Free The Mountain Can Wait by Sarah Leipciger

few stars had come out, people danced, and the fires bent in the wind. Nix walked across the clearing toward her cook van with Sweet just behind her. He stopped her, said something, and she laughed, put her hand on his chest, and shoved him away.
    “Why buy red if you prefer black?” Tom asked Luis.
    “Hm?”
    “Never mind.” Tom grinned at him and moved on.
      
    He decided to pack it in just the other side of midnight. Everyone was still up, either at the fires or the vestibules of their tents, drinking beer or red wine or mugs of tea. They would stay up all night and sleep, unburdened, all the next day. They deserved it. He would get up early in the morning, take advantage of the peace, and get on with his work. When he got to the door of his trailer he felt a light touch on his back, between his shoulder blades.
    “You okay?” It was Nix, with a wool blanket over her shoulders.
    “Going to bed,” he said. He could barely see her face in the dark, only the hint of her features; when she turned her head, her profile was backlit from the fires.
    “No, I know. Me too. I just wanted to say good night.”
    He pulled open the door and put one foot on the step and looked back at her. “Good night, then.”
    “Can I come in for a bit?” She said this as she shook the blanket from her shoulders and unfolded it and wrapped it around her body, so that her head was down and her words difficult to hear.
    “Sorry?”
    “Are you going to make me say it again?” She hopped a few times and hugged the blanket tightly around herself. “I want to come in with you. Can I?”
    He looked at her dark shape, considering. He did want to bring her inside; there was something about this time of night that made him feel as though he could. Somehow the lateness of the hour and the dark meant that it wouldn’t count—he couldn’t even see her face. And he had thought about her, about touching her. Over the past week he’d thought about it plenty of times.
    Somebody dumped a big log onto the fire, and a clap of sparks rose into the night and hung there spiraling, and then extinguished. And he had enough sense to think beyond this hour, this dark, and to how this would all look to him when the sun rose.
    He wanted to be kind, but he was no good at flirting. He smiled, hoped that she could see it in the dark. “No. You can’t come in.”
    “But you thought about it,” she said.

10
    Elka died four years after she left. News reached Tom via a brief letter from Bobbie, who still lived on Aguanish, in the same run-down cottage where Elka had grown up. By that time, Tom and Curtis and Erin were doing pretty good. House was clean; they ate the food he cooked. Curtis was starting to win trail races on his bike, and Erin could climb the neighbor’s maple tree to the top. At the bottom of Bobbie’s letter was a plea for him to come to the island, and if there was no other option, he could bring the children.
    So he packed a small bag and left Curtis and Erin with Samantha. Crawling in first gear behind a laboring truck on the switchbacks before Pemberton, a black Lab panting out the truck’s back window, Tom thought about the only other time he’d been to Aguanish Island. That first trip down, he had bruised the heel of his hand from hitting the wheel. On the narrow road that cut into the side of the mountain just north of Horseshoe Bay, he’d wanted to launch over the sea to the west; he couldn’t get there fast enough. This time, at least, it didn’t matter how long it took.
    He slept on the ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Vancouver Island and then drove unimpeded the short distance to Nanoose, where he could catch a smaller, foot-passenger ferry to Aguanish. The last scheduled crossing of the day was canceled due to high winds, and he was obliged to stay the night in a motel. The weather hadn’t improved much by the next morning, so he sat down to a late breakfast in the marina pub and watched the cruisers swing on their moorings