Chapter 39
Clementine
Our training schedule doesn’t feel like training anymore. It feels like dating.
With Alec, the stopwatch always ends up forgotten.
Hikes spill into banana boats by the fire with Mozart.
Kayak sessions end with us plunging into the river.
Breakfast at Daisy’s Diner before my shifts at Got Wood?
, where Alec loiters in the aisles pretending he needs screws we already have.
Evenings with Yura and Finn at the table, Monopoly somehow always stacked in Alec’s favor.
“How was work today?” Alec says when he parks in front of my place.
“The mayor came in to buy supplies to start building the Wild Trails stage,” I say. “The river’s packed. With twenty grand on the line, every outdoorsy person within a hundred miles is showing up to train. Cody’s thrilled—we’re selling out of everything.”
“I’m sure that has less to do with need and more to do with the woman selling them stuff.” He cocks his brow at me.
“Someone sounds jealous!”
“I don’t get jealous.”
“Sureeee,” I tease, not ready to say good night. “You wanna come upstairs?”
He doesn’t answer or hesitate. Just shuts off the truck and opens my door.
By the time we’re climbing the steps above the garage, I babble, “I’ve never had a boy over before.”
“Should I go ask Margaret for permission?”
“Oh, please don’t. Cody’s bike is outside, which is basically the backwoods version of a sock on the tentpole.”
“Good thing. I was going to put a sock on your door, but I guess I get to keep it.”
“So presumptuous.”
“Bold sentiment from someone who made me perform minor surgery on her ass last weekend.”
Our training usually ends with us finding some excuse to touch each other again.
A “stretch” that turns into me straddling him in the grass.
A “warm-down” that turns into sex against a tree, hence the splinter.
We’ve had sex in a tent, in the woods, even in the damn river.
But never in a bed. If he isn’t making a bed for himself at the lodge, then I can give him one here, at least for tonight.
“Oh my god.” I nearly drop the keys. “You’re not seriously bringing up the splinter.”
“Hard to forget.” He leans closer. “Not every man would rise to the occasion.”
“You sucked one splinter out of my butt cheek, you don’t get a medal.”
“I think I deserve at least a patch.”
“Well, good news for you, no bark up here.”
“Too bad.” He grins, and I’m already warm all over.
The truth is, I never really invited guys over when I lived in New York, either.
Not after the disaster of my second year, when one roommate snuck in a guy who just never left.
He ate our groceries, hogged the bathroom, and basically became our sixth roommate until someone staged an intervention.
After that, no boys were allowed, and I didn’t complain.
But now? Now I want Alec here. In my space. In a bed with me, even if the mattress is older than I am, and the futon’s stains are hidden under three thrifted blankets.
“Thought we could watch one of your documentaries tonight,” I say, fumbling with the lock. “And I could cook you my specialty.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“Butter noodles.”
“How could I possibly say no to that?”
When the door finally swings open, nerves flutter in my chest like I’m introducing him to a secret version of myself. The apartment is tiny, with a galley kitchen, a bathroom with a sink barely big enough for a toothbrush, and my room in the back, with a queen bed squeezed beside a chipped dresser.
“It’s small, but—”
He steps in, hand brushing the futon. “It’s very you.”
And for the first time in forever, I don’t feel embarrassed about that. I like being me.
The TV screen glows icy blue, the only light in the room.
An Icelandic glacier sprawls across it, ridges glittering like knives.
Alec is there too, not just beside me on the futon but on the screen, five years younger, leaner, sharper, moving across an aluminum ladder bridge so flimsy it makes my stomach pitch.
“How on earth are you walking on that?” I ask, twirling my fork but not taking a bite.
“Yeah, you gotta to summit Hvannadalshnúkur.” He’s in a black crewneck and sweats, and his posture is maddeningly relaxed given what’s going on in this documentary.
“We used it as a warm-up before Vatnajokull. God, I don’t miss those bridges.
” He flicks his fork toward the image of him moving across the horizontal death contraption.
“Step wrong, you’re gone. Straight into a chasm. ”
“That’s horrifying.”
“Look,” he says, leaning forward, pointing again with his fork.
“You’re clipped on leashes with the carabiners.
Finn’s right behind me, and he’s always got me.
” The camera pans to Finn, who’s smiling in the snow.
They have helmets on, but what is a helmet to do with a drop into a hole that seems to have no bottom?
When Alec told me about K2, I couldn’t imagine it, but seeing it here, I can picture the drop that wrecked Finn.
