Chapter Thirty-Five
I went straight to the UW team camp to tell Luke that we’d been found out. But right as I was giving his tent a one-two shake I realized being at his tent in broad daylight like this could fuel more rumors.
Luke popped his head out of his tent, nodding for me to join him inside.
I tipped my head the other way, for him to join me outside.
He shook his head and again motioned for me to come into his tent. This was way more obvious than if I had just disappeared inside. There was no one nearby, so that’s what I did, if just for long enough to explain that we had to stop hanging out in each other’s tents. But as soon as the zipper was up, we were kissing like we hadn’t seen each other in months. His touch lit up my body, and my breathing was all over the place.
When we finally broke, I took off my jacket. It was practically subtropical in his tent with the comparatively thick air at Base Camp and the sun that had been heating it all morning.
I touched my face, which was now even more chafed.
“You need to shave, buddy,” I said, grabbing his chin playfully.
He snatched me in for another kiss.
“Okay, seriously. Mercy. Do you have any lotion?”
He tossed me a tube, and I slathered it gratefully on my face.
“So what’s the deal with Greg?”
“Shhhh. Don’t talk so loud.”
“What’s going on?” he whispered.
“The Sherpas have been talking. Dad knows about us.”
Luke’s eyes went dark. “Do you know who it was?”
“It was Cook-Phurba—talking to the Winslowe cook, Pertemba.”
He relaxed a little at this.
“Do you think the rest of the Sherpas know?” I asked.
“They think they know, and they are watching, but I’m pretty sure they don’t have any evidence, because if they did they would tell Norbu, and he would have to bring it up to Jim.”
It was Cook-Phurba’s first year on the mountain, and Randall and Jim had hired him because he’d been to a culinary trade school in Kathmandu, not because of his Mount Everest climbing connections, so perhaps our secret was safe for now.
“I’m sorry, Emily,” Luke said. “I should have been more aware. Even if we aren’t doing anything obvious, it still might seem that way to others because we’re always hanging out. People here don’t know our history like everyone at Winslowe Expeditions.”
“It’s not your fault. We’ll just have to be more careful from now on.”
He shook his head, looking so sad that I scooted in front of him and put my hands on his knees.
“We get so little time together as it is,” he said, shifting so that we were even closer and he could speak more quietly.
I nodded somberly.
He sighed. “This is exactly why I was upset when I found out you were guiding with Global.”
“Not because I didn’t tell you?”
“Oh, it was that. For sure. But the bigger deal was that if we were guiding for the same company, we’d have to hide anything that developed between us because it’s not allowed.”
His lips drew up into a teasing smile. “I couldn’t tell you that part when we were at the puja, could I?”
His smile fell away as quickly as it came.
“It will be really bad if more people figure out what’s going on,” he said. “I’d lose my summer job on Rainier, and it would make it much harder for you to find work.”
I nodded my head in agreement. “I tried to not come in your tent, but you were making a huge scene. Now I don’t know how to get out without being seen.”
“Then you’ll have to stay until the coast is clear. Like when everyone has left for dinner.” His words were joking, but his face was anything but.
We lay down on his sleeping bag, and I snuggled in to him. We were heavy with the knowledge that this bubble of safety we were in right now could be our last time alone together in the privacy of a tent before our night in Camp Two during the summit bid.
The next night after dinner, I snuck out to meet Luke at the place we’d done ice ax pull-ups. There were enough rocks there to partially hide us, and the closest tents were from a different expedition and too far away for people to recognize us in the dark.
He had gotten there ahead of me and was sitting on a large rock. He pulled me onto his lap as I clicked off my headlamp, burying his face in my neck and inhaling deeply. The kiss that followed blazed with yearning, making me think of not just him but of everything that I wanted. My white bungalow. Cerro Torre. Freedom in the mountains. People whom I knew long-term instead of a revolving door of fellow travelers.
“I missed you today,” he said. “I’m always wanting more of you than I can have.”
He wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on my shoulder as we looked out over the Khumbu Glacier. It was late for Base Camp, and most climbers were in their headlamp-lit tents. Of all the glowing colors in front of us, the Swedish expedition’s tents were the prettiest of all, with their deep shade of violet fading gently into the black places on the horizon where mountains blocked the stars.
I tried to shift so that all my weight wasn’t on Luke, but he held me firmly in place. In the end, I was glad for it. The skies were clear tonight, and without the insulation of the clouds, the air was icy cold.
Satellites shuffled through the faint nebulas overhead, some moving imperceptibly slow, with others as fast as an airplane. I named the constellations silently in my head, stars that were steady like cairns in the sky no matter where in the northern hemisphere Dad and I went and no matter how remote our climb.
Luke’s lips grazed my neck as he raised his head to whisper in my ear.
“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, enwrought with golden and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths, of night and light and the half-light…”
It was the Yeats poem. I’d read it to him just that one time, so long ago. I held my breath to see if he would continue.
“I would spread the cloths under your feet…”
His warm jaw brushed against the chilly bottoms of my earlobes, sending tingles down my arms and legs. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want a single breath to take from the words that were coming next.
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet: tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”