When He Held Her Steady

I want to tell you about the night everything shifted at The Crux, but I have to back up a bit first, because the whole mess starts with a route I set on a Tuesday and the man who decided to critique it like he was getting paid by the word.

My name is Rachelle Cahill, I'm twenty-eight, and I've been the curator and route setter at The Crux for about a year and a half now. The Crux is this old climbing gym in a coastal Oregon town, the kind of place where the windows have salt cracks running through them like white veins and the holds on the walls don't match because half of them were donated by people who quit the sport and half were carved by Alexandra Lund back when she was winning competitions instead of worrying about rent. Alexandra owns the gym. She's twenty-nine, former competitive climber, currently stressing about whether she can keep the lights on through winter, and she lets me keep a little back room full of antique carabiners and a vintage wooden ladder because I'm putting together an exhibit for the local museum. That back room matters later, so hold onto it.

The man in question is Bryce Schaeffer. He's thirty, he's a climbing guide, and he's also my ex, which is a sentence I never thought I'd say with this much fondness attached. We dated for fourteen months after meeting at a museum benefit where I'd been talking about my carabiner collection to anyone who would stand still, and he'd stood still, and then he'd asked me to dinner, and for fourteen months it was good. Really good, mostly. Then we broke up in the spring, and now we work in the same gym four nights a week, which is exactly as comfortable as it sounds.

So. Tuesday night. The gym was nearly empty, just Don Philips over on the traverse wall, and Don is fifty-four and a retired carpenter who climbs as a man used to building things and refusing to stop, so he's there every night working the same hard route because his hip is going and he wants one last difficult send before it does. I like Don a lot. Anyway, I'd just finished setting a new problem on the main boulder on Tuesday night, and I was proud of it. It was a long, flowing thing with big sweeping moves and a couple of deadpoints that made you commit your whole body, the kind of route that feels like dancing if you trust it.

"Hey, Bryce, come try my new one," I called, because I wanted him to feel it. I wanted him to love it.

He came over, chalked up, and climbed it once, and he climbed it well, because Bryce is annoyingly good at everything. Then he dropped down, brushed his hands, and looked at me with that face. You know the face. The concerned face. The face of a man about to explain something to you like you're a first-day member.

"It's reckless," he said. "The second move, the way the holds line up, you're asking people to throw their whole weight at a crimp with nothing underneath them. Someone's going to get hurt."

"Someone is going to climb it," I said. "That's the point of it."

"Rachelle," he said my name like it was the beginning of a lecture. "There's no protection, there's no flow to the fall, if you pop off that crimp you're coming down on your own foot."

"Bryce, I've climbed it eleven times. I've watched Don climb it twice. Nobody is coming down on their foot."

"You don't know that."

I snapped. I'm not proud of how fast it came out, but there it is. "You're not my coach, Bryce. You broke up with me, remember? Which means you don't get to grade my routes anymore."

He went quiet, and Don, bless him, pretended to be extremely interested in his chalk bag, though I saw his shoulders shaking, so maybe not that pretending.

"I'm not grading you," Bryce said finally, and his voice had gone soft in that way that always made me want to either kiss him or throw a hold at him. "I just don't want you getting hurt."

"Well, stop it. I fell in love with climbing because it felt like flying, not because it felt like filling out paperwork."

He looked at me for a while, and the gym hummed around us, that low sound of rubber on wood and somebody's playlist in the back. Then he did the thing he does when he's switching tactics, which is he crossed his arms and got calm, which I hate, because calm Bryce always has a plan.

"You know what I did three weeks ago?" he asked.

"You covered my shift when I had the flu," I said slowly, because I could already see where this was going.

"Fourteen hours. I belayed kids' birthday parties for fourteen hours while you were home sneezing into a pillow. And you said, and I quote, Rachelle, you owe me one, anything, name it."

"Oh no."

"Yes," he said, and I could see him enjoying this, which was rude. "So here's the favor. One lesson. You let me teach you my way on that problem. The safe way. Midnight, when the gym's empty, just you and me. You climb it my way, start to finish, and we're even."

"Bryce, I set that route. I know every hold on it better than I know my own apartment."

"Then it'll be easy for you, won't it?" He smiled, and it was the smile that got me into this whole mess at a museum benefit in the first place. "Midnight Thursday. Bring your shoes."

I stood there hating him and hating the flu and hating the fact that I had, in a feverish moment of gratitude, promised this man anything. "Fine," I said. "One lesson. And after that you never say the word reckless to me again."

"Deal," he said, and shook my hand like we'd closed a business deal, and I swear his hand was warm and I swear I thought about it longer than I should have.

I spent Wednesday pretending I wasn't thinking about it, which lasted about an hour before Don caught me staring at the boulder problem and laughed into his coffee. Thursday crawled. Thursday was the longest day of my life, and I say that as someone who once sat through a museum budget meeting. By the time midnight came around, the gym was dark except for the light over the main boulder, and Bryce was already there, of course, sitting on a mat with his shoes on like he'd been waiting all evening, which maybe he had.

"You came," he said.

"I owed you," I said. "This doesn't mean anything."

