Holding On

by Pamela Clare

  She stood across from him, her bag on the bed. “If this upsets you that much, maybe you should call Esri. She can help—”

  “Are you saying you think I’m fucked up?”

  She flinched. “No! But this and your nightmares—it’s tearing you apart. You haven’t had a full night’s sleep since doing that interview with Wendy. It breaks my heart to see you hurting so much. I know it’s hard for you to reach out but—”

  “You don’t know a damned thing about it!” He shouted the words at the top of his lungs. “Do you climb?”

  She jerked as if she’d been struck, her face going pale. Then she turned and walked into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  Crushed by a sense of guilt, his emotions threadbare, he stared after her. Hadn’t he promised her he would never deliberately hurt her?

  You’re a fucking wreck, man, and she called you on it.

  When she emerged from the bathroom, he could see she’d been crying.

  Yeah, that’s your fault, asshole.

  He should never have gotten involved with her. He’d known it was a bad idea, but he’d been too damned selfish, too damned broken to keep himself away from her. But he could fix that now.

  He could end it before he truly did hurt her.

  Kenzie had lost him.

  Harrison had shut down. He’d shut her out, barely speaking a word to her since leaving their hotel. He sat in the aisle seat beside her, eyes closed, but she knew from the hard set of his jaw that he wasn’t asleep. He simply didn’t want to interact with her.

  If only she’d kept her mouth shut…

  Would that have helped him?

  No. Maybe. She didn’t know.

  She couldn’t just sit by while he was suffering and say nothing. She’d said what she believed was true. He needed trauma therapy. If he wanted to end their relationship because she’d tried to help him, then maybe he was doing them both a favor.

  That’s what she told herself, but that’s not how she felt.

  Inside, her heart was breaking.

  Maybe this wasn’t what it seemed. Maybe they’d get home, and he’d get some sleep and apologize to her for shouting. Maybe things would go back to the way they’d been before this trip. Breakfasts for two. Watching Netflix on the sofa at night with Gizmo and Gabby. Mind-blowing sex.

  God, she hoped so, because she couldn’t imagine her life without him. She loved him. With everything she was, she loved him.

  The flight seemed to go on forever, Harrison finally giving up the charade of sleep to stare resolutely at the little TV screen in the seatback in front of him. Afraid he would reject her outright, Kenzie didn’t reach for his hand or rest her head against his shoulder. By the time they landed, she was fighting tears.

  He carried her bag to his car despite her insistence that she could handle it. She did have one good hand, after all. She tried to see some hope in this little act of chivalry, but it was dashed when they climbed into his vehicle.

  “I’m sorry I raised my voice at you, Kenzie. When we get back to your place, I’m going to get my stuff and get out of your hair. Back when this first started, I told you I wasn’t in a good space. You don’t deserve this.”

  She blinked back tears. “Don’t use me as your excuse. If you don’t want to be with me, if you don’t care about me, just say it.”

  “I do care about you. That’s the whole point.”

  The drive back to Scarlet was excruciating, the pain behind Kenzie’s breastbone almost unbearable. He carried their bags inside and disappeared upstairs, where he grabbed his things out of the bathroom, her closet, and the laundry, and shoved it all in his duffel. He stopped at the front door, turned to face her.

  “You’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever known. Thank you for everything. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of this. If I could… ” He stopped, cleared his throat, a muscle clenching in his jaw. “Tell Gabby… Tell the little scamp I will miss her.”

  So he would miss the puppy, but he wouldn’t miss Kenzie.

  She wanted to scream at him, to shout in his face, to tell him she loved him, but there was no point in doing that now. She mustered every shred of dignity she had left. “Take care, Harrison. I will miss you.”

  Then he turned and walked out of her life.

  There were break-ups. There were broken hearts. And then there were nuclear winter heartbreaks.

  Kenzie didn’t know it was possible to hurt this much and still breathe. The dogs got her out of bed every morning, and her job forced her to leave the house. But she was only going through the motions, habit holding her hollow life together when she had shattered into a million pieces.

