Chapter Eight
Eight
Tyler was grinning like a middle schooler with a new phone. “Oh man,” he breathed, his voice laced with awe. He reached into his pack and started to take out the blindfolds again.
Alejandro placed a warning hand on his forearm and shook his head.
“I think we can be done with that part of the plan.” Lulu rolled her eyes in relief and sent up a thanks to the gods of common sense and to Alejandro’s parents, wherever they might be, for raising a son with such reasonable boundaries.
Bill, whom Lulu only now noticed was dressed in summer camo gear—in fact, only now noticed him, period—waved for the group to follow.
His knobby knees protruded from his gray-green shorts as he bounded up the stairs set into the rock alongside the waterfall.
Gwendy pitched herself up the stairs after him, and Ariana and Alejandro followed.
“Lu,” Tyler said, his voice low. “Can we talk a sec?” He glanced at the group, who continued to trudge toward the top, leaving them in privacy.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he faced her.
“Back there on the trail. That was my mistake. I keep…messing up. It was a trust walk, and I stepped away. I’m sorry,” he said, his voice steady.
Surely, she could forgive him for stepping away an instant to clear a branch out of the way. Lulu exhaled. “I shouldn’t have blown up at you like that. It’s just, this is all a little…out of my comfort zone,” she admitted.
He nodded. “Me too. I mean, it’s been a long time since I’ve done much outside of playing pickleball. I guess we’re not used to doing this kind of thing.”
“Me? No. But you do crazy stuff all the time.”
Tyler’s brow dropped too late to shield Lulu from catching the vulnerable wave that passed over his features.
She remembered the reason he was on the trip—kicked off the pro tour for pulling a wild, flaming-paddle stunt.
And she imagined for the first time in years that maybe they were not so different.
That he, like her, might be feeling out of sorts and worried about the future, with their jobs both hanging in the balance.
“All of this is just pushing my buttons,” Lulu admitted, softening her tone with her new realization. “I don’t like heights, and I don’t like surprises. And when heights are the surprise…well, I guess I overreacted.”
“Nah.” He shook his head. “You just reacted.”
His response was so genuine, so validating and unexpected that she looked up at him.
Sunlight caught the light brown flecks in his dark eyes and she…
reacted. Not with her head, but with the shimmer of attraction that rippled to her belly from his gaze, and she shot her eyes to the ground before he could read the confused feelings swirling in them.
“I mean, I get that you’re afraid. I would be, too. If I had any common sense,” he joked.
“We better get up there,” Lulu said, pushing her light tone to the forefront like a screen. “Before Gwendy tosses Bill over the edge to make way for husband number five.”
But Tyler didn’t budge. Instead, his hand reached to connect with her shoulder. “Lu,” he said. She stilled, her energy calming with the comfort of his friendly touch.
His voice, low and steady, grounded her.
“Remember how they offered you a spot on the varsity tennis team and you didn’t want to do it?
” She nodded. Lulu had been a freshman in high school, the youngest player to make varsity.
“You were afraid that they were all better than you. And they were. But they were older than you, so that made sense.”
She remembered. But really, she had worried that she wouldn’t be perfect. That they would see her for all her tennis flaws. And that would be embarrassing.
“But you joined anyway,” he reminded her. “And you didn’t need to worry about being the youngest or letting them down. You just worked hard, and you did it.”
And the truth was that it was Tyler who had encouraged her, and had helped her climb her way to success.
They sweated it out after school, training on the courts.
The hours flew because it felt more like play than work.
As scared as she was, it was Tyler’s faith in her that helped her step into a space where she could play with the big kids, even if she wasn’t perfect.
A month into training she was holding her own, and by her sophomore year, she was the soul of the team.
“This challenge that Alejandro’s got lined up for us,” Tyler said, “isn’t going to be easy. But just give it a chance.” And what she understood was the subtext layered into his voice: Give me a chance.
And maybe she could. There had been a time when Tyler had been a good friend, a loyal friend, and a support to her. Now, his encouragement made her wonder if the generous parts of Tyler had grown up more than she gave him credit for.
Tyler tipped his forehead down and hooked her eyes with his. “You know I got you.”
It came out like “I gotch-you,” and the phrase pinged in her brain.
