Poppy's Morning After

I woke up before the sun did. That's the ranger in me, probably. Fifteen years of watching dawn come over granite and my body just refuses to sleep past it, even the day after my birthday, even a little hungover on half a bottle of wine and one very long night.

Lee was still asleep beside me. Face down, one arm flung over my hip like I was furniture he'd grown attached to. The tent was doing that thing nylon does at first light, going from black to gray to this soft washed-out gold, all in about four minutes. I watched it happen instead of moving.

Here's the situation, for anyone just tuning in. My name is Poppy. I'm thirty-six as of yesterday, which I spent hiking alone, which is how I like it. Park ranger, Pacific Crest Trail, mile 478 segment. I live in a cabin with a wood stove and a cat who only likes me when it snows. And last night I slept with a guy I knew in college, in a tent, at my own campground, on my day off.

So. That happened.

He'd shown up at the campground late in the afternoon, dusty and grinning, camera hanging off one shoulder. Lee. I hadn't seen him in six months, not since he wandered into my station asking for water and I said his name before I even thought about it. He's section-hiking the whole PCT, a hundred miles at a stretch between photography gigs. He's thirty-seven. He looks younger when he sleeps, soft around the mouth, which is a thing I noticed last night and immediately felt weird about noticing.

But the part I kept replaying, there in the gray-gold light, was the camisole.

Okay. Some background, and I'm going to give it to you straight because that's the only way I know how to give anything.

Every year on my birthday I do the same thing. Solo hike, no radio, no visitors, just me and a loop I've walked so many times I could do it blind. And every year, at the end of it, I do one other thing. I change into the clothes I don't wear anywhere. Silk camisole, lace at the neckline. Little boyshorts to match. I bought them for myself four birthdays ago at a shop in Bishop where the clerk didn't blink and I paid cash like it was contraband.

I'm a trans woman, by the way. Been out to myself since my twenties, out at work since the paperwork made me be, out in the world in the boring ways, the practical ways. Work boots, uniform shirts, hair in a practical bun. But the pretty stuff, the soft stuff, that I kept private. A ritual. A gift to myself with a bow on it, except the bow was for nobody, which was the whole point.

So yesterday I hiked my loop, came back to my camp, washed off in the creek as best you can in October, and put on the camisole and the shorts and my one luxury item, a robe I tell people is for cold mornings. And I was sitting at the picnic table feeling thirty-six and fine about it when Lee came down the trail looking for the campground.

I should have changed. Any sensible person would have changed.

Instead I said, "You're late for my birthday party," and he said, "I brought trail mix and a bottle of wine, so no I'm not," and that was more or less that.

This is what I need to tell you about him, though. When he saw me, he did not do the thing. You know the thing. The double take, the too-long pause, the recalculating. He just sat down across from me like the robe over silk was a totally normal thing to find at a fire ring in the Nix, and asked if I had a corkscrew, and I said rangers can open wine with a bootlace and a stick, and he said prove it, and I did, and we drank maybe half of it.

And at some point he looked at me and said, "You look really happy right now. I mean generally. As a state."

And I said, "I am generally," which surprised me, because it was true.

And then, well. He asked before anything happened. That matters to me and I want it on the page. He said, "Can I kiss you? I've been wanting to ask since the trailhead and I've already used up all my smooth." And I laughed and said yes, obviously, and then the evening went where evenings like that go. Condom, because we're adults who barely know each other's lives anymore and neither of us is an idiot. And it was good. It was really good, in the specific unglamorous way where you're in a tent on a therm-a-rest and every movement makes the nylon squeak like a nervous mouse, and you both keep giggling about it, and it doesn't matter.

But this part is about the morning, and the morning is where the problem lives.

Because the problem is this: last night was impulsive. Last night I could file under birthday exception, once a year, never speak of it. Except he was still here. And except I was still wearing the camisole, because I'd slept in it, and the sleeping bag had slid down overnight, and the lace at my collarbone was sitting right there in the dawn light like evidence.

Lee stirred. Made a sound that resembled a slow leak in an air mattress. Then one eye opened and found me.

"Hey," he said. Voice all gravel.

"Hey!"

"What time is it?"

"Little after six."

"Jesus!" He closed the eye. Opened it again. "Is that legal?"

"Nothing out here is legal except being quiet and packing out your trash."

He rolled onto his back and blinked at the tent ceiling like it was a sky he didn't recognize. Then he turned his head, and his eyes went right to the lace at my collarbone. I watched him do it. Braced for it.

He smiled. Small, warm, not surprised at all.

"Morning, Poppy."

"Morning."

"Your sleeping situation looks better than mine." Which was his way of saying I look nice, or maybe just an observation about sleeping bags. With Lee you had to guess.

"Want coffee?" I asked, because I needed to be vertical and doing a task or I was going to sit there and combust.

"Want coffee more than I've ever wanted anything at six a.m. in a tent."

So I dug out the stove and the pot and the little tin of grounds, and I crawled out into the cold, and the morning was doing its show. The peaks went pink, then orange, the way they do, and the Jeffrey pines threw that vanilla smell around, and I stood there in my robe with two enamel mugs thinking, okay, this is fine, this is just coffee, I do coffee every single day.

