountains and the wilderness and the countries he photographs.
Mine is in Toronto, in client spreadsheets and vendor contracts and a one-bedroom apartment with throw pillows I picked to match the curtains.
Our lives don't overlap. The Venn diagram has no middle circle.
The mistake was believing I could say all of that without it costing me something.
"Mountains," Jaxon says, the first word either of us has spoken in ninety minutes.
Through the windshield, the Rockies rise from the prairie like a wall. Snow-capped, massive, sharp against the blue. The transition is sudden. One minute it's flat farmland, the next the earth decides to be vertical, and the effect is staggering.
"I've never seen them in person," I hear myself say.
He glances over, surprised. "Never?"
"I fly to Vancouver in July. Direct flight. I don't see the mountains because I'm on the wrong side of the plane, and I've never asked to switch seats because I book the aisle for legroom."
"You've been flying over these your whole life and never looked."
"I've been efficient my whole life and never looked."
The truck cab is quiet. My planner is open on my lap, the pen loose in my fingers. Two hours to Calgary. Two hours until this ends.
My phone buzzes.
El. I know you're almost there. Before you do the thing where you thank him politely and get out of the truck and never look back, I need you to consider something.
You spent two weeks with a man who flipped a canoe, cooked you dinner, and drove you four thousand kilometres across a country, and the thing that scares you most isn't the canoe or the bear warning or the moose.
It's the fact that you'd get back in the truck tomorrow if he asked.
Sloane. Always Sloane. Seeing the thing I refuse to see, then texting it to me in plain English.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Yes you do. Call me later. Whatever you decide, I love you. But Elise, please. For once in your life, don't let the plan be the reason.
My phone goes dark.
The mountains grow taller with every kilometre. Jaxon drives with both hands on the wheel for the first time since we left Ontario, and the set of his jaw tells me he's having his own version of this conversation inside his head.
"Pull over," I say.
He looks at me. "What?"
"The next viewpoint. Pull over."
"We're forty minutes from Calgary."
"I know. Pull over."
A viewpoint appears on the right shoulder, a gravel turnout with a low metal railing overlooking a valley. The Rockies fill every direction. Below, the Bow River cuts through green. Above, the sky is the ridiculous blue that Alberta pretends is normal and the rest of the country resents.
Jaxon pulls in, cuts the engine. Neither of us moves.
"I lied to you last night," I say, staring straight ahead through the windshield. "When I said we were always going to different places. That was a lie."
"Elise..."
"Let me finish." My hands are in my lap, trying desperately to hold myself together.
"I've spent my entire life building systems to prevent exactly this.
Colour-coded planners, laminated itineraries, pre-booked rentals.
All of it exists because when I was twelve, I watched my parents' entire world shatter over a salad bowl, and I decided that if I could control every variable, nothing would ever hurt that much again. "
The truck ticks as the engine cools. The dream catcher sways.
"And then you showed up with your canoe and your Timbits and your complete inability to measure rice, and every system I've ever built started failing. Not because you broke them. Because you made me want to stop hiding behind them."
My voice cracks on the last word. I press my lips together, hard, and force myself to keep going.
"You asked me last night if I'd turn down a dream job, and I said no.
But the truth is, I don't know what my dream is anymore.
Two weeks ago, it was the Weston-McAllister retreat and a clean itinerary and a promotion by January.
Now I'm sitting in a truck in Alberta, looking at mountains I've never seen, and the thing I want most is to not get out of this vehicle. "
Silence. Not the painful kind. The kind where someone is listening with their whole body.
"Take the Patagonia job, Jaxon. I mean that. Go photograph the most beautiful place on earth. But don't go because you're running from your mom's boxes and a grief you haven't finished feeling. Go because you want to, not because standing still is scarier than leaving."
My door opens before he can respond. The mountain air is cold and clean, and my heels make no sense on the gravel, and I'm walking toward the railing because if I stay in that truck for one more second, I'm going to cry, and I don't cry. I organize. I plan. I build systems.
The railing is cold under my hands. The valley stretches below, impossibly green, the river a silver thread.
His boots crunch on the gravel behind me. Slow, deliberate steps. Not rushing. Giving me space to change my mind.
"Elise."
"Don't." My voice is thin. "Don't say the nice thing. Don't make this into a moment. We've had enough moments. Moments don't survive geography."
"Turn around."
"No."
"Please."
I turn around.
He's standing three feet away, no ball cap, hair in his eyes, hands at his sides. The mountains rise behind him in a wall of snow and stone. His brown eyes are red-rimmed, and his jaw is tight, and he's holding his phone out to me, screen facing up.
An email. The Meridian Outdoor thread.
Subject: Re: Assignment Opportunity — Patagonia Series
Hi Liam,
Thank you for the offer. I'm honoured and I know this is a once-in-a-career opportunity. But I'm going to decline. I've spent the last two years saying yes to every assignment that took me somewhere new, because new places felt safer than the place I already was.
I'm done running. I want to see what happens when I stay.
Best, Jaxon
My vision blurs. My hands grip the railing behind me.
"You turned it down."
"I sent that at 6 AM."
"Before I said any of this."
He takes a step closer. "Kenzie told me something last week.
