One Last Night at the Trailhead

Sandra Driscoll was thirty-four years old and she was done. Done with the trail, done with her boots, done with the fifteen pounds of pack that had spent the whole day riding her shoulders like a grumpy passenger. She'd been a mail carrier for nine years. She walked for a living. So why did one day of hiking make her feel like she'd been hit by her own mail truck?

She came around the last bend at dusk and saw the campsite. Fire ring. Stream running nearby, that low talky sound she loved. And a small green tent, already pitched, already staked, with a guy crouching next to it.

Wait. She knew that guy.

No way. No way no way no way.

"Todd?" she called out. "Todd Matheson?"

He stood up fast and dropped a tent stake. "Sandra? Sandra Driscoll?"

"Oh my god!" She actually laughed out loud, right there in the middle of the woods. "What are the odds? What are the actual odds?"

He walked toward her with his arms half up, like he wasn't sure whether to hug her or wave. "You look... wow. You look great. Muddy, but great!"

"Thanks, I earned every bit of this mud!" She let him hug her, and it was quick and a little stiff and weirdly warm all at once. He smelled like woodsmoke and trail dust. She stepped back before her brain could do anything dumb. "How long has it been? Two years?"

"Two years in June," he said. "You look exactly the same."

"Liar. I look tired and forty."

"You look tired and thirty-four, which is a totally different thing."

God, he was still funny. That was the problem with Todd Matheson. He'd always been funny, and she'd always been a little weak for funny. They had dated for a year, from when she was thirty-one to thirty-two, and broken up in the nicest way two people can break up. He got a job offer in another state. She had her route, her house, her whole life here. Nobody cheated. Nobody screamed. They just said well, this is it then, and it was. It had been one of the saddest polite evenings of her life.

"So are you camping here?" she asked. "This whole site? Because I was planning to squeeze my tent in between those two roots over there like a weird camping gnome."

"It's all yours, this half of it. I didn't know they even double-booked sites this far back."

"Neither did I. I got my permit months ago." She dropped her pack onto a flat rock and her whole spine made a sound like bubble wrap. "Ooh. That's the stuff. Todd, I have been dreaming about taking that thing off since mile six."

"When did you start?"

"Wednesday, up at Skyland. You?"

"This morning, from the south. I've got four more days after tonight." He poked at the fire ring, where a few embers still glowed orange. "I was just about to feed this thing. You hungry? I've got way too many trail meals because I over-planned like a maniac."

"I have a stove, half a bag of rice, and a peanut butter packet," she said. "I am in no position to negotiate."

"Then it's settled. Sit down before you fall down."

She sat on the rock while he worked the fire. And here was the thing she noticed, the thing she kept noticing: it wasn't awkward. Or it was, but only for the first ten minutes, and then it just... wasn't. They talked about the trail and the water sources and whether the shelter back at mile twelve had mice (it did, she'd heard them all night). He told her he'd taken the new job after all, and then left that job, and now he did something with maps she didn't fully follow. She told him about the mail route, the dog situation on Marsh Hollow Road, the old lady on the corner who mailed letters to herself just to see somebody.

"Wait, she mails letters to herself?" Todd laughed. "That's the best thing I've ever heard."

"She says she likes having mail. I don't have the heart to tell her I'm the one bringing it."

"You wouldn't. You'd never tell her."

"Nope. I bring that lady her own letter six days a week and I tell her the mail's been slow."

He dug two beers out of a cold creek bag he'd rigged in the stream. Actual cans, actually cold. "I carried these four miles," he said, handing her one. "Heaviest thing in my pack and worth every gram."

"You carried beer uphill?"

"I carried beer uphill for four miles, yes."

"Todd Matheson, you are a dangerous man."

They clinked cans. "To weird coincidences," he said.

"To mice in shelters," she said, and they both laughed, and somewhere in the laughing she felt two years fold up like a map. That old ease. She'd missed it more than she'd let herself know.

The fire got going proper. The sky went from orange to that deep blue that means you've got maybe twenty minutes of light left. Sandra pulled her boots off and wiggled her toes at the flames and groaned like a woman in a commercial.

"That bad?" Todd asked.

"Worse. I think my little toe quit two states back. It's just along for the ride now."

"Which way are you headed after tonight? North or south?"

"North. You?"

"South." He said it easy enough, but something in it landed funny. Opposite directions. Of course they were.

"So this is it, huh," she said, before she could stop herself. "One night at the same site, going opposite ways in the morning."

"Looks like it." He looked at the fire. She looked at him looking at the fire. The stream kept talking to itself down the slope.

Sandra Driscoll was thirty-four, not stupid, and not in the mood to spend two more years wondering. She took a breath and drank half her beer in one go, which is what she did when she was nervous, which she was.

"So here's a question," she said. "And you can say no and we eat trail food and go to sleep like two normal campers."

Todd turned his head slow. "Okay?"

"Do you ever think about me? Like, honestly. Because I think about you. Not all the time. But enough. Enough that seeing you squat over a tent stake made my heart do something unprofessional."

"Sandra..." He set his can down on the rock. He rubbed his jaw, that same slow way, the way he did when he was picking his words like fruit. "Every time I'm on this trail. Every single time I hike, I think about that trip we took, the one where it rained the whole second day and you made up a song about wet socks."

"You sang it too."

