Trail's End Education

Danny Kimura was twenty-nine years old and he could count on one hand the number of conversations he'd had that lasted longer than a hookup app thread, which felt strange to realize on a Tuesday night in his apartment in Sacramento with takeout noodles going cold on the coffee table. He'd been single for two years now, ever since he and Stacy called it quits when he was twenty-seven, and in those two years he'd probably slept with fifteen or twenty women off the apps, and the honest tally of it was that not one of those nights had stuck to his ribs. They were fine. They were all fine. Fine was the problem. He'd get a match, they'd meet for a drink, things would go the way things go, and by Sunday he'd be back at his turntables wondering why he felt like he'd eaten a meal made out of the menu instead of the food.

So he booked a week off work, borrowed his cousin's Subaru, threw a tent and a sleeping bag and a cooler in the back, and drove north until the cell bars disappeared, which was kind of the whole point. He'd read about a dispersed camping spot called Grizzly Gulch off a forest road near the Pacific Crest Trail, basically a dirt pullout with two sites and a creek, and that sounded exactly like the amount of people he wanted to deal with, which was one.

He rolled in around four in the afternoon on a Thursday in late June, the light going gold through the pines, and pulled into the first site. The second site, maybe forty feet away, already had a small green tent and a beat-up day pack sitting on a log, but no car that he could see and no person either, so he set up camp, hauled his water jug out of the trunk, and went about the business of doing absolutely nothing for the first time in months.

Around six a woman came down the trail from the north, and Danny clocked her the way you clock anyone out here, a quick glance and back to what you're doing. She was thirty-something, he'd guess mid-thirties, short brown hair shoved under a sun hat, hiking poles, the kind of legs you get from actually walking places instead of pretending to. She gave him a nod as she passed his site and he nodded back, and that was the entire exchange, and it was somehow better than most of his conversations that year.

Her name, he learned later, was Vicky Hartford, and she was thirty-four, and she'd been hiking sections of the PCT for a decade, one long trip every summer like other people took cruise ships. But that first evening all he knew was that she was camped forty feet away reading what looked like a paper map by the light of her headlamp, and he was sitting by his fire eating hot dogs off a stick as if he had never owned a fork.

"Those look gourmet," she called over at one point, and he held up the stick like a toast.

"Charred to perfection," he said. "Can I offer you one? I bought way too many."

She laughed and came over with her camp chair, and that was how it started, two strangers by a fire ring trading the usual trail talk, where you came from, how far you were going, whether the creek crossing at Mile 72 was as bad as the posting said. Her name was Vicky. She was a school teacher out of Ashland, thirty-four years old, on her summer break. He told her about the DJ thing, the weddings and the bar nights, and she actually asked follow-up questions, which caught him off guard because he'd gotten so used to people just waiting for their turn to talk.

Somewhere around the second beer the talk got looser, the way firelight does that, and he heard himself saying more than he meant to. He told her about the two years of app dates, the sameness of it, the weird loneliness of sleeping next to someone whose last name you had to check your phone to remember. She didn't judge any of it, just nodded along and fed another stick into the fire.

"So what made you book this?" she asked, nudging the coals with her boot. "Besides the hot dogs."

"Honestly? I wanted to feel something that wasn't on a screen. I've been going through the motions with people and it's like, I don't even know what I'm into anymore. I've been so busy performing I forgot to check."

She looked at him over the fire, thoughtful, not pitying. "That's a pretty honest thing to say to a stranger."

"You're easier to talk to than most people I've dated. No offense to everyone I've dated."

"None taken, I'm sure." She poked the fire again. "Can I ask you something a little more personal, then? Since we're being honest?"

"Sure, go ahead."

"When you say you don't know what you're into, do you mean in general, or is there something specific rattling around in there?"

He felt his face go warm and thanked the darkness for it. "There's, okay, this is going to sound dumb. There's one thing I've never tried and never asked anybody about, because it felt like, I don't know, it felt like a conversation you don't have on a second date. Anal stuff. Receiving, I mean. For me. I've always been curious and I've never once brought it up with anyone."

