Nell
Three months later, I drive up Ridge Road and I know every switchback.
I am not passing through. I have a lease on the studio above Prentiss General — the same room I left my bag in before I hiked up and nearly got myself killed. Walt handed me the key without a question. I think he knew before I did.
I write a column now. At Altitude — dispatches from a place that doesn't care about being discovered. Four pieces filed. I haven't run out of things to notice. I know I won't.
The photograph of Harrow Falls hangs framed above my desk. I got it on my second visit — a clear October morning, the spray lit from inside, the best shot I've ever taken. It ran as the header for my first column.
I never mentioned that the first attempt nearly killed me. Some things belong to the mountain. Some things belong to me and Thane.
Sergeant breaks protocol before I've fully stopped the car — spinning, shoving his nose into my hands, his whole body vibrating with finally finally finally. Thane stands in the doorway with his arms crossed and pretends not to see this. He's not fooling anyone. He hasn't fooled anyone in months.
Inside, the base has changed in ways he'll never point out.
A second mug by the coffee maker — the blue one I bought at Dottie's.
My jacket on the hook beside his. The shower head lowered three inches.
A shelf cleared for my notebooks without a word about it.
Three months of small, deliberate rearrangements, each one a sentence in a language he speaks better than the spoken kind.
And the whiteboard. Mountain conditions: clear. Missing persons column: empty. And there — in his handwriting — N: arrives today.
My breath catches hard enough to hurt.
"I put it on the board when I'm tracking something important," he says.
I cross the room and kiss him. He doesn't just let me — he backs me up against the whiteboard and kisses me like he's been waiting since the last time I drove down that road, like the three days I was in Denver filing copy were three days too many, like restraint is something he used to have and has no interest in finding again.
His hands go to my waist, my jaw, the back of my neck. The whiteboard rattles behind me.
It rattles harder. I don't care.
The door behind us opens. Mace gets one look at us — me against the whiteboard, Thane's hands in my hair — and walks straight back out.
"Finally," he says through the door. I hear him lean back against it. Not leaving. Standing guard.
Thane doesn't pull away. He stays exactly where he is, his forehead against mine, and when he looks at me his face is open. Sure. Settled.
"I'm staying," I say. Then, before he can answer: "And I love you. I know that's fast. I don't care."
He looks at me the way he looked at me in the blizzard.
"I love you." His mouth against my hair. "I'm staying."
I laugh. I can't help it. "That's my line."
"It's mine now."
He says it like a man who decides everything deliberately, completely, and without plans to change his mind.