Naked in the Pines

The pine needles were still wet from the morning rain, and I could smell them, that sharp green scent that gets into your lungs and stays there. Her name was Lena, and she walked ahead of me on the trail, her blonde hair catching the light that filtered through the canopy in broken shafts. She hadn't said much for the last twenty minutes. Neither had I.

We'd met three days ago at the hostel in the valley. She was German, or Austrian, I never got it straight. She had a laugh that started low and ended high, like something breaking. Green eyes the color of bottle glass. The kind of woman who made you aware of your own hands.

"You're staring," she said without turning around.

"I'm looking at the trail."

"You're staring at my ass."

I was. She had on these tight black hiking pants that made it impossible not to. I didn't apologize. She didn't seem to want me to.

The trail curved left, up a gentle slope, and the trees got thicker here, older. Some of these pines had to be two hundred years old, trunks wide as cars, bark rough and dark with resin. The air was cooler in the shade. I could hear water somewhere, a stream or a small waterfall, not far off.

Lena stopped at a clearing. Just a small break in the trees where the sky showed through, pale and overcast. She turned around and looked at me. Really looked. Her eyes moved over my face like she was reading something written there.

"I'm going to take my clothes off," she said.

I laughed. I thought she was joking.

She wasn't.

She pulled her shirt over her head in one motion, that casual efficiency some women have with their own bodies, no hesitation, no performance. Her skin was pale, almost luminous in the grey light. Small breasts, the kind that sit high and don't need any help. A thin gold chain around her neck that I hadn't noticed before. She unbuttoned her pants and stepped out of them, folding them once and placing them on a flat rock like she was setting a table.

"You coming?" she asked.

I stood there with my mouth open. A bird called somewhere in the trees. The stream kept running.

"This is insane," I said.

"Probably."

She wasn't wrong. Anyone could walk up this trail. A family with kids. A park ranger. A group of German tourists with those stupid walking sticks. But the trail had been empty all morning. We hadn't passed a single person since the parking lot.

I took off my shirt. The air hit my chest and I shivered. She watched me with those green eyes and something in her expression shifted, softened, like she'd been waiting for me to prove something and I'd just passed.

My jeans came off slower. I'm not as graceful as she is. I hopped on one foot trying to get the left leg free and almost fell into a bush. She laughed, that breaking-glass laugh, and it echoed off the trees.

"Very smooth," she said.

"Shut up."

The underwear was the hard part. Not physically. Just the moment. That pause before you commit to something you can't take back. She wasn't wearing any. Of course she wasn't. I'd known that the whole time, I think, and just hadn't let myself know it.

I dropped mine on top of my jeans. Stood up straight.

The forest didn't care. That's the thing about being naked outside. You expect it to feel like something, and it does, but not what you think. Not embarrassment. Not exposure. Just air. Air on parts of you that never get air. The soft skin under your arms. The backs of your knees. That place between your balls and your asshole that you forget exists until a breeze finds it.

Lena walked past me and her arm brushed my stomach. Deliberate. She kept walking down the trail, bare feet on the wet pine needles, and I followed because what else was I going to do.

The ground was cold and soft. Mud squished between my toes. I kept expecting to step on a rock or a sharp stick, but the forest floor here was all moss and old needles, generations of them, a carpet that had been building since before anyone thought to call this place a trail.

She walked slower now. Let me catch up. We moved side by side through a corridor of trees, and I was acutely aware of every sound: my own breathing, hers, the crunch of our feet, the stream getting louder.

"You do this a lot?" I asked.

"First time."

"Bullshit."

She looked at me. That sideways look women give you when they're deciding whether to tell the truth. "Okay. Not first time. But first time with someone else."

I didn't know what to do with that. So I didn't say anything. We walked.

The trail opened up onto a flat area near the stream. Water rushed over smooth stones, clear and fast, maybe eight feet wide. On the other side, the trees started again, darker, older. Lena sat down on a big flat rock at the water's edge and dangled her feet in. She gasped.

"Cold?"

"Perfect," she said.

I sat next to her. Our thighs touched. Her skin was cool from the air but warm underneath. I could smell her now, not perfume, she wasn't wearing any, just skin and sweat and something else, something musky that I felt in my chest before I understood it.

"This is the part," she said, "where you ask me why."

"Why what?"

"Why I wanted to do this."

I looked at the water. A leaf spun past, caught in the current, disappeared around a bend. "I figured you'd tell me if you wanted me to know."

She was quiet for a long time. A minute. Maybe two. The stream filled the silence, and the wind in the pines, and somewhere far off, thunder, low and patient.

"My father used to bring me to forests like this when I was small," she said. "He was a forester. In Bavaria. We'd walk for hours and he'd name every tree, every bird, every mushroom. He knew all of it. And when I was twelve, he got sick. Cancer. It took him in eight months."

I didn't say I'm sorry. She didn't want that.

"After he died, I stopped going into forests. For years. I couldn't. It felt like walking through a graveyard." She pulled her feet out of the water and hugged her knees. "Then last month I turned thirty. And I woke up one morning and thought, he'd be so pissed at me. For wasting all that time being sad in the wrong way."

I put my hand on her back. Between her shoulder blades, where the spine dips in. She didn't flinch. Didn't lean into it either. Just let it be there.

"So this is like a ritual," I said.

"Something like that."

"Why naked?"

She turned to look at me. Her eyes were wet but she wasn't crying. Not exactly. "Because he used to say that shame was the only thing that kept people out of the woods. Shame about their bodies, shame about their thoughts, shame about wanting things. He said the forest doesn't know shame. It just knows what's alive and what's dead."

The thunder again, closer now. The light was changing, going grey-blue, the way it does before a storm. I should have been cold. I wasn't.

"You barely know me," I said.

"I know enough."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have."

She stood up. Water dripped from her feet onto the rock. She held out her hand and I took it, and she pulled me up, and we stood there naked in the clearing with the storm coming and the stream rushing past and her palm against mine, warm and dry despite everything.

She kissed me. Not soft. Not asking. Her mouth was cold from the water and her tongue was warm and I felt it in my knees, that weakness, that stupid beautiful weakness that makes you forget what you were going to say.

When she pulled back, her eyes were still open. Watching me.

"Now we walk back," she said.

"Just like this?"

"Just like this."

The first raindrop hit my shoulder. Then another on my chest. Cold and sharp and real. She laughed and started walking, back up the trail, and I followed her, and the rain came down harder, and I knew, with a certainty that had no logic behind it, that nothing about my life was going to be the same after this afternoon.

The trees swallowed us both.