She said the photo you took of me was the first time I looked happy in two years.
And I kept thinking about that. Why I looked happy.
And it's not the truck or the road or the prairie or the mountains.
" One more step. "It's you. Sitting in my passenger seat with a laminated itinerary, arguing about rice-to-water ratios, reviewing me on Instagram before we'd even met. You make me want to stay in the frame."
"Jaxon."
"I'm not asking you to give up Toronto. I'm not asking you to move to Calgary or change your plan or abandon your spreadsheets.
I'm asking you to let this be real. Whatever it is.
Whatever shape it takes. Flights and weekends and colour-coded visits scheduled a year in advance.
I'll take your system. I'll take whatever you want to build, because the thing I've figured out over the past two weeks is that you build things that last, Elise.
Everything you touch holds together. And I want to be something you build. "
The mountain air fills my lungs. Cold, thin, sharp with pine. The Bow River moves below us, indifferent to the fact that my entire world is rearranging itself on a gravel pullout forty minutes from Calgary.
"You're going to have to open those boxes," I say, and my voice is barely there. "Your mom's things. You can't start staying if you haven't finished grieving."
"I know."
"And I'm going to need a better couch in the Calgary rental, because the pull-out has destroyed my back and if we're doing this, I'm visiting regularly, and I refuse to sleep on Cold War surplus furniture."
His laugh is sudden and wet, startled out of him. "Deal."
"And the canoe stays on the roof. I'm never getting in it again."
"Understood."
"And you learn to measure rice."
"Now you're pushing it."
The last thing I see before I close the distance is his face. The crinkled eyes, the crooked smile, the look of a man who has been holding his breath for fourteen days and just remembered how to exhale.
My hands find the front of his flannel shirt. His hands find my waist. The kiss is soft, careful, warm, and when it deepens, I feel the last board come off the wall I built when I was twelve. The one that says: don't need anyone, and nobody can take anything from you.
The board comes off, and underneath it is just me. Elise Boyd. Thirty years old. Standing at a viewpoint in Alberta, kissing a man who sleeps anywhere, eats Timbits for breakfast, and treats schedules like polite suggestions.
When we pull apart, his forehead rests against mine. His breath is uneven. Mine isn't much better.
"I love you," he says, quiet and certain, like he's stating a fact he's known for days and just now found the right moment to say out loud.
"I know it's been a few weeks, and I know that probably breaks every rule in your planner, but I love you, Elise.
I loved you somewhere around the canoe. Maybe before. "
A laugh escapes me, wet and shaky. "The canoe was day five."
"I'm a fast learner."
My fingers tighten on his flannel. The mountain wind pushes between us, cold, and he pulls me closer. My forehead is still against his, and the words are right there, sitting on my tongue, the truest thing I've ever been afraid to say.
My mother held onto a salad bowl because she couldn't say what it meant.
My father scheduled his love into two-week increments because he didn't know how to offer it freely.
And I have spent eighteen years building walls out of spreadsheets and itineraries because wanting someone felt like handing them a ceramic bowl and praying they wouldn't drop it.
Jaxon isn't asking me not to break. He's asking me to hand him the bowl anyway.
"I love you too." The words come out rough, surprised, as if my own voice didn't expect them. "I love you, and I don't have a sub-bullet for that, and it terrifies me, and I don't care."
His whole body exhales. I feel it, the tension leaving his shoulders, his arms tightening around my waist, his mouth finding mine again. This kiss is different from the first. The first was a question. This one is an answer.
When we finally separate, he's grinning in a way that crinkles his entire face, and I'm smiling so wide my cheeks ache, which is an unfamiliar sensation for someone whose resting expression has been described as "competence with a slight air of disapproval."
"Your mom's colours," I whisper, glancing at the dream catcher through the truck window. Blue and white, swaying in the wind.
"Her favourite."
"She would've hated my itinerary."
"She would've loved you." His voice breaks, just slightly, on the last word. "She would've loved you for making me stay."
My hand finds his face. His stubble is rough under my palm. The wind pushes my hair into my eyes, and he tucks it behind my ear with a gentleness that makes my throat ache.
"For the record," I say, "you brought a canoe to a road trip. I brought a binder. And somehow we ended up here."
"Best wrong turn I've ever taken."
"I don't take wrong turns."
"You took this one."
"This isn't a wrong turn." My hand slides to the back of his neck. "This is a detour. An approved, thirty-minute, veto-authorized detour that I am choosing not to veto."
His grin spreads, wide and unguarded, and I kiss it off his face because I can. Because for the first time in my controlled, colour-coded, meticulously organized life, the plan has fallen apart, and the falling apart is the best part.
He was right about that.
I'll never admit it out loud.
The truck starts with a familiar rattle, the dream catcher swaying into motion.
Calgary waits at the bottom of the mountain, real life and client walkthroughs and napkin consultants and all the logistics that make up an ordinary Tuesday.
But the passenger seat is warm, and his hand finds mine across the console, and my planner is still open to the last page where Trip complete is written in blue ink.
Taking the pen from the dashboard, I cross it out, and write two new words underneath.
Trip beginning.
Then, because I am nothing if not thorough, I add a sub-bullet.
Do NOT let him go.