The Crush Bet

I was about halfway up the 5.10c on the east wall when I saw her. My grip opened up like somebody had pried my fingers off the hold one by one, and the next thing I knew I was swinging on the rope, dangling there like a piñata.

It was Cammie. Two years since I'd seen her and I still knew her from the back. She was sitting at one of the little tables by the café, pretending to read her phone, and she was wearing one of those physical therapist polo shirts with her hair pulled back. Cammie was thirty-four now, which I knew because I'd looked her up once or twice, and I'm not proud of that, but there it is.

Here's how I knew her. I'm Larry, thirty-three, I sell surgical staplers to hospitals, which is a real job, don't laugh. Two years ago I matched with her on one of those apps and we went on exactly one date, and it was a great one, honestly. We talked for four hours at a taco place and she laughed at my dumb jokes and when she touched my arm I felt it for a week. Then she just never answered again. No goodbye, no thanks for the tacos, nothing. She ghosted me so clean you'd think I was a debt collector.

And now she was at my gym. I go to The Boulder Stop maybe three times a week, and in two years she had never once been there, and now she was drinking a smoothie under the route I was failing at.

"Bro. Bro." It was Axel, the front desk guy. He's twenty-nine, and he has made it his personal project to get me back out there since my last relationship ended the way a paper towel dispenser ends. He was holding my chalk bag, which I hadn't asked him to hold, because Axel has no concept of personal space or tasks.

"You saw her too, huh," I said. I was still hanging on the rope.

"I've been watching you hang there for like ninety seconds. You good?"

"I slipped."

"You fell."

"I slipped dramatically."

He looked up at her, then back at me, and I watched the math happen on his face. Axel is not a subtle person. When he figured out who she was, his whole body kind of lit up.

"No way," he said. "Taco date guy? The one who got ghosted so hard you made me delete the app off your phone?"

"You made me delete it because you kept swiping on my matches."

"Details. Okay, okay." He set my chalk bag down on the pad, which is exactly where you should never set a chalk bag, and he put twenty dollars of his own money on top of it. "Twenty bucks says you can't get her to say yes to a drink."

"That's a terrible bet for you. You want me to lose."

"Twenty bucks says you chicken out. Come on, I know you. You're gonna climb back up that wall and pretend you didn't see her and then tell me about it for six months."

He wasn't wrong, and that was the insulting part. I had told him about Cammie a bunch of times, always framing it as a funny story about modern dating, and he always said the same thing, which was that any woman who ghosts you after a good date is either married or insane, and either way, forget her.

But I was thirty-three years old and she was right there and my palms were still chalky from the route.

"You're on," I said, and I took the twenty off my chalk bag because if I was gonna win it I wanted to hold it first.

"Attaboy," Axel said. "I'll be over here pretending to restock the rental shoes."

I unclipped from the rope and walked over there, and the whole walk took about nine seconds but felt like a mortgage term. She looked up when I was still four feet away, and I watched her face do the same thing mine had done, which was go from polite stranger to oh no.

"Larry," she said. "From the tacos."

"From the tacos," I said. "Hi, Cammie."

"I go here now. I just started, my clinic is like six blocks away." She said it like she was explaining herself, which was interesting, because it meant she knew she owed me an explanation. "I joined for the classes. My knees are garbage and my doctor said climbing, which I think was his way of punishing me."

"How are the knees?"

"Garbage. How's the stapler business?"

"Booming. People keep needing staples."

"God, that's such a weird job. You know I still think about that date sometimes?" She said it fast, like ripping a bandage, and then took a long drink of her smoothie like she was buying time. "I owe you an apology, actually. I just, my ex had called me that morning, right before our date, and I got it in my head I wasn't in a good place to start anything, and then the longer I didn't text you the weirder it got, and then it got so weird I figured you hated me."

"I didn't hate you. I was mostly confused. I made my old roommate Aiden inspect the taco place for hidden defects back then, like maybe I had something in my teeth the whole time."

