Leaving Everest

by Westfield, Megan

  There were a thousand people squished onto this island in the Himalayas that was Everest Base Camp, but remove just one—one certain one—and I might as well be a castaway.

  A Circ arrived from Luke as I was lying down to sleep the following night. It showed a dimly lit teahouse and a whole line of recognizable faces from Global, a few of whom were holding cans of Everest beer. Luke would have to be standing on a chair to get that angle, and this made me smile—it was a high point.

  At the end of the Circ, he swiped the camera across his own face, giving me a quick nod before the Circ ended. He’d tagged it #YCCM #ICYS.

  I’ll catch you soon, I guessed.

  In return, I sent him the Circ I’d taken of the highest point Doc and I had reached on Kala Pattar yesterday, which he would appreciate because it had not been taken from the top. Both of us are a little superstitious about turning around before standing atop the highest point of any hike we are on. I added a secretive code of my own after #YCCM: #MYL for miss you lots. Then, I replaced my profile picture of Tinkerbell as a calf with an actual picture of me. A picture Dad had taken in Kathmandu before we started our hike to Base Camp. I’d showered at the hotel the night before, and my hair was down and nice, my smile large and natural. Which was because, if I recall correctly, I’d just received a Circ from Luke.

  The next afternoon, Luke wasn’t with the group as they trickled into the big top. I went outside to see if there were people still on the trail. There weren’t, but as I looked around, I noticed a speck down by the Everest Base Camp signs that could be a person. With a pair of binoculars, I could make out this person’s yellow jacket and guessed that it was Luke.

  I grabbed my own Yellow Yeti jacket from the tent and walked toward the signs. He was sitting on a rock with his back toward Base Camp, but as I approached, the angle was just so that I had a peek of his profile beneath the bill of his Huskies cap. I was dying to see him but also a smidge intimidated. Two days apart and it was like seeing him again for the first time. It reminded me of when he was standing in the doorframe of his house and I could barely speak because he was so handsome and worldly. Except now, he was more handsome because I knew him even better.

  I knew more about him than I ever had before, yet there was so much still to discover, and with everything about our future up in the air, I might never have the chance to discover.

  Sensing someone behind him, he twisted around.

  “Hi. How was it?” I asked.

  He raised his elbow and coughed into it before answering. “The trip was good.”

  I walked the rest of the distance until I was as close to him as I dared, being that it was daylight and we were in plain sight of anyone on the trail or in possession of binoculars. Even from here, I could smell fresh shampoo and soap on him. Being this near but unable to touch—my body screamed in protest.

  “Lucky, you got a real shower,” I said with a pout as I planted myself in front of him.

  I could tell something was grating on his mind because he didn’t even crack a smile. My adrenaline kicked up a couple of notches. Why had he stayed down here instead of coming all the way up with the group?

  “You’re quiet today,” I said eventually.

  “I’m just thinking,” he said.

  “What about?”

  “Olivia. My ex-girlfriend.”

  I stiffened.

  “I was thinking about when we broke up.” He shifted, adjusting his cap, then pulling it back down low. “Remember when we were talking about Townsend College and you said that sometimes you have to get something out of the way to see what it was blocking?”

  I nodded.

  He reached for my hands. “I know exactly what you meant by that because that’s how it was with Olivia. I wasn’t thinking about it like that at the time, but looking back it’s clear she and I broke up because of you. Things were fine with her. But I was so aware that I’d be seeing you this spring, and at the time, I thought you’d be starting at Townsend College a few months after that. Subconsciously, I knew if there was any chance of this happening, I wanted to be free. She was that thing I had to get out of the way so I could see you.”

  My blood rushed inward to my core, making my limbs tingle.

  “It made me realize that even if I wasn’t leaving for Nepal soon, that it wasn’t right to stay with her any longer,” he continued. “Not once I truly admitted to myself that I was still dreaming about you.”