"I never stopped singing it. My hiking partners hate it." He laughed, then went quiet. "Yeah. I think about you. A lot more than enough."

Her stomach did a flip. "Okay. Okay so. Tomorrow is like this. You go south, I go north, and after tomorrow I probably never see you again, because the odds of tonight were already one in a million."

"I did the math on that already," he said quietly. "I've been sitting here doing the math since I heard your boots on the gravel."

"And?"

"And I don't want to waste one night being careful." He looked right at her now, no fire to hide behind. "But I'm not assuming anything. You'd have to tell me plain. That's what I got wrong last time, I think. I didn't say things plain."

Sandra put her can down next to his. Two empty cans side by side on a rock in the dark. She was very aware of her own heartbeat, of the fire on her shins, of him.

"Todd," she said. "I'm asking you plain. One last night. Just tonight. And then tomorrow the sun comes up and we walk our separate ways and we don't make it sad."

He reached over and took her hand. His palm was rough and warm. "One last night," he said. "Yes. God, yes."

"Okay," she breathed. "Okay then."

Neither of them moved for a second. Then she laughed, and he laughed, and the whole weird weight of it broke open into something else.

"So do we shake on it or," he started, and she grabbed his shirt and kissed him, and that answered that.

The kiss landed soft for about one second. Then it wasn't soft at all. Two years came off like a bandage. His hand slid up into her hair and hers fisted his shirt and the fire cracked and nobody cared.

"Oh my god," she said against his mouth. "You still kiss like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you mean it. Like you're trying to leave a mark on my whole week."

He laughed into her neck. "I used to practice."

"You did not."

"I did not," he admitted. "It just comes out that way around you."

Her hands found the old paths without even thinking. Up his back, over his shoulders, the notch in his collarbone she'd forgotten she knew. His hands were on her waist, then her ribs, then her jaw, like no time had passed at all. Which was a lie, obviously. Two years of time had passed. But bodies remember, that was the truth. Bodies keep their own maps.

"Wait," she said, pulling back.

He stopped instantly. Both hands flat and still. "Yeah?"

"Nothing bad. Just. Are we actually doing this? Say it out loud so I don't wake up tomorrow thinking I dreamed the whole thing."

"One last night," he said. "Here, now, you and me. That's what I want. Do you?"

"Yes. Yes, obviously, that's why I asked."

"Okay then." He grinned. "Just checking. You said say it plain."

"I did say that, didn't I. Ugh." She pulled him back in.

They kissed until the fire popped and made them both jump like two guilty campers. Adults, she reminded herself. Two adults in their thirties who should know better and didn't. The sky was properly dark now, the kind of dark you only get way out from town. The stream kept up its noise. Somewhere an owl said one word and quit.

"Tent?" he asked.

"Tent," she agreed.

They stomped out the fire together, careful, both of them pouring water from the pot over the embers because Sandra's boss had once shown her photos of a forest fire started by a careless camper and she'd never recovered. Then they crawled in. The little green tent was cozy for one hiker and ridiculous for two, which meant they kept bumping elbows and laughing about it.

"Sorry, sorry," he said, cracking her in the shoulder with his elbow.

"You're fine. I broke your knee cap with my knee first, we're even."

"Head lamp on or off?"

"On for now. Dim."

He clicked it down to a red glow and suddenly everything was warm and close and she could see him better than the fire had let her. His face. The lines around his eyes that hadn't been there two years ago. The little gray coming in at his temples.

"You got gray hair," she said, touching it.

"You got gray hair too, I saw it in the firelight."

"I earned every one of mine delivering mail in a hailstorm, thank you very much."

"Fair."

She got his jacket off him, then his flannel, and pushed up the hem of the thermal shirt under it, and there he was. Todd Matheson, thirty-six years old, in the red light. He'd filled out a little since she'd seen him last. Softer around the middle. She put her palm flat on his belly and he sucked in a breath.

"Sorry," he muttered. "It's not what it was."

"Shut up. I liked it then and I like it now." She stroked it, slow, feeling the warmth of him. "God, I forgot this. I forgot all of this. You don't get to apologize for a body I've been thinking about for two years."

"You've been thinking about this belly?"

"I've been thinking about all of you. The belly included. The belly is part of the package."

He laughed, that big rolling laugh she used to fall asleep listening to. Her hand wandered along his sides and around to his back, relearning. The scar on his ribs from the bike crash. The freckle pattern on his left shoulder, where the collar of the thermal had slipped, like a scatter of stars. She took her time. He let her, lying still, watching her with the red light on his face.

"You're memorizing me," he said quietly.

"I'm re-memorizing you. There's a difference. I had the whole map memorized and then I let it expire. That was stupid."

"Was it?" He caught her hand and held it over his heart. "Sandra. I have to say something else plain, since we're doing that now."

Her breath caught. "Okay."

"I never stopped. The whole time. The new job, the moving, all of it, I kept thinking, this is wrong, the thing I want is back where I started. And then I quit the job and I told myself it was about the work but it wasn't only about the work." He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. "I think about you every week. Not every day, I'm not a crazy person. But every week. Something happens and I think, Sand would laugh at that."

Sandra's breath caught for real this time. She'd asked for it plain and she'd gotten it plain and it was a lot. "Todd."

"I know. I know the deal is one night. I'm not trying to change the deal. I just didn't want tonight to happen without