Survey Leader Bathes in the High Tarn

Victoria had not taken her clothes off where any of us could see her in three weeks on the ridge. Not when the rain found the seams of the tarp and ran down the inside of the canvas onto our bags. Not at the washout, when Lilly’s heel split open and Victoria knelt in the mud for forty minutes with surgical tape and a cut-down tent stake, binding the boot back around the foot, then lifted Lilly’s pack and emptied the heavy half of it into her own without asking anyone’s opinion. She sent Amanda, Hawkes, and Armond back down the valley with Lilly and kept the two of us for the last high tarn and the species counts. I watched her climb the next pitch under that extra weight, and she did not slow, and she did not let her face show what it cost her. Once, on the switchbacks, she caught me looking, not at her body but at the effort she was hiding, and she stiffened the whole length of her spine and told me my last bearing was eight degrees off before I had even opened the notebook. It was not. Hers was. That afternoon I found a coordinate in her hand that put the second cairn on the wrong side of the stream, a transposed pair of figures anyone could have written, and I closed the book over it and said nothing. She kept her shirt buttoned to the throat and corrected my work without looking at my hands. So when she stopped on the flat stone at the water’s edge and began to undo those buttons, I did not understand what I was seeing until the wool parted and her chest came loose from it, soft and unheld, the skin there pale against the gray.

She stepped out of her boots and pushed the trousers down past her waist, and the cotton underneath went with them, so that she stood bare on the stone with the wet wind coming off the water. The wind took my shirt and snapped it against my ribs; the same wind had pressed hers, before she dropped it, flat against her and shown the shape it could not get past. I was cold through already, shivering in my sleeves, while the water that ran down her shins did not seem to reach her at all. Her footing on the slick stone never wavered. Mine, in boots, did. Where her waist became hip the line did not stop but kept going, and when she bent to free one ankle the low swell of her belly folded and then unfolded and rested forward, catching the light. She walked into the water without covering herself. The cold took a small sound out of her that she did not offer to me. Then she looked back over her shoulder and waited, and the wait had a hardness in it, as if she had already decided what I would do and was only confirming it.

I stayed on the bank. I would not go in unless she asked, and she did not ask. She only looked, the water climbing her in a slow line and spilling over the shelf of her belly, darkening the undersides of her breasts, and I stood in my boots on the wet stone and did not move. I wanted to. The wanting had nothing to do with the water. It had to do with the break in her, the first one I had seen, and with needing to know how far down it went. When I did not come her mouth went thin, a quick hard pull at one corner that I had seen her turn on Hawkes the day he dropped the clinometer, and she turned her back on me, not far, and let the tarn take her to the shoulders. When she came out the drops ran the channel under her breasts and lost themselves in the give above her hips, and I could smell the lake between us, mineral and cold, and under it the warmer salt of her skin. I knew the salt would dry there before night. She pulled the shirt on and did not button it. She stepped back into the trousers, bare underneath, and did not fasten them either, and the open fly and the open shirt and the unhurried way she bent for her boots made the whole walk back to camp a thing I could not look at and could not stop seeing. I looked at the far shore until my face cooled.

I unlaced my boots at the canvas edge and set them heel-down on the ground outside, where the frost would find them, and crawled in on my knees. The bedrolls had been two and became, by the way she lay down across the seam between them, one problem. She took the middle. I had the canvas edge and a strip of heat, the pad ending under my hip so that the bone sat on bare ground and the ground pressed back, and the whole warm bulk of her turned toward me in the dark. I tried to keep my knees drawn up. They would not stay; there was not enough tarp for the length of me, and my heels kept running off the pad into the cold. One knee slid and found her. Her belly. The shirt had fallen open and there was only skin, and the skin sank under my kneecap and rose again with her breath, and the weight of it pushed my knee an inch outward, settled over it, and did not let it back. She did not shift away. I lay there and felt the warmth climb from that one place up through my thigh, and I learned the exact interval of her breathing by what it did to my knee.

I had hardened against the seam of my trousers, a pressure that strained at the stitching and went no farther than that, and the pressure felt louder than the touch of my knee. Shame locked my jaw and kept my hips angled back toward the canvas, away from her, so that I lay in a curve I would feel in my spine by morning. I had spent the survey being the quiet one, the thin one, the man whose body made her steadiness look like armor and whose every glance at her felt like a test I was failing. Almost I said her name. Almost I asked whether the tarn had been an accident. The words stopped at my teeth. She breathed, slow and even, and the slowness was its own kind of refusal. My knee stayed where she allowed it, and I did not sleep.

Her hand found my wrist in the dark and closed around it harder than it needed to, the way she had taken the buttons at the water, as though a thing done quickly could not be taken back. She drew my palm down and set it on the bare skin above her hip, where the shirt had ridden up and the trousers hung open, warm from the bedroll and still faintly cool underneath with the tarn in it. Nothing was said. The permission was the weight itself, her waist pressing up into my hand and the heat of that one hip covering my whole palm so that no part of my hand was left untouched. When she breathed in, the pad shifted under me. Her weight moved it. I had not known a body could move the ground I lay on, and I lay there understanding it. My breath left me. My hand did not leave her; I let it rest and let the warmth climb my arm.

She pushed my shirt up and I let her. It caught on the points of my shoulder blades, the wool dragging over bone, and for a moment I was blind inside it with my arms raised and the night air finding my ribs one at a time. Then it was gone and the cold had all of me, and I waited in it, every rib lifted and lonely, until her palm came flat against my chest and I felt how much of me she could cover with one hand and how little there was under it for her to find. She did not hurry. She let her hand ride the ribs the way she would read contour lines, learning the spacing of them, and I lay under that and did not breathe properly because breathing moved the bones against her and I wanted her to feel them still.