  Every time her phone buzzed, she hoped it was him, but it never was. Every reminder of him made her cry—the few leftover condoms, the pair of socks Gabby had found under her bed, the lingering scent of his skin on her pillow. Every time she went to Food Mart, she thought she would run into him, but she never did.

  She couldn’t quit thinking about him, couldn’t quit missing him, couldn’t stand the nights without him.

  There was no one she could talk to. She didn’t want to bare her feelings to her friends on the Team, because they were also Harrison’s friends. She couldn’t confide in her employees. She didn’t pay them to give her emotional CPR. After a week of this, she called Esri and made an appointment for the afternoon.

  She burst into tears the moment she sat down in Esri’s office. “It’s over. He broke up with me. I suggested he call you, and it all fell apart. Why do I always fall in love with men who don’t want me?”

  Esri handed her a tissue. “Let’s start at the beginning, okay?”

  Kenzie told Esri the whole story—how the two of them had become lovers, how he’d warned her, how the interview with Wendy had made his nightmares worse, how the trip to New York City had turned into a disaster.

  “If there were any man in my life that I thought one hundred percent for sure I could love for the rest of my life, it would be Harrison.” She blew her nose. “But just like the others, he walked out the door and didn’t look back.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about them?”

  Kenzie spent the next ten minutes giving Esri the condensed version of her love life. “Basically, I’m drawn to climbers, outdoorsy kinds of men, but they prefer rocks and mountains and piles of snow to me. Story of my life right there.”

  “What attracts you to them?”

  “Well, they’re strong and ripped and good looking. God, that sounds shallow.”

  Esri smiled. “I won’t judge. What else?”

  “They’re adventurous, driven, exciting. There’s an air of—I don’t know—danger and daring about them. They’re not like me at all. I’m boring.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t climb. I don’t like to ski. I haven’t traveled. I spend my life doing paperwork and picking up dog poop.”

  “You train SAR and HRD dogs, and you volunteer for the most respected search-and-rescue team in the country. Your work has saved lives. Some people would say that’s pretty exciting.”

  “Okay. That’s probably true.”

  “What do you think drew Harrison to you?”

  “Gabby.” That was the truth. “He adores her. When he left, he told me to tell Gabby he’d miss her, but he didn’t say anything about missing me.”

  This brought a fresh rush of tears.

  “I’m betting there was more to his attraction than your puppy.”

  “We had an incredible sex life—I mean, off-the-charts incredible.”

  “That tells me there was some real connection there. People who don’t have a true emotional connection rarely have sex lives that are off the charts.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Esri handed her another tissue. “Let’s talk about what happened in New York again.”

  Kenzie told the story once more. “Then he said, ‘I do care about you. That’s the point.�
�� Does he really think that dumping me and leaving me out of his life helps me?”

  “Let me ask you this: Do you think you did the right thing?”

  Kenzie nodded. “He needs to talk to someone. I bit my tongue for a long time, afraid that pushing him to get counseling would drive him away. That day I didn’t feel like I had a choice. If you could have seen him and how on edge he was… ”

  “For what it’s worth, I think what you did was completely valid. The two of you were intimate, and you had every reason to be worried about him.”

  “But what good did it do if I alienated him? I don’t think anyone has seen him. He didn’t show up when the Team was toned out yesterday to help the guy with the asthma attack. Maybe what I did just made things worse.”

  Esri reached out, took her hand. “What Conrad does is his responsibility, not yours. When he decides he needs help, I’ll be here.”

  “So what can I do? I can’t stand feeling like this. It hurts so much that I can barely breathe. Are there some meditations or exercises I can do to make it better?”

  “I wish I had the cure for a broken heart, but I don’t.” Esri squeezed her fingers. “It will get better with time, I promise you.”

  But Kenzie wasn’t so sure about that.

  Conrad was passed out drunk on the sofa when a thunk thunk thunk woke him. Had Gabby gotten into something?

  He lurched to his feet—and remembered Gabby didn’t live there anymore. “Shit.”

