Thirty
Petra gave Rilla and Walker a ride back to the Valley, spending the whole time talking with Walker in the front seat about some trip they’d done together. They laughed and reminisced and Rilla found herself slinking farther into the dark backseat like a forgotten child. Finally, Petra dropped them off in the Camp 4 parking lot.
Rilla waved goodbye as Petra pulled off.
Walker pulled out a smoke. “Want to go look at El Cap?” he asked.
Her pulse jumped. “Sure. I’m not dressed for it though.” Her arms were chilly in the cool night air and she was still wearing shorts and sandals. At least her underwear was dry, thanks to the dryer at the Grove.
“You can borrow a sweatshirt. I just did laundry.”
“Oh, what, I won’t get the pheromones of greatness?”
He laughed. “I don’t need no pheromones.”
They turned off the path for his tent and he put his finger to his mouth.
Rilla took the smoke, waiting as Walker disappeared up the slope into his tent.
It was late—the entire camp was asleep, and fires were put out or burned down to embers. But she wasn’t a bit tired. Adrenaline hummed; and when she closed her eyes she saw his long, lean body stretching out in the sunshine.
He was back in only a minute and handed her a worn hoodie. She slipped it over her head and it came down over her thighs and off her hands, warm and soft and smelling like clean laundry soap and dusty canvas.
“I brought you a headlamp, if you need it,” he said, tucking something into her front pocket. “How’s training?”
“Training for what?” She asked.
“The Nose. I mean, tonight wasn’t the moment you realized you wanted to climb it, right?”
She laughed and slipped her hands into the pocket of his hoodie. “I didn’t realize it was obvious.”
He laughed. “Rilla, if you looked at a man with half as much lust in your eyes as you looked at that granite, you’d put him to his knees.”
She frowned. “That makes me sound—”
“No,” he interrupted. “I mean you want it. You can tell.”
“Well, that’s awkward.” She laughed. But if he could tell what she wanted, how come he couldn’t tell she wanted him? She followed him off the asphalt and into the darkened trees. They lost the moon in the wood, and she blindly reached for him and found his back.
“Can you see all right?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“You can turn on the headlamp if you need to.”
“If I just follow you, I’ll be fine.” She stumbled over a root and crashed into him. “I think.”
He reached behind and took her by the hand, this time letting his warm fingers twine with hers.
“I never realized how big your hands are,” she said. “How do you get these paws into those little cracks?”
He laughed. “Only in climbing is wow, big hands, not a good thing.”
“I’m just saying . . . those tiny crimps.” She ran her thumb across the top of his fingertips, smiling at the way his pulse fluttered in his wrist. “And your drawings. They’re so intricate.” She hadn’t seen them since the time she’d accidentally picked up his journal, but she wondered about it. She wondered what he drew and what he wrote. But it felt too personal to ask.
“Some things are harder. But then I can reach things you can’t. Your awkward off-width is my perfect hand jam. Your perfect hand jam is my finger crack. Everything is equal on the wall. And it’s not like my hands are freakish and can’t hold a pencil.”
“It’s not equal,” she said. “But I get what you mean.”
He squeezed her hand and pulled her on a bend in the path. “Mountains do not care who you are, they will kill you all the same. That’s what I meant.”
“At home the mountains always felt personal,” she said. “Here it feels like they don’t even notice you. They feel young and brazen and new. Not old and full of secrets and shadows. It’s beautiful. Like, beyond beautiful. Every day feels like a dream drenched in sunshine. I love being here. But sometimes I miss that old feeling of . . . brutality, or something. Where everything is terrible and great all at once. It feels strange to live without it. I didn’t even know I would miss something like that. I wonder sometimes if I am that, and that’s what I like about climbing.”
“Stop,” he groaned. “Ugh. Why you gotta be like this?” He pulled her under his arm, tight to his chest.
It was too easy to roll into his hug, to slip around in his arms and push up on her toes with her face tilted toward him in a patch of moonlight pouring through the silver leafed oaks.
They still held hands, twisted behind her back. He pushed her fist into the small of her back, driving her closer.
The breeze rustled the leaves above them.
She felt his breath pull and ease. His chest expanded and relaxed. The rhythm. A cadence. His gaze flickered over her face and came back to her eyes, his long body hard and alive against hers. She closed her eyes and her lips parted in a smile.
“There it is,” he whispered. “Open your eyes.”
But she couldn’t. She tightened her mouth, trying to bite down on the smile.
“Open,” he whispered, softly kissing between her eyes. A flush of heat drove down to the base of her spine.
She laughed. “No.” But she parted her eyes just enough to reach for his neck in the moonlight and pull his mouth to hers.
He kissed her slowly.
She pushed back with urgency.
He pulled away, his laugh tinged with a growl and he cinched her fist tighter into her back, against him. This time he kissed her with that intensity that she’d seen rippling under his skin since the bus stop in Merced. An intensity that made her stagger, even as he held her pinned.
It felt like a thing she expected to know, suddenly bigger and wider and taller, the world expanding inside her own chest.
It was almost too much. She needed to breathe. She pulled away.
He held her there as she caught her breath. His thumb circled lazily on her neck.
“You okay?” he whispered. “Am I okay?”
The oaks rustled a papery sound.
“Yeah,” she breathed. “More.”
The sky turned pink and found them still kissing in the shadows of the black oaks.