She swings up agile, plants her boots, and braces her palm on my shoulder while she finds her balance. The weight of that hand sears a print through flannel and down to bone.
I clear my throat, face forward, and start the tractor. We grind along the service lane that cuts behind the cider barn and through the thin strip of woods where I hung line after line in July while mosquitos considered me a buffet. The air gets colder under the trees; the ground smells like damp leaves and iron.
“Is that new?” she asks over the engine, leaning closer to be heard.
Her breath hits the side of my neck in a way that makes my gut tighten.
“Installed in August. Weekends only, because I like to watch my insurance agent age in real time.”
I nod to the small platform ahead where the line spans out over the pumpkin fields like a silver vein. “We have two harnesses. One brave staffer on the top end, one at the bottom.”
I grin. “Kids go nuts. Their parents go next and pretend they’re thinking about their children’s joy instead of the fifteen seconds they get to feel like they’re not paying bills.”
She laughs, grip tightening. “What inspired it?”
“What inspires anything? I got bored. Had materials. Decided to make gravity do some of the entertainment.” I downshift, let the tractor roll to a stop beside the ladder thatleads up to the launch deck. “Also, you once told me the woods felt like an Enchanted Forest and I wanted to give people a better view of them.”
The words are out before I can catch them. I can feel her go still behind me.
“I said that?” she asks softly.
“Maybe,” I say, which is not an answer. “Once. In the loft. When we were supposed to be studying for AP history and you were drawing mustaches on the Founding Fathers in the textbook.”
She laughs, but it’s quiet. “I was a menace.”
“Still are,” I say, and climb down so I don’t have to watch how she’s looking at me.
I secure the tractor brake and start the climb, boots ringing on the metal ladder. At the top the view opens like a held breath.
The fields are a patchwork of color. The bright shock of orange, the duller green of vines, the rectangular brown dirt of the parking lot.
She steps onto the platform and goes quiet in the way people do when a place reminds them they’re small and that smallness is a relief.
“Okay,” she says after a beat, voice trembling just enough to count as human. “That’s a view.”
“Yep.”
She turns her camera and gets to work, snapping, crouching, framing, leaning out over the rail like she trusts the integrity of my bolts, which she should, but still makes my stomach drop.
“You always were like that,” I say before I can stop it.
“Like what?”
“Braver when you had a job to do.”
She lowers the camera and looks at me, and the wind goes out of whatever defense I had left. “I learned from the best,”she says. “You dragged me onto the rope swing over Cold Creek when everyone else chickened out.”
“I broke my toe that day.”
“You didn’t tell anyone for a week.”
“I didn’t want to give Lanie the satisfaction.”
We grin at the same memory, and the grin melts into something I should never name on a platform I built with my own hands, because then I’ll be responsible for it.
I rest my palms on the rail, look at the line I strung tight, and do the thing I know how to do. “Want to try the zip?”
She blinks the past out of her eyes and tucks a new strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s safe?”
