Chapter Twenty-Six
Luke shook my tent with a one-two rhythm and then crawled inside. In an instant, his hands were in my hair and our mouths were together like it had been years since we’d seen each other.
He was leaning in to me so hard that I fell back onto my sleeping bag, knocking a little of the air out of my lungs and sending a jolt of pain through my right shoulder. All of which was of no significance compared to the effect of him, planked over me with his intoxicating, freshly showered scent and his lips matching my yearning for him.
I ran my hands down the rippled muscles of his back to the sliver of warm skin where his shirt had ridden up. I let my palm slip around to his stomach, where the band of bare skin was wider. I wiggled my hand until it was fully in contact with his stomach, warm and soft, taut and firm.
What would it be like to have his hands on my stomach like this? Or his bare skin pressed against mine?
I had a fleeting out-of-body memory of Luke and I as kids, licking lollipops on the stone wall behind Mingma’s. Sometimes it was as if my mind hadn’t caught up with all that had changed between us, like the two versions of Luke couldn’t be happening at once. He was the kid with the lollipop, but he was also this: the sexy, incredibly fit man with the warm skin that I uniquely had the privilege of touching in this most intimate way.
I put my other hand on his stomach, sliding both hands up his shirt and around to his shoulder blades. He followed when I directed his body down fully on top of me, his tongue reaching deeper into my mouth.
He didn’t stay this way for long, shifting to his side as if not wanting to squish me. I immediately missed his warmth.
“Want to try something?” he asked, his voice low and husky.
“Yeah.” I had no idea what was about to happen, but I trusted him.
“Okay. Shine your phone over here.”
I picked it up from where it had slipped to the side, facedown and still open to the book I had been reading. I aimed it at him. He was pulling a sleeping bag out of a stuff sack. I’d been so preoccupied that I hadn’t realized he’d brought anything with him.
He examined the zipper on my sleeping bag, and then the one on his.
“It should work,” he said. “It’s a good thing Winslowe Expeditions and Global both use Esplanade gear.”
He unzipped both our bags, then connected one side of his to the corresponding side of mine. He took off his down jacket and crawled inside. I turned off my phone light and followed suit.
We lay on our sides facing each other. We weren’t touching, but the heat radiating from his body was as strong as a caress. I scooted closer. Tentatively, he reached out and pulled me against him. We both had clothes on, but in a world where we were perpetually in puffy jackets, windproof pants, Gore-Tex, crampons, and helmets, we might as well have been skin-to-skin.
Without the usual bulk of our layers, Luke was physically smaller than he always seemed, but he was strong. I mean, of course he was strong. Look at the pace he could keep on the mountain. It’s just that with us being practically the same height, I tended to think of us as the same in everything, but here in the conjoined sleeping bags, there was no denying that with the solidness of his torso and the mass of his shoulders and back, physiologically, he was man to my woman. No wonder he’d beaten me at ice ax pull-ups: his body was as dense as a boxing bag.
It occurred to me that I had never seen Luke in less than a T-shirt and shorts. Oh, but to be in Railay Beach together someday, wearing practically nothing as we swam and body surfed after a day of rock climbing. To stand chest-high in that warm aqua water with my legs wrapped around his waist as we kissed, our mouths and bodies an indecipherable swirl of skin and heat and wet.
I rested my head on his lower arm, intoxicated by that thought, his proximity, and the true form of his body. He put his arm around me, and we lay like that for a long time, simply holding each other as our body heat blended and surrounded us inside the sleeping bag.
Again it hit me that this was Luke lying with me in this perfect paradise high in the Himalayas. This was the same Luke who liked to tease me about babying Tinkerbell and using English measurements instead of metric, and who attempted to pull sneaky moves in cards and checkers whenever I was distracted.
As he absentmindedly twisted a lock of my hair, my heart swelled with such happiness that it was deliciously tight against my breastbone. Everything between us still baffled me, but I loved it. I tucked closer into him.
“How did this happen?” I whispered.
“This as in us?”
I nodded.
“It’s hard to say.” His voice was slightly husky and unfamiliar again—a voice I wanted more of, a voice I wanted to know intimately. “There have been so many times over the years, where we were together in the Khumbu, then apart for a long time. But for me, anyway, every time and all the times in between, I guess it was the fact that my feelings didn’t disappear just because you did.”
I smiled.
As if he could sense this, he ran his thumb across my lower lip, tracing my smile lines first on the left, then on the right, which made me smile even wider. When he kissed me, his lips were pulled tight, and I knew he was smiling, too.
It took me a second to get oriented. The sun was starting to light the tent—my Base Camp tent with all the pictures and decorations—but Luke was here with me, in the same sleeping bag, with his body curled around mine and our heads sharing my pillow.
The double-wide opening at the top of the sleeping bag let in too much cold air, and sometime during the night, we’d put our down jackets and fleece hats back on, but our legs were still nothing but long underwear.
“Morning, MiniBoss,” Luke said. “Just so you know, you have drool all over your cheek.”
Oh god. I slunk down in our double sleeping bag so that my head was hidden inside.
“Ems!”
I didn’t move.
“Oh, come on.” He pulled back the sleeping bag.
My hair flew everywhere from the static when I sat up. I patted my face, checking for drool but didn’t feel anything. I shot him a scowl. “Maybe you should get out of here before everyone wakes up and catches us.”
“It’s five a.m. We have some time.”
I lay back down in our cozy cocoon. Finally I could look at him. Really look at him, for once, in daylight. One side of his face was crosshatched with pillow wrinkles, and his bangs stuck out oddly from beneath his hat. His smile was light and playful.
He glanced at something on the ceiling. I followed his eyes to the photo of the snowy rhododendron. I wondered if he recognized it as the same flower he’d held steady for me. “How come you never post any of this kind of stuff on Circ?”
I shrugged.
“And you’ve never posted a single Circ with you in it.”
I groaned. “Let’s not go into the self-Circ thing again.”
“No, not a self-Circ but one where you’re in it for a second. You don’t even have a picture of yourself on your profile.”
“Not my thing.”
“It’s probably good.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know my ex-girlfriend? If she had seen a picture of you, she wouldn’t have been cool with #YCCM.”
“Luke!” My face was on fire.
“It’s true. I had to tell her you were like a sister to me.”
“Eeew.” I started to scoot away, but he wouldn’t let me.
“So…I was walking by the Swedish camp yesterday, and they have a bunch of skis here. What do you say we borrow some and go ski Milam Peak today?”
“Nope. Sorry, I can’t. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Doc and I have plans,” I said.
He scoffed. “For what?”
“Hanging out. And painting our fingernails.”
“Seriously? You’re going to skip Milam Peak for nail polish?”
“Not skip. Delay. And, yes.”
He grabbed my hand and held it up for examination.
“What?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with nail polish.”
“That’s probably true.”
I don’t think I’d had nail polish on since…the day of the arrest, actually. Being right-handed, Amy had trouble painting that hand with her left, so she always had me do it. When I was done, she would paint my nails and toes despite my silent wishes that she wouldn’t. I was in Nepal with Dad before the last of the flakes from that final application had chipped off.
My stomach grew restless at the memories, and I hated that it did. As a child, Amy’s arrest and my role in it had been traumatic, but in the bigger picture, it had been a godsend. So many years had passed between then and now. Why, then, did thoughts about my past life in Washington have a strong enough effect on me that I now wanted to go sprint hills until I’d sweated all the icky feelings away?