Last Look

We'd been married seven years and I still couldn't read a map, which is how we ended up at the wrong trailhead for forty minutes while Dakota ate granola out of the box with her bare hand like a raccoon.

"William. Baby. It says Lost Lake. We are at a lake. It is lost. We found it."

"That's spiritually the same lake," I said, and she laughed, and for a second it felt as it used to in the old days, and then we both went quiet again, the way we'd been going quiet for months.

Here's the setup, so you can follow along. Dakota is thirty, she used to write travel pieces for a magazine that folded, and now she does stargazing stuff for fun, owns a telescope she talks to like a pet. I'm thirty-two, I draw buildings nobody builds, and I've been working overtime for two years like that's a personality. We drove up into the Cascades Friday after work for our anniversary trip. Number seven. Our car smells like hiking socks and old coffee.

We parked right at the actual Lost Lake trailhead around five, and camp setup went the way it always does. I stabbed the tent stakes like they owed me money. Dakota arranged the cooler with the precision of a woman who has strong opinions about ice distribution. Small talk happened.

"Did you pack the headlamp?"

"Top pocket."

"You always say top pocket and it's never the top pocket."

"It's the top pocket!"

It was the middle pocket. She found it without gloating, which was somehow worse than gloating.

And the evening had that texture, if I'm honest with myself, which I try not to be. Polite. Efficient. Two adults running a small bed and breakfast for nobody. We ate freeze-dried lasagna that tasted like drywall and ambition, and she said the stars would be good after eleven, and I said sounds great, and neither of those sentences contained a single actual feeling.

The avoidance had gotten so smooth it was almost impressive. Eleven months. You read that right. Eleven months since we'd touched each other like that, and we'd never once said it out loud, we just orbited it, careful as people dancing around a sleeping dog.

We hiked up the switchbacks before dinner anyway, because Dakota wanted the sunset from above the lake. Golden hour, she called it. The trail was dust and pine roots, empty, a sheer drop off to the left where the lake sat way down below like a coin somebody dropped.

About twenty minutes up, she stopped at a bend, put her hands on her hips, and looked at the view. Then she looked at me.

"You know what's weird?" she said. "We haven't had sex in eleven months."

I actually dropped my water bottle. It rolled downhill a few feet like it wanted no part of this conversation.

She picked it up, handed it back, and shrugged. "I mean, I did the math on the drive up. Anniversary trip. Figured somebody should say it."

"That's..." I tried. "You just. Out here? On the trail?"

"Where else would I say it? At home we've got the kitchen timer and your deadline calendar. At least here the trees can't awkwardly change the subject." She smiled, but it was a dry smile, a smile with a blade in it. "Don't worry, I'm not mad. I just counted. It's a fun little fact, like how many states I've been to. Forty-six, by the way."

"Dakota."

"What! It's true. Want to hear another fun fact? I bought new underwear for this trip and it's been sitting in my bag like a sad little gift with no recipient." She started walking again, boots crunching. "Eleven months. I keep thinking it's my fault, and then I think it's your fault, and then I get tired of both of those thoughts and watch nature documentaries instead."

"I keep thinking it's mine," I said, quietly, and she did stop then.

She turned around. The light was doing that late thing, all orange and sideways. "Yeah?"

"I took on the extra hours and I never took them back off. I told myself it was for us and then I just... kept going. And every month it got harder to say anything, because what would I even say? Sorry I forgot how to be your husband?"

She was quiet for a second. Wind moved through the pines. "You're not the only one who forgot things," she said. "I stopped asking. That's a whole crime of its own." Then that dry smile came back. "Anyway! Enough couples therapy on a mountain. Walk faster, the sun's going down and I have plans."

Plans. She said it like a threat.

The overlook she wanted was maybe ten more minutes up, a rocky shelf sticking out over the drop, the whole lake below going copper and pink in the last light. She stood at the edge, way too close to the edge for my comfort, and put her hands on her hips again.

"Okay," she said. "Here's my plan."

"Should I be worried?"

"Probably a little." She turned to face me, and something in her face I hadn't seen in months, maybe a year. Mischief. Actual mischief, aimed at me like a weapon. "I'm going to skinny-dip in that lake."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "That lake is four hundred feet down and the trail down is half an hour and it's, Dakota, it's going to be freezing."

"Glacial," she agreed cheerfully. "And you're missing the point. Watch."

"Watch?"

"Watch."

And she pulled her shirt off over her head.

Just like that. Standing on the overlook in her gray bralette, arms up, hair going everywhere, the last of the sun catching her all along one side. My brain, which has designed twelve buildings and passed two licensing exams, produced exactly nothing.

"Dakota, what are you doing," I whispered, like the trees were going to write us up.

"Getting ready for my swim," she said, and reached back, and the bra came undone with a snap that sounded enormous in all that quiet. She held it a second, then let it drop on the rock next to her boots. And there she was from the waist up, and I swear the sunset was doing it on purpose, everything warm and gold across her skin, and I had not looked at my wife like this in so long that it felt like meeting someone.

I could not move. I want that understood. My legs simply resigned.

"You're staring," she said.

"You're naked on a cliff."

"I'm not naked yet." And then, oh, then she hooked her thumbs in her shorts and pushed them down over her hips, slow, watching me the whole time like I was the view and the lake was nothing, stepping out of them one boot at a time, and there she stood at the edge of the world in nothing but underwear and a smug little grin, lit up orange and pink, all of her catching the light.

"Still staring," she said.

"You planned this," I managed.

"I did math on the drive up and I planned this." She raised her arms over her head like she was about to dive, which, no, absolutely not, and stretched, and I felt my whole face go hot. "Last look's free, honey. The swim costs extra."

"You are not jumping off this cliff."

"I wasn't going to jump. I was stretching." She laughed, and it turned into that helpless laugh she does, and she bent to pick up her clothes, and then just... held them, like she'd forgotten what clothes were for. The sun touched the ridgeline across the lake. "William. Come here."

I didn't move fast enough, apparently, because she said it again.

"William. Come here. Please?"

So I walked. Ten feet of rock between us and it felt like a mile, and the whole time she just stood there, holding her folded shirt against her chest like a woman in a museum portrait, which, she was thirty, my wife of seven years, and she was about to drop the shirt and I knew it.

She did.

She dropped the shirt on her boots, and then her underwear followed, one thumb, one push, and she stepped out of them and kicked them gently toward me like, here, evidence. And then Dakota stood in front of me with nothing on at all, completely nude, at sunset, above a lake, and she just waited. Arms loose. Chin up.

"Well?" she said.

"You're..." I started, and stopped. What was I going to say? Beautiful? She'd heard it. She'd heard it at twenty-three in a courthouse hallway and a hundred times since. I rubbed my jaw and tried again. "I forgot. I forgot that I know you."

Her face did something soft at that. Then she frowned. "That's a weird compliment."

"It's the truest one I have."

"Okay, weirdo." But she was smiling. "Come here, I said. Come on."

I crossed the last of it, and my hands were shaking, and I mean actually shaking, like I was twenty-two and hadn't touched anyone. I put them on her shoulders first, just resting, feeling the warmth of her after all that cold mountain air. Goosebumps everywhere. She shivered and leaned into my palms.

"See, this," she said quietly. "This is what I wanted. You looking at me. Really looking. Eleven months and you'd kiss my forehead and I'd lie there thinking, does he even see me anymore? So. See me."

"I see you," I said, and my voice cracked, and I didn't care, and she didn't laugh at me, which was kind.