Chapter 26
DARCY
We rolled into a little campground near the trailhead after ten last night, and Finn raised a tent in the dark in roughly the time it takes me to find my keys.
Whatever romantic Friday night plans anyone might have imagined, the week we'd both put in outvoted them.
He zipped us into a sleeping bag built for two, gathered me in against his chest, and I was asleep before I finished deciding to be. I slept like I was on summer break.
A few things were learned overnight. Item one: A sleeping pad is nothing but a rumor of a mattress, and my hips woke up with strong objections.
Item two, and more urgent: I unzipped the tent flap at dawn and found Finn crouched at a camp stove in the gray-gold light, hair tousled, entirely at home, making coffee, and I feel obliged to state that watching him do this is a problem.
I've met Showman Finn, Competent Finn, and Sex God Finn who takes his time and knows exactly how to please my body. Nobody briefed me on Trail Finn.
Trail Finn wears low-slung faded jeans and a black T-shirt that clings to his muscled shoulders and torso. He carries a pack the size of a mini fridge like it's a lunch box, and reads the woods the way I read a room of juniors: constantly, without appearing to.
His forearms alone are doing things that would get a book banned in three counties.
My phone, checked only once since we left, offered a single bar and then thought better of it. No signal. No school. No town. Just us.
"Feedback," I say, accepting a tin cup of coffee that tastes better than anything my kitchen has ever produced.
"Already?"
"The sleeping pad is a crime against humanity."
"The pad is a luxury item." He doesn't even look up from the stove. "You should see what I usually sleep on when I'm camping."
"A bed of pine needles and a rock for a pillow?"
"Moss, if I'm lucky." He hands me a plate of eggs that has no business being that good at this altitude, sits down beside me on the log with his own breakfast, and knocks his knee against mine. "Today you see it. Four miles in. We take it slow."
I groan and dig into my breakfast, even though deep down I'm excited to see what he has in store for us.
We finish eating, pack up our gear and extinguish our fire, then the rest of the adventure begins.
I am determined to be good at this, or, failing that, to look plausible doing it.
Finn adjusts my pack straps from behind before we start, hands warm through the fabric, so it stops pulling at my shoulders and starts riding my hips, and doesn't make a lesson out of it.
On the trail, he hands me water before I know I want it.
He matches my pace so naturally that it takes me two miles to notice he has never once been ahead of me, and when the trail turns into rock steps he's just there, hand out, like punctuation.
No quiz. No performance. He hands me the mountain one piece at a time as if it obviously belongs to both of us.
My boots hold. Somewhere early on I send a silent thank you to the version of me who broke them in a couple years ago and then abandoned the project. It turns out she was training for this all along.
I spend one entire quarter mile in serious contemplation of Finn's hands on a rock ledge, and where else those hands have recently been—and where, God willing, they will be again by nightfall. The mountain air is supposed to clear a person's head. My brain has other priorities.
At the stream crossing he goes first, turns on the far rock, and takes my hand for the last three stones, and then doesn't give it back for a while. I don't ask for it back, either.
And then, somewhere past the crossing, the brush to my right explodes.
I levitate. There is no verb for what I do that preserves my dignity, so I'll be accurate instead.
I levitate sideways, with a sound I will deny until death, colliding directly into Finn.
He catches all of me, one arm under my thighs, one across my back, as if women fling themselves at him on switchbacks daily and he has never once dropped one.
The murderer in the brush reveals itself.
It is a chipmunk.
It is the size of a dinner roll. It regards us both with open contempt and returns to its errands.
Finn laughs. He tries not to for approximately one second, and then he laughs from the chest. He has to put me down he's chuckling so hard, though I notice his hands take their time about releasing me.
"Not one word of this to anyone," I tell him, sternly, in my best serious teacher tone of voice.
"Wouldn't dream of it." His face is a parade of amusement.
"That rodent seemed a lot bigger before it came out of the bush."
"Enormous," he agrees solemnly. "Easily half a pound. You did the right thing screaming like it was a bear."