  He used his thumbs to trace the lines on my palms. “Deep down, this was what I was hoping for all along.”

  My face cracked in a smile that freed my spirit from all it had been weighed down with: worry about why he was being so quiet and the decision I needed to make about Tanzania and my immediate future. I wanted him to say those words again and again. Why could we not be somewhere private right now? I needed his arms, his body, his lips.

  “It’s an odd thing to be in love with your best friend,” he said. “It’s like you’re operating on different planes. It’s like a dream. Like it’s happening only in your imagination. You need this person so much, even if they are halfway around the world and probably not thinking about you at all. You’re just so happy to hear from them, to be around them, and whatever they give you, it’s enough.”

  My heart was happy-crying. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I nudged the toes of my camp boots against the toes of his hiking boots, the best I could do while in the public eye.

  “Now, all the planes are together in one,” I said.

  “Yes.” He looked off to the east with an expression that was unbearably sad.

  He was sad because all this—the crossing of planes—was only temporary.

  “Thom thinks Jim’s going to send us out on Friday,” Luke said.

  It was the earliest possible day of our estimated weather window, just two days from now.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “Yes, unfortunately.”

  He stood, stepping directly in front of me so that his back mostly blocked me from Base Camp. I stood, too, slipping my arms beneath his open Yellow Yeti jacket and wrapping them tightly around his waist.

  “I’ll come by tonight,” he said quietly.

  “But we can’t risk someone seeing.”

  “I’ll come late, and I’ll leave well before dawn. Is that okay?”

  I answered his question with a single nod as he ran the side of his thumb along my cheek. Then, we had to step apart in case anyone was looking our way. He coughed some more as we started back to Global City. It was a cough that had gotten much deeper than when he’d left, and I made a mental note to keep tabs on it to see if it got worse.

  “I brought something for you,” he said as we walked. He handed me a small bouquet of greenery, the stems tied at the bottom with a bit of white cord.

  It had been five weeks since I’d seen anything alive other than humans, yaks, an occasional stray dog, and crows. This small touch filled my heart to the brim.

  “You’re the best,” I said.

  He didn’t respond, but when he glanced over at me, his eyes were crinkled and happy, and it felt like a kiss.

  As we finished the walk to Global City, I fingered the leaves and stems of the bouquet and the cord holding them all together. I thought about what Luke had said about the crossing of the planes that were all the different ways we knew each other. Now, we knew the bliss that was their combining, but what would happen when we had to pull them back apart?

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I waited up for Luke a long time, our brief embrace from this afternoon living on in my body. At last, my tent shook in a one-two rhythm, and he crawled in quietly.

  “Everyone wanted to socialize tonight,” he said. “Right in front of your tent.”

  Before I could reply, his lips were on mine, taking my breath and my heart along with it. We made quick and quiet work of zipping our sleeping bags together and crawling inside. Our jackets came off right away, and then our shirts. All of our layers of s
hirts. I wasn’t wearing a bra, so it was nothing but hot bare skin on hot bare skin. My breasts pushed into his chest as his mouth found mine again in the dark. He tasted like the lemony menthol of his cough drops.

  All the new sensations swirling through my body made me dizzy. The headiness of his kisses demanded my full attention, yet I was also aware of the exact location of his slightly chilly fingers as they traveled across my belly and along the line of ribs where my bra band would have been. As those fingertips grazed the bottoms of my breasts, my nipples hardened, then electrified. I wanted his hands—maybe even his mouth—to continue on to my breasts.

  Instead, he moved his hands around to my back as we twisted onto our sides. I leaned in to find his mouth, but he pulled back so I couldn’t reach. “Hold on a minute,” he said.

  His hands were still on my back. He slid them slowly down my shoulder blades to the taper of my waist and across the small of my back. Then he did it again, his hands following the exact path as before.

  “I’ve always wondered how this would feel,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “Your body. You’re a powerhouse. A mountain-climbing machine.”

  “Luke!” Now I was self-conscious. And it wasn’t true. After this long at high altitude, I’d lost a lot of muscle, and almost all of my bust.

  His hands drifted up to my triceps, squeezing them before rounding across my shoulders and cupping them.

  “Not all bodies can do what you do. And this is what it feels like.”

  His hands studied the muscles of my back again, as if they were a map written in Braille. I had to admit, it was sexy.

  “Now can I kiss you?” I asked.

  He let me, and as we kissed, he slipped his hand over my breast like it was the cup of the kind of lacy underwire bra I’d never owned. He circled my nipple with his thumb, bringing heat and pressure to the junction of my legs. I sighed, which was as much in reaction to the sensation as it was with the surprise of his touch so strongly affecting a place that he wasn’t even touching.

  I wrapped my arms around him. His kisses paused as my hands explored the soft skin above the tight and defined muscles of his back. Then his mouth was back on mine, more insistent than before. My panties grew slick, and my mind drifted to the condoms in my jacket pocket.

  But if we kept going, Luke would realize I had no clue what I was doing. That I’d never been even remotely close to where we were headed. Should I say something?

  He pulled back with alarm. “Emily. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  I didn’t realize I had stiffened. “No, it’s not that. It’s just…I’ve never done this before.”

  He rolled back against me. I couldn’t see his face in the perfect blackness of my tent, but a smile was pressing his cheek into mine. His lips slid down to the pulse point at the base of my jaw, and he kissed me there before feeling for my hand and lacing our fingers together.

  “I guess we could start with this,” he said, moving our joined hands down his stomach to his jeans button.

  Oh my god. This was really going to happen.

  I followed his lead, popping the button free. The zipper teeth clicked in the quiet of the tent as I slowly lowered his fly. He pulled his jeans the rest of the way off, leaving nothing but long underwear bottoms. Then he untied the drawstring on my thick fleece pajama pants and helped me slide them off. As we moved, the sleeping bag kicked frigid mountain air across our bodies, and in the stark contrast between hot and cold, goose bumps pricked along my arms.

  We found each other again, our newly freed legs intertwining eagerly. My body relaxed as I followed his lead. A lead that I wasn’t sure I even needed, as it seemed like my body instinctually knew what to do. We kissed exactly as we had before, his hand cupping my breast and his thumb playing with my nipple, except this time there was no denying his hardness pressing against me. The yearning ache in my body wound tighter.

  My hungry hands were all over his back, chest, and shoulders, trying to feel what I’d never seen with my eyes. He exhaled loudly in response as he pulled my leg up his hip and squeezed my bottom. His hardness pressed directly across the damp part of my panties, releasing a rush of need so strong that I did something I could never fathom under normal circumstances: I nudged his head lower, toward my breasts.

  He cupped them with both hands and then, one at a time, took a nipple into his mouth, drawing a spiral around it with his tongue. It was so mesmerizing that I hardly noticed the footsteps on the rock just outside the tent. Until the footsteps stopped. We froze. Thankfully, the steps continued into the distance.

  I wrapped my leg tighter around him, and we continued kissing. His hand explored the length of my bare leg, making my skin prickle deliciously. Our kisses deepened, perhaps as deep and overtly sexually as we had ever kissed, our tongues wet and hot.

  “Okay, hang on, Emily,” he said, pulling away slightly. He was breathing as heavily as me. “We should think about this.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “It’s not that, believe me. It’s just, for your first time… For our first time… With people walking by… And it’s so dark in here, and it’ll be messy, and then I’m going to have to sneak back off to my tent.” He framed my face with his warm hand. “It doesn’t match how I feel about you.”

  My body reverberated with protest. If not now, there might not ever be another chance, first or otherwise.

  As if emphasizing Luke’s point, more footsteps passed by the tent.

  “But this could be all we have,” I whispered.

  He ran his hand slowly through my hair. His careful, caring touch was a gentle salve for the parts of me that still burned for him.

