Zeke
Zeke
I can’t believe she convinced me she wanted to do this. I can’t believe I let her. But by the time I figured out she was scared of heights, she was already on the second ladder.
It was torture watching her climb from the platform. It’s better now that I’m here, too, close enough to reach up and touch her. Whenever she pauses, or when I hear her breath start to speed up, I talk.
“Ask me a question,” I say, when I run out of things to ramble on about. “Any question.”
Lexi hesitates slightly, then keeps climbing. One steady step after another. My wound throbs nonstop, and my head feels tight, but I bet she’s suffering worse.
“How many women have you slept with?”
…Oh, God. Not that question.
“Hello? Zeke?”
I’m going to have to give her a ballpark. I start doing some rough math, gripping another rung, taking another step, trying to figure out how badly this’ll change her mind about me.
“Hang on. You don’t know the answer, do you?” Her disbelief cuts through the fear that’s laced her voice since she left the platform.
“Just give me a second,” I say. Wondering where the line is between rounding down and lying.
“You’re twenty-three. How much sex can you have fitted in?” she asks, breathing hard as she climbs.
“Quite…a lot?” I say, biting my lip.
She glances at me. It’s the first time she’s looked down.
“I’m not going to judge you, Zeke.”
Maybe she sees my doubt.
“Seriously,” she says, “I know you. Maybe if we’d just met and you told me you’ve slept with thirty women…”
I bite my lip harder.
“…I’d be a bit eye-roll about it and make some assumptions about the kind of guy you are, but…”
She pauses, and I watch her hands tighten on the ladder. She takes a shuddering breath. I’m about to say, Let’s just go down , when she takes another determined step up the ladder.
“But I know you’re respectful, and kind, and that you’ve taken a look at what that sex was about for you, and I know you’ll have made sure the women you slept with were on the same page as you. So, no. Not judging.”
I swallow. I don’t think I realized how much I needed to hear her say this.
“Was I close with thirty?”
“Mm,” I say.
I reach for the next rung, arm muscles starting to shake.
“Higher?”
“Bit.”
“OK, fifty? Higher or lower?”
She’s out of breath from the climb, but her voice is starting to sound stronger. I guess I should be pleased that my body count is distracting her, but it’s making me hot with embarrassment. I wish I were one of those people who could say, I don’t regret those nights , but I do. I know I slept with those women for all the wrong reasons.
“Higher.”
“Wow, right, a hundred?”
“Lower,” I say, with relief.
It’s almost easier to talk like this—not looking right at her, and moments away from probably dying. Really helps you open up.
“Seventy?”
“You’re close,” I say, and then I gasp.
She’s reached the top. Suddenly she’s falling forward onto her hands and knees, disappearing from my view as a bunch of outraged birds swoop away from the summit.
“OK?” I call, grabbing at the last few rungs.
The platform at the summit is really a walkway around a central pulley that drops down the middle of the tower, all rusted and rank with bird poo. Behind the machinery, there’s the most insane view. It’s like being on a plane. The horizon’s fuzzy, like the edge of a torn sheet of paper, and the sea’s so vast I can’t get my head around it.
“Behind you,” Lexi says, still down on all fours.
Her voice is different: hoarse and choked up. But I can hear how relieved she is—the relief you feel when you thought you were going to die and haven’t yet. I’ve got really familiar with that feeling lately.
I turn to see what she means, gripping the pulley at the center of the platform to keep myself steady. There’s just more sea, more sky.
No. Something else: another rig.
“That one might not be abandoned,” Lexi says, voice hushed.
She’s still kneeling, as if she can’t quite bear to stand up. Today’s been so hard on her body—she needs rest. I hope she can make it down that ladder again, a thought I’m careful to keep off my face as I look over my shoulder at her.
“It feels like we’re so close to life,” I say, letting go of the machinery and moving gingerly toward the railing. “Being here, seeing this…”
I stare and stare at the rig. Imagining the people who might be there.
“Please step away from the edge,” Lexi says, voice choked.
I don’t want to say it, but there’s not really anywhere to be except the edge—the platform is maybe three-by-three meters, but the mechanism takes up most of the space. I grip the freezing railing, my hair whirling in the wind.
“Maybe they’ll check on this rig,” I say. “The people in that one.”
“This place doesn’t feel very checked-on to me,” Lexi says, wiping her face with one hand.
“Here,” I say, moving to help her up.
“No!” She flinches away from me, crouching lower. “No. I’m good down at floor level, thanks.”
She shuffles in a fraction before realizing that only brings her nearer the hole in the center, where the cables plummet to the sea below. She lets out a whimper and crouches even lower, her cheek to the grating. Her face is tear-streaked and pale. I sit down slowly beside her. I’m not scared of heights, but I’m still moving slowly—there’s a bad vibe up here, a sense that the teetering platform might tumble sideways if we don’t step carefully enough. It doesn’t help that the grating is gappy and you can see through it to the structure beneath us.
“Just think of the deck of the houseboat,” I say softly. “There’s more space here than there.”
“The deck wasn’t a million miles up in the air , though,” she says.
“Yeah, but you didn’t fall over the edge and into the sea for over a week, so why would you do that here?”
“That is helpful, but also really annoying,” she says.
I smile. “Reckon you could at least sit up?” I ask. “Like this?”
I nod down at myself—I’m sitting with my knees up, back to the railing, facing the rusty orange pulley. It blocks out a fair bit of the view, which I think might help Lexi right now.
She sniffs and pushes up slowly on her arms, then clenches her eyes shut when she glances over the edge.
“Ugh,” she says.
“Just look at me,” I say, pushing my hair back from my forehead. “Hi.”
She opens her eyes and meets mine. I can see her temptation to shift her gaze to the skyline, but I keep our eyes locked, and slowly, slowly, I watch how she softens. Her shoulders drop ever so slightly. Without breaking eye contact, she reaches to grip the railing and rises to sit cross-legged.
We stay like this for so long I lose track of time, just looking at each other, the bare sky whistling around us. After those days cramped in a tiny wooden box with her, all this space makes me feel light-headed. But whatever else changes, Lexi’s still Lexi: brave, frightened, strong, soft, warm, cold. I’ve never met a woman who’s so many things at once. And I want her, even here, after this mad, wild day. I want her like I’ve never not wanted her, like every other time I’ve wanted a woman, I’ve been looking for Lexi.
“Sixty,” she says faintly.
“Pardon?”
“Women. Sixty women?”
“Oh my God,” I say, breathing out a laugh.
“What, you thought I’d drop the topic without getting an answer out of you?”
“Well, no, I mean, I do know you. But…” I swallow, finally breaking eye contact to stare down at the grating beneath us. “Sixty-five. There you go. And I’m not even sure it’s right. It’s a guess. That’s how…That’s how messy it all got. There’re women I don’t even remember.”
She sobers, looking at me with those wide, icy-blue eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“Don’t say sorry,” she says. “Not to me. I was just thinking how easily I could have been one of those women you don’t remember.”
I shake my head. “You wouldn’t’ve been.”
Her eyebrows rise slightly.
“No, seriously. It wasn’t like that. If this…” I nod at the sea, then wish I hadn’t—it makes her glance through the railings and blanch. “If this hadn’t happened, yeah, maybe we would have just gone our separate ways and never seen each other again, because that’s what you wanted. But I wouldn’t have forgotten you.”
“No?”
“No. And I never wanted you to leave that morning, you know.”
“I seem to remember you thought I was trying to steal your houseboat.”
I smile. “Well, yeah. But even so. I knew there was something about you even then.” I look down, the sea tugging at the edges of my vision. “Maybe I’ve had sixty-five one-night stands, but I’ve never once had this.”
“What, you’ve never once ended up lost at sea with a woman you slept with? Does it even count as sleeping around if you don’t tick that one off?”
I cut her a look. “I’ve never had this .” My voice shakes slightly as I say, “I’ve never felt like this about a person before.”
She inhales, as though I’ve shocked her. My heart pounds. I love her. It’s obvious to me. Not like some blindsiding bolt from the sky—I just know it in my gut, in the way I know it’s right to be kind. It’s an instinct.
“Zeke,” she whispers. “Don’t. You can’t mean that.”
“Why not?”
“I just…I don’t…you…” She’s shaking.
“Can I touch you right now? Can I hold your hand?” I whisper back.
She stretches out the hand that isn’t gripping the railing, and I twine my fingers through hers.
“Does this change the rules?” she says quietly. “Between us, does this…”
“I don’t know. Does it?”
“I don’t…I don’t really know what I want to say right now, and my brain feels like mush, but…” She takes a deep, unsteady breath, watching my thumb smooth over hers. “I think we might die on our way back down this tower, and if we do, I’m pretty sure I’ll be out there in the afterlife thinking, Why the fuck didn’t you kiss Zeke Ravenhill when you had the chance? ”
I smile slowly, something warm spilling through me. Her eyes slide back to meet mine. I don’t give her another moment to second-guess herself, to remember the sheer drop and the terror and everything that’ll pull her away from me. I just lean forward and kiss Lexi Taylor on the top of the world.
It starts tender and slow. Then her tongue touches mine, and my body is so full of pent-up adrenaline and desire that the sensation just floors me, and now it’s passionate and fierce, every bit the kiss that might be our last. The wind wraps around our shoulders and the sky falls away beneath us. The world stretches out and out and out. And still none of it’s big enough for the way I’m feeling. Lexi makes another sound in her throat, and I close my eyes, forgetting the empty skyline. Knowing that no matter where we were right now, it would feel like nobody else mattered.