Chapter Fifteen
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“D ID YOU DECIDE which dress you’re going to wear tonight?”
Rory took a deep breath and tried to squash the butterflies in her stomach.
She was staring up at the rope. Because today was the day she was going to attempt to climb. Which felt like a metaphor, because she had her date tonight.
She and Gideon had been working at this. At the climbing thing. And then yesterday there had been the shopping trip and...
If I said I was going to kiss you...
She was really hoping that she was going to make it to the top. Because it felt somehow inextricably tied to the date.
To the weekend camping trip.
But most of all the date, and she had to stop thinking about what Gideon had said.
There were only just over three weeks left until she went to Boston. She had to get this kiss. She had to climb this rope. She had to climb that mountain. Dammit, there was so much climbing. “I will probably wear the black one,” she said, stretching her arms out. “Because it’s sexy.”
The minute she said that she felt embarrassed heat rising in her cheeks.
“It is that,” he said.
Their eyes clashed.
Telling him about the whole thing with the frat boys had been...a moment.
The way that he’d said that to her... The way...
She felt undone by it. That husky promise in his voice. That maybe wasn’t a promise. And combined with what Quinn had said to her yesterday, she was just feeling a bit feeble.
Because she had a date tonight with a man she remembered only as an antagonist, who was pleasant enough to look at, but who hadn’t lit her up inside by any stretch of the imagination when they had seen each other again last week.
Not like Gideon.
And sometimes she felt like they were hurtling toward something impossible to ignore. And then she thought... She was a grade A coward. She could ignore whatever she wanted. She was great at ignoring things. It was like one of the things she was best at. Along with quitting. Along with avoiding.
“Well, thank you,” she said, her throat scratchy.
“The other two are very pretty. The green is nice. But it looks more like you’re going on a picnic with your sisters.”
“Yes. A picnic-sister dress. I think I’ll avoid that since I want a guy to jump my bones.”
The way that he looked at her was fierce. “Is that right?”
She hadn’t gotten this far with him by holding back, and she felt driven by something now. By the impending date. By what Gideon had said to her. By the restless need she felt whenever she looked at him. By Quinn’s warning. By the impossibility of it all.
“I do. Yeah, I mean that. I would like that. Who doesn’t want that? Everybody wants sex. It is a fundamental truth of humanity. People do crazy things to get sex. Empires have been destroyed for sex. Helen of Troy. The face that launched a thousand ships.”
“I didn’t realize that I had signed up for the world’s weirdest sex talk. But yeah. Admittedly, people are notoriously poor decision-makers when it comes to sex, but I didn’t take you for one.”
“I went to high school with him. Maybe it’s a long-held fantasy of mine.”
“Is it?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Just climb the rope, Rory.”
She let out a long, slow sigh.
Nothing bad was going to happen to her. Now, on that climb they were taking tomorrow, something might happen. They had to hike on an extremely narrow path. And she could fall to her death. She had pretty much gone over that a hundred times.
So, that was a very real possibility. For the rope, though, the odds were she wasn’t going to get up high enough to fall and hurt herself. So it wasn’t harming herself that she had to be concerned about. It was just humiliation. And what was a little humiliation in front of Gideon?
“You won’t think less of me if I fail?”
She hadn’t realized she’d said it out loud until his face shifted.
“There is no failure here. I have trained men who were already at a certain level of physical conditioning to do this kind of thing. I’m good at it. But you admittedly don’t have rope-climbing experience. If you’re not able to get to the top, it’s not a failure. It just shows where you are right now. And if you want to keep working at it, you could. But there’s no failing. You worked really hard to get where you are, and wherever you are today is just a progress report. Join a gym when you get to Boston, keep going till you’re happy with where you’re at. This is the problem. You know your own strengths, and you know what you really want. Rory, I think you must’ve read two hundred books that year that I drove you to school.”
“Two hundred and five.”
