Page 55 of Double Exposure

She nods and takes a sip, her lip lingering again on the top of the stone cup, pressed gently against it. She lightly licks the rim.

My groin tightens.

“Oh, he knows.” She’s oblivious to her effect on me.

“About that—look, I had no right to go off on you.”

She looks genuinely surprised. “You didn’t go off on me. You were worried. I get it.”

She has no idea how paralyzing worry can be though.

I glance around. Everyone's talking and laughing. I feel like an outsider to my own family.

She takes my hand in hers. “What I did was reckless—to a degree. I had bear spray on me, Carter. I did take precautions. My goal was to get the shots of bears coming out of torpor and I managed about thirty. It was exciting when you came.” She pauses. “The most dangerous part was outside the cave.”

She’s right, except I wasn’t thinking about the bear.

The danger was the realization she mattered. To me.

Conversation turns easily to stories from her childhood: building forts in the California desert where she grew up, exploring abandoned mines, reading under the bed with flashlights, and helping her dad build her own darkroom. When the conversation turns to me, I admit I’m still convinced prairie dogs have a language we can understand.

Slowly everyone starts to move back inside. I jump up to help gather glasses and beer cans, the near empty bottle of bourbon, and Mom stops me by the back door, taking the tray from my hands.

“Go back out there.”

I stare at her.

“I know what your dad told you and Brock,” she says and looks right at me.

“What?”

“I have a different philosophy.”

I still don’t know what she’s talking about.

She sighs. “Your dad used to say, ‘Don’t take advantage of a moment you want to remember.’” She searches my face. “Do you remember him saying that?”

I nod. “Well yeah, but—"

“You are so much like him, Carter. He worried about all of us. He hid it, but he did. And in the end, all the worry in the world couldn’t save him.”

My mother doesn’t speak of dad’s death—hardly ever.

Ryan starts to walk through the door to come back out and she hands him the tray. “Take this to the sink, sweetie. Thanks.”

She turns to me and glances through the glass at Jade, out by the firepit. “That is true for some moments. But not this—not now. I say, ‘Take advantage of a moment so you havesomething to remember.’” She pauses. “Now go.”

I step outside. The sky is dark, the fire jumps and dances, the flames a good three feet high. A barred owl calls, it’s “Who, who, who cooks for you?” providinglonely comfort. Jade stands next to the fire, her hair catching the orange of firelight.

Mom calls from the sliding door: “Before you two come in, can you put out the fire? All the way?”

Mom’s always been a little paranoid about fire. Even in winter. Sparks could ignite the roof. But I don’t think this is about that. I give her thumbs up and she closes the sliding door and pulls the drapes.

The fire crackles at full capacity. The light plays off Jade’s face.

“What do we do?” Her lips, dark and warm, close on the words.

I want to kiss her.