The Belay Partner

The text I sent at 9:40 on a Tuesday night was, in hindsight, pretty forward.

"hey are you free tomorrow? want to climb. River bend. Just us. I need to celebrate being free of my husband for 6 whole months lol"

Okay, maybe very forward. I stared at my phone after I hit send, sitting on the floor of my new apartment with no furniture except an air mattress and a folding chair, wondering if I'd just blown up a perfectly good acquaintance. Lawrence and I had met once, at Sandra's cookout back in June, and all we'd really done since was like each other's climbing photos on Instagram. That is not a foundation for a whole day alone at a crag.

He replied in eleven seconds.

"YES. Absolutely. Pick you up at 8? I'll drive. And congrats on six months, that deserves a summit or at least a topout."

I laughed out loud in my empty living room.

"8 works. I'll send the address. Also i should warn you i haven't climbed since like october so i might embarrass myself"

"Impossible. I've seen your flash of that V4 on your page. You'll be fine. Bring water, I've got the rest."

So that was that. I barely slept, which was stupid, but I lay there on the air mattress grinning at the ceiling like an idiot. Twenty-two years old, divorced, and going climbing with a cute gear rep I barely knew. My ex would have hated it. Which, honestly, made it better.

He pulled up at 7:58 in an old white Tacoma with a rack of quickdraws rattling in the bed, and I got in and immediately felt underdressed next to him. The man owns more carabiners than I own spoons.

"Morning," he said. "Coffee's in the cupholder if you want it. It's gas station coffee, so, manage your expectations."

"You are a gentleman and a scholar." I took it anyway. "How long is the drive?"

"About an hour. Traffic should be light this early." He pulled out and glanced over. "So. Six months. How's freedom treating you?"

"Weird," I said. "Good weird. Like I keep waiting for someone to tell me what to do and then remembering nobody works here anymore."

He laughed at that, a real one, and the drive went easy after that. We talked about routes we'd done, gyms we hated, the criminal price of climbing shoes. He asked about the divorce exactly once, didn't push, and I liked him for it.

River Bend was already warming up when we got there, the hillside all golden in the morning light, the river doing its lazy thing down below. There were maybe four other parties scattered along the bluff. Lawrence shouldered the rope and the trad rack like it weighed nothing and led us up the trail to a wall he clearly had strong feelings about.

"Okay," he said, setting his pack down at the base of this clean gray face maybe sixty feet tall. "I'm thinking we start you on this. It's a 5.9, mostly vertical, one crux move around the third bolt. Good holds, just a little reachy. I'll set a top-rope so you can relax and climb instead of worrying about leading."

"Top-rope works for me," I said, and then, because apparently my mouth had commitments my brain hadn't signed off on, "full disclosure, I'm rusty. Like, really rusty. October rusty. The last time I climbed outdoors I was married and my then-husband belayed me and complained the whole time about how it cut into his Saturday."

Lawrence looked up from untangling the rope and something in his face went careful. "Well. Today there's no complaining allowed. House rules." He flaked the rope out in a big messy spiral. "And rusty is fixable. Your body remembers way more than you think it does. The first pitch might feel clumsy, and then it'll come back."

"You're just saying that."

"I am literally never just saying that." He walked the rope around a big oak near the top of the approach, threw the tail over a low limb, and started rigging the anchor off two trees with this calm, unhurried efficiency that was honestly kind of nice to watch. "Top-rope through the oak, backup off the trunk. Bombproof. You could hang a car off this."

"Please don't hang a car off it. I will be hanging off it."

"That's the idea." He backed down to the flat ground, threaded the rope through the carabiner, and handed me one end. "Belay check me anyway. I know it's top-rope, but habit."

We ran through it. His figure eight was textbook. Mine was not, and he waited while I redid it without making it a whole thing, which I appreciated more than he probably knew.

"Okay," he said, clipping the grigri on his end and sitting back against the oak. "Whenever you're ready. Take your time. The rock's not going anywhere."

I chalked up and stood at the base looking up at the first moves. My hands felt weird. My brain felt weirder.

"Lawrence?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm kind of nervous," I admitted. "Which is dumb, it's a 5.9, I've led harder in the gym. But the last time I did this I was a different person. Like literally a different person, with a different last name and a different life, and he was standing right there. And now he's not. And it's just... a lot, apparently, to be standing at the base of a rock with a man I met at a cookout."

He didn't laugh at me. He leaned back on the rope and looked up at the route, then back at me.

"You know what's cool about climbing?" he said. "The rock doesn't know anything about you. It doesn't care who you were married to or for how long. It's just holds. One at a time. You only ever have to solve the one you're on." He winked at me. "And for what it's worth, I'm glad the cookout man is me and not him."

That got a laugh out of me, which broke about half the nervousness right there.

"Okay," I said, and gripped the first hold. "On belay."

"Belay on."

