Maya looks at me. "It's going to be dark in twenty minutes."
I grin. "That's the plan."
I set her down. Owen is there immediately, his hand at her jaw, tilting her face up, and the kiss he gives her is quieter than mine but no less thorough. She melts into it for a second, then pulls back with a slightly dazed look in her eyes.
Inside, the cabin becomes organized chaos. Reid is in the kitchen making sandwiches, moving with the efficient calm of a man who has packed provisions for a thousand outings and could do it blindfolded. He fills a thermos with coffee.
Owen checks the thermostat, adjusts the heating timer so the cabin will be warm when we get back. The small, logistical acts of care that Owen does without being asked and without expecting acknowledgment.
I go to my room. Find my favorite beanie, charcoal grey, worn soft from years of use. Bring it to Maya and pull it down over her ears.
"There," I say. "Now you're expedition-ready."
We assemble outside. Helmets, goggles. Reid has the thermos in a pack on his back. Maya looks at the three sleds, then at us, and crosses her arms.
"There are three snowmobiles and four people," she says. "So which two of you are doubling up?"
She says it with a straight face. With perfect delivery. The implication that she'll drive one herself, alone, at night, through mountain terrain she's never navigated, hanging in the air like a punchline waiting for someone to laugh.
"Very funny," I say. "You're with me."
"Why you?"
"Because I'm the best rider, I know every trail in this valley."
"He's not wrong," Reid says.
She climbs on behind me. Her arms wrap around my waist, her chest against my back, her thighs bracketing mine. The contact is immediate and complete. Her warmth against my spine, her grip tightening when I start the engine, the small adjustment of her weight as she finds her balance.
We move out.
I ride with Maya pressed against my back and the trail opening ahead of us in the headlight beam, the snow glowing white against the dark of the pines.
I take the long route deliberately. The scenic loop that runs along the creek and through the old-growth stand where the trees are so tall their tops disappear into the dark. The snow is firm and clean and the machine cuts through.
Maya's arms tighten around me on the first curve. Loosen as she adjusts. Tighten again on the next climb and this time her hands flatten against my stomach.
I point out things as we ride. The frozen creek bed where the ice is blue-green in the headlight. The stand of birch that catches moonlight like bone. A set of elk tracks crossing the trail, fresh, the snow barely disturbed. Maya leans to look at each one and her weight shifts against me and I feel every adjustment.
The trail narrows and steepens and the machines work harder, the engines climbing in register, and then we break through the treeline and the sky opens and the world goes wide.
The ridgeline. Two thousand feet above the valley. Snow stretching in every direction, pristine, untouched, glowing faintly in the moonlight. The mountains dark against the sky.
When we stop and kill the engines the silence is total and enormous.
Reid swings off his sled. Pulls the thermos from his pack.
"Coffee?" he asks Maya.
She takes the cup with both hands. The steam rises and disappears. We stand in a loose circle and share the thermos, passing it between gloved hands, and the coffee is hot and dark and the best thing I've ever tasted because everything tastes better at altitude with people you love.
Love.
The word arrives without warning. It's just there, in the space between one swallow of coffee and the next, sitting in my chest like it's been sitting there for weeks and has only now decided to introduce itself.
I love her.
I love Maya in the specific, present-tense, rearrange-your-life way that I have never loved anything that wasn't a mountain or a brother or an uncle who saved me from becoming someone I don't want to think about.
