Shep

I can’t remember the last time I’ve woken up feeling so smug, but I get some extreme pleasure from sending Claudia to bed wet and unsatisfied. I am not sure whether or not she’s broken the only rule I’ve set for her, but the few times I wake during the night and she’s peacefully sleeping in my arms or curled up against my side, her hands are nowhere near her crotch.

I’m still pissed at Jad for the shit he pulled over dinner, but Claudia is a nice distraction and I try not to think of that in all the ways it could be shitty. Her presence calms me and for the time being it's nice to remember there are other people who don't live on the mountain. I don't mind the sex all that much either.

My alarm goes off at its usual time. I sit up, then roll to the other side of the bed and wake her up. She jerks a little, but doesn't try to punch or elbow me. Definitely an improvement.

“Baby, wake up.”

“Hey,” she says, still groggy. “I’m up. What are we doing?”

“Every morning I go out and photograph different parts of the mountain. You’re coming with me.”

“Okay.”

She shuffles to the edge of the mattress and stands. I watch her as she gets her bearings and starts digging through her things.

I sit on the edge of the other side of the bed and don't realize I'm staring at her until she turns and looks at me.

“What?”

“I’m not gonna lie. I was starting to like the way you always argue with me. I didn't expect you to come along so willingly.”

Maybe she’s finally settled into the time difference and she’s too tired to argue. It is well before dawn. She goes into the bathroom and when she comes back I can smell the mint of her toothpaste coming off of her. I pull on my socks and watch her as she puts lotion on her face.

“Push back turning you on?” she says as she slips on her bra.

“A little bit.”

“I mean, I can make today a living hell for you, you just say the word, Master Shep.”

I pull on my shirt and walk over to her as she's hopping into her jeans.

“I'll think about it. Coffee sound good?”

“Yes please.”

I finish getting ready. We have our coffee and we head out. We head west again and I lead Claudia down the trail. She doesn’t say much, but I do laugh when she jumps at the sound of a screech owl. She slaps my arm and laughs quietly when she realizes she’s not in mortal danger. She finally speaks up though when we hit the clearing.

“This is where we came the other day.”

“Yeah.” I hand her Titus’s leash and set my gear down on the rock ledge. There’s still another fifteen or so minutes before sunrise. “I'm doing a series for the forest service and the Smithsonian called New Day. I've been photographing sunrises for almost five years.”

“Jesus. Is there an end point?”

“I'm aiming for a twenty-year series. When I was a kid I did a project for school on global warming and my grandfather was telling me how you could see subtle difference in the climate. You know, he’d noticed that the winters were shorter, summers hotter since he moved into the cabin, but it was the last ten or fifteen years they started really noticing differences in the migration patterns of some of the birds and the butterflies. The water levels of the streams and rivers, even the foliage. I wanted to visually document changes in the mountain as a whole. Some universities have been using some of my stuff too.”

“That's really cool. And a little bit frightening. We’re all gonna die.”

“Too true. But this will all go on, unless we nuke the planet down the center. I'll show you more of my shots from this spot when we get back.”

I look out over the Western rise and start snapping photos of that side of the valley. Claudia is quiet beside me, only whispering to Titus every now and then when he tries to convince her to follow him on an adventure into the trees. The sun crests over the peak in the East and I am able to capture the perfect outline of its shadow. When I have what I want, I lean on the bolder next to Claudia.

“You in a hurry to head back? Are you hungry?”

“A little. But we don’t need to rush. It’s nice up here.”

I lift my camera off my chest and turn to her. “Do you mind?”

Her eyes go a little wide for a moment, but then she shakes her head. “Do I need to pose or act natural?”

“Do what feels right.”

“’Kay,” she says. Then she crosses her eyes and sticks out her tongue at me. Then she’s smiling and then she’s making a kissy face. “Wait, get me with my new best buddy.” She hops off the boulder and squats next to Titus and I get a few shots of him trying to lick her face and Claudia laughing.

“Okay it’s my turn.” I watch her as she takes her phone out of her coat pocket and turns its camera on me. “You ready?”

I try not to roll my eyes. “Yeah, sure.” I never intentionally smile in pictures.

“Let me help you.” She steps in front of me and starts snapping selfies of us both. I cave and kiss her forehead and she’s able to capture that. Then she turns to me. “I fucking hate when people do this, but whatever.” She leans up and kisses me and when she pulls back, she pulls up her photo album. She’d managed to snap two slightly crooked pictures of us kissing.

