51 - Melissa

51

Melissa

Noah Richardson, the doctor who had examined my ankle before becoming my lover, was sitting on a log outside my tent. I had doused my fire before going to bed, but now fresh flames were licking up around new firewood. A cast iron pan was nestled on top.

“Noah? What are you doing here?” The sight of him caused something in my chest to settle. Like a puzzle piece snapping into place.

He grinned and gestured at the fire. “Making breakfast!”

My stomach rumbled at the sight of bacon, eggs, and hashbrowns sizzling in the pan. “That’s not exactly what I was asking.”

“I had a day off, and nothing better to do. Coffee?” He hefted a French press. “It’s better than instant.”

I had indeed been subsisting on instant coffee almost every day. Which was fine, but the smell from the French press was a quick reminder that nothing beat the real thing.

I fished my camp cup out of my pack and held it out. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

Noah leaned forward to fill it with steaming black liquid. “You told me your plan was roughly twenty miles a day. It wasn’t hard to extrapolate your daily route from Ouray to here.”

“What if I was slower than expected?” I asked. “What if I was days behind schedule?”

He smiled and met my gaze. “I knew you wouldn’t be.”

I cupped the coffee with both hands and sighed happily. “My ankle is great.”

“I can see that. You must have had a good doctor.”

“Technically, I was never anyone’s patient,” I said.

Noah nodded slowly. “Ah, yes. Of course.”

Having a real breakfast brightened my mood more than I expected. The company was good, too; Noah asked about the hiking so far, the freeze dried meals, the sleeping pad.

Then I tore down my camp and used the bathroom one final time before hitting the trail. I wasn’t sure how to say goodbye to Noah; I still hadn’t figured out what I was going to do or how I would approach everything with them. But when I got back from the toilet, I found that I didn’t need to say goodbye.

Because Noah was wearing a hiking pack himself.

“What are you doing?”

He glanced at his GPS watch. “About twenty miles, give or take.”

“I’m supposed to be hiking alone,” I reminded him. “To collect my thoughts and figure everything out.”

“This is a public trail,” Noah said cheerfully. “I’m just another random hiker going in the same direction.”

He winked, then began hiking toward the trail.

I gathered my things and followed him. We hiked in silence for a while, Noah staying fifty feet or so ahead of me. We really might have been total strangers for all the interacting we did.

But he was always there in my vision. It annoyed me, at first. I couldn’t lose myself in my own thoughts while he was right there , looking gorgeous in hiking pants and a T-shirt, blond hair swaying whenever a gust of wind picked up. It was like being on a diet and having a big, juicy cinnamon roll waved in front of my face every second of every minute of the day.

Around noon, he stopped and pulled out two long sandwiches from his backpack. “From Marlene’s,” he said, tossing me one. “Turkey club. No tomatoes, since it would make the bread all soggy.”

“Thanks, but I like to keep moving while eating lunch.”

He nodded without missing a beat. “Me too.”

We walked together while eating our sandwiches. Mine was amazing . Much better than a Mexican PB&J. I could have eaten three of them, and was disappointed when there were only crumbs left.”

“Want to hear about the crazy patient I had this week?” he asked.

I started to tell him no, but then changed my mind. “How crazy are we talking?”

He glanced sideways at me. “The kind of crazy where they fractured their leg mountain biking, but wanted to keep going because they paid for a weekend pass and didn’t want it to go to waste.”

I chuckled. “Ash took me mountain biking on the ski trails. I can’t imagine going over all those bumps with a fractured leg!”

“That’s because you’re not crazy,” Noah said. “This patient was the kind of guy who calls himself tough . Like it makes him more of a man to keep going. So his leg is fractured, and he gets back on the lift…”

I had to admit: it was nice having a companion after being alone for the past couple of weeks. Noah spent the afternoon telling me about all the weird patients he’d seen since I had resumed my hike. It made the time pass quickly, and before we knew it we were walking into camp for the evening.

“Twenty-two miles?” Noah asked, squinting at his watch. “How about that.”

Noah camped in his own tent in the spot next to mine. “I’m just here to keep you company. That’s all.”

“Good,” I said, but once again I was kind of disappointed that he wasn’t making a move. Now that he was here, I wanted to pick up where we’d left off, with kissing and cuddling and certain activities that were not suitable for a public campsite.

I laid on my back in my tent, listening in the night. Waiting to see if he would change his mind, leave his tent, and join mine. I wanted it desperately, to the point that I couldn’t sleep.

But he didn’t make any move.