Vicky didn't laugh, didn't even blink, just turned her stick over in the fire like he'd told her he'd never tried cilantro. "Huh. Okay. Well, first off, it's not dumb, it's a body part with a lot of nerve endings in it, and most guys never get past the part where they feel weird asking. I've been into it myself since my early twenties, with a few different partners, and the difference between a good experience and a lousy one is almost entirely about how slow and how clean and how talked-through it is."

"So it's a real thing, people actually enjoy it?"

"People love it, when it's done right. Done wrong it's just pain and regret, so." She shrugged. "It's all in the setup."

Danny stared into the fire for a while, heart going a little faster than the beer explained. "I don't even know where you'd start. There's no, like, beginner's manual."

"There kind of is," she said, and there was a smile in her voice but also something careful in it. "And I should be upfront, I'm not coming on to you, I'm not trying to turn your camping trip into anything. But if you wanted, I've got lube in my kit, the good silicone stuff, and I could show you the basics yourself. Fingers only, your own pace, you stop whenever you want and we never speak of it again if you'd rather. Or we just finish the beer and talk about the creek crossing, and that's fine too."

He sat with that for a second, the fire popping, the creek doing its background noise thing. "You'd really do that?"

"It's honestly my favorite thing to teach. Nobody believes that, but it's true. Most guys are so grateful and so nervous it's like watching a puppy figure out stairs."

That made him laugh, and the laugh loosened something in his chest. "Okay. Yeah. I'd like that. I'm nervous as hell, but yeah."

"Nervous is correct," she said, standing and brushing off her pants. "Nervous and curious is exactly the right combination. Grab your sleeping bag and a water bottle and come over whenever you're ready. My tent's got a foam pad, you'll thank me."

He doused the fire, checked his phone uselessly out of habit, and walked the forty feet to her site feeling like he was seventeen again except in a good way. Her tent was a roomy two-person thing with a lantern hanging from the top, and she had him sit on the pad while she dug a small bottle out of her pack, unlabeled trial size, and a packet of wipes, and laid a hand towel down like she'd done this a hundred times, which, he was realizing, she probably had.

"Rules first," she said, sitting cross-legged across from him, all business and warmth at once. "You say stop, I stop, no questions, no awkwardness, that stands for the whole night. Everything we do, I'll tell you before I do it and you tell me yes or no. And you'll want to take your shorts off yourself, at your own speed, because I'm not touching anything until you've said it's okay. Deal?"

"Deal," Danny said, and his voice came out steadier than he felt, which was maybe the first honest thing his body had told him in two years.

He took his shorts off first, which felt stranger than he expected it to, sitting in a lantern-lit tent in the woods with a woman he'd met six hours ago, and she just waited, sorting the towel flat, not watching him like it was a show but not pretending he wasn't there either.

"Okay," she said, when he was down to his boxers and his knees were doing a fine impression of a guy with no knees at all. "Here's the deal with this part. Lie on your left side, kind of curled, like you're napping. It's the most relaxed position there is, and relaxed is the entire game. If you're clenching, nothing good happens, so we're going to go slow enough that you stop clenching."

Danny got into position, half on his side with his sleeping bag bunched under his hip, and Vicky settled behind him, close but not touching, her voice level like she was explaining a trail junction. "First thing is breathing, and I mean it, actual breathing. In through the nose, out slow through the mouth, and on the exhale everything lets go, jaw, shoulders, and everything else. Try it a couple times."

He tried it, and the third exhale actually worked, his body dropping a notch he hadn't known it was holding.

"Good, that's the one. Now, I'm going to put some lube on my fingers, silicone stuff, which stays slick way longer than the water-based kind, so don't worry about it drying out. I'm going to rest a hand on your hip first, just my hand, and you tell me if that's okay."

"That's okay," he said, and her hand was warm and steady on his hip, and somehow that little bit of contact was the thing that made it real.

"I'm going to warm the lube in my palm first, because cold lube is the number one rookie mistake and I'm not making it on you. Then I'm going to touch, just on the outside, just pressure, no going in. That part's still a yes?"

"Yes," Danny said, breathing out slow, and a few seconds later he felt her slick fingertip press gently against him, not pushing, just there, and his whole body tried to clamp down on reflex anyway.

"Ha, there it is," she said, not unkindly, keeping the