Chapter 3
LINCOLN
The take-out point was a wide gravel bar downstream of the gorge where the river flattened out and went slow and easy, like it had forgotten what it had just done to us. Wells beached the raft and hopped out into the shallows, pulling the bow line until the hull scraped up onto the rocks.
He offered me his hand. I didn’t need it. I took it anyway.
His grip was warm and callused and brief—he let go as soon as I was on solid ground, and the absence of his hand registered in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Like a sound cutting out mid-note.
We hauled the raft onto the trailer and he drove us back to Wildwood River Co. with the windows down and neither of us talking. Not awkward silence. The kind that happens after something big, when your body is still processing and your mouth knows better than to get in the way.
Wells backed the trailer down to the dock and killed the engine. “I need to rinse the raft, rack the paddles, and log the trip. You can head out.”
“I’ll help.”
“You don’t work here.”
“I know. I’ll help anyway.”
He didn’t argue. He handed me a paddle and pointed toward the rinse station, and we worked side by side in the kind of quiet that felt like the river had followed us onto land.
The lot was empty by then—not an employee in sight, doors propped open, the smell of river water and sunscreen baked into the wood.
I rinsed paddles while Wells hosed down the raft. I watched him the way I’d watched him in the gorge, and I was honest enough with myself to admit that I wasn’t watching his technique. He had a body that did what he asked it to do—comfortable, certain, a man who trusted his hands and his instincts.
He caught me looking. I didn’t pretend I hadn’t been.
“You ran the Gauley at twenty-six hundred CFS,” he said, coiling the bow line. “That’s not a beginner release. Who taught you to paddle?”
“I taught myself. Online video tutorials, books, then a lot of time on the Ocoee making mistakes.”
He stopped coiling. “You learned whitewater paddling from the internet.”
“I learned the strokes from the internet. I learned whitewater from the water.”
“Most people learn from a guide,” he said. “Or a club.”
“Most people have parents who let them near the water before they turn eighteen.”
It came out before I could stop it. I could feel the question forming behind his eyes.
“Your parents didn’t let you near the water,” he said. Not a question.
“My parents didn’t let me near anything that involved elevated heart rate, heavy breathing, or the possibility of inhaling something that wasn’t climate-controlled air.
” I set the last paddle in the rack. “I had asthma as a kid. Bad enough to put me in the hospital. I outgrew it by the time I was nine, but they never outgrew the fear.”
He leaned against the trailer and looked at me. Not pity—I would have walked away from pity. Something quieter. Attentive.
“So every time you do something like this,” he said, “you’re doing it for the first time.”
My throat tightened. Nobody had ever said it back to me like that—the private engine underneath every climb and every rapid and every freefall. Everyone saw the adrenaline junkie. Nobody had ever looked at the pattern and understood what it meant.
“Yeah,” I said. “Every time.”
He nodded. Didn’t push. Processed it the way he processed information about the river—as a fact that mattered, without commentary.
“Come inside,” he said. “I’ve got to log the trip, and you need water.”
I followed him through the front room and into a back office—smaller, messier, obviously where the real work happened.
A desk buried under logbooks and river charts.
A mini fridge humming against one wall. A couch that looked like it had been dragged in from someone’s porch, cushions sun-faded and dented from years of bodies dropping into them after long days on the water.
He handed me a water bottle. I drank half of it without sitting down, only then realizing how hot I was—flushed from the sun, the effort, and being that close to a man who smelled like the river.
He sat on the edge of the desk and opened a logbook. “Date, put-in time, take-out time, water level, participants, incidents.” His pen moved in neat block letters. “Any incidents?”
“You missed a rock.”
His pen stilled. The look he gave me was something I’d remember for a long time—annoyance edged with something like admiration, as if he couldn’t decide which one won.
“I’m not logging that,” he said.
“I would.”
“You’re not the guide.”
“No. I’m the one who saw the rock.”
The office was quiet except for the drone of the mini fridge and the distant murmur of the river through the open back door.
I was standing four feet from him. My clothes were still damp.
I could feel my heartbeat in my throat, and it wasn’t the hum—it wasn’t the pull toward the next risk, the next proof that I was alive.
It was something that scared me more than Dead Man’s Pocket.
Stillness. He made me want to stand still.
That had never happened before. I’d spent my whole life moving—filling every day with motion, because motion was the opposite of the hospital bed, the nebulizer, the sound of my mother’s voice in the hallway.
And now a man sat on the edge of a desk, a logbook open, pen in hand, and I wanted to stop. Not stop living. Just stop running.
“Wells?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know how to do this.”
He set the pen down. Closed the logbook. Looked at me with the same unhurried focus he’d given the river.
“Do what?”
His voice had dropped. He already knew. He was giving me room to say it because I needed to speak it out loud.
“Stay,” I said. “I don’t know how to stay somewhere. I always leave. I book the trip, I do the thing, I drive to the next place.”
“Okay.”
“But I don’t want to leave.” My voice cracked—not dramatically, just a fissure in the wall I’d been building since I was nine. “And that terrifies me more than anything on that river.”
He stood up. Slow, deliberate, giving me time to step back. I didn’t step back.
He was close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his skin. His eyes were lighter up close—green-brown, the color of river water over mossy stone.
“Then don’t leave,” he said. “And don’t worry about the staying part yet. Just be here right now.”
His hand came up and brushed the wet hair off my neck—slow, careful, his fingers trailing the line of my jaw. I stopped breathing. Not the asthma, not the old familiar panic. The opposite. My body going quiet because it had found the thing it had been running toward all along.
“Right now,” I said.
“Right now.”
He kissed me. Or I kissed him. It happened the way the river happened—a force meeting a force, neither one yielding, both finding the line through each other.
His mouth was warm, with a faint taste of river water. One hand cupped my jaw. Mine pressed into his chest. The mini fridge rattled softly. The river murmured through the open door. The world outside kept moving without us.
I kissed him back harder. He made a sound against my mouth—low, rough, the sound of a man who’d been holding something back and had just decided to stop.
His other hand found my hip and pulled me in. The full-body contact sent a shock through me, made the rapids feel like flat water.
He pulled back just enough to look at me. Breathing hard. Eyes dark.
“Lincoln.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never lost focus on the water,” he said. “Twelve years, hundreds of trips, every section of this river. I don’t get distracted.” He held my eyes. “You distracted me today. You’re the only person who’s ever done that.”
“And I saw the rock,” I said.
“And you saw the rock.”
The full version of the smile I’d been chasing since yesterday—cocky and warm and completely undone underneath it.
“Stay,” he said.
“I’m staying.”