I stalk up the trail more determined than ever, with my chin high and his laugh warm on my back. When I take the next rock steps without his hand just to prove a point, he has the grace to let me.
An hour later the trail bends, the trees open, and there it is.
A ledge clearing, small and level and impossibly green, with the whole valley falling away blue beyond it. Ridge after ridge going soft in the distance, and somewhere below us a stream is making music against the tranquility of it all.
It's not grand. It's not a postcard. It's better.
It's a secret. A room with one wall missing and the world for a view.
"I found it the summer I was seventeen," Finn says. He's watching me see it, with an expression that makes me think watching me is his favorite thing to do. "I never brought anybody here until now."
I look at this man, who got bullied by his own brain in every classroom in Mattichogue and answered it by making the entire outdoors his library, and who is now standing in the middle of his oldest secret watching me like my opinion is the only review that counts.
"It's perfect," I say, because it is, and because the other things lining up behind my teeth aren't ready yet.
We eat lunch on the ledge, the valley doing its long blue thing below us, and I ask the question the place keeps asking for me.
"What did seventeen-year-old Finn do up here?"
He chews, considering. "Sat, mostly. Planned.
" He tips his chin at a flat rock near the edge.
"The first Bardot Adventures logo got drawn right there, on the back of a chemistry quiz I'd failed.
Mostly I sat up here and planned my escape.
" A beat, his eyes on the ridges. "Thorough work. Look how far I got."
He says it wryly, but I hear all the layers, and I put my hand on his knee and leave it there. We sit with the valley for a while, not fixing anything, because some things aren't broken anymore, just true.
Then, while he sorts gear, I make my announcement.
"I'm putting up the tent."
He pauses a beat before responding. "Okay."
"Alone."
"Now, look who's getting into roughing it," he says, then holds up his hands in surrender and finds himself a big boulder with a view.
The tent comes with instructions, which I read completely, because I am who I am.
The instructions have eleven steps and a serene confidence I immediately distrust. The poles are a mystery.
Step three produces a pole that assembles itself into a whip and catches me across the shoulder.
Step five produces a sleeve that accepts the pole, considers it, and returns it.
By step seven I am inside the tent, which is not up, arguing my case.
"It's just geometry," I inform the fabric currently wearing me. "I teach next door to geometry."
A chuckle comes from the direction of the rock.
"Do not help me," I demand, blowing a sweaty tendril of hair out of my eyes.
"I'm just sitting here drinking my water."
Any other man I've known would have had the task out of my hands by step four with an exasperated, "Here, let me." Finn sits on his boulder in the afternoon sun and watches me fight my war like it's the best show in the Catskills. It isn't mockery; it's the opposite.
It's a man refusing to take a victory away from me just because he could get there faster.
It is not lost on me, as I wrestle the rainfly, that the thing I'm building is also where we'll sleep tonight.
Both of us know it. Neither of us says it.
The knowledge hums under the whole afternoon like a live wire.
When the last stake goes in and the tent stands, actually stands, square and taut and mine, he applauds. Full, unironic applause, echoing off the ledge. Then he crosses the clearing, takes my scratched hand, and kisses my knuckles like I've won a national title.
"Nobody's ever put up that tent on the first try," he says. "I'm impressed."
"You're lying."
"Through my teeth," he says, "and I mean every word."
I laugh so hard I have to sit down on the world's most uncomfortable rock, which is somehow, like this whole weekend, the most comfortable I've been in years.
I have a master's degree. I have tenure. I own a color-coded daily planner that runs through June of next year. Nothing in recent memory has made me feel as capable as one assembled tent.
And the truth arrives all at once, small and enormous.
I'm in love with him.
Not the beginning of it, either. I'm past the trailhead. Well in. No signal, no map. I've fallen in love with Finn, the boy from my oldest bad memories and the man with his fingerprints on every good thing that's happened to me this spring.
He looks up and finds me watching him. He smiles, slow, and doesn't ask.
I run it through every measure I own and they all return the same result. This is the scariest adventure I have ever been offered. Skydiving at least comes with a parachute.
This reckless adventure only requires him to stay in the end.