"Sure," he said, in the voice of a man who absolutely did not believe me, and honestly I didn't believe me either, standing there in the empty gym at midnight with my ex and a chalk bag and a heart doing things I didn't authorize.

"Okay, professor," I said, walking over to the wall. "Teach me your safe way. I've got nowhere to be and a favor to pay."

He got up, and the way he looked at the route suggested he'd been studying it all week, and I realized with a small lurch that he probably had. "First move is fine," he said, pointing. "It's the second one we fix. You don't need to throw. There's a foot chip, right there, left of where you've been placing it. It changes the whole problem."

"It changes the whole problem," I repeated. "That's my route, Bryce."

"It's your route," he agreed. "I'm just asking you to try it my way. One time."

And that's how I ended up on the wall at midnight, doing the version of my own route with the foot chip, and it worked, it worked so well it made me angry, and I'll tell you what happened next in a minute.

The thing is, climbing it his way worked, and that was the problem. It worked like a form filled out in triplicate, like a tax return, like something you could hand to a stranger and they could climb it too and nothing would ever go wrong. I sat on the mat at about one in the morning with my shoes off and my feet aching in that good way, and Bryce was smiling at me like a proud teacher, and all I could think was that I had never felt further from flying in my life.

"See?" he said. "Nothing to it. You didn't even need the throw."

"I didn't need anything," I said. "That's the problem, don't you get it? I climbed like I was mailing a letter."

He laughed, and I threw my chalk brush at him, and he caught it, and for a second the gym felt like it used to, like when we were together and everything was easy and funny. Then the second passed, the way seconds do, and we were just two people putting on jackets in a cold gym at one in the morning, and I went home and slept like a rock, and hated myself a little for it.

Now here's where I confess something, because you've been kind enough to read this far. I waited a week. A whole week, which is practically biblical restraint for me. But it was Saturday, a week after the lesson, and the gym was closed Sunday, and Alexandra had texted us all about the winter numbers looking bad, and Don had been grumbling that the new problem I'd set was getting old, and I don't know, the whole week had felt gray. And there's this thing that happens to me, you probably have it too with whatever your thing is, where the longer I go without doing the real version of it, the louder it gets in my head. So at about eleven that night I put my shoes in my bag and drove to The Crux with my headlights cutting through the coastal fog, and let myself in with my key like I had a right to, which technically I did, and that's different from sneaking, I decided, and then immediately parked around the corner anyway, which is sneaking.

The gym at night with just the one row of lights on is my favorite version of it. The windows all fogged and salt-cracked at the corners, the holds looking like they've been painted by somebody with a grudge against consistency, and that old wooden ladder in the back room standing there like it climbed things before any of us were born. I said hi to the carabiner case, because yes, I talk to my exhibit pieces, and then I walked out to the main boulder and looked up at the problem, my problem, and felt my hands go warm.

I turned most of the lights off, actually, because if you're going to do a thing you may as well commit, and I left just the wash over the wall and the one lamp by the desk. And I climbed it my way again. The second move, the throw, no foot chip, just my body swinging out over nothing and catching the hold one-handed, and it felt like the first swallow of cold air after a long hot day. I climbed it the real way and I didn't stop at the top of the problem, because the problem ends and the wall keeps going, and there's an arete up there that nobody ever tops out on because the last five feet are trash holds, loose-feeling things that Alexandra has been meaning to replace for a year.

I topped out anyway. I got to the top of the whole wall, fourteen feet up on garbage holds, one-handed at the end because the last good sloper only fits four fingers and I'd given the fifth to the swing, and I stood there on the top edge of the world with the fog pressing against the windows, and I laughed out loud in the empty gym, and that was the moment the back door opened.

I don't know how he got in. Later he told me Alexandra gave him a key when he started guiding out of here, and later I told her I was going to change the locks, and later she laughed and said not before winter. But that night all I knew was the sound of the door and then Bryce Schaeffer standing in the pool of light by the desk in his street clothes, looking up at me, and I want you to understand that I expected the lecture. I had the whole defense prepared, I had the you-owe-me-one-lesson-is-over argument loaded, I even had the thing where I get self-righteous and it works because I'm usually right.

He didn't say a word. He took his shoes off, put his climbing shoes on, which he apparently had in his car at eleven on a Saturday night, and chalked up, and walked under me, and put his hands up, and just looked at me, and I understood that he was spotting me, which is such a Bryce thing to do, standing there ready to catch me with his whole body instead of catching me with an argument.

"Get down," he said, finally, and it wasn't a command, it was almost gentle. "I've got you."

"Bryce, I'm fine, I've topped out a hundred times."

"Not on these holds you haven't." And his voice was doing something I hadn't heard before, something quiet and careful, like the voice you use near a sleeping animal. "Come down. I'll stay under you the whole way."

And the thing was, and I hate this, the thing was I wanted to come down, because his voice made the wall feel different, made the trash holds feel trashier, and there is no version of me that argues with that. So I downclimbed, and he stayed under me the whole way, arms up, shuffling with me step for step like a dance partner who never touches you, and when my foot was a foot off the mat I just let go and dropped, and he took the last of it with his hands on my waist, steadying me, and then