Bridge to You

Okay so let me start with the basics. My name is Robbie Hawthorne, I'm twenty-eight, I'm an architect, and I'm a trans woman who's been single for a while. Well, single until about six weeks ago, when a dating app decided to ruin my life in the best way.

Here's how it happened. I got a notification that somebody liked my profile, and the name was Caitlin Wilks. Now, most people would think, cool, new person, whatever. But I knew that name. Three years ago, when I was twenty-five and Caitlin was twenty-six, we had this online thing. Not a relationship exactly, more like two months of flirty messages at one in the morning that eventually just sort of faded out because I got scared and she stopped pushing. I always wondered what would've happened if I'd been braver back then.

So obviously I swiped right so fast I nearly threw my phone across the room.

We messaged for weeks. Real messages, not the boring hey-how-are-you stuff. She's a lobbyist for an environmental nonprofit, which sounds dull until you hear her describe chaining herself to a conference table in Bern. Eventually she said, why don't we meet in person, there's this lodge I know in the Alps, the Frostpine Chalet, above Lake Tarn. A whole weekend. I said yes before I finished reading the message.

Which brings me to Friday afternoon, standing on the porch of this gorgeous timber lodge with my duffel bag and my heart doing something unreasonable.

The door opened and there she was. Caitlin. Twenty-nine now, taller than me, dark hair loose, cheeks pink from the cold, grinning like she'd been waiting all day to say whatever she was about to say.

"You're even shorter than your profile said!" she said.

My stomach did a full flip. "Excuse me? Five foot four is a perfectly respectable height!"

"It said five five. You lied to me in your profile, Hawthorne."

"That was three years ago! People shrink."

She laughed and it was the same laugh, the exact one from all those late-night messages, and I swear my knees got a memo about it before my brain did. She pulled me into a hug before I could overthink it, and she smelled like cold air and pine, and I thought, oh no. Oh no, the crush is not dead. The crush is very much alive and it brought luggage.

"Come inside, it's brutal out here," she said, tugging my bag off my shoulder like it weighed nothing. "Wine first, gossip second, opinions on the architecture third, because I know you've already got them."

"I have four opinions and one of them is about your roofline."

"Save the best one for me."

The common room had a huge stone fireplace and about nine throw blankets, which told me everything I needed to know about the place. She poured us mulled wine from a pot on the stove and we settled into chairs by the fire, and it was easy. That's the part that got me. It should've been awkward, right? Two people who ghosted each other three years ago? But it was like the messages just picked up mid-sentence.

"So tell me about the staircases," she said, tucking her legs up under her. "I've been following your firm's page. That spiral thing in Zurich? Robbie. It goes nowhere."

"It goes to a viewing platform."

"It goes to a platform you can see just fine from the ground."

"That is not the point of a staircase, Caitlin. The point of a staircase is the journey. The romance. The..."

"The wasted budget?"

"Poetry," I said, pointing at her with my wine glass. "The poetry of vertical movement. Not that a lobbyist would understand. What was your latest stunt, gluing yourself to a meeting?"

"That was last year. I've matured. Now I just show up at conferences with a fake glacier made of paper maché and stand next to it looking sad until reporters take pictures."

"That is deranged and I respect it."

"It works, is the thing. A minister took a photo with it and it ended up on the front page. Paper maché, Robbie. Cost me forty francs."

We kept going like that, trading jabs, and somewhere in the middle of her impression of a very pompous energy executive I realized I was grinning so hard my face hurt. The old crush wasn't just back, it had brought friends. Every time she looked at me I forgot what I was saying. Twice I lost a whole sentence mid-word and she just waited, smirking, like she knew exactly what was happening to me. Maybe she did. Maybe she always had.

The light outside started going that blue-gray alpine color that photographers would kill for, and the snow on the peaks turned pink for like ten minutes. I was watching it out the window when Caitlin stood up and stretched.

"Come on," she said. "I want to show you something before it's fully dark."

"Is it your paper maché glacier? Because I've seen the photos."

"Better. Well, worse, actually, for you specifically." She grabbed two more blankets and her coat and looked at me with that grin. "There's a rope bridge. Connects the main lodge to the guest annex, where our rooms are. It goes over a little gorge."

"How little?"

"Little enough to be scenic. Big enough to be exciting."

"How long is it?"

"Robbie." She said my name all soft and patient, the way you talk to a cat about to bolt. "It's a hundred and something feet of very well maintained Swiss engineering. It sways a little. That's the fun part."

I want to tell you I'm brave. I'm an architect, I do load calculations for a living, I understand rope bridges on a technical level. But my hands were already shaking when we got to the platform, and it was mostly dusk now, the lake below gone dark and glassy, and the bridge was just this pale line swinging gently in the wind and I hated it with my whole chest.

"Okay, here's the deal," Caitlin said, stepping close. "You go first or I go first, your choice, but you're not getting out of this. The annex has the good beds and the good view and I refuse to sleep in the lobby chairs."

"The lobby chairs are fine."

"They're from 1987."

"Vintage."

