The Late Shift Belay

I'm fifty-four years old and I've been nervous about this Tuesday night for two weeks. That's the part I keep circling back to. I've rebuilt transmissions in driveways during hailstorms. I've told a customer their engine is shot while their kid is crying in the back seat. None of that made my hands sweat like checking my phone for the third time in ten minutes to see if Tatiana had posted anything new.

She hadn't. She probably doesn't check her phone the way I do. She's a physical therapist, she's forty-nine, and from everything she wrote me over the last four months of messaging, she is a person who decides things and moves. I am a person who checks things three times and then checks them again. Some part of me has known since we first matched on that app that this difference is the whole point.

The Grip sits in an old warehouse district on the east side, and it's the kind of gym where the mats have been worn to a gray fuzz and the chalk dust has settled into everything, including, I would learn, my lungs. Tuesday at eight means a handful of regulars, one bored kid at the front desk, and a lot of empty wall. I signed the waiver, rented shoes, and stood by the entrance as a man waiting for a blind date at a bus station would, which in a sense I was.

She walked in at eight, right on time, and I recognized her instantly, which surprised me, because profiles lie. Hers didn't. Silver-streaked dark hair pulled back, climbing shoes dangling from one hand, gray tank top, forearms that told you everything about her hobbies. She spotted me doing my awkward half-wave and crossed the mats without hurrying.

"You're shorter than your profile picture let on," I said, and immediately wanted to walk into traffic. Of all the opening lines my brain had stocked for this evening, that was the one it fired.

She laughed. Actually laughed, head back a little, not a polite laugh. "And you're more nervous than I expected," she said. "Let's see if you climb as stiffly as you talk."

That broke something loose in my chest. I don't know how else to describe it. Four months of careful messages, of me drafting and redrafting replies, and she'd just gutted the tension in one sentence and a laugh. I paid for a day pass for her, which we'd settled beforehand, no debt between us, and we got to work.

We warmed up on the easy top-rope routes along the main wall, the 5.6s and 5.7s that even my forearms could forgive. I told her the truth about why I'd picked this gym, which is that I read fourteen Yelp reviews and this place had the most forgiving ratings and the least intimidating crowd. She was on the next route over, climbing smooth and quiet, and she called down that I was overthinking a gym selection the way I probably overthink everything.

"Probably," I admitted, to the wall in front of my face.

"Uh huh," she said, and I could hear the smile in it. "I have a theory about what to do with all that overthinking later. But first you're going to do that traverse wrong. Foot lower. Yes. There."

We climbed for an hour. She corrected my footwork without cruelty and without flattery, just the flat instruction of someone who fixes bodies for a living and knows how to fix movement. My forearms burned and I loved it. There's something about a rope above you and a wall in front of you that makes everything else simple. Up or down. Grip or let go.

Around nine she steered us toward the bouldering corner on the far side, near the cave wall, where the padding is thickest and nobody had been for twenty minutes. The regulars were clustered by the auto-belays on the other side of the gym, and the front desk kid was watching something on his phone. We had our patch of quiet.

She sat down on the mats to pull her shoes off, and I sat next to her, and for a minute we just breathed. Then she looked over at me in that sideways way people do when they already know the answer.

"Duane. In your fantasies. The ones you told me about, and the ones you didn't. Did you ever picture being tied up with climbing rope?"

My heart was pounding and I'm sure she could see it in my neck. I thought about lying, out of habit, out of fifty-four years of habit. I didn't.

"Yes," I said. "More times than I can count. I just never said it out loud before."

She smiled, slow, like she was unhurried on purpose. "Good. Then tonight you don't have to. Stand up."

I stood. She rose with me, took a length of gym rope off the wall rack, and coiled it in her hands with the quick economy of somebody who has done this, actually done this, not just read about it. She held up the rope and let me look at it, which I understood as a question. I nodded before I could get in my own way.

"Wrists behind your back," she said. "Hold them together for me."

I did. There's a specific shame that men my age are taught to feel about wanting this, and I'd carried it since my thirties, through two short relationships with women who were kind and vanilla and never the wiser. Standing there on a worn mat with my wrists out behind me, the shame just wasn't there. What was there was a feeling I didn't have a name for yet.

She looped the rope around my wrists in a single column tie, two wraps and a cinch, snug but not tight, and I could tell she was checking tension with her fingers as she went. Twice she pressed a fingertip against the inside of my wrist and watched my fingers.

"Circulation's fine," she said. "Pins and needles, numbness, color change, you tell me immediately. What's your safeword?"

"Red," I said. We'd agreed on it weeks ago over messages, but she wanted it said here, in the room, out loud, and I was glad she did.

"Good. And yellow for slow down. Say them back."

"Red stops it. Yellow slows it."

"Kneel on the mat, facing the wall."

I knelt. The mat was soft and smelled faintly of rubber and chalk, and the rope bit lightly at my wrists when I settled my weight. From somewhere behind me I heard her kick off her shoes. I heard her walk a slow half circle around me. I stared at the gray wall with its route tape and waited, and the waiting was its own kind of good.

"Four months of messages," she said, conversationally, like we were still on the couch texting. "You described this exactly once, in the middle of a paragraph about your truck, like you hoped I'd skim past it. I didn't skim past it."

"I know," I said.

Her hand landed on my right cheek through the jeans, firm, open-palmed, and the sound of it went through the quiet corner like a clap. I flinched, mostly from surprise.

"Count," she said.

"One," I said.

The second landed on the left, harder. "Two," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected.