Chapter Twenty Julia #2
Months ago, back when Julia and Harry were still staying with his parents, Tara had brought up the wedding venue. Julia had hurried to ask if they could get married in the South, so that it felt more familiar to her—and, more important, to her aunt and uncle.
Aunt Jess and Uncle Daniel could just about handle an opulent wedding in Georgia. But if Tara insisted on somewhere like Lake Como or the south of France, Julia knew they would feel wildly out of place. Honestly, so would she.
“That’s a lovely suggestion,” Tara had said carefully, “but I’m afraid we’ll have a lot of guests from our side. Is there a venue in Marietta that can accommodate us?”
Harry had jumped to Julia’s defense. “What about Sea Island, or Palmetto Bluff? Somewhere not too far from where Julia grew up.”
Tara shook her head. “Not big enough.”
Harry had met his mother’s gaze. There was a meaningful note to his voice as he replied, “Then I guess we’ll have to find somewhere new.”
As it happened, there was somewhere new—a resort on the coast of Georgia named Ismene Island.
The sort of place with twisting palmetto trees and water oaks, with Planter’s Punch cocktails and two golf courses.
“As it happens, our hotel group just built the property! Isn’t it a perfect coincidence?
” Tara had exclaimed while Julia studied the website.
“Yours will be the very first wedding there!”
Julia had agreed without hesitation. It looked beautiful, of course, and was within driving distance of where she’d grown up.
“If a wedding at home is what you’ve always dreamed of, just say the word,” Harry insisted now.
“Home,” Julia repeated, and shook her head. “Harry, Marietta hasn’t felt like home to me in a long time.”
“Then where is home?”
“You,” she said simply. “As long as I’m with you, I’m home. Remember?” It was what he’d told her when he proposed.
“As if I could forget,” Harry said warmly.
Now the words struck Julia in a way they hadn’t before. Harry was her home. She’d been adrift for so long, living on a cruise ship, watching people come and go from her life without leaving a ripple in their wake. Until she’d met him.
Harry was her safe harbor, the person she wanted to share everything with: good or bad, painful or joyous.
Next to her love for him, all her worries evaporated like smoke.
And really, what did she have to complain about?
An all-expenses-paid trip to London, where her best friend lived?
A lavish wedding at a resort that looked like a more picturesque version of the rural Georgia she knew?
Julia nodded down at the gym, which was empty except for the two of them and their belayers. “Should we head down?”
“Loser buys tacos,” Harry agreed.
They didn’t speak much on the descent; it was always harder going down than up.
Julia felt herself fall into intense focus, concentrating on her center of gravity, her balance.
She was vaguely aware of Harry in her peripheral vision, darting down the wall with preternatural ease.
The one time she dared a glance down, she saw that Bianca was staring, too, almost swooning.
Well, Julia couldn’t blame the woman for ogling the perfect lines of Harry’s body. She felt a burst of pride in that moment, that he was hers.
She turned her attention back to the wall, pausing at a particularly tricky section. On the way up, she had braced her hand on a hold and leaned on it, roughly the way you leaned in yoga triangle pose, so that she could swing her other hand higher. Maybe she could try that again.
As she flung her body forward, she heard a sound that no climber ever wants to hear: the sound of rope squealing rapidly through wheels.
“Julia!” Harry shouted.
“Oh god, oh god!” Bianca cried out. Julia didn’t dare look down, though she knew what she would see—the woman scrabbling for a rope that had already slipped out of her hands.
“Stay where you are! I’m coming!” Harry cried out.
Julia couldn’t have moved if she tried. Except that she was moving, and not in a good way—one hand gripped the wall, but the other stretched out into midair.
Her legs had started to shake. Dimly, she heard the employees on the ground descending into panic.
If you hadn’t been busy lusting after my fiancé, you wouldn’t have dropped the rope, Julia wanted to say, but she couldn’t waste energy speaking right now.
Every atom of her being was focused on maintaining her increasingly precarious position.
An eerie calm descended over her in that moment, as if her body had accepted that she was forty feet in the air, wearing a harness that connected her to nothing at all.
Would she die after falling from this height, or be paralyzed from the neck down?
“Julia!”
Harry was still too far, twenty feet below her at least, when Julia lost her hold.
As in the movies, time began to slow. Or perhaps it was Julia who sped up, her heart chattering as fast as a hummingbird’s, bringing everything into frightening focus. She braced herself for the brutal impact of her body on the mat below.
Her body did slam, but not against the floor.
Somehow she was colliding with the rock wall, and Harry was pressed against her, his body covering hers the way it did in bed—his chest over her back, his arm sneaking around her torso. His legs braced against the sheer concrete of the wall, muscles straining.
Impossibly, he was holding Julia around the waist, his hand clinging to a single handhold as he supported their combined weight.
“You okay?” he murmured.
Julia’s heart fluttered wildly against her rib cage. Her mouth was sharp with the metallic taste of fear. But she was alive. She closed her eyes, tucking herself tighter against Harry’s body, relishing the warmth of him, his solidity. His strength.
“It’s okay,” Harry kept murmuring. Then, his voice tight with anger, he called out, “Belay down!”
The gym employee hurried to let out slack, so that Harry could slowly ease them both to the ground. “It’s okay,” Harry kept saying. “You’re safe, don’t worry.”
He waited until Julia was seated, taking small sips from a water bottle, before turning to the gym employees and saying something Julia couldn’t hear. Afterward, they scurried off like frightened rabbits.
“How do you feel?” Harry asked, crouching next to Julia. His blue-gray eyes were bright with concern.
“I’ll be fine.” Julia hugged her torso, unable to stop shivering. “A little cold, though.”
Harry came to sit behind her, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her against his chest. “That’s the aftereffect of the adrenaline.
You should warm up in a minute; let me just get your hormones back to baseline.
” There was something adorable about the way he said that, as if he were a first responder setting a broken bone, rather than a man who loved her—who could do nothing but hold her close.
And yet, this did seem to be working. Julia felt herself calming because of the simple fact that Harry’s arms were around her. Her breath grew steady in her chest, her heartbeat slowing to match his.
Finally, Julia twisted around to look at him. “Harry. How did you get to me in time?”
“I climbed, of course.”
“You were twenty feet away on a sheer rock wall!” Julia had a bizarre urge to ask if he had flown to her. But that was impossible.
“Twenty feet? I was way closer than that,” Harry insisted.
Right. He must have been closer, or he couldn’t have reached her in time. It was simply impossible.
Julia stood, striving valiantly for a normal tone. “Can we get out of here? I want to eat an entire bowl of guacamole.”
“Let’s go to El Cantinero,” Harry agreed, relieved.
As they walked out of the rock-climbing gym, Julia resolved not to mention this incident to anyone else. Because really, what could she say? Her fiancé was like the hero from a fairy tale and had saved her from a terrifying accident.
Yet she couldn’t help thinking of that final summer with her mom, when all those strange things had kept happening. Goose bumps trailed up her arms. Seeing her shiver, Harry shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over her shoulders.
It was nothing, Julia reassured herself, just a combination of good timing and good luck. She refused to let herself think about it again.