The first ten feet were clumsy, exactly like he predicted. My feet skated off smears twice and I hung on the rope once and swore, and he just quietly took slack back in and said nothing, which was somehow the perfect response. Then, somewhere around the third bolt, my hands remembered. Weight to the outside of the foot. Hips to the wall. Breathe. The crux move was a reach up and left, and I found a crimp I liked, stepped high, and stuck it, and something in my chest unclenched that had been clenched, I realized, for about six months.

"Nice!" he called up. "That's the move. You look like you've done this before."

"I have done this before!"

"Could've fooled me. Keep going, you're almost there."

I topped out at the top of the face, whooping, and leaned back to be lowered, and the whole way down I was grinning like a fool. When my feet touched the ground I spun around to face him.

"Okay. That. I needed that so bad. Can we do it again?"

"Again, and then I want to get on something harder." He was smiling too, this easy warm smile, and he started flaking the rope for my next go. "You're not rusty, by the way. You're just cold. Big difference."

We ran it two more times, then he took his turn and floated the thing like it was a sidewalk, and by early afternoon we'd migrated down the hill to the boulders, and the other parties had thinned out one by one until the bluff went quiet. The light started doing that long gold late-afternoon thing through the trees, and we ended up back at the picnic area near the lot, sitting sideways on the bench with our legs stretched out, sharing the last of my water.

"So what's next for the newly free woman?" he asked. "Besides climbs on random Wednesdays with near-strangers."

"Uh, you're not a near-stranger anymore. You're my belay partner." I took a sip. "And I don't know. That's kind of the fun part. For two years every week was planned out for me. Now it's just... blank pages."

"Scary?"

"Terrifying. Amazing. Both." I looked over at him. He'd pulled his shirt sleeves up and his forearms were all ropey and chalk-dusted and I was absolutely not looking at them, except I was. "Why, are you offering to fill some pages?"

The word came out before I could stop it, flirtier than I meant it to be, or maybe exactly as flirty as I meant it to be. He looked at me and something shifted, just slightly, in the way he was sitting.

He didn't answer right away, which was answer enough, honestly. He turned his water bottle over in his hands a couple of times.

"Maybe," he said. "Depends on the pages."

"Okay, that was smooth and I hate you a little for it."

"You literally started it."

"I know, I'm just saying." I took another sip of water so I'd have something to do with my mouth that wasn't talking. "So. Hypothetically. If a recently divorced woman wanted to fill a Saturday with, I don't know, more of this, would the belay partner be available? Professionally, I mean. Or not professionally. Whatever."

He was quiet again for a second. The river was doing its thing down below us, that low constant sound.

"Yana," he said. "Can I say something kind of direct?"

"Oh no!"

"Nothing bad. I just want to check before I say it."

"Okay, fine, say it."

"You're twenty-two, you've been free of this guy for six months, and today has been one of the best climbing days I've had in a year. And I like you. Like, not just as a climbing partner. So before I do anything about that, I want to make sure this isn't a rebound thing where I wake up tomorrow and you've changed your number."

I stared at him. "That's your direct thing? That's very polite."

"I'm a polite direct person."

"Okay, my turn to be direct then." I set the water bottle down on the bench between us like it was a gavel. "He complained about climbing cutting into his Saturdays. That encapsulated the whole marriage, basically, in one sentence. Him asking me to be smaller. And for six months I have been waiting for somebody to ask me to be bigger, and then today you tied in with me and said the rock doesn't care who I was married to, and I almost cried on a 5.9. So no. This is not a rebound. This is the opposite of a rebound. This is a... launch?"

"A launch." He was grinning now. "Okay. Launch. I can work with that."

"But just so we're on the same page, I'm not looking for anything serious right now. I literally own an air mattress and a folding chair. I can't host a relationship. I can barely host myself."

"What do you have against furniture?"

"I have a whole philosophy about it, I'm not getting into it right now." I nudged his knee with mine. "I'm saying today was great and I'd like more of today. That's all. No schedule, no expectations."

"No schedule, no expectations," he repeated, and he looked at me while he said it, and my stomach did something complicated.

"So is that a yes to more Saturdays?"

"That's a yes to more Saturdays."

"Cool. Cool cool cool." And then because apparently I had no chill left at all, "Lawrence, are you going to kiss me or do I have to fill out a form?"

He laughed, this surprised bark of a laugh. "That was supposed to be my line."

"You were taking too long."

"I was trying to be respectful of the six months of freedom."

"The freedom would very much like to be kissed, thank you."

"Well, when you put it like that." And he leaned in, slow enough that I could have pulled back, and I didn't, and then his lips met mine and it was soft and warm and tasted a little like chalk dust and my water bottle. His hand came up to the side of my face, careful, like he was still asking. I let out a noise into it that I'm glad nobody else was around to hear, because the bluff had gone completely quiet except for the river and us.

When we broke apart I was holding his shirt in both fists like I was afraid he'd float away.

"Okay," I said. "Wow. Hi."

"Hi."

"That was worth the wait. Do it again?"

"Yes, ma'am." And he did, and the second one was less careful, and I liked the less careful one better, and my hands found the back of his neck under all that hair, and he made a low sound that did things to me, and