Chapter 2
Kai
Levi is doing the thing where he leans against the trailer and watches me work while pretending he’s supervising.
“You missed a strap,” he says.
“I didn’t miss a strap.”
“I’m just saying. If I were rigging that raft.”
“You’d still be rigging it at noon. And talking.”
He grins. This is how we operate. I insult his work ethic. He insults my social skills. We’ve been doing this for four years and neither of us has gotten tired of it.
I check the bow tubes. Inflation is right. Straps tight. The throw rope is looped and clipped to the D-ring. My hands do this on instinct.
“Trip’s going out at nine,” Levi says. “Marissa’s friend. Tori. The nurse.”
I know which one.
The blond. The one who sat in the raft during the Class III section in July and didn’t scream.
Every other woman on that trip screamed, and I don’t hold that against them because that’s a normal response to whitewater.
She didn’t. She gripped the paddle and watched the water and leaned into the turn like she’d been reading currents her whole life.
I was in the safety kayak behind them. I watched her watch the river and I filed that information somewhere I don’t usually file things about clients.
Six weeks ago. I’ve thought about her more than is reasonable for a man who saw a woman on a raft for three hours.
“She’s the one from Charlotte, right?” I say. Casual. Like I’m confirming a booking detail and not pulling up a file I’ve already accessed several times.
“ER nurse. Marissa says she’s running on empty. Needs the trip.” Levi pushes off the trailer and stretches. “Be nice.”
“I’m always nice.”
“You’re always competent. Nobody cries tears of joy about competent.”
“Your clients cry tears of joy?”
“Frequently. I’m gifted.”
“You narrate rapids like a man auditioning for a nature documentary no one commissioned.”
“People love the narration. It’s immersive.” He picks up two paddles from the rack. “She’s Marissa’s friend. If she doesn’t have the best day of her vacation, I’m going to hear about it. Marissa has a system.”
“Laminated?”
“Digital now.” He says this with the pride of a man whose girlfriend reorganized his entire business and he considers it the greatest thing that’s ever happened. “Nine o’clock. Small trip. Just her and Marissa. Keep it easy, the scenic stretch. Class II.”
“I know the stretch, Levi.”
“I know you know the stretch. I’m talking because that’s what I do. You’re welcome for the atmosphere.”
I tighten the last strap. The raft is ready. My brain is ready. There is no reason for the low-grade awareness sitting behind my ribs, the one that’s been there since Levi said her name. She’s a client. I guide clients five days a week. This is Tuesday.
Marissa’s car pulls into the gravel lot at 8:47. Thirteen minutes early.
The passenger door opens. I’m facing that direction because the raft is facing that direction. I look up because that’s what a person does when a car door opens six seconds after they happen to be looking at the parking lot for professional reasons.
She steps out.
The sun catches her hair first. Blond, pulled back in a braid, the practical kind a woman wears when she works with her hands.
Then her face. Then her eyes, which sweep the lot and find me with the efficiency of someone who checks every room she enters.
They hold on me for two seconds and in those two seconds she takes me apart with more precision than most people manage in a full conversation.
I know this because I do the same thing. I read people constantly. Posture, movement, weight distribution, where someone carries tension. It’s what makes me good on the river. I can tell when a paddler is about to panic before they know it themselves.
She’s reading me. Right now. The way I read water.
I’m standing here with a strap in my hand and nothing in my head.
The thing I was going to say (I always have something for clients, a line about the water temperature, a joke about the canyon, the standard Kai Denmark guide welcome that Levi once called “aggressively casual”) is gone.
Cleared out. My brain, which has been producing quality insults and complete thoughts all morning, has left the building.
She’s not what I expected. Or she’s exactly what I remembered and the real version is more than the memory prepared me for.
Pale skin, the kind that comes from months inside under bad lighting.
Toned arms. Strong shoulders. The build of a woman who uses her body at work.
She’s in water sandals and shorts and a tank top and she looks tired underneath the energy and she doesn’t want anyone to see it and I can see both of those things at the same time.
I go back to the raft. Because the raft needs attention and my hands need something to do that isn’t standing in a parking lot staring at a woman I haven’t spoken to.
Levi materializes beside me. I can feel his grin without looking.
“You good?”
