Chapter 1 #2
“Did you just audit my business from the middle of my raft?”
“I multitask.”
“You are something else.” He shakes his head. The grin comes back but it’s different now, edged with something I can’t read. “All right. Paddle up, everyone. Rapid ahead.”
The river picks up. I hear it before I feel it. The roar building, the current pulling faster. Levi’s voice cuts through, clean and commanding.
“Forward paddle. Hard. Stay with me.”
We paddle. The raft drops over the first ledge and the water hits like a wall of ice.
Jenna screams. Claire screams. Paige screams. I do not scream.
The wave crests over the front of the raft and drenches me completely.
Head to chest. Freezing. I throw my head back and laugh.
Loud. Full-volume. The sound of a woman who is soaking wet and ice-cold and having the time of her absolute life.
The rapid churns under us. Levi calls the commands. We paddle through. The raft bucks over a wave. I’m grinning so hard my face hurts. Canyon walls flying past, the river roaring, the spray on my skin. This. THIS. This is why I planned the trip. This is the thing.
We clear the rapid. The water smooths out. Everyone is drenched and gasping and laughing.
“Oh my GOD,” Jules says, shoving wet hair out of her face. “I think the river just tried to kill me.”
“That was a Class III?” Tori is grinning. “What’s a IV feel like?”
“Louder.”
Paige is quiet. Then she laughs. Small at first, then bigger. She leans forward over her paddle and laughs like she hasn’t laughed in three weeks and the sound makes my chest tight in the best way.
I turn around to look at Levi.
I’m soaked. My hair is plastered to my face. River water is dripping off my chin. I can only imagine what I look like, and don’t care one bit.
He’s looking at me. Not at the group. At me.
And the grin is gone.
Not replaced with anything performative.
Not the guide smile, not the professional warmth, not the easy charm he wears like a second skin.
Just gone. What’s underneath is a man looking at me with an expression I don’t have a name for.
His eyes on my face, on the water running down my jaw, on the fact that I just took a wave to the chest and came up laughing instead of cursing.
He’s trying to figure something out. I can see it.
The math behind his eyes, working on a problem he didn’t expect.
It lasts half a second. Maybe less.
Then the grin is back. Full wattage. The door closes.
“Trouble,” he says.
One word. Not my name. Not “ma’am” or “hey” or anything a guide says to a client. Just “trouble.” Like it’s a conclusion he just reached. Like he took one look at me laughing in the whitewater and the word arrived fully formed.
“Excuse me?”
“You.” He points his paddle at me. “Trouble.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Don’t need to. Twelve years on this river. I know it when I see it.”
Behind me, five women make five different sounds.
Jules says “oh, wow” under her breath. Tori raises an eyebrow at me.
Claire pulls out her phone and types something, which should be impossible in a wet raft, but this is Claire.
Jenna takes a photo. Paige smiles. The real kind.
The kind I’ve been waiting three weeks to see.
I turn forward and face the river. I am not blushing. I am sunburned. The cold water and the warm air and the sun on my face. That’s the explanation and I am committing to it fully.
The rest of the trip is two more rapids and a long calm stretch where Levi talks about the canyon geology and Jenna photographs everything and Jules trails her hand in the water and Paige tilts her face to the sun.
I paddle. I listen. I do not look at the guide more than is necessary for safety purposes, which turns out to be fairly often because safety is extremely important to me.
Kai meets us at the take-out point, quiet and efficient, pulling the raft onto the gravel bank.
He looks at Levi. Levi looks at the equipment.
Kai’s mouth twitches. The smallest, most controlled not-quite-smile of a man who saw something and is choosing to keep it to himself. He goes back to securing the kayak.
We climb out. The sun hits my wet skin and the warmth is immediate and perfect and I stand on the riverbank with my helmet under my arm and my PFD unclipped and my hair a complete disaster and I feel alive in a way I haven’t in months.
“So.” Levi is near me. Not close. Near enough. He’s collecting paddles and his voice is casual and his body language is professional and his eyes are doing something his body language doesn’t agree with. “Day after tomorrow’s a longer run. Class IV at the end. If your group’s up for it.”
“I’ll check the schedule.”
“The laminated one?”
“It’s a highly effective organizational tool.”
He grins. The crooked one. “See you the day after tomorrow, trouble.”
“That is not my name.”
“No,” he says. “It’s better.”
He walks toward the equipment trailer. I watch him go for one second. Two. Fine. Four seconds. Then I turn around and five of my best friends are standing in a row looking at me with five variations of the same expression.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything,” Jules says.
“You were about to.”
“I was going to say that was a very normal and professional interaction and I’m sure you have zero thoughts about it.”
“I don’t.”
“Great.”
“Great.”
Tori loops her arm through Paige’s. Claire is already checking the itinerary for the day after tomorrow. Jenna is reviewing photos. Jules falls into step beside me as we walk toward the van, wet hair drying in the sun.
“Trouble,” she says, not looking at me.
“Shut up.”
“What? It’s a word. Words are just words. Unless a very large man says them while looking at you like you personally invented the concept of fun.”
“Jules.”
“Shutting up.”
She’s not shutting up. She’s grinning. They’re all grinning. I’m going to hear about this every single day for the rest of the week.
Here’s the thing. I planned every hour of this trip.
I have the cabin booked, the hikes mapped, the restaurants researched, a backup itinerary in case of rain, and a backup to the backup in case the first backup falls through.
I am a woman who runs her own business, coordinates her own life, and has never once been derailed by a man with a crooked grin who thinks calling a stranger “trouble” is an acceptable greeting.
And it wasn’t the grin. It wasn’t the forearms or the voice or the way he handles a raft like the river answers to him.
It was the half-second where the grin disappeared.
The moment the performance stopped and what was underneath was just a man, looking at me like I’d knocked something loose in him he didn’t know was there.
That half-second is going to be a problem.
But that’s tomorrow’s problem. Today I’m on a mountain with my five best friends and the sun is warm and the river is loud and the air smells like pine and cold water and summer, and I planned this week for exactly this feeling.
I’m not going to let a river guide with a nickname and a jaw ruin my schedule.
I’m not.
Probably.