Spotter's Hands

*This one started with the idea of someone who wants to cause a specific kind of hurt and ends up accidentally wanting something real. Thanks for reading; the climbing details came from watching people fail at knots for an afternoon.*

I'm thirty-two years old and I spend my days driving a delivery van around a midsize city, which means I've had a lot of time lately to think about the exact moment my girlfriend stopped seeing me. That's a lie, sort of. She sees me. She just doesn't watch me anymore, if that makes sense, and I've been turning the difference over in my head for weeks now, all through the stops and the signature pads and the long stretches of Route 9 with nothing but storage units sliding past the window.

The moment happened at a team dinner two months ago. Sophia manages Route 9 Climbing & Fitness, this converted warehouse on the edge of town with exposed brick and paint peeling off the walls in long gray strips, and once a month she takes her staff out somewhere with cloth napkins. I came along that night because I was invited, technically, and I sat at the end of the table next to a guy who ran the front desk and mostly talked about his car. Across from me, down past two other people, Sophia sat beside Marcie Webb, who is a member at the gym and apparently a big deal on some regional competition circuit. Blonde, tall, loud in a charming way, the kind of woman who touches your forearm when she laughs at your joke.

Sophia laughed at maybe six of her jokes. I counted. I counted because each one got a little bigger than the last, and by the sixth one Sophia had her head tipped back and her hand on Marcie Webb's arm, and I sat there at the end of the table with my water glass and thought, well, there it is. That's what it looks like when I'm not in the room even though I'm in the room.

Did Sophia flirt? I honestly don't know. That's the part that eats at me. She'd say no, and she'd mean it, and she'd be hurt that I asked, because she pursued me for six months back when we met at a friend's cookout, two years ago now, and she reminds me of that whenever I get cold on her. And she's not wrong. She chased me across an entire summer with texts and dropped-by visits and one very patient conversation in my driveway where she said, plainly, that she wanted to be exclusive and she'd wait for me to be ready. I said yes eventually. I have never once regretted saying yes. But I have been pulling away lately, small pulls, the kind you don't announce, and I know she's noticed because she's started doing this thing where she asks if I'm okay in a voice that's too careful.

So when I pulled the van into the gym's gravel lot last Tuesday, I had a plan. I want to be fair to myself here and say the plan felt reasonable at the time, and it still feels about sixty percent reasonable now, which is more than most of my plans manage.

The plan was this: Sophia had been after me for a year to take the beginner climbing class. Tuesday nights, six weeks, she teaches it herself. I always said no because watching her in her element makes me feel like furniture, and because I'm afraid of heights in a way I've never said out loud to anyone. But Marcie Webb was going to be there that night with her climbing partner, and I had decided, somewhere between the storage units and the auto shops on my route, that I was going to flirt with that partner. Right in front of Sophia. Let her feel the little cold pull for once. Let her sit at the end of a table counting laughs.

I signed the waiver at the front desk with a pen chained to the counter, and the kid at the desk, who is maybe twenty-three, looked at my name and then at the staff photo behind him and said, oh, you're Sophia's Myra, and I said yes, I'm Sophia's Myra, and then hated how that sounded out loud.

The class gathered by the bouldering wall at six. There were eight of us, mostly people in their twenties with the fearless rubbery bodies of people in their twenties, plus one nervous man of about forty who kept checking his phone, plus me. And then there was the partner. Marcie Webb's partner, the one I'd scoped out at the dinner and decided would be my instrument of petty revenge.

Her name, it turned out, was Marci Hopkins. Same name, different spelling, which struck me as the universe having a lazy night. She was lean in the way climbers are, all ropey forearms and no wasted motion, somewhere around my age, thirty-two maybe, with dark hair pulled back and these steady brown eyes that did something I wasn't prepared for. They stayed. When she looked at you, she stayed looking. Everyone else in that gym was glancing around, checking the wall, checking their phones, checking Marcie Webb to see if she was checking them, and this woman just looked at things until she was done looking at them.

She was also, I noticed with some annoyance, kind. When the nervous forty-year-old froze halfway up the easiest wall, she talked him down in a low even voice, no teasing, no hurry, and I watched him come back to the mat looking like he'd been handed something. She spotted people without being asked. She chalked her hands and clapped the chalk cloud off and watched other climbers the way some people watch birds, with real attention and no scorekeeping.

So much for my instrument. You can't use a person like that as a prop. I knew it within ten minutes and I signed up anyway, and I told myself it was reconnaissance, which is a word I don't think I've ever used before in my life, and which my inner voice immediately mocked me for.

Sophia taught the class. She's good at it, that's the thing, she's genuinely good, patient and clear and funny in a dry way she saves for strangers because she thinks I've stopped listening. I climbed the easy wall on the auto-belays and my hands shook and I did not look down and I made it to the top twice, and both times I looked over to see if she'd seen, and both times she was spotting Marcie Webb on the harder wall, giving beta, calling out holds. Hold the blue, reach left, Marcie, you've got it, that's it.

I hung at the top of my wall like a sad ornament and thought about how she used to look at me like that. Like I had moves worth calling out.

After class, everyone stood around unlacing harnesses and making the small talk people make when they've survived something together, and Marcie Webb was holding court near the water fountain about some competition in Knoxville, and Sophia was laughing, and there it was again, that laugh, the big public one, the one I used to earn. And Marci Hopkins was standing a little apart from it, packing up a rope coil with neat efficient hands, not performing anything, not looking at anyone, and I walked over to her because the plan was still alive in some stubborn back room of my head.