“Fine.”
“Because you just checked that strap again.”
“The strap is important.”
“Fourth time, Kai.”
I let go of the strap. I do not look at the parking lot where Tori Lane is standing with her arms pale in the sun and her braid over one shoulder and her eyes taking apart everything they land on.
“She’s pretty,” Levi says. Because Levi has never in his life had a thought he didn’t share.
“She’s a client.”
“Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“Go do your job.”
“My job is managing the operation. This is me managing.” He watches me not look at the parking lot. “I’ll bring paddles. Try to remember how talking works.”
Marissa brings her over. They’re carrying coffee. Marissa is explaining the schedule. Tori is nodding. I am focused on the bow tubes because the bow tubes are a thing that requires focus and have nothing to do with the woman walking toward me.
She stops at the raft. Close enough now that I can see the exact color of her eyes. Hazel ringed with gold. Direct.
“Hi,” she says. Clean and simple.
I nod.
I have a mouth. I have a decade of guiding experience. I have what Levi calls “a gift for making people feel comfortable on the water through strategic deployment of personality.” I nod.
“Kai’s your guide today,” Levi announces, arriving with paddles and the expression of a man enjoying a private joke. “Best on the river. You’re in good hands.”
I adjust a strap. A different strap. Not the one I’ve checked four times. I don’t react to the compliment because reacting requires a facial expression and I am currently rationing those.
Tori is standing six feet away and she smells like coffee and sunscreen and I have lost the ability to arrange words in order.
The safety briefing saves me. I’ve given this briefing four hundred times.
My mouth can run it without participation from the parts of my brain that are currently occupied.
PFD buckled tight. Feet braced under the thwarts.
Paddle at the T-grip. If you go in, feet up, float on your back, don’t fight the current.
Two minutes. Clean. One pass.
Tori listens. She doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t ask unnecessary questions. Doesn’t do the nervous laugh that half my clients produce during the “if you go in” section. She listens with attention that means she’ll remember it if she needs to.
I like that about her. I add it to the file.
We load in. Tori and Marissa on opposite sides. Me at the stern.
“Forward,” I say.
The river takes us and I can breathe again.
The water is where I make sense. On land I’m a man who checked a strap four times and forgot how conversation works.
On the water I’m the one who knows where every current runs, where every rock sits, how much angle to hold through the bend at mile marker four.
I call commands. “Forward.” “Hold.” “Left.” Single words. No eye contact required. This I can do.
She paddles well. I noticed it in July. I notice it again now. Her strokes are efficient and clean. Most clients muscle the paddle. She reads the resistance and adjusts. I’ve guided people with years on the water who don’t paddle this well.
I watch her. I tell myself I’m scanning the river. The river happens to run in the same direction as her shoulders and her braid and the line of her neck when she tilts her head to look at the canyon walls.
I see the moment it happens. The moment she stops holding herself together and starts letting go.
The tension in her shoulders releases one degree at a time.
Her grip on the paddle loosens. Her breathing slows.
She’s shedding something heavy, and I can see it happening the way I see a current shift: gradual, undeniable, real.
I don’t look away. I should. I’m the guide, she’s the client, and watching a woman have a quiet moment of emotional release from the stern of a raft is not in Marissa’s employee handbook. (She definitely has one.)
I look at the water. I check the line. I look back at her.
“Calm stretch ahead,” I say. The canyon opens around the bend. The walls go copper and gold. The water spreads into the flat pool where the light hits in a way that makes people go still. I bring the smaller groups here on purpose.
Tori goes still. The good kind.
Marissa tells the bachelor party story. Eight guys from Boise. Matching tank tops. Bluetooth speaker.
“They brought it,” I say. “Made it to the second rapid.”
The words come out before I think about them. The real me, surfacing because the story is funny and my guard slipped for a second. Tori looks at me. Quick, surprised. Like I handed her a piece of data that doesn’t match her assessment and she’s not sure where to file it.
I look at the water. Her gaze stays on me for another beat. I can feel it the way I feel a shift in current. Then she goes back to Marissa’s story.
She laughs. Not polite. Full, open, a laugh that fills the raft and the canyon and hits me somewhere I wasn’t guarding.
She leans back. Just a fraction. Her foot shifts on the thwart.