3. Joy
JOY
I’d been packed and waiting since ten.
He’d said tomorrow. That was all. No time. No details. I didn’t have his number. He didn’t have mine. He’d kissed me and said tomorrow and walked back through the laurel.
And now it was morning. I was sitting on my log with my day bag at my feet and a closed paperback in my lap. I had no idea when he was coming.
I’d packed at nine. I’d unpacked and repacked at 9:30 because I’d forgotten my water filter the first time. After that, I sat on the log.
I didn’t check my phone.
That was the part I couldn’t quite get over. I’d had it in my pocket all morning, and I’d taken it out twice to check the time. Both times, I’d put it back without opening anything.
There were notifications. There were always notifications. There was a brand email I’d been ignoring since yesterday, a DM from another influencer I’d been meaning to answer, and a draft post in my camera roll I’d shot at the trailhead before I’d set up camp.
I hadn’t touched any of it.
The truth was, I’d spent the whole morning trying to figure out what I’d done last night.
I’d told a man I’d known four hours about my career precarity. I’d kissed him. I’d let him walk away when he could have stayed, and I’d lain in my tent for an hour afterward staring at the dome of nylon over my face thinking about his hand on the back of my neck.
The thing that was bothering me wasn’t that I’d done it. It was that I wasn’t panicked about it.
I’m the kind of woman who tells a careful version of my life to half a million followers and a full one to almost nobody. I’m extremely good at the careful version. I’ve built a brand on the careful version.
But last night, by a fire, after four hours of knowing him, I’d told Spencer Kirk a full version. Not the worst version, not the most embarrassing version—just the actual one. I’m holding a following. Barely. And I’d said it without flinching, and I’d watched him not flinch back, and I’d slept.
I’d slept like I hadn’t slept in three months.
That was what was really bothering me.
I heard his truck door close up on the road, through the trees. Then his boots on the trail. He came through the laurel screen into my campsite with a small soft cooler over his shoulder.
He’d shaved that morning—the line of his jaw was clean, not the day-two shadow from last night. Clean work pants. A faded navy T-shirt.
He looked at my day bag on the ground and then at me on the log. “You been waiting long?”
“No.”
That was a lie. He probably knew it was a lie.
“You eat lunch yet?”
“No.”
“Good.”
He hefted the soft cooler. “Made you a sandwich.”
“You made me a sandwich.”
“I make myself one every morning. Wasn’t any harder to make two.”
I didn’t know what to do with that.
He opened the passenger door for me. I climbed up. He shut it behind me and walked around to his side. He set the cooler between us on the bench seat and started the truck.
“How far?”
“Ten minutes up. Then we hike.”
“To where?”
“You’ll see.”
He drove me up Creekside Road past my campsite turnoff and took a left onto a forest service road I hadn’t noticed on the way in.
Gravel. Narrow. Trees pressing in. He drove it the way a man drives a road he’s driven a thousand times—easy on the wheel, slowing for the washouts before I saw them coming.
He pulled over at an unmarked turnout. There was no sign. There was no kiosk. There was no trail register. There was a faint footpath through the rhododendron, and he slung the cooler over his shoulder by its strap and led me into it.
The path climbed.
It was harder than the tourist trails I’d done on the way in.
Roots and rock, a couple of pull-up scrambles, no switchbacks where switchbacks would have been kind.
My legs started to burn in the first half hour, in the good way, the way they burned on a real hike.
He walked ahead of me at a steady pace and glanced back at intervals to check on me without slowing.
I kept up.
He didn’t say anything for the first half hour. He let me hike.
Then, over his shoulder, without looking back at me, “Why’d you pick Laurel Creek?”
“What?”
“For the campsite. You said you scouted it on your way in. I want to know what you saw.”
I thought about it for a few steps before I answered. The honest version was not the influencer answer. The influencer answer would have been the rhododendron, or the wildflowers, or the way the light at golden hour flatters my complexion.
I gave him the real one.
“I pulled up satellite imagery before I left home. I saw the creek bend at the spot where my tent is now. I saw it had three flat tent spots and a fire ring and a clear sightline back to the trail, so anyone coming in from the road would be visible before they got to me. I picked it because I could defend it from a chair.”
He stopped walking.
He turned around on the trail and looked down at me. I was two steps below him, hands on my hips, breathing harder than he was.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s not the answer I was expecting.”
