Last Call Climb

I had told myself a dozen times on the drive over that I could still turn around. Red light, yellow light, plenty of chances to hang a U-ey and go home to my couch and my cold leftovers and my complete absence of dignity. Instead I made every light green, which felt like the universe laughing at me.

Here is my situation. I'm Taylor, thirty-four, paramedic, twelve years of hauling strangers off floors and talking them into ambulances. I have dated on and off since I was twenty-two and I have never once fallen in love, which my mother treats as a medical emergency and I treat as a hobby I haven't gotten around to. Lately every date has been some guy who talks about his ex for ninety minutes or asks what I do for fun and then explains why my answer is wrong. So when I saw a profile that said, plainly, "one time only, no repeats, meet me where I work," I swiped right out of spite. A man with terms. Finally, someone honest about wasting my time.

His name was Patrick. Thirty-six. The profile said he owned a climbing gym. I figured that was a flex. It turned out to be an address.

The Stone Reach was a converted warehouse on the east side, all brick and steel beams, with a roll-up door that was cracked open enough for me to slip through. Inside it was dim, lit mostly by colored LED strips running up alongside the climbing routes, blue and magenta and green, like the place had been decorated by a DJ with a budget. It smelled like chalk dust and sweat. My kind of honest smell, if I'm being fair. Bodies working.

"Down here," a voice called, and I found Patrick fifteen feet up a wall, under a wash of violet light, screwing holds into a bouldering route. He wore gray sweatpants and no shirt, which was apparently the uniform, and he climbed down with an ease that annoyed me on principle.

"You came," he said.

"I lost a bet with myself," I said. "Also you said no repeats, so worst case I'm out one evening."

"That's the spirit." He wiped chalk off his hands and looked me over without pretending not to. "You look like you sat in traffic and hated it."

"I sat in traffic and hated myself. Different thing. Where do you want to do this, back office? Let's not waste the whole night talking."

He laughed. Not a smooth laugh, an actual one. "Wow. Straight to it!"

"I told you. I'm tired of the warm-up part of men. Twelve years of appetizers, I want the meal and then I want to go home."

"Okay. One problem." He pointed his chin toward the far wall, and that's when I noticed the other two people. A man on a bench tying climbing knots with the idle speed of someone who does it all day, and a woman in a green tank top stretching against the wall. "That's Dev, my business partner. He's got keys too, he kind of lives here. And that's Kristie, she climbs here enough that we stopped charging her."

"Hi!" the woman called, cheerful, not embarrassed at all. "Don't mind us. I mean, do mind us a little, that's up to you."

Dev gave a small wave. "We heard you were coming. Patrick has zero poker face on the phone."

"Dev," Patrick said, in the tone of a man who has said it many times.

"What? It's true. You did the voice."

"I don't have a voice."

"You have a voice," Kristie confirmed.

I stood there with my jacket half off, recalculating. I had driven forty minutes for a spite hookup in a locked gym and instead I'd walked into a small crowd. The old Taylor, the sensible paramedic Taylor, would have said nice meeting everyone and left. But I was already annoyed at myself for coming, and being annoyed is a fuel I run on pretty well.

"Fine," I said. "You've got an audience. That's a new one. Do they get popcorn?"

"They get to climb," Patrick said. "That's the deal. Nobody's watching anything. I don't know what you think is happening, but I asked you here to climb first. You showed up ready to skip to the end of the movie."

I blinked at him. "You matched with me under a profile that says one time only."

"And the gym closes at ten and it's ten fifteen and I had a route to finish. So. While I finish it, warm up. Or don't, and stand there being mad at me, which honestly also works."

I should have left. I want that understood by any jury reading this later. I should have left and I instead took off my jacket, because he had just dared me, and dares have always worked on me better than charm.

* * *

Kristie materialized at my elbow while I changed into the athletic top I'd luckily worn under my work shirt. "For the record," she said, "I'm thirty-one, I've been coming here two years, and I promised myself this year I'd stop only doing the safe stuff. So if this is a weird night, I vote weird night."

"That's a lot of information for a stranger," I said.

"I'm a lot of information for a stranger." She grinned. She had a small silver ring in one eyebrow and forearms that told me she climbed four days a week. "Patrick's route over there is brand new and he does NOT want anyone touching it before he tops out. So obviously we're all going to touch it."

The route was under the magenta strip, maybe fifteen feet of wall, and Patrick was still two holds from the top, hanging there like it cost him nothing. Dev drifted over and stood beside me with his hands in his pockets. He was thirty-three, lean, dark hair buzzed short, with the calm of a man who spots falling people for a living.

"V start," he said. "Left heel hook, then trust the slopey one. Everybody thinks it's the crimps that get them but it's that slopey one."

"You're coaching me against your partner's route."

"I'm coaching you toward chaos. It's my role on this team."

I got on the wall. The first moves were easy, big holds, and then the heel hook Dev had promised, which required me to fold myself up compactly. Above me, Patrick had stopped moving. He was just hanging there on two holds, watching.

"You're blocking my route," I called up.

"It's my route."

"It's my route now, I'm on it!"

From the ground, Kristie said, "oh, I like her," in a stage whisper that was not a whisper.

I made the heel hook. My thigh burned, and the next hold was the slopey one Dev had warned me about, a fat rounded blob of plastic with almost no edge. I slapped it twice before my hand stuck. Patrick was still above me, close enough now that I could hear his breathing go ragged, close enough that when I pulled up he had to shift his whole body sideways to give me room, and even then my shoulder brushed his ribs.

"Sorry," I said, not sorry.

"You're not," he said. "You're matching me move for move on my own route on your first night in a gym."

"Is that rare?"

"It's obnoxious, is what it is."

