Green Light, Tentmate Gone

The green is not one color. She noticed that first — the way the rain fly turns noon into something underwater, something that belongs to a different taxonomy of light entirely. Olive where the nylon doubles at the seams. Pale where it stretches thin over the poles. She is lying on her sleeping bag looking up at it and she has been looking at it for four minutes, which she knows because she checked her watch when Mara's footsteps faded toward the river and she has been counting the silence since.

The forest does not fill the silence. That is the thing about the Hoh. It absorbs it. The only sound is the faint drip from last night's rain still finding its way down through the canopy, irregular, patient, landing somewhere on the fly above her and rolling off. She listens to it. She is very good at listening to things precisely.

The shorts are still damp at the waistband from the morning's climb. She is aware of this — the slight cling of the nylon against her lower stomach, the warmth that has been building there since the trailhead, since before that, since she woke in the dark of the tent at five and lay very still next to Mara and thought about exactly nothing, which is what she does when she is thinking about something she has not yet decided to think about.

She has decided now.

Her right hand is resting on her stomach, fingers spread, the heel of her palm against the waistband. She is aware of the weight of it — not heavy, just present, the specific gravity of a hand that has stopped pretending it is there for any other reason. Her left hand is flat against the sleeping bag beside her hip. She can feel the nylon of the bag under her palm, slick and cool where she hasn't warmed it yet.

She exhales. The sound comes out longer than she intended, loosening something in her chest she had not known she was holding. The green light does not change. The drip from the canopy continues its irregular count.

She is already noting it — the way the wanting has a specific texture today, not urgent, not the sharp thing it sometimes is. More like the forest itself. Patient. Accumulated. The kind of wanting that has been depositing itself quietly for hours and is now simply full.

Her hand slides lower. The waistband of the shorts gives without resistance, the nylon warm now, and she stops with her fingers just at the edge of the fabric, not past it yet, feeling the heat that is already there — her own, held and waiting.

Above her, the rain fly glows its particular green. She keeps her eyes on it.

The drip from the canopy falls.

She parts her knees, just slightly, and feels the shorts shift with her, the inseam pulling taut, and she stays there — in the almost, in the green — breathing.