“See the light here? I wanted this to express the elements of hopefulness and helplessness that plague the modern, yet slightly older millennials,” she says.

“We should frame it.”

“You want me to send it to you? As soon as we get back to your place ’cause there is no service out here.” She sings the last bit.

“Yeah, send me all of them. And I’ll email you the photos I took.”

“Thank you.” She leans against my arm and I shift my camera out of the way and wrap my arm around her shoulder. I want to tell her that I’m enjoying the mountain in a different way now that she’s here. I want to tell her that she’s making the trek out to these more remote spots easier. She’s quieting the dull buzz in my head that usually comes with the noises of the forest. I like having her with me.

“What brought your grandfather up here?” she asks.

“The tent boom in the seventies.”

“What?” She looks up at me. She has this little smile on her face.

“Lightweight tent engineering was a game changer. They needed more rangers and he was the first to show up.”

“And now here you are.”

“Yup.” A natural silence falls between us again. I just need to enjoy this morning and not think ahead. She’s going to leave, she has to. I pull her closer and kiss the top of her head. And then I hear it. Movement on the trail.

“There's some people coming, that way,” I say as I nod to where the trail splits down to the southwest It’s less worn, more overgrown and not the way I usually travel to this point.

She stands away from me and I watch her as she presses her hands behind her against the boulder. She swallows and keeps her eyes trained on the trees.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Yeah. I'm fine,” she says, but her eyes have suddenly gone wild.

A few moments later two hikers come up the trail, two women. One Black, one Asian. They’re holding hands even though they're loaded down with gear.

“Good morning,” the Black woman says in a chipper voice.

“Morning,” I reply with a nod.

“Glad to see we’re not the only ones up to witness God’s glory at this ungodly hour.”

“It's the best time to witness it,” I say.

“Beautiful dog,” the other woman says. She holds her hand out as they come closer and smiles when Titus gives her palm a lick of hello. “Hey, buddy,” she coos.

“You guys local?” the Black woman asks.

“I am, yeah. You heading up to Dixon’s Peak?”

“Yes,” they both laugh.

“Is there a shortcut? We want to get up there by lunchtime,” the Asian woman says.

“This is the best way. The only shortcut I know of involves a helicopter ride over a ravine. You should be at the site by eleven if you keep a steady pace.”

“We better keep moving, babe,” The Black woman says. She has the look in her eye. I’m sure there’s a proposal at the end of their hike.

“Yeah. Thanks for the tip. You have a good one.”

“No problem. Enjoy the view.”

Both women nod their goodbyes and I watch them for half a second then look back to Claudia. She's not breathing right. I slip my lens cap on then run my hand down her back.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. No. I'm not sure,” she says. Her voice is shaky.

I step in front of her and lift her head with my finger under her chin. Her pupils are all fucked up. I step closer and smooth my hands over her shoulders.

“Breathe. In and out.”

She closes her eyes and drops her head to my chest. We stay like that for a few minutes until she lets out a deep sigh and straightens up. Her eyes are almost back to normal, but her breathing is still a little shaky. I touch the side of her face and her neck.

“Sorry,” she says.

“You don't have to apologize. Are you alright?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure. Maybe it was the sound. It got really loud up here all of a sudden. I wasn't expecting to see other people up here.”

“Are you afraid to run into other people up here?” I ask. Anything she says will make sense. I just want to make sure I understand.

“I'm… I can't explain it. I just got—I just freaked out.”

“I got what I need so we can head back and we don't have to come back out for the rest of the week if you don't want to.”

“No, no.” She waves me off but she still lets out another deep breath. “I just wasn't expecting to see people.”

“We can head back anyway. You want some breakfast.”

“Yeah. Food would be good.”

“Come on. You got, Titus?” I ask. That seems to shock her back to her senses.

She looks down at her hand and looks at her grip on Titus’s leash. “Yeah. Yes, I got him.”

We take our time heading back down the trail. She doesn’t say a word the whole time.

* * *

Food seems to help. She tells me after she eats that she thinks she had a panic attack.

“I’m not ignoring it,” she says. “I just—yeah. I’m okay. Really. I just need to figure out what that was all about.”

She lets me hold her and kiss her since I have nothing helpful to say. She sits with me while I upload my images. She gives me her email so I can send along the pictures I took of her. I try not to stare at them for too long as I transfer the files. She knows she looks good, but she doesn’t know how beautiful she is. She doesn’t know what her beauty does to me.