My trousers had become a pain. I worked the button open and dragged them down with the drawers inside them, and there was nothing graceful in it: my knee struck the tarp pole and the whole canvas shivered overhead, my heels ran off the end of the pad into the frost at the edge, and the cloth caught at one ankle so that I had to kick twice. Then I was bare, and the cooler air between us met me where I stood hard and brief from my body, and I knew to the inch how little there was of me against the dark. I could not hide it. I did not try. I heard her then. The rasp of her trousers coming down her thighs over the bedroll, cotton on nylon, a long drag she did not rush; the pad sinking under her as she lifted one knee free and then the other; the open shirt sliding off her shoulders and landing somewhere behind her. Her belly came bare against my forearm, warmer than the air and heavier than any thought I still had of stopping, and I lay beneath it with my forearm trapped and let the warmth go into the bone.

She turned me onto my back with one hand on my shoulder, and I went, my shoulders finding the thin pad and my knees not fitting under the low slope of the tarp so that they fell open on their own. Then she rose over me on her knees, and I heard it before I felt it: the pad hissing as her knees found their places on either side of my hips, the canvas brushing her back where the ridge of the tarp dipped, her breath above me gone thick and uneven in a way I had never heard from her on any climb. She hovered. Warmth reached me before she did, the damp of her against the inside of my thigh and then, as she shifted, against my stomach, slick and hot enough that I knew she had been wet since the water or before it. She looked down at me, a pale shape against the darker canvas, her breath coming hard and the tarp ticking as the frost came on, and I waited under her for whatever she had decided.

Her weight came down over my thighs and pinned me flat to the bedroll. The low curve of her belly spread warm across my abdomen and kept spreading, but she did not let the rest of herself fall; she planted her hands either side of my head and held her chest lifted so that her breasts hung above my face, swaying with each breath, close enough that I felt their warmth on my cheek. Victoria reached between us without a word. Her fingers closed around me, and there was not much for them to close around, and she guided the head into her, and the heat took what it could. There was no depth to find. There was nowhere for a thrust to go. She began to rock, slow and unhurried, the motion all grind and weight, her hips settling and lifting in a rhythm that matched the drag of her breath. My hands found the sides of her waist and could not meet; I spread my fingers as wide as they would go and still held only a portion of her. I braced what I could and lifted my face into her chest where it hung above me, mouth open against skin that yielded under my cheek and swung away and returned.

I held still because speed would have been absurd. There was so little of me inside her that any hurry would have slipped me free. Shame sat under my tongue, hot and precise: how little I filled her, how what was left outside pressed useless against the slick outer heat. I fixed on what I could feel instead. The cushion of her tummy dragging over my flat stomach with every rock. The wet clasp that closed and eased around the head and the first inch. The way her weight made my hips sink into the canvas until the ground pressed back through the thin pad. She smelled of lake water and the salt that had dried on her skin. I breathed it in and did not move my hips. The rhythm was hers. I matched my breath to it and let the shame stay where it was, under the heat and the give.

She chased it. I felt the change in the way her thighs tightened against my sides and the way the rock shortened, grew tighter, more insistent. Her breath caught and restarted. The muscles low in her belly drew in under my hands, then failed to hold. She tried again. The same tightening, the same stall. Weeks of being the one who kept the line and the map and the others from breaking had turned the want into something she could not get under. I was watching her too closely and it was the wrong kind of weight; I knew it as I felt it, the way she had known it on the switchbacks when she caught me watching her carry Lilly’s share. She stilled. The rock stopped. Her hands flattened on my chest and her arms locked, holding herself farther off me so she could look down at the place where we joined and then away. Anger moved through her jaw, that quick hard pull at the corner of her mouth I had seen at the water. I felt it in the set of her shoulders more than I saw it.

I stopped with her. My hands eased their brace on her waist. I shifted, careful, and slipped free of her, the short length of me sliding out into the cooler air between our bodies. She made a sound that was not a word. I drew her down, all of her, her arms giving at last, the full weight of her waist and her belly and her chest coming to rest across me until my ribs complained and I did not care. My palms found the lower curve of her belly and stayed there, open, not flinching from the softness or the heat. I put my mouth on the slope of her shoulder, not her mouth. Skin. Salt. The tremor that started under my lips and ran down into the place where her stomach met my hands.

She gripped my ribs hard enough that I felt the bones shift under her fingers. The break came without the release she had been chasing. It was a shudder that started in her chest and moved through the whole soft mass of her and into me, breath breaking, shoulders locking, then giving. No climax. Just the weeks and the failure and the fact of my hands still on her, unmoved by the thickness under them. I held her through it. My own arousal stayed, a low insistent ache, the hard inch of me pressed between my stomach and the underside of her belly, but I did not chase it. When her breathing steadied enough for words she offered, voice rough against my collarbone, to finish me with her hand. I shook my head against her shoulder. It would have been a debt. I would not take it.

We stayed like that while the light changed under the tarp edge. Gray, then the thin gold that meant the ridge would be visible again. Her weight never fully left me. At some point she reached for the notebook without lifting her torso clear, and her fingers found the coordinate she had marked wrong the day before, the one I had closed the book over. She corrected it in a voice that was almost her field voice, flat and precise, while my hand remained where it had been, palm open on the curve of her waist. The wanting sat between us, unfinished, and neither of us moved to finish it. She closed the notebook. I kept my hand where it was. Outside, the others would be waiting at the washout by midmorning. We would walk out with it unsolved.