I asked her how long she'd been climbing. Stupid opener, fine, but I was working from a script written by a resentful woman in a delivery van.

"About twelve years," she said, and she looked at me while she said it, all the way at me, the way she'd looked at the wall and the nervous man and everything else, and she asked what had finally gotten me in the door after a year of Sophia asking. She remembered that. That Sophia had been asking. Sophia must have mentioned me at some point, which shouldn't have made my chest do what it did, but there you go.

I said something about being tired of feeling like furniture in her gym. I hadn't meant to say that part. It just came out, plain and a little bitter, and instead of laughing or filing it away, Marci Hopkins nodded like it was a real answer to a real question.

"Furniture's just stuff nobody sits on anymore," she said, coiling the last of her rope. "Maybe you're in the wrong room."

Then she said the thing that broke my plan on the spot, quietly, while Marcie Webb's laugh went off again across the gym like a car alarm. She said she'd noticed me watching Sophia all class, and that it was obvious Sophia watched back when she thought nobody was looking, and that people who watch like that usually have something worth fixing. And then she asked if I wanted to come back Thursday, just to climb, just the two of us, because beginners improve faster with a patient partner.

I said yes before my plan could raise its hand.

Walking to the van, I texted Sophia that I'd signed up for the full six weeks and she sent back a row of exclamation points and a heart, and I sat in the gravel lot with the engine off and realized I had no idea anymore whether I'd come here to make her jealous or to get seen.

Thursday. I told myself all week it was just climbing, that I'd pay my gym dues and take my beginner lumps and go home smelling like chalk, which I now understood was a smell I liked, and that the whole jealousy apparatus had been quietly dismantled and hauled off sometime around the moment Marci Hopkins said maybe you're in the wrong room. That's what I told myself. I drive a delivery van for a living, so I know a load that's shifting in the back when I feel one, and this one was shifting.

The lot was empty when I pulled in at five forty, just Sophia's little hatchback and one other car I didn't recognize, and the gym was in its weekday evening quiet, lamps on low over the bouldering wall, the big warehouse space holding its echoes the way warehouses do. Sophia was in the office with the door half open, on the phone about a supply order, and she looked up when I came through and did the thing she does, this small two-finger wave off the phone, this we'll-talk-later wave, and I felt the old familiar sting of being scheduled around. Marci was already at the ropes, laying out gear on a bench with the neatness of someone who does it eight times a week. Dark hair pulled back, sleeves pushed up, forearms like cable. She looked up and said hey, like we were two Thursdays into a thing instead of one.

"Ropes or bouldering today?" she asked, holding up a harness in each hand like a waiter presenting options.

"You're the teacher."

"That's not an answer."

"Ropes," I said, and she nodded and set one harness down and started threading a rope through a grigri with hands that never once looked at what they were doing. I asked what the metal thing was called and she told me, and then she said the word belay about nine times in two minutes, patiently, the way you repeat a word for a kid, except she never made it feel like that, she made it feel like we were both learning the same language and she just had a head start.

She checked my figure eight knot twice. She checked my harness twice. She explained the whole system to me top to bottom, rope, device, carabiner locked and flipped, her weight on the other end, and she made me repeat it back, and when I fumbled the part about the brake hand she just waited, arms crossed, no sigh, no glance at the clock, and eventually my brain produced it. That's when I decided to test her. I know why I did it. I wanted to see if the patience had a floor. Everybody's patience has a floor, I've been to the floor of plenty of people's patience, I live there professionally, and I wanted to know where hers was before I got comfortable.

So I dropped a term wrong. On purpose. She'd said on-belay, the call and response thing, climber ready, belay on, the little ritual handshake of the sport, and I looked her dead in the eye and said, so when do I get to do the pendulum thing, the pendulum, meaning the swing you'd do cleaning an overhang or falling off lead, which has nothing to do with anything we were doing, on a top rope, on a slab, in a beginner session, and I watched her face for the flicker. The are-you-stupid flicker. The lord flicker. Sophia does the flicker. Most people do the flicker.

Marci tilted her head about a degree.

"On top rope you just sit into the rope," she said. "Pendulum comes later, if you get on lead."

No correction of the term. No lecture. Just the actual answer, given straight, like I'd asked a real question, and then she added, "Some people mean a fall swing when they say that. You won't get one here, the rope runs straight over your head." And she picked up the grigri and said on-belay, and I said climbing, and up I went.

Here's what nobody tells you about being belayed by someone who's good at it. It feels like being held. Not the dramatic version, not some movie thing, but the small mechanical fact of it, that a woman with twelve years of rope time has her brake hand locked on the other end of your line and she is reading you the whole time, reading your hips and your breathing and the micro-hesitation before a reach, and feeding slack or taking it a half inch at a time so the rope is never dead and never choking you. I got halfway up the 5.7 and my foot skated off a hold, both feet, clean peel, and the rope caught me inside a second, soft, almost no jerk at all, and Marci said from the floor, calm as anything, "That's the system working. Shake it out and try the blue again."

I hung there in my harness in the middle of the converted warehouse with my hands shaking and thought, absurdly, that no one had ever caught me that well. Not in climbing. Not anywhere. My last serious relationship, the two-year one before Sophia, ended with a woman who drove me everywhere and then informed me she'd been keeping score the whole time, so I know a little something about people holding the rope wrong on purpose. And Sophia, God love her, catches things late. She catches them after the dinner's over, after the laugh's been given away, weeks later, over dishes, in paragraphs. Marci caught me inside a second and didn't even make it a moment.