Twelve Miles, No One Coming

The raven called from somewhere above the canopy — one flat, declarative sound that moved through the firs and disappeared — and that was when she knew she was alone.

She had known it for two hours, really. The last boot prints in the mud behind her had been her own since the junction at mile ten, and she had been tracking the silence the way she tracked elevation, steadily, with attention. But the raven made it official. Nothing human up there. Just old wood and filtered light and the specific cool of a forest that had been old before anyone named it.

She stepped off the trail without deciding to.

That was how it worked with her. The decision arrived already made, and her body followed it into the firs before her mind had fully formed the thought. The cedar was six feet from the trail's edge, bark dark from recent rain, the surface rough and wet when her palm pressed flat against it. The weight of the pack settled differently when she stopped moving — heavier, somehow, the hip belt pressing into the crest of her pelvis with a specific, muted pressure she had been half-aware of for the last mile.

She shrugged the pack off. Set it against the cedar's base.

The waistband of her pants caught at her hip when she pushed it down, the way it always did — the nylon warm on the inside from her body, cool on the outside from the air, and she felt that contrast as a line across her thigh when the fabric pooled around one boot. She left it there. The ground was soft with duff, the light coming through in slow columns, and the only sounds were the drip of water from some branch above and the faint shift of her own weight on the moss.

Her right hand was already moving.

Not yet — she held it a breath away, palm hovering over the heat she hadn't touched yet, and she felt the warmth of herself before contact. That specific warmth. It came out ahead of her like something impatient, and she held the distance between her hand and her own body for one long inhale through her nose, the damp forest air filling her lungs, her thighs still, her left hand braced flat against the cedar's wet bark.

The exhale came out shorter than the inhale. A sound she hadn't planned.

She pressed her lips together.

Her fingers made contact through nothing — she had pushed the fabric far enough — and the first touch was just pressure, just the shape of her own hand finding what it already knew. Her thighs were still almost closed. The space she was allowing herself was exactly as wide as her wrist. Somewhere in the crease where her hip met her thigh, a slow heat was beginning to travel upward, and she felt it in her stomach before she felt it anywhere else.

Above the canopy, the raven called again.