Chapter 1 #2
I’m staying in Marissa and Levi’s guest room, which has hosted enough displaced women this summer that Marissa has started calling it the mountain’s intake department.
Claire drives us to Wylde Beans. The others are already there.
Marissa sits down and opens her laptop, looking like a woman who runs a successful outfitting company before 8 AM because she does. Jenna is next to her, camera bag slung over her chair, hair catching the light. Tori is across from them, eating a muffin.
They see me and they stand and then I’m being hugged by four women at once and I’m laughing and my eyes are wet and someone smells like pine and someone smells like coffee and someone is squeezing me so hard I can feel their heartbeat through their shirt.
“Okay,” Marissa says. “Tell us everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell. Ryan’s engaged. I ate queso on my kitchen floor. I got on a plane.”
“The queso is concerning,” Claire says.
“The queso was excellent. Everyone needs to stop worrying about the queso.”
I sit. Coffee appears. The conversation wraps around me the way Mason’s jacket wrapped around my shoulders last night: warm and heavy and smelling like something safe.
I look at them. My friends. Four women who came to this mountain and fell in love with men who build things and guide rivers and carry lumber.
Four women who look happy in a way that shines through.
Marissa, who dismantled her whole life and reassembled it here.
Jenna, who got lost in the woods and found Jasper.
Tori, who fell in a river and stopped pretending she was fine.
Claire, who was carried down a mountain and stopped running the numbers.
I’m happy for them. I have always been happy for them. That’s my job. That’s my role. I’m the friend who cheers and celebrates and sends heart emojis and means every single one.
I’m the friend who is happy for you. I know they want to be happy for me, too.
“We should do a rapids trip,” Marissa says. “All of us. The guys too. Like last time but bigger.”
“Yes!” I say. The exclamation point is automatic. The enthusiasm is real but the volume is a habit, the brightness I put on the way other people put on shoes. I’ve been doing it for so long I don’t always know where the performance ends and I begin.
“A few days from now?” Tori says.
Everyone agrees. Plans form. Dates settle. The conversation shifts to the jacket.
“You should return it,” Jenna says.
“Definitely return it,” Tori says.
“Soon,” Marissa adds. She pulls out her phone. “Let me ask Levi where he lives.”
“You guys. It’s just a jacket.”
Four faces look at me.
“It’s just a jacket,” I say again. Quieter this time.
Marissa’s phone buzzes with the info.
“A billionaire rancher changed a tire,” Claire says. “And gave you his jacket. Which you slept in.”
“I did not sleep in the jacket.”
I slept in the jacket.
“Go tomorrow,” Claire says. “Take my car.”
She texts Leo to pick her up outside Wylde Beans, leaving the Subaru with me.
~~~
Tomorrow.
I’m driving the north road toward the Crawford ranch with a jacket on the passenger seat that I’m not going to think about how many times I’ve smelled because the number is embarrassing and I’m a grown woman with a college degree and a teaching certificate.
The ranch opens up around a bend in the road and I pull in slowly because I can see horses. The property is sprawling and green and backed by mountains that look like they were painted there by someone who wanted you to understand what the word “grandeur” means without having to say it.
There’s a main house, stone and timber, large without being loud about it. A barn set back from the house, solid and well-kept. A ring next to the barn where two men are working horses.
And then there’s Mason.
He’s on the back of a horse. Not just any horse. A bucking bronco, a horse that wants him off and is expressing this opinion with every muscle in its body.
The horse twists and kicks and Mason stays. His body moves with the animal’s violence like a countermelody, absorbing the chaos, meeting it with balance and weight and the kind of physical intelligence that can’t be taught.
I stop the car. I watch.
His thighs grip the horse. His core absorbs the impact. His free hand is up for balance and his body is a conversation with the animal, every buck answered, every twist met with an adjustment so fluid it looks like the horse is the one following him.
The men at the fence are watching too, arms folded, not concerned. This is a Tuesday for them. This is just Mason on a horse.