She texts the pictures she took of us to my phone. I glance at them to make sure they came through. I won’t look at them again until she’s gone. I can’t. I have a conference call with our dev team. After, I explain to Claudia more about what I do. She watches TV while I spend the rest of the day working.

At 2:30, Carla from the post office calls to let me know my stuff has arrived. I tell Claudia we’ll head into town at four. She nods off after my second meeting and then I wake her up so we can leave. She seems one hundred percent back to herself when she tells me to hold the fuck on until she can brush her teeth.

She’s chatty on the ride down, telling me on the way about a group chat she’s in with some friends she’s known since high school. One of their husbands is cheating and they are trying to decide whether or not he should die slowly and how much of an accident his death should look like. She cusses me and the mountain for the shitty service when I tell her she should get a signal once we get back into town, in another fifteen minutes.

“He could be dead by then!” she yells at me and then she laughs.

“Sorry. You’ll just have to miss out on all of those counts of conspiracy.”

“You are no fun.” When we reach the bottom of the hill, her phone starts vibrating like crazy and I’m getting the full play by play of their plan to deal with Brendan, the asshole, soon-to-be ex and possibly dead husband. She stays in the car while I run into the post office.

“I just don’t understand how you cheat like that,” she says once I’m back behind the wheel.

“You got me,” I say with a shrug. I glance over at her and smile even though her face is glued to her phone. I leave her to it until we pull up to the store. I park and slip my hand around the back of her neck. She’s typing frantically. I realize she’s only really been in contact with her friend Liz. I wonder if her other friends know she’s here.

“You want to come in or you want to tell me your shoe size and I’ll surprise you?”

She looks up from her phone and stares at the large sign hanging over the double wooden doors right in front of my truck. The noise she makes is part cackle, part hacking cough. “Doug Wilmer’s Sportsman’s Gear Emporium?”

“The Wilmer name has been a staple of Quinten County for over seventy years.”

“And I’m sure Doug the seventh is working the register right now.”

“Close. The fourth.”

“Not the same. Let’s go get me some boots.” We head inside and Doug Wilmer’s great-great grandson, Dougie the fifth, is actually working the register. Claudia calls me a liar when she learns the truth. We head to the back and she picks out a pair of boots. Dougie grabs her size and leaves us to try them on.

I know she doesn’t need me to, but I squat in front of her and pull her knee-high boot off. She’s wearing these white knit socks that make her feet look adorable and dainty. I feel her eyes on me as I take her heel in my hand and help her wiggle her foot into the less sexy hiking boot.

“My prince,” she says with a smile.

“How does that feel?”

“I never thought I’d buy another pair of these things again.” She turns her head to the side and looks closer at the boot, but I can tell her mind is on her brother.

“I take it you didn’t pick up gear here before?”

“No,” she shakes her head. “Miles gave me a list of woodsy things and I picked everything up in the city before I came out here. He took care of everything else, like the tents and stuff. Damn that lightweight technology.”

“We will not be camping. I promise.” I run my hand up her leg and give her calf a little squeeze.

“I know,” she leans forward and kisses me. “They fit great.”

“You want to wear them out?” I say as I reach over and pick up her other boots.

“I probably should. Break them in a little. Are we getting dinner next?”

“Yep.”

“Should I leave my bra here just in case you want easy tit access?”

“A bra isn’t likely to stop me.” We head up to the register and listen as Dougie tells us at length that Claudia made a great choice in boots.

“If it was warmer you could hike down to Doe’s lake, but it’s a little too cool to take a dip. Unless you’re into that sort of thing.”

“No,” Claudia says with a little laugh. “Polar bearing is not my idea of a good time.”

Dougie nods in my direction, but keeps his eyes on Claudia. “Have him take you up to Dixon’s Peak. Great views from up there. And you can be up and back in a day. No need to camp.”

I look at Dougie as he glances between us and I realize that he at least has an idea of who Claudia is. I’m tempted to skip dinner and take her back up to the house.

“Well thanks, Dougie. We’re gonna head to the Notch tomorrow actually.”

“Oh another great spot. Enjoy.”

I take Claudia’s hand and walk her out to the car. “Everyone knows, don’t they? They know I'm the girl who almost got murdered and now I'm back.”

“You’ve been here a few days and people do talk. Especially Jad and May-Bell. And no one has seen me with a women in three years.”