She laughed, then her voice went gentler. "Hey. Look at me. I've crossed this thing like thirty-nine times. Nothing is happening to you tonight. I'll be right behind you the whole way, okay?"

"Okay," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted.

"Here." She took hold of the back of my jacket, her fist closed in the fabric, solid and warm. "I've got you. If you wobble, I've got you. First step is the worst one."

I gripped the cables and stepped out, and the whole bridge moved under my boot and I made a noise I'm not proud of. Caitlin made a noise too, a snort of a laugh that she tried to turn into an encouraging sound about halfway through.

"Don't laugh at me."

"I'm not laughing. I'm supporting you. Supportively."

"It sounded like laughter."

"It sounded like admiration." Her hand tightened on my jacket. "Six steps in. You're doing great. Look at the water, isn't it pretty?"

"Everything is pretty when I'm not actively dying."

Halfway across, the wind picked up and the bridge dipped and I went completely rigid. Caitlin's grip on my jacket held, firm, and she leaned in close so I could feel her breath near my ear.

"I've got you," she said again. "Breathe. Next plank. Just the next plank."

So I did the next plank. And the one after that. And somewhere around plank sixty I realized my hands had stopped shaking, that her fist in my jacket was the steadiest thing in my whole world at that moment, and that I would cross a hundred bridges if it meant she kept holding on like that at the end of each one.

"You're stalling," she said.

"I'm admiring the view."

"You're stalling AND admiring the view. Fine, both are allowed." She gave my jacket a little tug. "Almost there. Ten more steps and you get a hot drink and a warm fire and I stop making fun of you. Mostly stop."

I took the last steps fast, like ripping off a bandage, and stepped onto the annex porch with my legs feeling like overcooked noodles. Caitlin came off the bridge behind me, cheeks pink, looking way too pleased with herself.

"See?" she said. "You survived. Told you."

"Barely. I want it noted that you witnessed my heroism."

"Noted. Also witnessed the squeaking."

"That was the bridge squeaking."

"Sure it was, Robbie." She smiled at me, and it wasn't the teasing grin anymore. It was softer than that. "Hey. Thanks for coming all the way out here."

"Thanks for holding my jacket like a backpack strap."

"Anytime," she said, and something in the way she said it made me think she meant it for more than just bridges.

The annex was perfect, honestly. Warm wood, big windows, beds you could actually sleep in. We dumped our stuff and Caitlin said we should go back over for dinner before the kitchen closed.

Famous last words.

The bridge was way easier the second time, I'll say that. Five minutes maybe. We got to the main lodge door and Caitlin grabbed the handle and pulled and it didn't open.

"That's weird," she said. She pulled again, harder. "That's really weird."

"Is there a trick to it?"

"No, there is not a trick to it, Robbie, it's a door." She yanked on it with both hands now. "Oh no. Oh no no no. It auto-latched. The wind, it must have caught the wind when we left and the latch fell and now it's..."

"Locked."

"Locked." She turned around and looked at me with this awful blank face. "The front desk closes at nine. There's no phone signal here, remember? The owner mentioned it. I thought he was being quaint."

"So we can't call anyone."

"We can't call anyone until morning."

I tried the door myself, like my architect arms were going to do what hers didn't. Nothing. I even walked the whole front of the building looking for another entrance and found exactly one very locked service door and a lot of beautiful, sealed, energy-efficient glazing.

"We're stranded," Caitlin said. She sat down on the front step. "On a mountain. In the Alps. In winter."

"On the bright side, we have coats and I have about nine blankets' worth of experience being cold in fancy buildings."

"That's not a thing."

"It's an architect thing."

She laughed, but she was already doing math in her head, I could tell. Her eyes kept going past me, over toward the path down to the lake.

"Okay," she said slowly. "Okay. The sauna."

"The sauna?"

"The sauna. It's down by the water, the glass-walled one. It runs on its own little stove, wood-fired, the owner told me all about it at check-in and I pretended not to care because I was busy looking at you." She stood up, brushing off her pants. "The annex is no good, its heating runs off the main lodge boiler, which shuts off at nine, and the owner said it's minus eight tonight. The sauna has its own stove and it stays warm all night if there's wood. There's wood. We can sleep in the changing room if it comes to that, or just sit in the heat until our brains stop panicking."

"You want to spend the night in a sauna."

"I want to not spend the night in a snowbank, yes."

Honestly? It was a good plan. It was the only plan. So we walked down the path to the lake, which was frozen and dark and weirdly beautiful, and the sauna sat right at the edge of it like a big glass lantern. Caitlin got the stove going like she'd done it her whole life. Lobbyists, apparently, know how to build fires. She said it was from all the protest camps.

An hour later the little room was toasty and the sky was doing that alpine thing where there are somehow more stars than sky.

"Okay," Caitlin said, standing, "I'm getting in. Sauna rules, Robbie. You don't sit in a Swiss sauna in your jeans, that's a crime up here. They'll revoke my residency."

I laughed and then I realized she was already pulling her shirt over her head and I was going to have to deal with my whole situation.

I hadn't talked about this with her yet, not in person. I'm trans. It's in my profile, right there in plain words, so she