4. Cash
CASH
The sled takes Will and leaves us the quiet.
I watch its light go down the north side and get swallowed—one patrol driver and a scared kid strapped in a basket, gone into the white where I can’t follow.
Then there’s nothing out the windshield but snow coming sideways through the dark, the heater ticking, and Elyse in the driver’s seat with her hands finally still in her lap.
I brought him down. I put a life on my rope and brought him down, then stood in a drift and let somebody else carry him off the mountain. Every part of me that’s spent four years making sure I never had to do that again is loud right now.
It went right. It went the way the other one should have. I keep waiting to feel the difference, but I can’t find it yet.
The radio cuts in. “Elyse, this is Base. Patient’s off the mountain, en route to the clinic. Good work up there, both of you.”
Elyse keys it. “Copy. Any word on the plow?”
A pause. “Not before morning. Crew won’t touch that pass in the dark with it still coming down. You’ve got a full tank and a heater, so we’re holding you put until first light. Sit tight. Nothing up there but the two of you and the weather now.”
“Understood.” She sets the mic in its cradle. “All night, then.”
“Could be worse.” I say.
“Could be.” She pulls her knees up onto the seat and turns to face me, this small brave woman who walked into a storm because she doesn’t send people into it alone. “We have a full tank and a heater and nothing to do. So you might as well tell me the rest of it.”
“The rest of what?”
“Whatever’s been sitting on you since I keyed that radio.” Her eyes don’t leave me. “You went somewhere. Back in the office, you were all easy charm and I-don’t-winter-twice. The second there was a man missing on that ridge, you turned into somebody else. I want to know who.”
I could tell her the short version. That’s what I do. I give strangers the outline and keep the rest to myself.
But she’s not a stranger. I knew it in the office, and I’ve stopped fighting it somewhere on this mountain. Now it’s just the two of us in the dark with hours to fill, and I’m tired of running along the top of a wall.
“His name was Craig,” I say.
The name comes out into the warm cab, and it’s the first time I’ve said it aloud in longer than I can count.
“We came up together—guiding, climbing, the whole thing, for ten years. He was better than me on rock and I was better than him on snow, so we split it down the middle, and we were never wrong about each other, not once.” My gloves are off and my hands don’t have anything to do, so I look at them.
“Four years ago, he took a solo up a couloir on a day I couldn’t go.
Routine. He’d done it fifty times. A rock came off the wall and took his leg out, and he went down thirty feet and couldn’t climb out. ”
Her gaze shifts to my forearms. The flame ink, wrist to elbow, both sides. People assume things about a man with fire on his arms. They assume wrong.
“They’re for him,” I say, before she asks.
“Craig. He’s the reason for them.” I turn my arm so the light catches the work.
“You spend enough cold nights on a mountain, you learn the only warm thing up there is the one you carry in with you. He was that. Loud, warm, the guy who kept everybody’s blood moving on a bad bivy.
” My throat does something. “After, I put the fire on where I’d see it.
So I’d remember I was warm once. So the cold wasn’t the only thing I came down that mountain with. ”
She reaches out and lays two fingers against the ink, light, like she’s checking whether it’s hot. “You carry him with you everywhere you go.”
“Everywhere. Every mountain.” I close my hand over the ink like I can hold the heat in. “Everything else, I leave before it can cost me. Him, I keep with me.”
“Cash.”
“He was alone. That’s the tough part.” I make myself look at her.
“He had no partner and no radio, because it was a milk run and he didn’t want to bother anybody with it.
By the time he was overdue and I went up after him, it was hours too late, and the weather was on him.
I found him. I carried him down. I did every single thing right, and it didn’t matter, because the thing that killed him already happened the second he decided to go up there by himself. ”
She doesn’t reach for me. She doesn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault, which is what everyone does, and which I’ve never once believed. She just holds still and lets it be as big as it is.
“So you stopped staying,” she says.
“I stopped roping anybody.” The truth of it is easier out loud than I thought.
“Day-trips. Moving groups. Men whose names I don’t learn.
I go from mountain to mountain, and I never let anybody’s weight get on my line, because I already know what happens when the line goes and you can’t hold it.
” I turn my hand over. “You want to know what I went back to when you mentioned the Saddle? I went back to standing in a rig about to break my one rule. And then I broke it anyway, because a downed man takes two to carry, and going up there alone tonight was the exact thing that killed my best friend.”