They move like they are walking at Disneyland, not over a thin metal bridge that creaks with every step.
The boots on their feet are massive, jarring metal spikes biting into the ground and over the rung of the ladder.
A shiver zips down my spine. “So, if you’d fallen—”
“Finn would’ve caught me, obviously.”
But my chest feels tight. Because it’s not obvious. Because on-screen, all I can see is him moving over nothingness, the void ready to eat him alive. And he looks so young—careless in a way the Alec beside me isn’t anymore.
He finally turns, catches me watching him. I straighten, force my expression smooth.
“You’d maybe like climbing,” he says. “You’ve got good balance.”
“I’ll take the compliment, but I’ll stick with butter pasta.”
We finish the bowls, and I lick my fork clean just to keep from screaming out how insane all of this is, how insane he is.
Alec washes our dishes immediately, stacking them neatly on the drying rack.
A man who can dangle from glaciers like they’re jungle gyms but can’t leave a dirty plate in the sink.
What a man.
The fear presses under my ribs, hot and insistent. I can’t sit in it, can’t keep staring at the screen where he’s dangling over a void.
The documentary cuts to a wide shot of the ridge, wind tearing across the glacier, and I can’t breathe.
This is what he does for fun. The man I’ve been straddling in the grass and laughing with over banana boats…
he treats staring down death like a casual hobby.
Yura was right. This is nothing like my grandpa did. No way.
The camera jolts as Alec falls from the ladder. My heart lurches, but he catches himself, hanging from the lip of the metal by nothing but two gloved fingers. Just two. His whole body dangles before he hikes himself up in one smooth motion.
My brain doesn’t know what to do with the information. ’Cause, yeah, he could’ve died…but the way he just pulled himself up with two fingers.
Fingers that have been inside of me. That grip. That strength.
“You did that? With just your fingers?”
Alec doesn’t even blink. “Yeah.”
“Can you still?”
“Definitely.”
“What are you waiting for? Show me!” I shove him off my futon.
“What do I get for it?”
“Bragging rights?”
His mouth twitches. “Pathetic.”
“Fine. The satisfaction of proving me wrong.”
“Tempting,” he says flatly. “But no. Try again. I wanna see what you can do.”
My jaw tightens. Of course he won’t just take the win. He wants to drag it out, wants me squirming, wants me to offer.
It shouldn’t thrill me, but it does.
What do I even have? A thirty-two fouetté sequence.
A penché so deep my nose hits the floor?
I could arabesque across the futon or snap into a triple pirouette.
All the things I’ve trained my whole life to perfect, and none of them feel like enough against the way he just hauled his whole body up on two fingers.
Which leaves me with exactly one trick worth throwing on the table. The kind of move that isn’t in any ballet manual but might just knock that smug look off his face.
“Best I can offer is a standing split, leg over my head, and you already saw that in my gran’s kitchen. Not sure it tops your finger trick, but it’s flexible in…other ways.”
“That’s your bargaining chip?” He strolls toward the doorway that leads to my bedroom.
The way he fills the frame makes the whole apartment feel smaller.
“It’s a good one.”
“Think of something better.” His eyes flick down my body like he’s already imagined ten things I could offer.
He lifts his hand, two fingers, pointer and middle, pressed together, and my stomach doesn’t just drop, it plummets straight through the floor.
Then he grips the doorframe, and with the kind of terrifying ease that makes no sense in the human world, he pulls his entire body upward.
His whole five-eleven frame suspended on nothing but tendon and bone and willpower.
Muscles coil, forearms as tight as rope, veins snaking to the surface like lightning. His shirt rucks up, flashing a hard line of abs and the curve of his hips.
Every rational thought I have short-circuits. My inner ballerina catalogs the mechanics—lats firing, scapula pinned, knuckles white around the doorframe—but my cavewoman brain? She’s already dropped her club and is fanning herself in the corner.
My thighs squeeze together on instinct. Heat slams through me so fast it almost feels unfair. Because there’s strong, and then there’s this.
I gape, words scrambled. “That was so hot.”
“For that, you’re going to have to offer me something better than a wall split.”
“You’re getting what I’ve offered, and that’s final,” I fire back, even though my throat is tight, and my pulse won’t quit sprinting.
He smirks, still hanging there, shoulders broad, body taut as a bowstring. “I can do the splits too, you know.”
“Absolutely not. You’re way too bulky.”