Woods of Desire

The dirt road unspools beneath Lila's tires in a ribbon of ochre dust, rutted and stubborn, swallowing the little hatchback whole every time she hits a pothole. She doesn't slow down. She likes the jolt of it, the way her teeth click together and her hair whips loose from its knot through the open window. Three hours of highway monotony have finally given way to something alive—trees pressing close on either side, their canopy stitching the sky into fragments of gold and green, the air thickening with the mineral tang of creek water and the sweet rot of fallen leaves.

She inhales like she's starving for it. Maybe she is.

Six months of staring at blank canvases will do that to a person—hollow her out, leave her grasping for anything that smells like rain instead of turpentine, anything that doesn't remind her of the gallery owner's polite, disappointed voice asking when she might have *new work*. Lila doesn't know what she's hunting for out here, exactly. Inspiration, maybe. Or just permission to stop performing the version of herself that knows what she's doing.

The GPS gave up twenty minutes ago, swallowed by the canopy's static, but the hand-drawn map tucked in her glove…

Morning arrives gray-gold through the pines, mist still clinging to the lower branches like something reluctant to let go of the night. Lila wakes to the smell of coffee drifting up from the lodge kitchen and the distant clatter of a dozen other guests finding their hiking boots, their water bottles, their enthusiasm for a six-mile loop trail that the retreat brochure optimistically calls "moderate." She dresses in layers—a tank top, a flannel she can tie around her waist once the sun climbs high enough to burn off the chill—and braids her hair back loose and quick, not bothering with a mirror. She doesn't need one to know what she looks like. She knows exactly what she looks like: a woman who slept four hours and doesn't regret a minute of the time she spent awake instead.

Rhea is already on the porch when Lila comes down, standing a little apart from the cluster of other guests, dressed in pressed khaki shorts and a moisture-wicking shirt so technical-looking it might as well have a spec sheet stapled to the sleeve. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail so severe it looks like it might be rationing blood flow to her scalp. She has, Lila notices with a private, helpless grin,…

The second night's fire burns bigger than the first—communal this time, the whole retreat gathered in a loose horseshoe of camp chairs and blankets, someone's bluetooth speaker murmuring low folk music beneath the crackle of burning pine. Hollis has produced three bottles of red wine from somewhere, decanted now into an assortment of mismatched mugs, and the group has settled into that particular, golden looseness that follows a long day of exertion and a longer evening of unearned relaxation. Stories circulate. Someone tells an elaborate, probably embellished tale about getting lost on a different trail entirely two summers back. Someone else produces marshmallows, and the ensuing debate over proper toasting technique grows more heated than the fire itself.

Lila claims a spot on one of the fallen logs ringing the pit, tucking her legs beneath her, mug cradled warm between both palms. She doesn't engineer where Rhea sits. She doesn't have to. Rhea simply arrives there, a few minutes into the gathering, lowering herself onto the same length of log with the particular, deliberate casualness of someone pretending the choice means nothing, and the log is not especially wide, and so…