5. Tamra
TAMRA
He was still asleep when I opened my eyes, and I let myself look.
It was early. The light coming in through the window over his bed was the soft kind, before the sun had really come up, and the whole cabin was quiet.
I was on my side facing him. His arm was heavy across my hip. My leg was pushed between his under the sheet, and I was naked, and he was naked, and I'd slept that way against him all night without waking up once.
I was a different person than I'd been on Friday morning.
I knew it the way you know a thing in your body before your brain catches up.
The woman who'd driven up the mountain with a clipboard two days ago wouldn't have known what to do with the man asleep next to her now.
She'd have panicked. She'd have grabbed her clothes off the floor and run for the bathroom.
She'd have sent a long apologetic email later, framed in professional language, about boundaries.
The woman who woke up against Alec Hollister on Sunday morning did none of those things. She lay still and watched him breathe.
His face was different asleep. Younger. The careful watchfulness he wore around other people was gone, and what was left was just a man with a soft mouth and dark lashes against his cheek.
I had a brief, sharp thought that right now, I was the only woman in the world who got to see him like this. The thought made my throat ache.
He breathed. I breathed.
"Tamra." His eyes didn't open. "How long have you been awake?"
"Not long."
"You're staring at me."
"I am."
His eyes opened. He looked at me with the unhurried face I was getting used to, and his hand on my hip slid up my back and pulled me in against him. He kissed me on the forehead and held me there.
"Morning."
"Morning."
"You sleep?"
"Like a rock."
"Good."
He didn't move for a long minute. He held me against his chest with his hand spread between my shoulder blades, and I could feel his heart under my cheek. It was beating slow and steady and unbothered, like a man waking up next to the woman he was going to wake up next to from now on.
I closed my eyes against his collarbone. "I want to ask you something."
"Ask it."
"What is this?"
He didn't answer right away. His hand kept moving between my shoulder blades.
"What do you want it to be?"
"I asked first."
"It's you and me, Tamra. It's been you and me since you walked across my gravel with a clipboard. I'm not going to pretend it's anything else."
I lifted my head off his chest.
He looked at me.
"I live in Hartsville," I said.
"It's twenty minutes."
"I have a job."
"I know."
"You have a job."
"I know."
"I have an apartment with a lease."
"We'll figure it out. People figure it out. My brother lives at the river company, and his girlfriend was an entomology student from Raleigh when he met her, and they figured it out. We’ll figure it out too."
I lay there with my hand on his chest and let that settle. "Your brother?"
"Bishop. He owns the river company down the mountain."
"There's another Hollister?"
"There's another Hollister."
"And he met his girlfriend?"
"Yeah, and they figured it out."
He kissed me. He kissed me slow and full and without rushing, and when he pulled back, he was smiling—the first full smile I'd seen on his face. I put my hand against his jaw because I wanted to feel it move.
"You're smiling," I said. "You haven't smiled at me until right now."
"I've been busy."
I laughed. He pulled me back against his chest and held me there while I laughed against his collarbone. I felt his chest shake under my cheek as he laughed too, and we lay there a while longer and didn't move.
"I want to show you something," he finally said.
"What?"
"The cliff."
I went still. "The one you wouldn't show me yesterday?"
"That one."
"Alec."
"You don't have to jump. You don't have to do anything but look at it. I want you to see it."
"Why?"
"Because I want you to see how I make my living, and because the view from the top is something else. And because if you ever want to, I want you to know it's there."
I lifted my head and looked at him. "If I ever want to."
"If you ever want to."
"No pressure."
"None."
"You'd be there."
"I'd be in the water below you. I always go first."
"You always go first."
"That's the job."
I pressed my forehead to his.
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Show me the cliff."
He pulled on jeans. He found me one of his T-shirts and a pair of his boxers that were too big and made me laugh again. He tied a knot in the side of the shirt at my hip so it wouldn't hang down to my knees. Then he made us coffee and we sat together at the counter, drinking it.