“And you let me come.”
“I let you come.” Here’s the piece I haven’t said, the one that scares me more than the mountain.
“And halfway up that slope, with you in my boot prints doing exactly what I told you, I realized I wasn’t scared you’d fall.
I was scared I’d let you matter. That’s worse.
That’s the one I can’t outrun with a truck. ”
The heater ticks. Outside, the storm keeps on, indifferent, and inside it’s just her face turned up to mine in the dash light.
“I do the same thing,” she says. “You know that, right? You figured it out in the office before I did.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“There was a girl. My best friend, since we were kids.” I watch her decide to say it.
“Rae. We had it all planned—everywhere, all of it, the whole wall of postcards. We were going to hand the desk to somebody else and just go. She had the maps, and I had the nerve, and we were going the summer after graduation, both of us, no matter what.”
Her voice stays level as she continues.
“And then that spring, she just went. Took the trip without me. Met people, kept moving, sent a postcard from somewhere I’d never heard of, then another, and then they stopped coming.
She got the whole world. I got the desk she left me sitting at.
” She wraps her arms around her knees. “So I stayed. I told myself somebody’s got to hold the board so nobody gets stranded.
That’s the lie. The truth is, I stopped letting myself want the horizon, because the last time I wanted it, the person I wanted it with left to go get it alone. ”
“You stay so nobody can leave you.”
“And you leave so nobody can be taken from you.” She almost smiles, but it doesn’t reach anywhere good. “Same wall. We just stand on different sides of it.”
I’ve spent four years being certain I was the only man alive who understood exactly this, and she just said it back to me from the driver’s seat of a stranded rig like she’s had it written on the inside of her all along.
“Come here,” I say.
She doesn’t ask what for. She unfolds off the seat and crosses the space the heater’s been holding between us, and I get a hand into her hair, cold at the ends and warm at the root, and I stop where I said I’d stop so she can be the one who closes it.
She closes it.
Her mouth finds mine, and it’s nothing careful. Four years, one bad plan, and a whole night of almost—all of it landing at once.
She makes a sound against me, and I feel it go all the way down. I’ve kissed people to pass the time. I’ve kissed people so I wouldn’t have to talk. I have never once in my life kissed anyone I wanted to stay for. But I’m kissing her, and I want to stay.
“Elyse.” I get it out against her lips. “I’m not going anywhere tonight. The mountain made sure of that. But I need you to hear it isn’t the mountain.”
“I hear you.” Her hands are fisted in my jacket, pulling, certain. “Stay anyway.”
“I’m staying anyway.”
The kiss deepens, her mouth opening under mine like she’s been waiting for permission she already decided to give herself. I drag her across the console into my lap, the seat creaking under us, and the heat of her thighs straddling mine cuts straight through the cold still clinging to our clothes.
Outside, the storm hammers the rig—snow packing every window into solid white, the wind a low, constant roar. But inside, the cab is small and warm and sealed, heater ticking like a second heartbeat.
I break the kiss just enough to look at her. Dash light paints one side of her face gold, the rest shadow. Her lips are already swollen. Her eyes are dark and sure.
“I’ve never done this,” she says, quiet but steady. No apology in it. Just fact. “Any of it.”
Something in my chest pulls tight, then lets go. I slide both hands up into her hair, holding her still so she has to see me.
“You sure you want it to be here? With me?” My thumbs stroke the hinge of her jaw. “We can wait. The storm doesn’t get a vote on this.”
She shakes her head once. “I’m done playing it safe. I want adventure.” Her fingers curl into the front of my jacket. “I want you.”
That’s all I need.
I peel her jacket off first, then mine, both of them heavy with snowmelt and dropped to the floorboards. Her sweater follows, then the thin thermal underneath.
I take my time with every layer, watching the flush rise on her chest as the warm air of the cab touches new skin. When I get to her bra, I unhook it slowly, letting the straps slide down her arms.
The sight of her bare breasts in the low light of a stranded rig makes my mouth go dry. Outside, the world is freezing and white and closed. In here, she’s soft and pink and breathing harder already.
“Good girl,” I murmur against the hollow of her throat, and I feel the shiver that runs through her. “My girl. Just like that.”