In fact, his tent was gone when I woke up the next morning. But a new fire was roaring, and it was the massive frame of Ash stirring the embers with a stick.

“Thought I was going to have to wake you,” he said, not taking his eyes off the fire.

“Oh, is that how this is going to be?” I demanded. “You guys take turns hiking with me all the way into Denver?”

His dark eyes met my gaze. “Pancakes will be ready in ten. There’s a line for the camp toilet, if you have to go.”

Ash and I spent the day walking in total silence, but it fit. It was nice—we didn’t need to fill the silence with talking. We were just together, the two of us, sharing in an activity. Just like the via ferrata or mountain biking.

“Good weather,” Ash said while we boiled water for dinner that night. “Clear skies the past two weeks.”

“Yeah! Only one day with rain, and it only lasted for a few minutes.”

Ash nodded. “Lucky.”

It was the same thing with him: he pitched his own tent, with a new sleeping pad identical to the one he’d loaned me. And when I woke up the next morning, there was no sign that he had ever been there.

And Jack was sitting outside my tent, using a hatchet to whittle at a small piece of wood.

“Aren’t you supposed to be making me breakfast?” I asked.

He blinked and looked up at me. “Why would I make you breakfast?”

“Because the others…” I looked at the dead fire, still doused from the night before. “You didn’t even get a fire going.”

“Fires are for the end of a day of hiking,” he said simply. “No time for that in the morning. You going to get ready or not?”

I rolled my eyes and went through my morning routine. An hour later, everything was packed up on my back and we were walking along the trail, two days outside of Denver.

“The others made me breakfast,” I said after a little while.

“I’m not the others.”

“No, you are not,” I replied.

We hiked for another quiet hour, side by side.

Finally, the words wouldn’t stay inside of me. “You fucked up, Jackie.”

“Only Noah calls me Jackie.”

“I get to call you whatever I want because you fucked up. And I’m not talking about breakfast.”

“Yeah,” he admitted with a sigh. “I fucked up bad.”

“Asking a girl to move to a new city, a new state , after having sex once?”

He smirked over at me. “We had sex a lot more than once.”

I snorted. “True. But you know what I mean.”

Jack nodded. “It was a world-class fuck up.”

“You probably blew it.”

He glanced sideways at me. “Probably? Not definitely?”

“That remains to be seen. But I need you to know how badly you fucked up.”

“Trust me: I know,” he muttered. “I’ve lost sleep over it.”

I blinked. “Really?”

“I didn’t plan on asking you to stay,” he explained. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead at all, honestly. I was trying to enjoy my time with you without overthinking it. But you were standing there that morning, and the sunlight was playing in your hair and you had this pure smile on your face. And the words just came out. I don’t think I’ve had a good night’s sleep since then. It’s given me a lot of time to think, though.”

We kept walking along the trail. “And have you come to any big revelations?”

“A few.”

He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t push him.

Our camp that night was just southwest of Denver. The light pollution from the city lit up the night sky, a tantalizing sign of just how close I was to the finish. It almost seemed like a waste to camp at all, that I should heft my pack onto my shoulders and hike through the night and get it done.

But I made myself go through my normal routine. I used Jack’s hatchet to collect firewood, then cooked Noah’s last freeze-dried meal. The campfire gave Jack’s handsome face a grim cast while we enjoyed our meals, not really eating together so much as eating adjacent to one another.

“Get some sleep,” Jack said when we started to turn in. “Big day tomorrow.”

“Big day,” I agreed, unzipping my tent.

But I couldn’t stand it anymore. I’d managed to hold back with Noah and Ash, but there was something irresistible about Jack that had gotten under my skin. It was driving me crazy, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep unless I scratched the itch.

I crossed the space between us in three long steps and kissed him.

He wasn’t prepared for it, and his body was stiff. I ended the kiss before he could react. “Goodnight, Jack.”

“Night, Mel,” he replied.

I guess the marking on the hatchet was a nickname. I liked it.

As I climbed into my sleeping bag and closed my eyes, I had a feeling I knew what would happen the next day. I would wake up, and all three of them would be sitting around the campfire together. Jack, Noah, and Ash would then hike the final stretch with me into Denver, all of us together.

It felt nice. It felt right. I fell asleep with the same kind of excited anticipation as a kid on Christmas Eve.

But when I woke up the next morning and eagerly threw open my tent flap, I wasn’t greeted by the three of them. I wasn’t even rewarded with Jack making breakfast. In fact, there was only a dark spot on the ground where his tent had been.

I was all alone.