Page 19 of Autumn With The Grumpy Mountain Man

He handed me a flashlight. “Stay close. It’s steep.”

The trail went straight up through the trees. I kept pace with him despite the brisk tempo he set. He held branches back for me and waited when I slipped on wet leaves. When we got to a stretch of loose rock, he turned and held out his hand without a word.

I took it. His hand was warm and rough and completely swallowed mine. He held it all the way up the rocks, and then he held it a few steps past them, where I didn’t need it anymore.

I didn’t say anything about that. I didn’t want him to let go.

The trees ended all at once. We stepped out onto a wide ledge of rock, and the whole world fell away in front of us.

The valley was still full of dark. Far down at the bottom, I could see the lights of Ridgewood Falls, small and gold and scattered along the river. Above the ridge on the other side, the sky had just started to go gray.

“Oh,” I breathed.

He didn’t say anything. He just stood beside me and let me look.

It was cold up there, much colder than at the shop. The wind came over the edge of the ledge and went straight through my sweater, and my teeth started to chatter before I could stop them.

Shepherd sat down on the rock with his back against a boulder. He opened his jacket.

“Come here,” he said.

My heart did something silly and enormous.

I sat down between his knees with my back against his chest, and he closed his jacket around both of us as far as it would go and folded his arms over me. He was so warm. I could feel his heartbeat against my shoulder blade. His chin rested near my temple, and when he breathed, it stirred my hair.

We sat like that and watched the sky change.

“I found this place when I was fourteen,” he said after a while. I felt the words in his chest more than I heard them. “I needed somewhere my father couldn’t find me.”

“Did he ever?”

“No.” He was quiet a moment. “I’ve never brought anybody up here.”

I didn’t turn around. I had a feeling that if I looked at him, he’d stop talking. I just pressed back against him a little more, and his arms tightened.

The sky went from gray to pink. The light crept down the far ridge, and the trees caught it one by one and went red and orange and gold. Right at the edge of the ledge, there was a scraggly little shrub I hadn’t noticed in the dark. As the light reached it, I saw it was covered in tiny yellow blooms, thin and spidery, like little bursts of ribbon.

“What’s that?”

“Witch hazel,” he said. “It’s the only thing on this mountain that blooms this late. Everything else is shutting down for winter, and that’s just getting started.”

I twisted around enough to look at him. “Did you bring me all the way up here to show me a plant with my name?”

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t deny it, either. He just looked at me with the sunrise in his eyes, and I forgot what I’d been teasing him about.

I turned back around before I did something about it.

“Can I ask about the picture?” I said quietly. “The magazine.”

He was quiet so long I thought I’d ruined it.

“I had a studio in Asheville,” he said finally. “I kept it for ten years. I did installations for resorts and festivals and galleries all over the Southeast. It was good, for a while. Then it wasn’t.” His arms shifted around me. “The clients started wanting things that photographed well. Things they could make fifty of. They wanted the work to look like a brand.”

“And your partner?”

“We were together for four years. Business and otherwise.” His voice didn’t change, but I felt his chest go tight against my back. “She emptied the business account on her way out. Then she told a reporter that she was moving on to serious work, and that I’d always made small-town craft fair art.”

I sucked in a breath. “She said that? Publicly?”