He came out a few minutes later wearing his jacket over everything and sat down at the picnic table the way a man would who was arriving at a business meeting he hadn't prepared for. Steam coming off both mugs. Granite peaks doing their thing behind him.

"So," he said.

"So."

"This is the part where it gets weird, right? Or the part where we pretend it isn't weird." He wrapped both hands around his mug. "I'd like to skip to the part where it's just coffee, but I don't think either of us is that good an actor."

I laughed into my coffee. "I'm a decent actor. I convince the public a fire ban is their idea."

"See, I can't compete with that."

We drank for a while. Comfortable, mostly. Almost.

Then he set his mug down and got this look, the look of a man assembling a sentence he'd been carrying around overnight. "Can I tell you something? And you can tell me to shut up."

"That's a great opener. Go."

"October of junior year. Your dorm, fourth floor, the room with the weird hinge on the door that never latched." He was looking at the fire ring, not at me, giving me an exit. "I came by to borrow your notes for Limnology. Knocked, no answer, so I did the thing where you push and it opens anyway. And you were there."

I stopped breathing for a second. I remembered exactly. October, junior year, I was twenty-one. Skirt. Heels. The whole thing, the full private me, standing in the middle of my dorm room holding a hairbrush, and the door opening, and Lee standing in the doorway with a notebook in his hand.

"Oh my god," I said.

"You said my name really flat. Like a word in a language you didn't speak. Then you sat down on your bed and said, 'Okay.' Just okay. And I put your notes on the desk and left." He finally looked up at me. "I never told anyone. I want you to know that first. Fifteen years, nobody ever heard about it from me."

"I know," I said. "I mean. I figured. You weren't a jerk, Lee. That was never your setting."

"But it's why I wasn't surprised this morning," he said. "The lace. I've seen you before. Both times you looked like the truest version of you I'd ever seen, and the first time I was too young and too chicken to say so." He picked his mug back up. "So there it is. Now you can tell me to shut up."

I looked at my coffee. At the peaks. At him.

"I'm not going to tell you to shut up," I said. "But I need a second."

This is what I need to say about that second I asked for. It stretched out. The coffee steamed. Somewhere up the ridge a jay made its idiot call, twice, and quit. I turned thirty-six yesterday, and apparently part of the birthday package was a conversation I'd been dodging since I was twenty-one.

"You're doing your ranger face," Lee said. "The one for people who ask if the water's safe."

"This is not my ranger face."

"It's adjacent to it."

I put the mug down. Held it with both hands so I wouldn't do something dumb like hide them.

"Okay," I said. "Here's my second thing. You're the only person who ever saw that. The dorm night. And then yesterday, sort of, by accident, the lace." I took a breath. "Nobody else. Ever. Not in fifteen years. My mother doesn't know. My friends from college don't know. The woman at the shop in Bishop who sold me the camisole knows, technically, but she thinks it was a gift for somebody. I let her think that. I didn't correct her because correcting her meant saying it out loud in a store in Bishop on a Tuesday."

Lee didn't jump in. He just nodded, slow, like he was letting each sentence land before the next one arrived.

"Every birthday," I went on. "That's the ritual. I hike alone, and then I come back and I put on the camisole and the shorts and the robe, and I sit in my cabin and drink a beer and look at myself in the little mirror over the wood stove. That's it. That is the entire celebration. Then Monday I'm Poppy the ranger again and the silk goes in the bottom of the duffel under the emergency blanket."

"That's a lot of emergency blanket between you and the world," he said.

"Yeah, well. It works. It worked." I shrugged. "I bought the set four birthdays ago. Told myself it was a one-time thing. Then next October came around and I bought a second beer."

He laughed at that. Good. I'd been going for funny and it landed, which felt like a small miracle given what my hands were doing to the mug.

"Poppy." He said my name the normal way this time, not flat at all. "Can I say the thing now? The thing I was too chicken to say at twenty-one?"

"Please. You've built it up enough!"

"I thought it was hot then." He said it plain. No armor, no joke riding on top. "And I think it's hot now. This morning, the lace, I wasn't being polite about it. I liked it. I liked it a lot."

I felt that go through me like current. Not the way it sounds when men say it in bars, thrown like a card, catching on everything. This was more like, here's a fact, I'm setting it on the table, you can pick it up or not.

"You're not just saying that because of last night," I said.

"I've been saying it for fifteen years in my head. Last night just gave me an audience."

And there it was. My heart doing that thing. I got up and dumped the cold end of the pot over the fire ring, mostly so my back was to him, and looked at the peaks while I did it. Orange now. Morning moving on without me.

"You're doing the dishes-avoidance thing," he said.

"I'm doing fire safety."

"Uh huh."

I came back and sat down. Closer than before, which was its own answer, I guess.

"Okay," I said. "Say the next part too. I can hear you building it."

He turned the mug in his hands one full rotation.

"Would you," he said, and stopped, and started over. "Would you ever want to do it on purpose? With me? Not for me. With. I want to be in the room where you're choosing it, not sneaking it. I keep thinking about you in that dorm, how fast the door closed. I'd like to be somewhere the door stays open."

The jay did its call again, like a heckler.

"You understand what you're asking," I said. "It's not a costume. It's not a fun Tuesday for me. It's the thing I built my whole, whatever, my whole privacy around."