This is what my life has become.
My great-grandfather's legacy, reduced to fake plaques about strip poker and a shirtless man named Jake.
I spot Sierra under the old maple.
Of course she's standing under the old maple. Just stab me in the fucking heart already and get it over with.
It’s the place I had her meet me after our first kiss.
No doubt she thought I planned to apologize.
Apologize. Rewind the kiss. Pretend it hadn’t happened.
But I’d replayed that moment on the lift a hundred times.
And not once did I regret it.
So no—I didn’t meet her to say sorry.
I met her to do it again.
My fingers tangled in hair I’d never be able to resist again and I kissed her harder than I meant to.
Slower than I should have.
And when I finally stopped, I said, “I’m not sorry, Sierra. And I’m sure as hell not done.”
Now she's using the spot as a vantage point to document my humiliation.
Her camera's up. Her armor's on. She's doing the thing she always does when the world gets too sharp—putting glass and distance between herself and whatever's hurting her.
I know that move. I've been on the other side of that lens more times than I can count as she honed her talent.
Back then, it felt like intimacy. As friends, and then as more.
Now it just feels like evidence.
Women giggling as they pose with Jake.
Click.
The “Morgan stamina” plaque.
Click.
A couple making out against the boulder where my ancestor allegedly conceived his seventh child.
Click.
Jaw set and shoulders rigid, she does her job—documenting the event, capturing content for the festival—but every line of her body screams that she'd rather be anywhere else.
This was supposed to be her thing. History. Preservation. Respect for what came before.
And her brothers turned it into a circus.
At least I thought it was a circus. Four hours in though? That became the real tipping point.
Hour one, I flinched every time someone yelled “Mount Me Everett.”
