"Trust me. It's there."
I reached up and put my hand on her calf, guiding her foot to the hold. My palm was on bare skin where her leggings had ridden up, and she went still. I could feel her pulse through her ankle.
"There," I said. My voice came out rougher than I'd meant.
She stepped up. Made the next hold. Her hips were at my eye level and I was looking at the wall, at the rock, at anything that wasn't the curve of her ass in those leggings three feet from my face. I was a professional. I'd guided hundreds of clients up rock faces and kept my hands where they belonged.
My hands were not interested in where they belonged.
She made it two-thirds up before her left foot slipped and she dropped. I caught her. Instinct, arms coming up before I thought about it, and she landed against my chest, my palms on her waist, her back pressed to my front, both of us winded.
She didn't pull away. Neither did I.
"Nice catch," she said. Her voice was steady. Her pulse, where my thumb rested against her ribs, was not.
"Part of the job."
"Is it?"
I let go. Stepped back. "You want to go again?"
She went again. Three more times. Her hands were red and chalked. She'd scraped her knee on the rock. She didn't quit, and watching her refuse to give up on an activity she was terrible at hit me in a place I wouldn't examine on a Tuesday afternoon.
We walked back to the truck. The trail was narrow enough that our arms brushed, and when her foot caught a root I put my hand on her lower back without thinking and she leaned into it for half a second before straightening.
In the cab, the windows down, the afternoon light coming sideways through the trees, she turned to me.
"Thank you. For teaching me."
"You're a fast learner."
"I fell seven times."
"You got up eight."
She was quiet for a moment. The road wound down toward the cabin and the river got louder. I drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the bench seat between us, and I felt her little finger brush mine. I didn't move. She didn't move. The touch was so light it could have been accidental, except nothing with Nell Chambers was accidental.
We sat on the porch steps at dusk. She had an ice pack on her scraped knee and I had a beer and the sky was going through its evening routine, gold to pink to purple above the ridge. The river was high and steady.
"Can I ask you a question?" she said.
"Depends."
"This place. The cabin, the trails, all of it." She gestured at the view. "What made you stay here?"
It was a simple question. Should have had a simple answer: the property was cheap, the location was good for guiding, themountains were where I wanted to be. All true. All not the real answer.
"I got out of prison three years ago," I said.
The words landed in the quiet between us. I hadn't planned on saying them. Hadn't planned on telling her any of it, not yet, not sitting here. But her finger was warm against mine on the step and the light was soft and she'd fallen off a rock wall seven times today without complaining, and I just let go.
"Aggravated assault. Bar fight. I was protecting someone, but that doesn't look any different in a courtroom than the other kind." I took a drink. "Two years at Monroe. I got out, drove until the road ran out, and this is where it ran out."
She was quiet. Not the processing quiet I'd learned to read, where her brain was running calculations. Just quiet.
"I didn't have anything," I said. "No money, no job, no plan. The cabin was a wreck. I rebuilt it because I didn't know what else to do with my hands. And somewhere in the middle of putting up drywall and learning to cook salmon that didn't taste like punishment, I realized this was the first place I'd ever wanted to keep."
I looked at the beer in my hand. "I don't know if I deserve it. The place. The life." I took another drink. "Most days I figure if I can get through the day without wrecking anything, that's close enough."
