CHAPTER TWELVE
Jackson had been thinking about the fire tower for three days before he took her there.
Eleven on patrol. Twice with Dominic. Once alone, on a night six years ago he didn't let himself examine.
This was the fifteenth.
He'd told her at the trailhead that morning that the fire tower was the best high view of the western quadrant, which was true, and that her sampling protocol would benefit from a confirmed line-of-sight on the basalt cliff line at the eastern ridge, which was also true.
The protocol benefit was real. The line-of-sight was real.
The tower was, geometrically, the best place to confirm the visual orientation of the formation she was mapping.
It was also a thing he'd been thinking about for three days, which was the part of this assignment he wasn't, today, going to let himself examine.
They climbed in single file.
She was ahead. He was twelve steps behind. The climb took eleven minutes. He counted.
Her hand on the railing. Her breathing in the third minute.
The pause she took at the seventh switchback, where she rested her palm on the iron grating and looked out at the slope below, and on the stair below her he stopped because she stopped and did not look at the slope, did not look at anything except the angle of her shoulder and the loose strands of auburn at the nape of her neck.
She didn't turn around. She started climbing again.
The wolf in his chest was silent. On a frequency he had not felt in his lifetime.
They reached the platform.
The view opened. The whole western quadrant laid out below. The long meadows on the lower flank, the river bend at mid-elevation, the dense forest of the upper slopes, and at the far middle distance the dark hand of land he'd been calling, in his own head, the place she keeps looking at.
Claire didn't set her instruments down.
She walked to the railing and put both hands on it and looked east.
Her body went still.
He stood three feet behind her and watched her go still.
Weather was coming in from the west. He'd been watching it since they left the trailhead. The cloud bands were tightening overhead. The air had the close quality it took on before a late-summer system rolled through, a pressure you felt in your teeth before any reading showed it.
Claire said, without turning: "That's where I'm going next."
"East ridge?"
"Past it."
He didn't respond.
She turned around.
She was looking at him with a face he hadn't seen on her. The professional reserve gone. The careful contained register gone. She was looking at him the way a person looked at someone they'd been considering for a while and had now decided to actually look at.
Mate, the wolf said.
He did not tell him to shut up this time.
Eight days at the trailhead and four months at his desk and thirteen years at the perimeter of his pack, telling the wolf to shut up about one thing or another, and on this platform at this elevation in this weather, with the pressure tightening in the trees below and the woman in front of him looking at him like she'd decided — he couldn't find the word to make it stop.
"Claire," he said.
The first time he'd said her first name. The first time he'd let himself.
Her face changed.
"I know," she said.
He didn't know what she meant by that. Then, half a second later, he did. She'd known longer than he had. She'd been waiting for him to catch up.
"How long," he said.
"Since the rock face. The first time. When you saw me."
He moved. Three steps. The platform was small.
She was already meeting him at the third, her hands going to his jacket, his going to her jaw, and the kiss was not the way he'd imagined a kiss could be when he imagined it four months ago, lying awake telling himself this was a security file.
The kiss was recognition. A man and a woman who'd been seeing each other across a trailhead for nine days, and across a survey site for four months before that, and across a basalt outcrop for three thousand years if you wanted to be honest about it.
The body finally allowed to admit what it had been refusing.
His hand at her jaw. Her hand in his jacket. The wolf wasn't pushing. The wolf was settled and had been waiting four months for him to figure it out, and he had, and he could afford to be still.
She broke the kiss.
She was looking up at him, hand flat on his sternum.
"This isn't a good place," she said.
"No."
"It also isn't a bad place."
"No."
"Jackson."
"Yes."
She took his face in her hands. Slow. Deliberate.
Her thumb moved across his cheekbone the way a person moves a thumb across a thing they're trying to memorize.
His eyes had gone gold and he knew it without seeing, because his own vision had taken on the slight registry shift the wolf made at the surface, and Claire was looking at his eyes and she was not afraid.
"Your eyes," she said.
"I know."
"I'm not asking you to put it away."
"I'm not."
She pulled him down.
The platform was small. The bench was small.
The weather closed around the tower. He didn't, in any conscious sense, decide what happened next.
He was past the part of himself where deciding lived.
The wolf had gone quiet and warm, and he was kissing her, and her jacket came off, and his came off, and her hands were in his hair and his were at her ribs and they were on the bench, the cedar rough under his knee, and he was being careful with her and careful with himself, and the careful was the thing the wolf had been waiting for.
He went slow.
He went slow because the wolf, for once, wasn't telling him to go fast. The wolf had decided this was important, and important things were meant to be done with attention.
He paid attention. To the way her breath caught when his hand moved up her side.
To the small sound she made when he kissed her throat.
To the way her body found his rhythm before he set it.
To the warmth of her palm flat against the back of his neck, the warmth pulsing under it.
Her hands, doing the thing her hands did.
He put his mouth at her ear.
"You are," he said.
He didn't finish it. He didn't need to.
She knew what he meant. Her breath changed against his jaw. She had.
Her hands tightened.
The weather closed in. Rain started somewhere on the upper slopes.
The platform smelled like cedar and wet metal and the clean smell of high air about to break.
He didn't, at any moment, think about the fact that they were forty feet off the ground in a thunderstorm.
The platform held them. He held her. She held him.
Time, on the platform, did the thing time did when two people had finally stopped arguing with what their bodies had been telling them.
After.
He was sitting against the cedar wall with his jacket on and her in front of him, her back to his chest, his arms around her, the rain hitting the platform in long uneven sheets.
Both of them still breathing slightly hard.
Her hair had come half down out of its knot.
Her thumb traced a small arc against his forearm.
"I don't know how to do this," he said.
"Me either."
"I have not done this for fifteen years."
"I have not done this ever."
He didn't ask what she meant. He understood. She'd been doing other things, with other people, for some span of years that didn't interest him. She had not done this. This was new for both of them. His arms were around her and he was not, for the moment, capable of much speech.
"We should go down," she said.
"Mhm."
They did not, immediately, go down.
Eventually the rain eased. They stood. Put themselves back together with the care of two people who'd just changed something and meant to take care with the changing. He went first down the stairs. She came behind. He counted. Ninety-six.
At the bottom they stood in the wet pine duff and looked at each other.
"My truck or yours," she said.
"You take yours back to the cabin in town."
"All right."
"I'll see you tomorrow."
"Yes."
She didn't move. He didn't move. He took her hand. Brought it to his mouth. Pressed his lips to her knuckles, once, and let go.
She got in her truck. He got in his. They drove down the access road in convoy.
At the gate, she turned south to town. He turned north to his cabin.
He sat at his kitchen table that night with the lights off and his hands wrapped around a mug of cold tea.
He had said you are. Out loud. To her. In the rain.
He hadn't finished it because, in the moment, he hadn't had the word. He had it now. The same word the wolf had been saying for four months. He just hadn't, until tonight, allowed it.
Mine. He let himself think it. In his own dark cabin, with his own cold tea, his own pack of ghosts going quiet in the back of his head.
The wolf, who had waited his whole life for him to say it, settled and slept.
* * *