“I bet you some of those people that could whip up that rope in gym didn’t read one . Count me in that camp. Everybody has their different strengths. And they have to work at other things. I’ve read more in the last couple of years than I ever have. Mostly nonfiction, but I discovered something that I enjoyed. I’m never going to be as fast as you, or it might take a few more years of practice, and maybe I will be. But it’s not inherently better or worse. It’s just everybody has those natural inclinations, and you can build them as you want. And no, I wouldn’t think less of you if you failed. But you can’t fail today. Just showing up was already a success.”
“Why aren’t you a motivational speaker?” She was only kind of kidding.
“Because I’ve been through a lot of things that are not particularly motivational.”
“But you are standing here,” she said, not having any idea what he meant, but knowing it didn’t matter. Because he was an inspiration all the same.
“Yeah, but I crawled over. Across broken glass. So. People don’t really like to hear that, or watch you keep on picking glass out of your skin.” She was about to say something to that, when he regrouped and changed tone. “Come on. Up the rope.”
She looked up, and she grabbed hold of the rope.
She remembered what he had told her, what he had shown her. He used his feet to help, and he said that she would probably need that. Because her lower body would likely naturally be stronger than her upper body.
And so she began to go. Climbing, pulling up with her arms and following up with a scooch from her legs.
Up, and up. Her shoulders were screaming. A week of lifting tiny weights was hardly enough to prepare her to haul her whole ass up a rope.
Thank God it was kind of a skinny ass because it wasn’t that heavy to lift.
Halfway, she thought she was going to throw up. Or simply let go.
She felt herself beginning to slip. “You can let go,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
And she did.
But it didn’t feel like quitting. It felt like something else. Like being okay with a limit. Accepting where she was at.
And knowing that someone would be there for her no matter what.
That he wasn’t waiting to humiliate her. To hurt her, to step away, to pour beer on her.
She let go, and she trusted him.
And she landed right in his arms.
H IS HEART WAS beating fast.
He had been a little bit worried about catching her.
Only because he knew it was so critical.
Not just for him—for her.
There was something healing about this coaching he’d been doing with her the last week. But it was more than that.
He could feel himself stitching a bond between him and Rory with golden thread, and in some regards it freaked him the hell out.
Because it just couldn’t happen.
But he was holding her now, and he had caught her. And that made him feel like she might be his.
She was soft. Her hair a reddish gold halo in the sunlight.
“Rory,” he said, his voice rough. “You did good.”
She looked up at him with wide, searching eyes.
“Did I?”
“Yeah,” he said.
He touched her cheek, and without thinking drew his thumb down to her lower lip and traced it. She closed her eyes.
“Rory,” he said, her name a whisper.
Then her eyes snapped open, and she wiggled out of his hold.
“I’ve got that date. Tonight. And now I have sore shoulders.”
“Did you need your shoulders?”
“I don’t really know. I don’t know. Because I haven’t been on a date. You know. Ever. So, maybe I will need my shoulders. Maybe.”
“I hope that you check off climb the rope on your list.”
“I didn’t climb it. I let go.”
“You climbed it. You tried. You gave it everything, and you let go when it was safe.”
But he didn’t feel safe. He felt fucking wasted.
Torn apart.
He had caught her. And that made him want to roar. Made him want to growl in victory. Because he’d done it. What he needed to. He’d been there.
But it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t something to feel triumphant about.
He was still the man who had shattered under pressure. Who had destroyed his own marriage.
A disaster. It had been said.
A selfish bastard. That had also been said.
You couldn’t keep it together for me? Not even for me? You aren’t the man I married.
And he’d been selfish yesterday, watching her try on dresses. Saying what he’d said to her.
Catching her. Holding her.
He took a breath and watched Rory as she shook her arms out.
“I hope you get what you want out of it,” he said. “The date, I mean.”
It would be better if she did. Better she did hook up with that guy. If she got exactly what she was looking for.
Because he had to stop this.
“Well, I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow when we go on the hike.”
“Great. I can’t wait to hear about it.”
“I can’t wait to tell you.”
She turned away from him, and he felt like something inside him had torn in half. He couldn’t explain it. Didn’t want to.
But he did find it all kinds of inconvenient that he was suddenly having feelings that he hadn’t had for years, with a woman whose heart he simply couldn’t risk.