Page 3 of Mountain Man's Honeysuckle Darling
I was excited about it. I was.
I heard the paddle before I saw him.
He came around the bend with that same powerful stroke and same easy pace. He saw me on the bank and altered course without making a production of it. Like things were just decided and then handled. I’d watched him move around on the water yesterday and thought about the way he probably ran his whole life—no wasted motion, no announcement, just the thing getting done.
He pulled up and looked at me, and I felt it again. That inconvenient thing I’d been feeling since yesterday that I refused to label.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning.” I kept my voice easy. “Different time of day for you.”
“First trip doesn’t go out until nine.” He rested the paddle across the bow. “Quieter before the groups come through.”
“I know. I like it.”
He looked at the river and then back at me. “You sleep all right?”
His eyes stayed on me after he asked it. No glance at the water, no fidgeting with the paddle, no filling the pause with something easier. Just the question, and then the space for me to answer it.
I'd been surrounded my whole life by people who said twelve things when they meant one. Kyron Gibbs apparently only kept the one.
“Better than I have in months,” I said, which was true but more information than I’d meant to share.
He nodded like that made sense. “River does that.”
We fell into it the way we had yesterday—easy, low-pressure, no pretense. He told me about the heron on the far bank, that it had been working this stretch all summer, that herons were creatures of habit the same way the river was. I asked him how long he’d been running the outfitter, and he told me about Wildwood River Co. He and five of his friends built it from nothing. He talked about what it meant to own something you’d put your hands into from the ground up.
He didn’t brag. It was his everyday life.
I told him about Charlotte, about the business degree and the job I’d lined up, about the year abroad that started in eight weeks. I watched his face the way I’d watched it yesterday, looking for a reaction, getting almost nothing.
“Europe,” he said.
“Italy first. Then I’m not sure yet.”
“First time out of the country?”
“First time out of North Carolina.” I laughed before I could decide whether that was embarrassing to admit. “My family’sidea of travel was this cabin. Every summer, same week. My dad’s friend owns it.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not much—it was never much with him—but enough.
“You came back every year,” he said.
“Every year.”
He looked at the honeysuckle on the bank. “Makes sense.”
I waited for him to say more. He didn’t, and somehow that hit harder than if he had. Just—makes sense. Like he understood something about this place and me and the way those two things fit together that I was still working out for myself. Like he’d looked at the honeysuckle growing in, thick and unbothered, and seen something I hadn’t.
I lingered on that thought longer than I probably should have.
The sun had cleared the tree line by the time he picked up his paddle. The light on the water went from gray to gold in about thirty seconds the way it did out here. Like the morning had decided all at once to start.
“I’ll be back through this afternoon,” he said.
Not an invitation. Just the information, the same way he gave everything—flat and certain and somehow weightier than it had any right to be.
I looked up at him. He was already watching me with that steady, unreadable expression, waiting to see what I’d do with it.
