Chapter 8 Walk Behind the Water #2
"Hands on the rope," he shouts, voice already swallowed by the noise. "One at a time. Lean into the wall. Don't look down—there is nothing down for you today."
He grins at his own line. The others laugh, nervous and excited, and we shuffle forward.
Riley goes ahead of Derrick, mouth already open in awe, her entire posture bending toward the water.
Alex follows, one hand braced on the rock by the time he's even reached the rope, the same careful, deliberate man who walked Channelle back to the lodge two days ago without a single complaint.
Channelle's right behind him, phone already tucked away somewhere waterproof.
Then two of the other VPs, and then Andrew already narrating the experience to no one in particular.
"You first," I tell Nora.
One corner of her mouth tips up. "Want to be behind me, Santi?"
I swallow hard at the implication. "Yes," I say gruffly. "Very much."
She wraps her fingers around the wet rope. Coarse and slick at once, algae-soft in places, fibers worn down by decades of hands. I take it just behind her, close enough to watch her shoulders, the rock wall cold and pocked to her right, the world made of water to her left.
Then she steps through, and I follow her into it.
It's like walking into the inside of a storm.
The waterfall stops being something we see and becomes the only thing there is. Sound goes solid. The roar compresses against my eardrums until my own breath has to be hunted for separately.
Water hits from every angle—spray off rock, off the falls, off every body ahead of us. Nora's hair escapes her braid almost immediately, plastering dark against her cheek. The path is a shallow ledge, barely wider than her shoulders, the wall slick where the damp never gets a chance to leave.
Ahead, the group becomes a blue: the curve of Riley's shoulder, the flick of Channelle's ponytail, breaking and re-forming behind veils of white. They move at an uneven pace—someone pauses to gasp, someone reaches for the water, the whole line concertinas.
I watch Nora's hand slide along cold stone, her other fist tightening white-knuckled on the rope. Feet placed with care, toes testing each foothold before weight follows.
Halfway in, the light disappears.
There's enough filtering through the water to keep shadows alive, but the enclosure is total. The falls form a luminous curtain between us and the rest of the world. The rock curls overhead in a low, dripping arch. The only constant is the thunder.
Nora stops. Not out of fear—I'd know fear on her by now by the set of her jaw, and this isn't that. It's the scale of the thing, pinning her in place the way it's pinning a feeling I quite can't name in my own chest, too, if I'm honest about it.
A small, warm certainty standing inside something elemental and indifferent.
I press my palm flat between her shoulder blades.
"Lean in," I say, close enough that she'll feel it more than hear it.
Her chest is already against the rock, but her weight shifts forward at my hand anyway, center of gravity settling where I want it. Water crashes inches from her left fist.
"You okay?" I ask it against the side of her neck, lips nearly on her skin.
She laughs, short and real. "Define okay."
I crowd her back, pinning her more firmly to the rock with the length of my body. Minimal pressure, maximum effect. Our hands overlap on the rope. Every point of contact sparks between us, drowned out by water and somehow still the loudest thing in this entire enclosed world.
"Up there," I say against her ear, angling my head toward a break in the rock high above the falls—visible for half a second through a gap in the spray until the curtain swallows it again. "That's the ridge line Ryan marked. Camp's on the other side of it."
I feel her go still under the information, feel the second it lands.
Right. This isn't only a waterfall walk.
It's reconnaissance wearing the costume of one, and I almost let myself forget that thirty seconds ago with my hand at her back and nothing on my mind but the shape of her spine.
I don't let myself forget things. Not normally.
"Did you get a good look?" Her voice comes out steadier than I expect, all business under the breathlessness.
"Good enough. I'll confirm the angle with Ryan." I stroke my thumb once over her knuckles on the rope—apology and promise in the same motion. "That's the job done. The rest of this walk is merely a walk."
The path jerks as the line ahead rearranges. Someone stumbles, laughs, shouts a few words while the water edits into nonsense. The whole world out there could be falling apart, and neither of us would hear it from in here.
There is only stone, water, a camp on the other side of a ridge we can no longer see, and her body fitted along the front of mine, her back to my chest, her hips a half-inch from where I want them.