"You did not."

"He checked. He said I was clean. He was lying, probably."

She laughed at that, the same laugh, and something in my chest unclenched. She looked older in a good way, like the last two years had been worth whatever they cost her. She was still wearing her clinic polo and she had a climbing injury wrap on her left wrist, which figures, a physical therapist who can't keep her own parts together.

"Okay," she said, and she set her smoothie down and turned her chair a little toward me, which felt as if a door was opening. "Here's my situation. I'm new here, I know nobody, and I spent the last ten minutes watching you hang off that rope like a coat on a hook."

"Dramatic slip."

"Sure it was." She was smirking at me and enjoying herself, and I remembered that from the date too, how much she enjoyed herself. "You still drink beer?"

"Professionally."

"There's a place on Fifth, the one with the terrible neon sign. I'm free tonight if you want to grab one. And Larry?" She pointed the smoothie at me. "You're buying, because tacos were great and the follow-up service was nonexistent."

"That's fair. Seven?"

"Seven. And wear something that isn't gym clothes, you look like someone who just fell off a wall."

"I did just fall off a wall."

"I know, I watched. It was the best part of my whole day."

I walked back to Axel with my heart going and my hand out, and he slapped the twenty into it without a word, because he'd been watching the whole thing from the shoe wall like it was television.

"Not a word," I said.

"I wasn't gonna say anything," he said, and then he said something anyway. "She asked you out. You overperformed. And hey, that bet was only ever about a drink, so whatever happens after is your business, not mine. I want a rematch sometime."

I pocketed the twenty and went back to my route, and I climbed it clean, top to bottom, first try, which I had never done before in my life. Some of that was the two years of practice and some of it was that a woman who ghosted me two years ago had just asked me out for beer, and my body had decided fear was optional tonight.

The place on Fifth was exactly as bad as its sign suggested, which was half the charm. The neon said "TAP RO OM" because the B and the A had died sometime during the previous administration of the building, and the inside smelled like fryer grease and old wood. We grabbed a table by the window and she ordered a porter and I got the same thing because I am nothing if not a follower.

"Okay, so catch me up," she said, pulling her wrap tighter. "Two years. Are you still living with that roommate, the one who inspected the taco place?"

"Aiden? God no, he moved to Denver two years ago. I have a new roommate, a guy named Chandler who sells roofing and eats standing up. You?"

"I moved apartments. Same clinic. I dated a guy for about four months who owned three juicers and talked about them constantly. That's my big news."

"That's genuinely terrible."

"Thank you, I thought so too." She drank some beer and wiped the foam off her lip with her thumb, and I had to look at the window for a second. "Can I ask you something kind of embarrassing?"

"You may."

"That first date. Was I weird? Be honest."

"You were great. That's the part that confused me. We talked for four hours and you laughed at my stapler jokes, and nobody laughs at my stapler jokes, and then you just vanished."

She winced and turned her glass a slow circle on the table. "Okay. So the real answer is dumber than the ex answer. The ex answer was maybe thirty percent of it."

"What's the other seventy?"

"I liked you too much." She said it to the table, then made herself look at me. "Like, by the end of tacos I was already doing the thing where you plan the second date in your head, and the third date, and I hadn't even known you a month, and it scared the hell out of me. So I ran. I'm not proud. I've apologized to you in my head like forty times."

"Well. Forty times in your head and once in person. I'll take it."

"You're taking it too easy. Yell at me a little."

"Cammie, I got twenty dollars out of this. My dignity is fully restored."

She laughed, that same laugh, and kicked me under the table, not hard, just to make a point. "You always did have a cheap dignity."

We stayed until the bartender started giving us the closing moves, the wiped counter, the pointed glass collecting. By then we were sitting on the same side of the table and her knee was against mine and neither of us had mentioned it. Her knee felt like a warm coin