“I gotch-you,” he’d said, holding her in his arms when she sprained her ankle her sophomore year a week before the varsity championship.
“I gotch-you,” when she failed a chem final because she hadn’t slept a wink the night before, bereft at the loss of her dear cat, Ruby.
“I gotch-you,” he used to say. When he really meant it.
His words reached her and had the effect of tying an enormous helium balloon onto the heaviness that had worried her chest. She absorbed his optimism, looking away before he could read the impact of his words.
They tromped up the narrow steps, Lulu blowing out her anxiety through her nose as she watched her feet near the sheer edges of the steps.
By the time she made it to the top, her heart was racing from nerves and exertion.
The climb had bordered on harrowing, but she had made it to the summit, and she had to admit, the bird’s-eye view was pretty spectacular.
From up above, flat rocks rushed to meet the overhang, where the steady stream of water sped up before plunging over the edge.
Ariana, camera poised, stood boots-deep in the low river, leaning her body over the edge.
Lulu had a terrific urge to tug her away from the precipice and fling her to safety.
The sensation triggered thoughts of Zoe, and she vowed to check for a signal and call her daughter when she was on stable ground.
Clapping Alejandro on the shoulder, Tyler asked, “Okay, Alejandro, my friend. You are in charge of Part Two.”
Their guide began, “There’s nothing to fear here, because we have each other’s backs.
During this next activity, we’ll continue to build trust. We are all going to support each other throughout the activity.
” Alejandro spoke his last sentence more as a command than a statement, and Lulu straightened.
Because Lulu was a one-woman support machine.
She supported her toddler. She supported her students. She could do support. All day long.
“So what we’re going to do,” Alejandro continued, “is rappel down this waterfall.”
“Aw, hell no,” Gwendy proclaimed. She took a step toward the precipice and peered over the edge. “Hell no to the two-thousandth degree.”
Tyler clapped his hands together. “Let’s go!” Then, with a quick glance in Lulu’s direction, he rephrased, “Let’s go safely!”
Lulu pursed her lips. Hard no. She would hang back to go last. And then walk down the stairs. Good plan, Lulu, she congratulated herself, all the while forcing an expression that she thought conveyed that she was interested and eager to throw herself off a cliff for fun.
“Rappelling is exciting, but as always, it’s safety and security first. So let’s meet our team.
” Alejandro waltzed the group around a few trees that towered over the edge of the falls.
The sound of footsteps approached from the sliver of a wooded path, and an instant later, two young guides appeared.
The fit pair looked like they walked off the cover of one of those outdoorsy magazines that you find at the dentist’s office and think, yeah, right.
Like people do that kind of shit for fun.
“I want to introduce you to our activity coordinators at Diablo Falls, Quique and Ana-Sofia,” Alejandro said.
Ana-Sofia’s tank top hugged her slender frame, and she wore the kind of khaki pants that could zip off at the knee in case she had a shorts-requiring emergency. Quique wore the same pants, but with a rugged cotton T.
But what struck Lulu most was the nerve-racking appearance of their accessories.
Blue hard hats and belted rappelling harnesses, complete with metal clips and ropes and some clampy thing that Lulu guessed might be used as a brake, or possibly for killing a really big mosquito.
Two enormous lengths of rope coiled haphazardly near their feet.
This—Lulu narrowed her eyes—could not be good.
Second of all. Where the hell had these adventure-crazed models come from?
As if in answer to her thoughts, Ana-Sofia piped up. “Welcome. Quique and I are excited to host your group here in our home at Diablo Falls. Tonight, you’ll be our guests.”
They lived up here? Lulu imagined the only things that could live here were snakes and scorpions. She scoured the ground cover for movement.
Quique passed out clipboards with waivers as complex as instructions for IKEA furniture assembly.
Numb and distracted, she signed as Quique began hooking his own belt harness into a system of ropes and clips.
Her gaze followed the ropes to where they looped through metal grommets in the rocks and dropped over the sharp lip of the cliffside beside the rushing waterfall. Nuh-uh, Lulu thought.
Without preamble, Quique gripped the rope and edged his feet along the ridge until he angled himself backward. “So, what you want to do here is sort of cantilever yourself over the edge.”
“Can’t a-leave ’er; can’t a-leave without ’er,” Tyler quipped.