This is stupid. All of it. The confined space, every person in our professional lives sixty feet ahead with no idea their Director of Corporate Development is one decision away from a decision that would never survive an HR review, while a missing man's location sits a mile off our left shoulder.
"Keep moving, Reyes," she says softly, pressing herself back against my aching cock. "We're going to cause a bottleneck."
I curl my fingers over hers on the rope, knuckles against knuckles. "They're ahead. No one's behind us."
I don't finish the thought out loud. My mouth finds the shell of her ear instead—not a kiss, just breath and proximity, the deliberate stillness of a man confirming something for himself he acts on.
Her free hand leaves the wall, reaches back, finds the wet line of my jaw. Her fingers slide over stubble slick with spray. I turn into the touch, and her palm meets my mouth; my teeth graze the heel of her hand, and her breath catches.
She twists as much as the ledge allows. Rock at her chest becomes rock at her shoulder. The rope drags against her other hand. I slide my body along hers until we're nearly facing each other, both of us pinned to stone, feet staggered for balance.
Water roars inches away, a wall of light. Her face goes half-shadow, half sudden gold when a gap in the spray opens. Water runs down my own hair, my cheekbones, the line of my throat, but it's her face I'm watching, drops clinging to her lashes.
Her hand fists in the front of my shirt and hauls me down.
The first kiss in the rock shelter had been an explosion. This one is already a detonation by the time our mouths meet.
No hunt for the right angle. No hesitation. Our bodies already know the coordinates.
I slide one hand to cup her jaw, thumb angling her chin. The other stays anchored to the rope, a reminder that even now some part of me refuses to let either of us forget the ledge, the drop, the rules that keep people alive in places like this.
Our tongues meet with all the want that never got the chance to cool overnight.
She surges into me, erasing what little space there was.
Her chest meets mine, her thigh slides between my legs, and the sound that tears out of her when she feels exactly how much I want this gets steamrolled by the falls—but I feel it anyway, against my own mouth.
"Sí," she breathes, unplanned. "Here."
A word that might be her full name, might be closer to a prayer, leaves me in the smear of the kiss.
I turn her, trading our positions so her back takes the rock and my body shields her from the water. It's instinct, more than thought, to shield her, protect her.
I wedge my thigh between her knees, forcing them wide enough.
My mouth drags along her jaw to her ear, then lower, to the place where her pulse hammers loud enough that I don't need to hear it to know it's there.
My teeth close, not cruel but firm, and whatever sound that pulls out of her gets claimed instantly by the roar—gone to the rest of the world, kept entirely for the two of us.
My free hand slides down, flattens against her midsection. Even through soaked fabric, I can feel the heat underneath.
"Tell me if you want me to stop," I say against her jaw, words half-lost but the meaning unmistakable.
Her hips speak first, arching into my hand. "We had a conversation about this last night," she manages, breathless. "Never stop fucking me."
My exhale comes out somewhere between a laugh and a groan. I slip my fingers under the hem of her shirt, find skin already damp from spray. She tenses and releases under my hand in the same motion.
I palm her hip, move up, thumb tracing the edge of her waistband, testing. When she doesn't stop me—when her own hand leaves the rope long enough to grab my wrist and drag it exactly where she wants it—whatever was left of my restraint goes.
I don't waste time after that.
Under the thin barrier of her shorts, I find out exactly how much the water, the fear, and the anticipation of my touch have done to her.
"Jesus, Nora."
Her knee locks tighter around my thigh in answer.
My fingers move in small, deliberate strokes across her clit, finding the place she's chasing without needing to be told twice.
Everything about where we're standing—the stone, the water, every coworker sixty feet ahead—turns the whole thing obscene and pure at once.
There's nothing neat or planned about it.
It's need, compressed into two feet of wet rock since that's the entire space the world has given us.
Her forehead drops to my shoulder, teeth sinking into soaked fabric over my collarbone to keep from crying out. I hiss, my hips jerking once, then again, entirely on instinct.
"Quiet," I breathe into her hair, aware even as I say it of the irony, the waterfall screaming for all of us. "You'll get us caught."
She knows as well as I do that nothing beyond this curtain could ever pick our sounds out of that thunder. I can feel her register the tease in it, feel her loosen further in response.
"Then move faster," she says against my skin.
A curse leaves me in Spanish, low and helpless, against her temple.