I drop the tailgate. Her duffel sits right on top where I strapped it, one bag for an entire weekend in the mountains, which is better packing discipline than I've ever had. She comes around beside me while I'm reaching for it, close enough that her shoulder brushes my arm, and she still smells faintly of campfireunder the evening air. Two days in the woods with this woman and the smell of camp smoke is going to be a problem for me for the rest of my life.
She goes for the strap. I get there first and swing the duffel onto my shoulder.
"Finn. I can manage it."
I shake my head. "Didn't you read the brochure? This was a full-service expedition. Complaints go to management."
She gives me a dry look that has never once worked on me the way she thinks it does, and heads for her stairs.
"One more thing," I call. Her new jacket, off the seat back.
I bring it to her at the bottom step and lay it over her arm.
"Thank you." She gives me a sad smile that says she's not any more eager than I am for our weekend to end.
I've climbed the steps to her apartment before. Never this slow.
She goes up ahead of me, her hips at eye level, and I want her the way I've wanted her all weekend. That much hasn't changed. I still want to follow her through that door, peel her out of everything she's wearing, and take my time with her. But time is the one thing I didn't pack enough of. She has her life here and I have mine somewhere else. I came back to my hometown eager to leave even before I set foot out of my car. Now, I'm wishing like hell I never have to go.
Darcy's only three feet in front of me on the stairs and I already miss her.
She glances over her shoulder at me. "I'm going to feel that mountain tomorrow."
"Tomorrow you'll be fine. Day two is the one that gets you."
Her answering laugh sounds a little sad. "Wonderful. Is there a cure?"
"There's one." I shift the duffel strap on my shoulder. "You go back up."
She looks back at me again, and her mouth tilts. "Of course that's your cure. More mountain."
"Works every time."
She turns and keeps climbing, and I follow her up with my own trail wisdom sitting wrong in my chest.
Day two is the one that gets you.I wasn't wrong about that. Tonight is going to feel fine, because tonight has her in it. The ache from this weekend won't land until tomorrow, or the day after, once she's back in her classroom and I'm wherever I decide I'm supposed to be while I wait for any excuse to see her again.
The only cure I've ever trusted for an ache like this is the one I just handed her. Go back up. More mountain. Keep moving. That's been my answer to everything I've ever felt, and she knows it.
Some answer. The man whose fix for everything is perpetual motion is stretching a one-minute climb into a career. The bag could have gone up in her hand. The jacket definitely could have. And underneath the wanting sits the flat fact I keep stepping over: when that door closes tonight, I don't know what comes next.
I don't mean just tomorrow. I meannext.
I'm a man who plans in his sleep. I have contingencies for my contingencies and gear lists for weather extremes that haven't been invented yet. For the part of my life that starts back at the bottom of these stairs, I've got nothing. No route. No next camp. Nothing on the map at all.
Normally this is where the act comes in. Somewhere around now I'd reach for my usual fallbacks, the grin, the line, the easy dismount that sends everybody home laughing. It has carried me out of worse rooms than this.
I reach for it now and come up empty. Not broken. Just not there. The booth is dark, the emcee has wandered off, andbehind all of it there's only the truth, which I have no plan for saying out loud tonight.
She reaches the landing, works her key into the lock, and pushes the door open on her dark apartment. Her keys land in the bowl somewhere inside. She turns around instead, and there she is. Hair loose and wild from mountain weather, her face flushed, the last of the dusk caught in her eyes. She looks more beautiful to me right now, trail-worn and lit by one bad overhead bulb, than she has ever looked. A moth is already making a fool of itself around that bulb, and I understand the moth completely.
"Where do you want your bag?"
"Right inside the door is fine."
I lean past her and set it down across the threshold, and her hand comes up and rests flat on my chest while I do it. Not pushing. Not pulling. Just there, warm through my shirt, right over a heartbeat that picks up hard enough she has to feel it.
I straighten up. She's close now. If I lean in I could kiss her before the duffel finishes settling, and every nerve I own is lobbying for it. I keep my hands to myself instead. There's an order to tonight. The bag, the goodbye, the stairs. And now I'm out of things to carry. Out of stairs. Out of jobs to do for her.
