Ethan shook his head. “No issues.”
Cole nodded, unreadable. “You’ll be fine, then.”
The group sat, sunlight tilting and elongating their shadows, and Ethan tried to force his thoughts into neat, non-threatening boxes. He had come here to outrun a failed marriage, to let someone else be in charge for once. But he hadn’t planned on Cole—on the chemical pull, the magnetic field he was desperate to ignore.
Harper broke the silence with a story about leading a school group through Death Valley and having to rescue a kid who thought scorpions were a suitable protein snack. The laughter was real and infectious. Even Jack thawed, eventually offering up a disaster tale from his last Everest “adventure.”
Through it all, Ethan kept looking up, kept catching Cole’s profile against the setting sun, jaw and neck golden, every movement deliberate. He felt his own body react—a flush, a tightness in the gut, a fast skip in the chest.
By the end of orientation, Ethan was both more relaxed and more tense than he’d been since the divorce.
The session ended, and Cole dismissed them with a nod. “Dinner’s at seven. Bar’s open now.”
Harper made a beeline for the lounge. Riley followed, hands in pockets, chatting about trail playlists. Jack hung back, asif looking for a moment alone with Cole. Ethan lingered, pretending to check his phone but watching the two men from the edge of his vision.
Jack said something—Ethan caught the words “leadership style” and “liability waiver.” Cole just listened, arms still crossed, face impassive. Eventually, Jack drifted off.
Cole looked over, blue eyes catching Ethan’s for a fraction of a second. Ethan looked away fast, heat flooding his cheeks. He hoped the other man hadn’t noticed.
The sun dropped behind the hills like a gold coin into a slot. Warm air cooled and stretched the shadows out, turning the lodge yard into an arena of silhouettes and voices.
The group drifted back to the fence after orientation. Harper balanced on a bottom rail, beer in hand, and launched into a story about how she once used duct tape to reattach a kid’s toenail on the PCT. Her delivery was all deadpan confidence; the punchline was both perfectly timed and absolutely disgusting.
Jack tried to top it with his own Everest horror story, involving a tent collapse, frozen PowerBars, and a Norwegian socialite who insisted on packing six pairs of heels. Every sentence seemed designed to one-up the last. Harper let him go, occasionally tossing in a withering comment that Ethan admired as a thing of art.
Riley turned to Ethan every few minutes with a “can you believe this?” expression. The two of them ended up exchanging muttered asides while Harper and Jack jockeyed for the role of Story Alpha.
The horses grazed just beyond the rail, chuffing and snorting with each other, indifferent to the drama. Cole moved among them, checking tack and water buckets, stopping to give each animal a moment of soft attention. He didn’t join in the banter, but his presence anchored the chaos—every now and then he’dglance over, blue eyes cool and measuring, as if cataloguing the group’s potential for survival.
The evening grew colder. Ethan zipped his jacket and leaned in close as Harper delivered the final blow of her story—something about super glue and a bear warning gone wrong. The laugh that followed was cathartic, the kind that wrings out everything left inside you and then makes room for more.
Cole called the group over to a demo horse, a burly gray quarter mare with a scar on her shoulder. He showed them how to check the girth, then stepped up to demonstrate the saddle mount in a single, fluid motion.
Ethan watched, breath caught, as Cole swung up and the shirt lifted just enough to show a strip of hard, tanned skin at the waist. It was such a small thing, but it set off a pulse in Ethan’s body—a recognition of form and heat that landed somewhere between desire and terror.
Riley caught him staring and grinned, sharp but not unkind. “He’s got that effect on people,” he whispered.
Ethan choked out a laugh. “It’s just—he’s very good at this,” he said, immediately aware of how lame it sounded.
Riley nodded, eyes still locked on Cole. “I’m sure he’s good at a lot of things.”
Ethan glanced at Riley, looking for sarcasm, but found none.
Jack attempted the mount next and nearly tipped the horse sideways, much to Harper’s delight. The group collapsed into another wave of laughter. Cole dismounted, caught the animal gently by the halter, and murmured something only the horse could hear. His voice was as steady and low as when he’d calmed the runaway colt that morning.
Ethan felt something loosen in him, some knot tied too long.
They spent another hour sharing horror stories and survival hacks, the light fading to a navy blue and then to black. Lamps on the lodge porch flicked on one by one, casting golden circlesonto the flagstones. The chill deepened, and the first stars burned through overhead.
As the others peeled off toward the bar and their rooms, Ethan lingered at the fence. He watched Cole walk the horses in for the night, every move practiced and strong, and wondered for the hundredth time what it would feel like to let someone else take the lead. To trust it.
The air smelled of hay and sweat and distant pine. The loneliness in Ethan was real and biting, but for the first time in a long while, it wasn’t the only thing he felt.
The next morning, the lodge grounds buzzed with the quiet, electric hum of anticipation. Sunrise hit the mountains like a slap, lighting up the snow lines and flooding the yard with fierce, early gold. In the orientation ring, a dozen horses milled with their heads down, vapor streaming from nostrils. The chill bit through Ethan’s jacket, but his skin was already prickling from something hotter than the air.
Cole waited by the fence, clipboard in hand, aviators shielding his eyes from the flash of light off the barn. His voice cut cleanly as he called names and matched each person with a horse. He didn’t look at Ethan until the last minute.
“Hayes,” Cole called, holding a halter and lead. The horse next to him was a pale buckskin, muscled and wary.
