Chapter 9 Thorn
I wake up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night.
It’s windy—but I’ve slept through worse.
I sit very still, listen to the sounds of the nocturnal landscape: I hear a faint rustling, growing louder.
My first instinct says bears, even though I’ve never had an encounter in this part of the Sierras—there’s a first time for everything, though. I’ve heard rumors of them raiding campsites in neighboring parks, in Kings Canyon and Sequoia and Yosemite.
All at once, the rustling stops.
The wind picks up again. Maybe I’m still half asleep, but it almost sounds like it’s saying my name.
“Thorn,” I hear again, more urgently this time—and also more distinctly human.
I unzip my tent and find myself face-to-face with Sadie.
The sight of her makes me forget everything, and for a split second the world is nothing but her silk pajamas and that mane of untamed hair and her eye mask haphazardly pushed up like a headband and her long, long legs—
But then she says my name again and it all comes into focus.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
It’s got to be three or four in the morning, and the last thing I want to do is wake up the entire camp.
“My tent, uh—it’s kind of annihilated at the moment?” She grimaces, glancing over to look at it. “Can you come help me?”
“ ‘Kind of annihilated’?” I ask, rubbing a hand over my face as my eyes adjust to being awake.
“Just come see?”
I climb out of my tent, and—oh—
There’s a dark blob of fabric crumpled on the ground, limned in moonlight.
I can’t help it, I laugh. “Did this, like…fall on you?”
She swats my arm playfully like she did earlier, when we were talking. I like it more than I should.
“Yes it fell on me, Thorn! Don’t laugh!” Despite her best efforts, my laughter is contagious, and now we’re both trying to stifle it. “I woke up thinking I was drowning—but it was just the tent on my face. I think the wind tore one of the pegs out of the ground, maybe?”
I bite back a smile. “Well, my first instinct was bears—”
“Bears?!” she practically shrieks, ripping through the silent night.
I hold up a finger to her lips.
Please, please, let the rest of the camp not wake up in a panic over the nonexistent bears.
“Bears?” Sadie repeats in a whisper-hiss. “I was under the impression that bears weren’t a thing here. The website explicitly said ‘lowest risk of bear encounters in all of the Sierras.’ ”
“There’s always a risk of bears,” I whisper back, shrugging. “Low risk isn’t no risk. But I haven’t seen one personally—and the people who have say they’re mostly interested in food, not people-as-food.”
“That is only mildly comforting, Thorn.”
“Try to forget about the bears,” I say. “Really, it should be comforting since I’ve spent more nights out here than in my own bed at home over the last six years. If anyone would have seen one out here, it’s me. And I haven’t.”
This, I think, finally works.
I move over to inspect the fallen tent. She’s right about the peg being torn from the ground—it’s the one she was having trouble with before dinner. I should have checked it later, made sure it was secure. Given the high winds, it’s no wonder it ripped right out.
Unfortunately, that’s not all that ripped: the tent itself is torn clean through, a long gash in the fabric.
“What’s the damage?” Sadie asks.
“Definitely not salvageable tonight,” I reply. Possibly not at all.
I’ll have to remember to ask Danica to bring a new tent along with the fresh batch of food when we meet up for a restock later this week—but until then, one of us will have to go without.
I make a snap decision. “You should sleep in my tent tonight.”
She smirks. “Thanks for the invitation, but I’m not sure we know each other well enough yet for that.”
“Wha— Oh.” I see, now, what I implied. “I was thinking you could take my tent and I could sleep out here.”
“With the bears?”
I laugh. “I thought I told you to forget about the bears.”
She sighs dramatically. “I tried. But yeah, no, that didn’t work.”
I bend down to examine the carcass of her tent. “Your stuff will be good in here until morning—just grab your pillow and sleeping bag and I’ll move mine out to make room.”
“You’re sure you don’t mind sleeping out in the open?”
I grin. “I’ve done it countless times before. It’ll be okay.”
“What about tomorrow night?”
I take a deep inhale. I’m quickly learning that Sadie loves a plan and hates not having all the answers at once.
“That’s for our tomorrow selves to worry about,” I reply with calm confidence. “Let’s get through tonight and go from there.”
She looks like she’s debating asking another question, but in the end, her trust in my answer wins out over her desire to know every single detail.