“What were you expecting?”
“Something about how the pictures will look online.”
“I’m not like most influencers.”
“I know.”
He turned and kept walking.
We came out onto a granite outcropping maybe twenty minutes later.
It was wide. It pushed out from the ridge like the prow of a ship, and the view fell away to the south in layered ridges that went on as far as I could see.
There was a flat slab of rock big enough for two people to sit on, and a small pool of water collected in a hollow of the granite from the last storm, and not another human anywhere in sight.
I didn’t reach for my phone.
I wanted to. The brand would have lost their minds.
The light was incredible. The ridges were incredible.
I was wearing their flannel tied around my waist and I was having a good hair day and the slab of granite was a post—a series of them—a whole reel I could have shot and edited and queued for the week.
I didn’t reach for my phone.
I sat down on the slab and pulled my knees up and looked at the view.
Spencer sat down next to me and pulled two sandwiches out of the soft cooler. Wrapped in waxed paper, tied with butcher’s twine. He handed me one. He pulled out two bottles of water and set one next to my knee.
We ate.
“This is where I come,” he said, “when I need to think about something.”
I nodded. I didn’t say anything.
After a while he said, “Satellite imagery. Sightlines. Defensible position. Who taught you all that?”
“My grandmother.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. When I was nine. She’d been a Forest Service surveyor for forty years. She taught me to read contour lines on her kitchen table with a USGS quad and a pencil.”
“She still living?”
“No. She’s been gone for about four years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s been long enough that I can talk about her.”
“Yeah. That’s how it goes.”
He uncapped his water and took a long swig.
I did the same. He told me about the first cabin he’d ever built—solo, when he was twenty-three, off a hand-drawn plan he’d done in a notebook on his kitchen table over a winter.
He still owned it. He rented it out to the same couple from Asheville every August.
“You drew the plans yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“At twenty-three?”
“I had to draw them twice. First draft, I forgot to put a door on the bathroom.”
I laughed.
The laugh came out of my chest suddenly and surprised me. It was the first time in months that I’d laughed.
He looked at me.
He set his water bottle down on the granite. He set his sandwich aside. He turned his body toward mine, and he reached up and put his hand against the side of my face. His palm was warm and rough and a little calloused from work.
He kissed me.
It wasn’t last night’s kiss.
Last night had been an introduction. This was the second kiss of a man who’d been thinking about the first one for fifteen hours.
It deepened. His hand slid back into my hair.
My hand found the front of his shirt. The granite was warm under us from the sun, and somewhere down the ridge, a hawk called.
I was in his lap. I didn’t remember getting there. My knees were braced on the granite on either side of him and his hands were on my waist, palms flat, fingers spread. His mouth had moved to my jaw. He was breathing hard.
I broke the kiss and lowered my head, eyes closed. I had to say it twice in my head before I said it out loud.
“I’ve never done this.”
He went still under my hands.
“Any of it,” I said. “I haven’t—I just want you to know.”
He pulled back, just enough to see my face. He didn’t take his hands off my waist. He looked at me for what felt like a long time.
Then he moved one hand up from my waist to the back of my neck and rested it there. His palm was warm against the skin under my hair.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay. Thank you for telling me.”
“I don’t want you to think it changes anything.”
“It changes everything,” he said. “But not what you think it changes.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
He kissed me again. Slowly. He didn’t push it past where we were. He kissed me like a man who’d just been handed something he intended to handle carefully.
After a while, he pulled back. “I want to take you somewhere quieter.”
“Quieter than this?”
“Yeah.”
I climbed off his lap. He stood and pulled me to my feet by the hand. We packed the wrappers and bottles back into the cooler without talking about it—the kind of thing two people who knew the outdoors did without thinking. He slung it over his shoulder and didn’t let go of my hand.
He led me off the granite outcropping and back into the trees.
Not back the way we’d come. He turned uphill.
He took us up a faint use-trail that wasn’t a trail, just a softer place in the rhododendron where deer had moved, and we climbed for maybe ten minutes, and the sound of moving water got louder and louder until we came out onto a small grass flat above a bend in the upper creek.
The creek ran fast and shallow over stone below us. The flat was maybe twenty feet across, soft grass, ringed by hemlock. Sun coming through in patches. Not another sound but the water.
He set the cooler down at the edge of the grass.
He turned to me.
I stepped into the clearing.