Slade
She is outside the Summit at ten to six in hiking boots and a light pack, Owen's notebook tucked in the outer pocket. Ready before I arrived.
Dottie was already in the kitchen. Two coffees on the counter. She was gone before I could say anything.
I take her up the eastern ridge.
Not the easy route — the trail that climbs above the treeline where the valley opens on one side and the peak rises on the other and the scale hits your lungs. I've taken this trail twice since I got back. Both times alone.
She keeps up without commentary. Weight centered, breathing even — she grew up at altitude and it shows. I watch her navigate a root-choked step and her thighs flex under the hiking shorts and I look at the trail ahead instead.
She asks questions when she wants answers and goes quiet when she doesn't. She is the most comfortable silence I've had since I got home.
I tell her more than I mean to. The rescues — two in my first month, one requiring a night bivouac on the north face in weather that went from stable to dangerous in forty minutes.
The training runs at altitude, how the team moves together on a technical face.
August up here — the upper meadows going dry, the marmots coming down, the light at the treeline turning everything gold by seven.
She listens the way she did last night — fully, without performance. Her dark eyes come back to me from the ridgeline and I lose the thread of what I'm saying for half a second before I find it again.
"Owen was going to come here," she says.
"I know."
She touches the notebook's edge where it sticks out of her pack. "He was going to come after separation."
The trail levels at the ridgeline and the valley opens below us — the town, the switchback of Ridge Road, how Harrow Peak sits against the mountain like it grew there. Owen wanted to stand here.
She stands at the edge for a long time. I stand beside her and give her the quiet.
The guilt — that I'm the one here with her, that I'm the reason Owen isn't — settles behind my ribs like a stone I swallowed wrong.
"Thank you for bringing me up here," she says.
"He would have loved it."
"He would have narrated every single thing."
"Every. Single. Thing," I say.
The smile stays. "You miss him."
"Every day."
I watch her — the line of her jaw, the wind pulling a strand of dark hair across her throat — and I don't look away when she glances back and catches me at it.
She holds my gaze. I should look away.
She's the one who breaks it — turns back to the valley, tucks the loose strand of hair behind her ear. Her cheeks are flushed from the altitude. Or not from the altitude. I exhale through my teeth and check the trail down.
Coming down the eastern trail, the heat has climbed and the air smells of dry pine and dust and wildflowers at the treeline.
She is ahead of me on the narrow section and I am watching her move — hips, balance, the curve of her waist where her pack strap pulls her shirt tight — and I am done pretending I'm not.
She stops. I nearly walk into her.
"Sorry." She turns. "Rock."
I am closer than the trail requires. She doesn't step back. The light comes through the trees and lands across her collarbone and I am close enough to see the pulse at the base of her throat.
"I need to ask you something," she says.
"Okay."
"Did Owen know you were coming back here? Did he know about the SAR team?"
"Yes. He was going to visit after separation."
"Then he knew you'd be here," she says. "He would have known I'd find you."
"I think so."
"That's very Owen." Precise. "He always thought three steps ahead and never explained them."
She is close. She has been looking at me openly, deliberately — the way I have been not-looking at her since the porch.
"Piper."
"I know." And then, quieter, "I know it's complicated. I don't care right now."
Fourteen months. Every reason I've built for keeping my distance, every careful boundary I've held — gone in the time it takes her to say right now.
I kiss her.
My hands are on her waist, her jaw, the warm skin at the back of her neck. She tastes like coffee and altitude and something underneath that is only hers. Her fingers curl into the front of my shirt and pull.
The weight of what I haven't told her presses in. I push it back — not now, not with her mouth under mine and the sound she makes, quiet and involuntary, when I pull her closer.
Not now.