“Here,” she says. In one fluid motion, she pulls her eye mask off and offers it to me. “You’re going to need this more than I will when the sun comes up.”
When I don’t immediately take it—anyone who knows me would laugh at the idea of me willfully wearing an eye mask at all, let alone one made of pink silk—Sadie reaches out and guides my hand up to meet her outstretched one.
She settles the eye mask into my palm and closes my fingertips over it before I can protest.
“You’ll thank me in the morning,” she says, grinning.
When we’re all tucked in for what’s left of the night, Sadie in my tent and me under the stars, I slip it on.
It’s even softer than I expected, and more comfortable, too—and it smells like rosemary and mint, which I can only guess is the scent of her shampoo.
How am I supposed to sleep now?
It’s not the rocky ground directly underneath my sleeping bag keeping me awake, or the unlikely threat of bears, or the way the sleep mask feels like a luxury I never knew I might possibly want, let alone enjoy—
No. It’s that, after just two days out here, Sadie Whitlock has effortlessly unraveled the professionalism I’m usually so committed to maintaining…
and the fact that, despite the voice in my head trying to tell me that trekker/guide relationships are off-limits, a louder voice is unhelpfully pointing out that I haven’t been this intrigued by a woman since I met Blair nearly three years ago.
I’ll just have to do better tomorrow. Head down, one foot in front of the other, resist the pull of getting close. At best, Sadie will leave at the end of the trek anyway, like everyone else always does. At worst, I could lose focus on my job—or lose my job altogether.
The thought scares me.
Even though Sky Ranger’s offer is still on the table, I just don’t know if I’ll ever be able to leave the tour company—I don’t know if I could ever leave this place. This place is part of my soul.
Maybe that’s what scares me: I’ve built my whole life around these trails, this job. This park has been part of me for as long as I can remember—
So who would I be without it?
“What are you doing out here? And what the hell is that on your face?”
It’s bright and early when I peel back Sadie’s (surprisingly effective) sleep mask, the sun blinding even with Matteo’s head eclipsing it.
“Good morning to you, too,” I grumble.
I most definitely did not get enough sleep.
“Wind?” Matteo asks, gesturing to Sadie’s fallen tent behind me.
“Yeah. I gave her my tent, and she gave me…this.” I peel the sleep mask off, disappointed to find I already miss the comfortable fabric against my skin. The last thing I need is to become a sleep mask guy.
I glance around camp. No one else is up yet, though I’m sure that won’t last long.
Usually, I love being the only one awake. I love moments of solitude—the way the colors of the sky shift with the rising sun amid sounds of birdsong and babbling streams and leaves in the breeze.
Being the only one awake with Matteo? It kind of ruins the dynamic.
I groan inwardly, knowing what I have to do.
“Can we talk for a minute?” My voice sounds hard and uninviting even to me. “Before everyone else gets up, I mean. So we can, uh…get on the same page about…all of this.”
Matteo, until everything went down between us, used to be the most happy-go-lucky person in my world.
The most loyal friend, always offering to help before I even realized I needed it—especially since I’ve always had a hard time asking for it.
His chill-but-energetic vibe was a magnetic force that drew everyone to him whether they realized it was happening or not.
I like to think that’s how Blair fell for him. That it was an accident, something that happened without either of them realizing.
But then again, they both accidentally ended up moving to Peru together for the last two years. And conveniently neglected to tell me about it until it was too late.
This morning, Matteo is a dim version of his usual self: his demeanor is not quite heavy enough to show the gravity of how far our friendship has fallen—but still edgy enough to reassure me that I’m not the only one who feels it.
“Sure, man,” he replies.
We walk in silence over to the bank of the stream. There’s a boulder at the edge of the water, small enough to climb but wide enough for both of us to sit.
I settle myself onto it and Matteo follows my lead.
A trout swims past, oblivious to everything but the current carrying him toward his next meal.
That’s how I need to be now, I decide: Just be a trout, Thorn, I tell myself. I need to focus on the mission, the hike, our next meal, our next stop—how to get the group from here to there. Not what Matteo did, or didn’t do, in the past. That’s irrelevant to the mission.
