Nell
The falls are everything I came for.
Forty feet of granite and the water hammering down hard enough to feel in my chest from twenty yards back.
The spray catches the last of the light and throws it sideways — gold and white and near-silver where the sun hits the mist. I get my camera up.
The light is perfect. The framing is perfect.
I take six shots in thirty seconds and every one of them is going to be extraordinary.
Then the wind changes.
The temperature drops so fast my next breath stings.
I lower the camera and turn around and the sky behind me — the sky that was blue ten minutes ago, the sky my weather app promised me until midnight — is a wall.
Gray-white and low and close enough already that I feel the pressure change in my ears.
My phone has no signal. I check twice. Nothing.
Okay. I'm not an idiot. I know what I don't know, and what I don't know is this mountain.
I find a rock face, press my back against it, pull my jacket tight around me.
The stone is cold through my clothes and the wind cuts through every gap — the collar of my jacket, the strip of skin above my waistband where my shirt has ridden up.
I can still hear the falls but I can't see them anymore. I can't see much of anything.
I stay put. That's the rule. If you don't know where you're going, stop going there.
I talk to myself. Or maybe to the mountain. I do that — talk to things that can't answer. Hotels. Rental cars. A cactus in Tucson that I'm fairly certain was listening. "Okay," I say. "Okay. Someone will come."
My hands are shaking from the cold. I know the difference.
Someone comes.
He materializes out of the white like the mountain made him. Full gear, shoulders filling the space between the trees, a dog at his heel with the focus of an animal that has a job and takes it personally.
He stops when he sees me.
For a fraction of a second — his chest expanding on a harsh exhale, his shoulders dropping, a look crossing his face that is too real and too fast for a man this controlled. Relief. Gut-level. Involuntary.
I make my living catching the thing people do before they remember they're being watched.
Then it's gone. His hand shifts on the dog's lead — one sharp adjustment — and his eyes go flat and assessing.
Taking in the rock face at my back, the camera still around my neck, my hands tucked under my arms for warmth.
Everything about him says I do this for a living and you are a problem I am solving.
He is the most serious-looking person I have ever seen.
His shoulders fill the space between me and the weather. For one ridiculous second the wind feels quieter on my side of him.
He's here. I didn't have to wait long. Something about the way he found me is lodged behind my ribs, warm and persistent, and I don't have time to think about it right now.
"What possessed you to come out here alone."
Not a question. His voice is low and rough and it doesn't occur to me not to answer.
I look up at him. The snow is in his hair and his grip on the dog's lead is white-knuckled — the hold of a man who has been climbing hard.
"The photograph was going to be excellent," I say.
He stares at me. I stare back. I am freezing and my thighs are screaming from the hike up and my fingers might actually be a concern soon, and I don't look away.
The assessment in his eyes cracks. Just barely — underneath it — interest.
"Can you walk."
Also not a question. He hasn't asked me a single actual question since he got here — no are you okay, no what's your name.
I should mind the fact that he hasn't asked me a single thing like a question. I don't. Not even slightly.
"Easily," I say. It's a lie — but I'm upright and moving before he can offer to carry me.
He doesn't slow down for me. The trail goes up — of course it goes up — and the switchbacks are brutal at altitude with the wind shoving at my back.
My lungs burn. My thighs — my round, decidedly non-mountain-climber thighs — are on fire inside of ten minutes.
The cold cuts through to my fingers, my ears, the strip of neck above my collar.
"The falls were incredible, by the way," I say to his back, because silence has never been something I'm good at and I refuse to start now.
"Forty feet of water and the light was hitting the spray like — I got six shots before the wind changed.
They're going to be extraordinary. And the color of the sky just before it turned?
This perfect impossible blue and then just — gone.
Like a curtain dropping. I've never seen weather move that fast. Is it always like that up here? "
He doesn't answer. Doesn't slow down. Doesn't turn around.
"I'm going to take that as a yes." I'm panting between sentences now but I keep going. "Your dog keeps looking at me like I'm his responsibility. Does he do that with everyone or am I special?"
Nothing. The wind. His boots on the trail.
"I'm going to take that as a yes too."
He glances back. I'm flushed and panting and still talking, and whatever he expected to see when he turned around, it wasn't that.
He turns back to the trail. His pace doesn't change. But the tension in his shoulders shifts — from solving a problem to something he wasn't expecting.
I surprised him.
Good.
The dog keeps pace beside me. Not beside him — beside me, glancing up every few strides like he's assigned himself to my flank. The man ahead of me doesn't look back. But his hand tightens on the pack strap when he checks the dog's position.
Forty minutes. A shelter — squat timber, barely visible until we're on top of it.
He has the door open and a woodstove lit before I've finished shaking the snow out of my hair.
Two bunks against the far wall, a supply cache, and a thick wool rug spread in front of the stove that looks like it's survived more storms than I have.
He turns around. Looks at me properly for the first time with light instead of whiteout between us. The stove light catches dark hair, a jaw that hasn't softened in years, brown eyes. He looks at me like he's already decided something.
His gaze moves over me — slow, deliberate — and stops at my mouth for one half-second before coming back to my eyes. I kept up. I didn't panic. I'm still warm and talking and here, and he knows it.
Outside, the wind hits the walls and gets nowhere. The storm is a sound now, not a danger — muffled behind thick timber. And he's still looking at me.
I look back.
My heart kicks hard against my ribs.