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“Nothing.” Nicholas casually shrugged. “Just extra gear. I figured it was better to be safe than sorry.”

“Extra gear? We’re not climbing up the side of a mountain or something, are we?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“Good.” I relaxed in my seat, taking another sip of my coffee. “Because there’s no way I’m prepared for that after last night.”

“About last night…”

“Yeah?”

“Was that… okay for you?” Nicholas quietly pressed. “Everything that we did?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we didn’t do anything that pushed any boundaries for you, did we? I know we’d been drinking, and I just wanted to make sure that everything was?—”

“Everything was perfect, Nicholas,” I interrupted, with a small, contented sigh. “Probably some of the best sex I’ll ever have in my whole life.”

“That’s high praise.” Nicholas smiled. “You sure you want to give me that one?”

“It’s deserved praise,” I clarified as I smiled now, too. “And yeah, I think I’ll let you have this one, just this once.”

“I think you should pick the next hiking spot,” Nicholas suggested, his eyes returning to the road ahead of us.

“The next hiking spot? Nicholas, I don’t know how much longer I’m really going to be here?—”

“Maybe it’s something we can do whenever you come back around, then,” he cut me off, his tone calm. “I just think I’ve been hogging all the planning recently. It’d be nice for us to go somewhere you were interested in going, too.”

“Right. Whenever I come back around…” My words trailed off as I spoke, something warm blossoming in my stomach at the realization.

Nicholas wanted me to come back around.

For someone who’d wanted to keep things practical, this didn’t exactly fit the bill.

I smiled to myself, delighted at the thought of coming back around someday, Nicholas and I taking a hiking trip of my choosing, us meeting again at some predetermined time. And while it was a dangerous kind of fantasy, I let myself sink into it even further, my mind racing with thoughts of me and Nicholas in the future, something between us shifting from practical to something so much more?—

“We’re almost there.” Nicholas’ voice threw off my train of thought, excitement lingering on his every word. “Just a few more minutes and it should be just around the corner.”

I looked over at him, letting myself get lost in a daydream, one where this was more like our hundredth hiking trip, something we’d done so many times before that we had all the right moves down, had all the right expectations. I imagined myself reaching for Nicholas’ hand, holding it tight until we reached the hiking spot, and continuing that same affection all throughout the trip. I imagined openly admitting to him how I felt, hearing him say those words back, but because we’d already confessed before none of it was a big deal, more like repeating something we already knew about each other, a comforting truth we both shared. We’d then talk about planning the next trip and the next, Nicholas joking about giving me too much power when it came to that arena, me joking back about there being no such thing as too much power?—

And then, we’d find a secret, hidden place to be close, to kiss, to make love. Somewhere only we knew, somewhere uninterrupted and off the beaten path. Somewhere we could belong to each other without any prying eyes or unexpected surprises. It’d always be the same, being out together in nature, being together back at home. Always orbiting each other like planets around the sun, always on the same path as each other no matter what.

Fuck.

That might’ve been everything I ever wanted.

And it was so close…

Yet too far away all at the same time.

“I thought you said we weren’t climbing up the side of a mountain.”

I groaned through my complaint as I followed behind Nicholas, taking yet another step up the mountain. I was in pretty good shape but there was something about these more extreme hikes that always seemed to kick my ass no matter how much I’d prepared for them. I had a theory that it was something about the air, the elevation giving me a punch in the lungs I wasn’t accustomed to. It was the sort of thing people had to be born experiencing, their body adjusting to it over time.

Hopefully, my body was going to adjust to the Virginia wilderness any day now.

Any fucking day now.

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