CHAPTER 13 – NELLIE #2
Nellie turned back to the slope and kept walking, abruptly aware that the back of her neck was warm.
She talked more than she’d planned to. It happened when she was moving through terrain that occupied the part of her brain usually devoted to social self-monitoring—her feet and eyes busy with the ground, her scientific mind parsing habitat, and the rest of her simply talking.
She told Sawyer about the six months she’d spent sleeping on a colleague’s fold-out in Portland during the Oregon campaign, working two part-time jobs to cover the sampling equipment the university wouldn’t provide.
She described the morning she’d found the protected wetland marker, crouched in three inches of cold water at seven a.m. with a hand lens she’d bought at a garage sale and laughing so hard at the find that her field assistant had briefly panicked.
Sawyer asked four questions across the full climb.
Each one landed precisely at the point where Nellie’s momentum was running out, and each required actually listening to everything that had come before it.
Not the social kind of listening, where you gather enough material to deploy the next comment.
The real kind, which was rarer than people pretended, and which Nellie had not expected to find here, between a root cluster and a rocky switchback, in the company of a CEO who ran on treadmills facing blank walls.
The sheepishness didn’t leave. It sat at the edge of everything Sawyer said. Nellie wanted to poke at it the way she poked at interesting soil composition. She didn’t. She talked about the Oregon campaign instead, and then the Cascades solo count, and let the impulse settle back down.
It did not settle all the way down.
The ridge opened ahead of them through the last stand of hemlock—the rocky outcrop she’d been targeting all week, flat-topped and broad, with a clear sightline northwest across the canopy.
They came out of the trees side by side, both breathing heavily, stopped at the rock’s edge and looked out at the valley below.
The upper drainage unfurled in a long green V, the forest canopy continuous from here to the northern boundary and beyond. Nellie had grown up in the high desert. She’d been seeking forests for almost twenty years. She still sometimes forgot to breathe for a second.
Beside her, Sawyer was looking at it too. Not the way she’d looked at things in the early weeks—the assessing, categorizing look, the one running a calculation behind it. She seemed to be in awe.
“You said you’d been in territory you couldn’t navigate without other people’s expertise exactly twice in your career,” Nellie said.
Sawyer turned her head a fraction, eyebrows raised. “Did I say that?”
“On the climb. When I was telling you about Oregon.” Nellie kept her eyes on the valley. “You said twice. I’ve been wondering what could possibly have landed you so out of your depth.”
“Well...” Sawyer stared at the horizon. “First was Singapore, 2021. An audit flagged a data architecture issue I didn’t have the technical vocabulary to fully assess.
I had to bring in outside expertise and trust someone else’s read on terrain I couldn’t map myself.
” She sighed through her nose, like it still bothered her all these years later. “I find that situation uncomfortable.”
“And the second?” Nellie pressed.
Sawyer turned and looked at her.
“The second time...” She took a deep breath, as if she was bracing herself, and Nellie felt the need to brace herself too.
“I feel out of my depth every time I see you. Every time I hear your voice. Yesterday, on the phone, Martha put you through and I already—” Sawyer made a short, dry sound that was not quite a laugh.
“I have commanded rooms full of people trying to take something from me and I have never once lost the thread. I have been competent at most things I’ve attempted for a very long time, but now. ..”
“Now you’re in territory you can’t navigate without outside expertise?” Nellie smirked, the expression decidedly more self-assured than the absolute circus that was tumbling around in her stomach.
She’d known it already, and she hadn’t wanted to admit to herself that she’d known it, and now it was all coming out into the open, and she had nothing—no scientific framework, no field protocol, no rigorously annotated notebook entry— for what it meant to have Sawyer Alburn tell her, in plain language, that she was lost.
“I suppose that’s an accurate description of how I feel,” Sawyer mumbled.
Nellie turned from the valley to look at her properly. Sawyer was still facing the canopy below, jaw set.
“I know the feeling,” she said quietly.
Sawyer’s gaze came sideways.
“I mean it.” Nellie took a careful step toward her.
“I have eight years of fieldwork and a master’s degree and a very good gut, and since approximately the day you showed up in front of Eleanor in those high heels, none of it has been particularly useful.
” She stopped an arm’s length away. “I’m just as lost as you are. ”
Her feet decided before her brain could tell them otherwise. She closed the last of the distance between them and took Sawyer’s face in her hands. “It can’t be all that terrible,” Nellie murmured, “being lost together.”
This kiss was nothing like the first one.
That had been sudden—reflex dressed up as a decision.
This was deliberate. Slow. She felt Sawyer’s stillness last a half-second and then release into it, the way a held breath finally goes.
Nellie took her time with it, felt Sawyer’s mouth warm and careful and then—incrementally, measurably—not careful at all.
Sawyer’s fist closed around the front of her jacket and pulled, and the tentative went somewhere else entirely and left something hungrier in its place.
Then, all too soon, Sawyer’s hands pressed at her shoulders. She pushed Nellie back.
Nellie blinked.
Sawyer’s expression was doing several things at once. Her color was high, and she looked—Nellie searched for the word—undone. Not distressed. Just undone, like an arrangement taken apart.
“This is getting complicated,” she said.
“Is it?” Nellie was perplexed, she did not think those would be the first words out of Sawyer’s mouth when just seconds ago they had been acquainting themselves with each other’s tongues.
“We are supposed to be on opposite teams.” Sawyer stepped back, put a precise foot of air between them. “There is a legal agreement. There is a development project. There’s a timeframe—”
Nellie laughed. She hadn’t meant it to come out the way it did—slightly bewildered, a little unsteady, landing somewhere between amused and lost. But that was what it was. “You kissed me before.”
“I’m aware of what I did.” Sawyer suddenly seemed very interested in a point over Nellie’s shoulder.
Nellie had never seen the CEO incapable of making eye contact.
She was always direct, always using those piercing, pale eyes to drive her point home.
This Sawyer Alburn in front of her felt like a nervous stranger.
“And today you’re all of a sudden worried about being on opposite teams?”
“I’m concerned about the conflict of interest.” Sawyer’s knuckles went briefly white as she tugged at her coat hem.
“Right.” Nellie blew out a slow breath and looked at the valley below them, then back.
“Well… If you ask me, it doesn’t have to be complicated.
That’s a choice.” She took a careful step forward again, like she was trying not to startle a wild animal.
“You could just let yourself feel what you feel. It’s allowed.
It’s not like our agreement is going to end in a fight to the death. ”
Nellie laughed again, but Sawyer didn’t appear amused in the slightest. Sawyer’s jaw worked. She was chewing the inside of her cheek, eventually finding the courage to look Nellie in the eyes again. Her stare was achingly vulnerable, almost longing.
“I need to think this all through,” Sawyer said finally.
She turned abruptly, found the tree line behind them, and started back down the slope. Not quickly. Not with any particular agitation. Just away from Nellie.
Nellie stood at the edge of the rock for a moment and sighed at the valley below. Then she followed.
They didn’t speak on the way down. The forest filled the silence ably enough—bird calls and the drip of wet cedar and the soft percussion of two people navigating the same terrain even when they felt miles apart from each other.
At the cottage, Sawyer set the secondary pack on the porch without comment. She walked to her car. Got in. The engine turned over into its sleek purr, and she drove the access road back into the trees.
Nellie watched until the taillights disappeared, and for the first time in a very long time, her brain and her gut were screaming completely different conclusions.