“Okay, so for today,” I say, putting on a voice that’s all business, “you can take the lead again. We need to cover a lot of ground in order to get to the lake by tomorrow night, so I’ll need your help to keep us moving while I make sure the back of the group keeps up at a decent pace, and—”
“Thorn,” he interrupts, the exhausted edge to his voice so sharp it cuts me right off. “Just say what you really want to say, man.”
It’s so unlike him—so direct, so assertive, so unchill—that every thought about the trek flies right out of my head.
Just say what you really want to say, man.
I’m not sure he’s ready for what I really want to say.
Everything I can think of feels like it would just be salt in old wounds—and not just his. Salt in my wounds, too.
“Look, if you’re still hung up on Blair, I get it. She’s incredible. I tried not to fall in love with her, I really did.”
My mouth goes dry. Where to even begin with all of that?
“It’s not about Blair,” I say evenly. “Blair can make her own choices, and clearly I’m not what she wanted.”
It’s actually more freeing to say this out loud than I expected: it doesn’t feel like salt in a wound so much as salt on an old scar. I think there was some part of me, deep down, that feared it was Blair I was still hung up on.
“And honestly,” I go on, “it didn’t completely surprise me when Blair left.”
Blair reminded me of a bird from the moment I met her, too much energy to stay in one place for long. I think I always knew she’d take off with some other guy one day, but I talked myself into thinking maybe I was the one who’d be worth staying for.
I take a deep breath. He told me to say what I really wanted to say, and this is it.
“But you—you surprised me. It wasn’t just some other guy she left with. You were my best friend, Matty. You were supposed to be here to help me get through our eventual breakup, not be the reason it happened.”
Matteo’s face goes completely blank.
I was right. He wasn’t ready.
And truthfully, neither was I. This feels like an entire vat of salt in a very raw wound.
“Are you still with her, at least?” I ask after a long minute.
He clearly regrets bringing it up. I bet he wishes he’d just let me keep talking about our itinerary for the next two days.
Finally, he clears his throat. “Yeah,” he says, picking at a thumbnail, not meeting my eye. “I moved back to get a place for us to settle down.”
The idea of Blair settling down anywhere just doesn’t sit as it should—what I said was true, I never could imagine her staying with me forever, and I still can’t imagine her staying with anyone else. Not even Matteo.
But I’m not about to say so.
“I didn’t even know you were back until Danica told me,” I say instead.
There was a time when we saw each other daily, when we knew each other’s plans as well as we knew our own. He was my closest friend.
“Yeah, I realized last week that I was just kinda done with Peru,” he replies.
“We both were, but she stayed a bit longer to help with one more hike—they’re sort of scrambling to fill our spots.
I flew home over the weekend and reached out to Danica as soon as I got back since our savings won’t carry us for long. I forgot how expensive shit is here.”
Again: Where to even start? Am I hearing this correctly—that they just decided on a whim, last week, to ditch their jobs and move back to California together without doing any real prep work to secure jobs or housing or—
I can’t think about it too much. It’s a headache waiting to happen.
Was Matteo always this flighty, or has Blair just rubbed off on him? His sudden move to Peru was a blindside when it happened and seemed totally out of character.
Well, if this is the real him now, maybe he and Blair will work out: maybe they’ll flit around the world together, tied to each other and not necessarily a specific place. Birds of a feather and all that.
“For the record,” Matteo says, pulling me out of my thoughts, “I never meant for things to go like they did with Blair—it all just kind of happened.”
How can he not see that this excuse doesn’t actually make anything less painful? When he says it all just kind of happened, all I hear is I liked what was happening too much to stop it.
I’m not like Matteo: how people gravitate to him, how he makes friends everywhere he goes. It’s much harder for me to let people in.
When he left, my world went silent for a long time.
It’s harder to make lasting friends when you’re out in the woods with strangers all the time, in a leadership position that prevents you from getting as close as everyone else gets to each other…
and then they all inevitably fly home, and the next group takes their place.
I’m still at a loss for words when the sound of footsteps—the crunch of hiking boots in gravel—saves me.
There’s Hunter, his six-foot-five shadow long under the morning sun. He’s got a speckled metal camp cup in each hand.
“Either of you want some coffee?” he asks.
Matteo and I spring up simultaneously. Neither of us says so, but I know without a doubt he’s saying a silent thank-you to Hunter for getting us out of this conversation, just like I am.
We follow him back to camp.
The coffee, I admit, is very good.