We drove down the ridge with the windows open.
The cliff was on the back of his property, down the track he'd walked me partway along yesterday. This time, he drove me past the overlook, all the way to a turnaround above the river. The sun was up now. The air had the clean cool weight of an August morning before the dog days came back.
He took my hand and walked me to the edge.
I looked.
Forty feet down, the river was wide and green and deep, and the pool below the cliff was still and dark in the early light. A flat slab of rock on the far bank was where he said the jumpers swam to.
The drop was clean. The water was deeper than it looked. The whole thing was beautiful in a way I hadn't been prepared for, and I stood at the edge with his hand in mine and looked down at it and felt something I'd never felt before.
I wanted to do it.
I wanted to do it the way I'd wanted to drive up the mountain Friday morning. The way I'd wanted to put my hands on his chest in the dark water. The way I'd wanted, two years ago, to walk up to a man in a hardware store and ask him about chain.
"I'm going to jump," I said.
He looked at me for a long count. "You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Tell me what scares you."
"All of it."
"Tell me what you want."
"To do it anyway."
He nodded once. He took both my hands. He walked me through it—the drop, the breath, the feet-first, the entry, the surface—and he answered three questions I hadn't known I was going to ask.
He pulled his T-shirt off over his head and tossed it back toward the truck.
I did the same with his, left in his boxers and nothing else, and the morning air on my skin was the last thing I noticed before he kissed me one time on the mouth and let go and stepped to the edge.
"Watch me first."
"Okay."
He jumped.
I watched him go. The clean line of him through the air. The clean way he sliced through the water. He surfaced and shook his head and looked up at me on the ledge, and he didn't wave me down. He just floated and waited.
I stood at the edge.
The woman with the clipboard wasn't there anymore.
I'd left her somewhere on the mountain—I wasn't sure where, exactly.
Maybe in the gravel lot on Friday morning.
Maybe in the dark water on Saturday night.
Maybe in his bed this morning, with his hand spread between my shoulder blades and his heart steady under my cheek.
I jumped.
The fall was fast and slow at the same time. The air came up at me. The water came up at me. I had time to think—oh—and then I was in, the cold closing over my head, and I was kicking up toward the light and the surface, and I came up gasping into the morning sun.
Alec was right there. Three feet from me. Treading water with both hands open between us, ready to come at me if I needed him and not coming at me if I didn't.
I laughed.
I couldn't help it. Something had shifted in me, and there wasn't anything else to do with it, so I laughed, and Alec laughed too. He closed the three feet between us and pulled me against him in the deep water. My legs wrapped around his waist. I kissed him with river water running down my face.
"There she is," he said.
"There I am."
"Tamra?"
"Yeah."
"Come back next weekend."
"Yes."
"And the weekend after that."
"Yes."
"And every weekend until we figure out which side of the mountain we're going to live on."
"Yes."
He kissed me. He kissed me in the deep cold water with the morning sun on us, and the heat of him through the water was the only thing in the world I needed.
Then he swam us to the flat slab on the far bank, helped me out, and walked me barefoot up the trail that wound back to the top of the cliff.
The truck was where we'd left it. Our shirts were where he'd tossed them, dry in the grass.
We pulled them back on over wet skin, and he drove me up to the cabin so I could change into my own clothes—folded on a chair where he'd set them sometime while I was asleep.
I drove home Sunday evening.
I drove down the mountain alone because I had work Monday morning and a life in Hartsville I wanted to bring with me into this new thing.
Alec stood in his gravel lot in a clean T-shirt and watched me back out.
The last thing I saw in my rearview was him lifting one hand and not waving—just lifting it, holding it, until I came around the bend and he was gone.
I drove down a different woman than the one with the clipboard who'd come up Friday morning.
I knew it. I could feel it in my hands on the wheel. I could feel it in the way I breathed.
I was twenty minutes from him. That was nothing. That was a drive.
I'd see him Friday.