He’s beautiful. The word arrives fully formed, the way a melody comes to me sometimes, whole and undeniable, a thing I hear before I understand it.
He’s on the back of a bucking horse in the morning sun and his body is doing something extraordinary and I am gripping the steering wheel of a borrowed Subaru and my heart is beating in a time signature I have never felt before.
He jumps off. Clean, controlled, landing on his feet. He dusts his jeans off. He pushes his hair back from his forehead.
He looks up.
He sees me.
And I watch his whole body change. Not dramatically. Not a stumble or a freeze. A settling. Like a chord finding its root note. His shoulders shift. His weight redistributes.
His eyes find mine across the yard and there it is again: the resonance. The hum. The frequency that started on a gravel shoulder two days ago and hasn’t stopped.
I get out of the car. I give a slight wave, feeling like a woman who is waving at a man she cannot stop thinking about with a jacket she slept in as her only excuse for being here. I hold the jacket up.
He nods. He walks to the fence. Every step is steady and unhurried.
“Hey,” I say. Brilliant. A lifetime of lyrics and the best I can produce is “hey.”
“Hey.” His voice. The low, unhurried voice from the road.
He’s leaning on the fence and he’s close enough now that I can see the details the gravel shoulder didn’t give me.
Crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. A small scar on his jaw.
Hands resting on the fence rail, rough and wide. “You brought my jacket.”
“I brought your jacket.” I hold it out. He takes it. Our fingers don’t touch this time and I feel the absence of contact like a rest in a song, the beat where the sound should be and isn’t.
“Thanks for coming all the way out here,” he says. “You could’ve just kept it.”
“It looked expensive.”
“It’s not.” The corner of his mouth moves. Not a grin. The beginning of one. A half measure. His eyes are on my face and the heat in them is barely concealed.
He’s looking at me the way he looked at me on the road, like I’m something he found that he wasn’t expecting. But now there’s more. Now there’s two days of thinking about it behind his eyes and I can see every one of them.
“Your friends’ car okay?” he asks.
“New tire. All fixed. Thank you again for stopping.”
“Couldn’t not stop.”
The way he says it. Couldn’t not stop. Like physics made the decision and he just followed the law. I feel my face get warm and I’m not blushing because I’m a woman who has been complimented before but I’m blushing because this man said three words and meant them with his whole body.
“So, um.” I should leave. I’ve returned the jacket.
The errand is complete. There is no reason to stand at this fence asking follow-up questions.
“My friends are doing a rafting trip. Wylde Mountain Outfitters. I don’t know if you might want to, I mean you probably have things to do, there’s the ranch and the horses and you’re obviously very busy. ”
I’m spiraling. I’m the woman who can stand in front of a room of third graders and make them sing in four-part harmony and I’m spiraling at a fence because a man has forearms and crow’s feet and a voice like a bass note.
“I mean, would you want to come? With us? On the raft?”
He looks at me. The half-measure grin gets a little wider.
“When?” he says.
“Tomorrow. Nine AM.”
“I’ll be there.”
I blink. He said yes. He said it without hesitation, without checking a calendar, without the careful non-committal that Ryan used to deploy like a shield against enthusiasm. He just said yes.
“Okay,” I say. “Great. So. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” He’s looking at me and the heat in his gaze is doing something to my internal temperature that has nothing to do with the Montana sun. “See you at nine, Paige.”
He says my name. He remembered my name from ninety seconds on a gravel shoulder two days ago and he says it in that low voice and the sound of my name in his mouth is a song I want to hear on repeat.
I get in the car. I drive away. I check the rearview mirror once. He’s still standing at the fence. Watching me go.
I drive three miles before I realize I’m smiling. Not the exclamation-point smile I put on for airports and flight attendants and friends who need me to be the bright one. A real smile. The kind that starts somewhere below my ribs and works its way up to my face without asking permission.
A real smile. Because a man said my name and the sound struck a chord.