I laughed, and laughing mid-climb is a mistake, because I peeled off the slopey hold and for half a second I was in the air. Then the rope caught, except there was no rope, because bouldering, and instead two hands caught me. Patrick had dropped off the wall, both feet, fast, and he took my weight on his forearms and set me down on the mat like he'd done it ten thousand times, which he probably had.

"Nice catch," Dev said, unbothered, from the bench.

"Twelve years of catching people," I said. "Occupational habit. Though usually off bathroom floors."

"Paramedic?" Kristie asked.

"Since I was twenty-two."

"That tracks. You've got the calm."

"I've got the tired," I said. "Calm is the display version."

Patrick hadn't stepped back after setting me down. We were maybe six inches apart, both breathing hard from the route, and the magenta light made him look purple and ridiculous and, annoyingly, good. He looked at me the way you look at a hold you're not sure will take your weight.

"So here's my thing," he said. "I'm going to say this once and then drop it. The profile means what it says. One night, no repeats, I'm not boyfriend material and I'm not auditioning. But I'd rather do that properly than in a hurry. Which means I'd like to kiss you, and I'd like your yes first, and if the answer is not tonight, that's fine too and I'll drive you home."

Dev, from the bench, said, "oh my god, he rehearsed that."

"Shut up, Dev."

"He practiced it in the mirror on Tuesday," Kristie said. "I heard him."

"You were not here Tuesday."

"I have keys, Patrick. I have keys."

I looked at Patrick. He was a little pink under the violet light, which I chose to enjoy very much. The thing was, the asking itself did something the swagger hadn't. Every other man this year had just leaned in and hoped, and here was this one standing there with his hands open, waiting on a word from me like the word was the whole point.

"Yes," I said. "You can kiss me. Once. I'm still mad at you about the profile."

"That's fair," he said, and he leaned in slow enough that I could have changed my mind, and I didn't, and his mouth was warm and chalk-dusted and patient, and one of his hands came up to my jaw like he was spotting it.

Somewhere behind us, Kristie said, "okay, that's actually kind of sweet," and Dev said, "give it nine minutes," and I decided I was going to make him eat that prediction.

The kiss ended and Patrick stepped back about a foot, which felt like a controlled descent. I was not going to be the one who closed the gap again. I had my pride, plus a job where I see what happens to people who make decisions at altitude.

"That's the once," he said. "For the record."

"You don't get a twice just for asking nicely."

"No, but I get to keep hoping."

"Hope's free," I said. "Everything else here costs a beer."

Dev raised his hand from the bench the way a kid with the answer would. "Speaking of which, we have beer. In the office fridge. Which is technically against gym policy, which is why we wrote the policy, so we could break it with a clear conscience."

"You own the gym," Kristie said. "Owning it makes it sweeter."

He went and got four bottles, and handed them around, and I took mine because refusing seemed like more work. That's my whole story, honestly. Twelve years of paramedicine and the through line is that I take the path of least resistance between me and whatever's going to happen anyway.

Dev cracked his open and looked at the two of us the way a man looks at a whiteboard he's about to erase. "So. Genuine question, no judgment. Am I interrupting something, or am I witnessing something?"

"You're witnessing," Patrick said. "Barely."

"Because I can leave. I have a couch in the office that has absorbed worse evenings than this one."

"You're not leaving," Kristie said. "You're the entertainment."

"He's staying," Patrick said, and something in how he said it made me look at him twice. He wasn't asking Dev. He was telling me, sort of, in the way you tell someone a fact about the room and let them do what they want with it.

I sat down on the mat with my beer, because my thighs were done pretending they'd had enough of standing, and Kristie folded down next to me cross-legged. Dev dragged the bench over. Patrick stayed up, which I figured was a habit, and leaned against the wall with one foot hooked on a hold like the floor was for people with desk jobs.

* * *

I don't know how we got from beer to the conversation we got to. Actually I do. Kristie started it, which surprised nobody who'd been listening to her for five minutes.

"Okay, but the profile thing," she said, pointing her bottle at Patrick. "'One time only, no repeats, meet me where I work.' That's not a bio, that's a manifesto. What are you protecting, exactly?"

"My peace."

"Your peace."

"Some people guard their calendars, Kristie. I guard my peace."

"You own a climbing gym. Your peace is already weird."

Dev laughed into his beer. "He's had the rule since his fling at twenty-eight. Some climber girl, they were inseparable for a summer, then it went sideways and he wrote the policy."

"You wrote a policy about a person?" I asked. "I wrote a policy about myself. There's a difference. Mostly."

"See, this is what I mean," Kristie said, and turned to me. "You're the test case. You drove forty minutes on a manifesto. What were you expecting, actually? Be honest, we're all strangers, this is the cheapest therapy in town."

I took a drink to buy a second. "I was expecting to be annoyed and then go home. That was the plan. Annoyed, quick, home by midnight, never think about it again."

"And instead?"

"Instead I'm sitting on a mat at eleven at night drinking a beer that belongs to a business that has policies about itself."

"That's growth," Dev said.

"What about you?" I asked him. "What's your deal? You kind of live in a climbing gym."

"I sleep here four nights a week and shower in a locker room, and my mother says I'm throwing my life away, and my mother also says my life was already thrown, so." He shrugged. "I'm thirty-three. I like watching things work. Routes, partnerships, groups of people. I'm curious, basically. Curiosity is my whole personality and it's cheaper than a hobby."

"Curious about what, exactly?" Kristie asked, and there was a little pause where everyone heard the shape of the question.

"Anything," Dev said, carefully casual. "Everything. Whatever presents itself."

Kristie looked at me. I looked at Kristie. It was one of those looks where two strangers exchange information faster than either of them