“I guess that’s to be expected in such a small town.”

“Doesn’t hurt that you’re so beautiful either,” I say to distract her even though it’s the truth.

“Ugly girl would breeze right through this place, huh? No questions asked?”

“Pretty much.”

“Like I said, such a prince.”

I wink at her and nudge her toward the passenger door with a hand on her butt. We head over to Connie’s. It seems pretty quiet, but I almost slam my truck into reverse and floor it back to my house when I see Sarah’s Tahoe in the parking lot. I pull in between it and Connie’s truck. I take a deep breath. I’ve seen Sarah more times than I’d appreciate since she moved back to town. I can stomach it. I can, but Jad opened up some old wounds and I can’t pretend that everything between Sarah and I is completely okay. I know I will be, but I don’t want to act civil.

“That’s Sarah’s car,” I say.

“Oh. Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“The nearest place with real food this time of day is forty minutes away and I really want to crack that box open.”

She glances over her shoulder at the massive box of kink related devices and apparel. “Let's go in.”

“You're sure?”

“Yeah. I got this. Plus, we don't have to sit with her.”

“True.”

She flashes me a big grin and hops out of the truck. I'm right behind her and wait for her to come around to the other side so I can take her hand. Just as we cross the short distance of the gravel lot, the door to Connie’s swings open and out comes Sarah with a takeout bag in her hand. She takes half a step and then almost trips down the stairs. Claudia and I both stop walking at the same time.

Sarah quickly recovers though and lets out a manic laugh. She waves. “Hi. Hey!”

“Sarah,” I say.

“Hi.” She comes down the stairs with more success this time. She glances at our hands. “Claudia, I didn't know you were still in town.” I know she's lying. Her voice gets really high when she lies. “What are you two—what are you two up to?”

“Uh we just came down to run some errands and grab something to eat,” Claudia says.

“Cool, cool! How long are you in town? Thank you again for the flowers. They're on my dining room table.” Another lie. She lives with her sister and they don’t have a dining room table. My best guess is that she threw them out the second someone in town told her about us.

“Oh, good,” Claudia says. “It’s an open-ended trip right now.” She looks up at me and smiles. “Didn’t seem right to fly cross-country, drive all the way into town just to see this guy for like five minutes, so I’m hanging out for a little while. I finally got another pair of proper boots so we can explore a little.” She lifts up her foot and I think Sarah is going to throw up or her eyes are going to explode.

“Oh wow! Cute. You're going hiking?” she says, nervously.

“Just a little in the morning. I know. You'd think the woods up there would be literally the last place I'd want to be, but Shep here knows what he's doing and he’s proven I can trust his aim with a shotgun.” Claudia's voice gets really tight at the end. Sarah blinks and almost takes a fraction of a step back.

“Too true,” she says. “He is pretty protective.”

I've had enough at this point. I gently squeeze Claudia's hand. “You ready to eat?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Thank you again.” She lets go of my hand and hugs Sarah. I'm not sure what to think. Neither does Sarah, from the look on her face.

“Oh! You're welcome. Just doing a nurse’s duty.” She pulls back and gives me a tight smile. I keep my expression blank. “Enjoy your supper.”

“Thanks,” we both say at the same time in a way that I know unsettles Sarah even more. I can't drag this shit out a second longer. I lead Claudia inside.

I'm sure Connie knows all about what happened between me and Jad, but she greets us with her usual smile and gives us the booth in the back. The few people in there don’t pay too much attention to us.

“That was interesting,” I say once we’re sitting down.

“Whatever. She’s not my fucking therapist and she fucked with you. She's not gonna comment in any kind of way on how either of us are coping or how we spend our time.”

“Is this you pissed off?”

“No, just mildly irritated. Why, does me being pissed turn you on?”

I shake my head. It's doesn't. “No. You sticking up for yourself was hot, but not the idea of you being worked into a frenzy or the idea of something upsetting you. Just wondering.”

“No, I know it’s not my business per se, but I don’t like what she did to you. You might only be mine for a limited time, but you’re still mine. You don’t fuck with what’s mine,” she says with a little shake of her head.

“You need a moment with the menu?” I ask.

“Yeah give me a sec.” She flips it over then unzips her jacket. Then pulls up her shirt and pulls her tits out of her bra. “Okay let’s see. How’s the BLT?”

I know she’s leaving at the end of the week, but in that moment I want to marry Claudia Deja Cade.