“
Chapter Six
Alice
Iwaketograylight and the smell of coffee.
For a moment I don't move. I take stock of the room the way you do when you wake somewhere unfamiliar: low ceiling, wood-paneled walls, a window showing the dark shapes of pines against a pale sky. A dresser. A chair with a sweatshirt draped over it. The particular quality of mountain quiet, which is not silence so much as the total absence of the city sounds I've stopped noticing I always hear.
Cal is not in the bed. His absence is recent — the pillow beside mine still holds the impression of him, and from somewherepast the bedroom door I can hear the soft sounds of someone moving around a kitchen.
I lie there for another minute and wait for the morning-after recalibration to arrive. The one where last night reassembles itself in daylight and looks different. Smaller, or stranger, or like a mistake wearing the costume of a good idea.
It doesn't come.
What I feel instead is clear-headed and specific: I am in a ranger cabin in the Smoky Mountains. I slept with a man I met twelve or so hours ago.I do not regret it.
I get up and find my clothes folded on the dresser—he must have retrieved them from the main room at some point—and pull them on, along with the sweatshirt, because it's cold and also because I want to snuggle inside the scent of him again.
Cal is at the stove when I come out. He's already in his uniform, the day apparently having made demands on him before I was conscious to witness it. He looks up when he hears me and something in his expression shifts — not surprise, more like relief, as if some part of him expected to turn around and find the room empty.
"Coffee," he says, which is both a statement and an offering.
"Please."
He pours it and sets the mug on the table without fuss. I sit down and wrap my hands around it and watch him crack eggs into a pan with the same economy of motion he brings to everything. The morning light is coming in at a low angle through the window and lying in strips across the floor.
"You're quiet," he says.
"I'm thinking."
"About?"
I consider being oblique about it and decide against it. He doesn't deal in oblique and I don't want to start now. "Aboutwhat happens next. After breakfast. After you walk me back to the main trail."
He slides the eggs onto a plate and brings it to the table, then pulls out the other chair and sits down across from me. Same position as last night, same unhurried attention, except now there's morning light on his face and I can see him more completely than the firelight allowed. The lines around his eyes. The gray coming in at his temples. The way he looks at me like he has already thought carefully about what he's about to say.
"My rotation here ends in two weeks," he says. "After that I'm back in Gatlinburg, which is only two hours or so from Knoxville.”
I go still. “You looked up the distance to my place?”
"Of course, I did. I want to keep seeing you, Alice.”
The simplicity of it catches me off guard every time — the way he moves straight from feeling something to naming it without the defensive circling I'm used to from men, from myself. No hedging, no manufacturing distance to seem unbothered. Justhere is what I want, is that something you want too?
"You'd drive two hours for a date with me?”
"I'd drive a hell of a lot further than that,” he says. “Hell, I’d charter a boat or stowaway on a jet… whatever it takes.”
I look at him across the table. The eggs are getting cold and neither of us is touching them. Outside the window a bird calls twice and goes quiet. I think about my fox at the edge of his meadow, watching the lights in the hollow and telling himself the dark was fine, that he preferred it, that there was nothing over there he couldn't live without.
I lick my lips. “You’re asking to date me?”
Something flickers across his face. Something delightfully possessive yet loving, something that tells me he wants more than just todateme… but that’s the socially acceptable thing, so he’ll go along with it.
"Whatever it takes to be with you,” he says again.
Chapter Seven