  “That’s just the thing,” he said. Something about his voice reached deep inside me, connecting with a place that made me feel more alive than any of the ways he’d touched me tonight. He twisted a piece of my hair and laid it along my bare shoulder. “It doesn’t have to be.”

  I knew exactly what he was implying. He was quiet for a long time, letting his words sink in.

  “I can’t leave Washington for another two years,” he said. “For all the people who have contributed to my scholarships and worked to get me where I am today—Greg included—I will finish my degree. You said you still don’t have anything lined up next, so why not figure it out in Washington? April was telling me her roommate is going to Antarctica for six months, and I bet you could sublet that room.”

  Washington.

  Luke was trembling a little, and I realized it was because he was nervous.

  “I know you have bad associations in Washington and your mom lives there,” he said. “I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to go. But your mom is one person. I’m another. For all that she’s not, we are a lot.” He slipped a hand back to my face. “Aren’t we?”

  I put my hand on top of his. I couldn’t imagine this being it for Luke and me. “We are,” I said.

  As more cold air snuck in the wide opening at the top of our sleeping bags, we shivered. After putting some of our layers back on, we re-wrapped ourselves in each other.

  He swallowed. “What if you came back…for me?”

  Time went into slow motion, into a zone where elation and fear could exist at the same time. Luke tilted his forehead onto mine. “I know you’re going to need to think this over, and I don’t need an answer right now, but I’m really asking you. Officially. Will you come with me to Washington?”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  It was more than a touch scary imagining Luke in his real life and me there with him. It haunted my thoughts as I drifted to sleep last night. And when the sunrise woke me too early this morning, I scooted down in my sleeping bag and thought about it some more.

  I had wanted to be able to say yes to him immediately, that it was a great idea and of course I’d do it. But Luke was right; I needed to fully consider it. There were implications in this decision that ran deeper than simply crossing my fingers that it woul
d all work out. I would make a decision, and I would do it with intention, not on a whim.

  What would it be like to be in a modern Western city with Luke? To be out in the open with him, not having to hide away in a tent or behind rocks? To not be constantly at the mercy of the hourglass of our dwindling time left together?

  I launched Circ and scrolled through Luke’s account, studying the world that was his. And could be ours. I wanted him with all my heart, but everything in the background of the Circs he’d taken at UW and in the Seattle metropolitan area overwhelmed me. Was there really a place in all that for me?

  I left my tent with plenty of time before our pre-breakfast guides’ meeting in the Cubans’ team tent. It was our final review of the details for the summit attempt, and even though no one had yet had coffee, the group was stirring with excitement. Almost everyone in the tent had summited before, and to most of us, the excitement wasn’t the prospect of standing on top again. It was that we knew how excited the clients would be in a few minutes when Jim gave the official announcement that we were leaving tomorrow.

  When we broke to go into the big top, I wound up next to Luke. He snuck me a smile. Despite not being thrilled to be working on Everest this season, he was excited to get cracking tomorrow, same as everyone else.

  Jim’s news was followed by cheers, confetti poppers, and some bottles of champagne Glissading Glen had kept stowed away in secret.

  The big top cleared out quickly after breakfast. After five days of purposeful lethargy, we were all suddenly on fire with repacking gear, mending holes in clothing, deciding which trinkets to bring to the summit, calling home, and doing final posts for blogs and video diaries. I hurried through my own preparations so I could spend some time down at Winslowe Expeditions.

  When I arrived, Dad was busy with Tshering and a grumpy client, so I went to the kitchen tent to make a batch of peanut butter fudge cookies for the Winslowe clients. Pertemba, the gossiping traitor, was in there, too, but at least he was polite enough not to bring up Luke. As I worked, I relished the smell of the fudge mixture heating on the stove and the feeling of Mingma’s favorite wooden spoon in my hand as I mixed the dough. I had been away from a kitchen for far too long.