Piper
The hike down was full silence. I followed his truck to the cabin instead of turning back to the Summit. Neither of us said anything about that.
Now I am standing at his kitchen window with a glass of water, doing the accounting I've been avoiding since his mouth was on mine. He went to check the water heater ten minutes ago. He needed the distance. So did I.
I am attracted to a man I met less than twenty-four hours ago. I can still feel his hands at my waist, my jaw, the back of my neck — and I am standing in his kitchen trying to think straight.
This is not, by itself, a problem. I'm thirty. I haven't stopped living because Owen died. Attraction is not complicated.
The complication is Slade.
He's someone Owen trusted enough to talk about constantly for two years of phone calls. Coming here and feeling something for this man is either a betrayal of everything I'm carrying or the most Owen thing I've ever done, and I can't currently tell which.
I turn the glass in my hands. He carries weight — I caught it Friday evening when I said best medic and watched his hand go flat on the table, and I've been collecting data points since.
The way he said Owen's name like it cost him something every time.
The way his thumb moved across his glass when I asked him to show me the mountain.
I've worked four years in emergency medicine. I know what it looks like when someone has replayed a single event so many times it runs underneath everything else they do.
I've been doing the same thing for fourteen months. We are matched on that.
What I don't know — what he's replaying. What carved the groove.
I don't have enough yet to know if what I'm feeling is grief wearing a different face or something entirely its own.
What I have — how the mountain felt different with him beside me on the ridge.
His hands on my waist, certain and unhesitating, like he'd already made a decision his mouth hadn't caught up to yet.
I hear the front door. His boots on the floorboards. My breath catches — and every line of reasoning I've built collapses the second he fills the kitchen doorway. He smells like pine and trail dust and sweat and I want to press my face against his chest and breathe him in.
"Stay," I say.
He is holding himself very still. I can see the exact moment he stops holding.
"Okay," he says.
I take one step toward him. It is the most deliberate thing I have done in fourteen months.