  He was about to flop back onto the couch when the noise came again.

  Thunk thunk thunk.

  Was someone knocking on his door?

  Kenzie.

  God, he missed her. He missed her so fucking much.

  Heart slamming, he threaded his way through empty bottles and pizza boxes to the front door, too unsteady on his feet to make use of the peephole.

  He opened the door. “Megs.”

  She must have heard the disappointment in his voice.

  “I’m happy to see you, too.” She pushed past him, glanced around at his mess. “You’ve redecorated—a little less nineteen-fifties, a little more Jim Beam. I’m not sure I like it, but I guess it’s the new you.”

  Something about that seemed like an insult, but before he could work it out, she started picking up his trash.

  He shook his head. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I know, but I don’t want to trip and break my damned neck.”

  He tried to bend down to pick up a beer bottle but came close to falling.

  “Sit down. You got coffee in that kitchen?”

  “Yep.” His ass landed on the sofa where it had been these past two weeks.

  In a few minutes, Megs returned with a cup. “You drink yours black, right?”

  He took the cup from her. “Thanks.”

  She went back to picking up empty bottles and pizza boxes, carrying them out to his recycling bins. Then she opened his curtains, flooding the room with daylight that made his head ache. “That’s better.”

  “You came here to clean my house?”

  “I came here to tell you a story.” She sat on the other end of the sofa, crossed her legs. “Back when God was still a child, Ahearn and I came to Colorado to tackle the famous fourteeners.”

  “You really are telling me a story.”

  “A true story. Drink your coffee and listen.” Megs went on. “We were on our way down from the summit of El Diente—that’s in the San Miguels—when our good buddy Dean slipped on talus, fell, and broke his ankle. Have you ever climbed El Diente?”

  Conrad nodded. “It’s steep, lots of loose talus, and some drop-offs—big cliffs.”

  It was an easy place to kill yourself if you didn’t know what you were doing.

  “We tried to get Dean on his feet. We thought maybe he could hop down the mountain with the two of us for support, but, as you say, it’s steep. After some slipping and a near fall, the three of us decided that it would be best to leave Dean behind with some food and water and head down the mountain to get help.”

  Conrad nodded. “That makes sense. If you’re all injured, no one gets out.”

  Climbing sometimes involved making tough choices.

  “That’s how we saw it. We made it back to our truck and drove to the nearest town, but no one there was willing to head out that late in the afternoon to rescue a climber. There were no rescue teams at that time. Climbing was a young sport. The sheriff’s department promised to head up to get him the next morning.”

  Wait. Had she told Conrad this story before? It sounded familiar.

  “That night, the San Miguels were hit by a freak snowstorm—whiteout conditions, freezing temps.”

  “I guess it’s lucky you got down.”

  “Lucky for us. Not so lucky for Dean.”

  Conrad had forgotten about him. “Shit.”

  “We headed up the next morning through deep snow, but it was too late. Dean had frozen to death right where we’d left him, the food and water we’d left behind with him frozen solid.”

  “God. I’m sorry.”

  “I grieved for a long time afterward, and I blamed myself. I ran different scenarios through my mind. If only we’d done this or that, Dean might be alive.”

  Conrad shook his head. “You can’t know that. Maybe you would have all died up there in that snowstorm.”

  Megs nodded. “Ahearn held me together after that. He got me through it. He came up with the idea for the Team, gave me a new focus, a new passion.”

  That is where Conrad had heard this story. Dean’s death had inspired Megs and Ahearn to found the Team.

  Megs went on. “But none of that changes the fact that Ahearn and I left Dean behind. We left him there, alive and breathing, and when we came back, he was a corpse. We left him because it was easier for us. For the rest of my life, I will regret that we didn’t push on and try harder to get him down. And do you know what makes it tougher to live with?”

  Conrad shook his head. “No.”

  Fuck, he was drunk.

  “All these years of doing rescue work have proved to me that we could have gotten him down. Dean died because we didn’t try hard enough.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself.”

  “Pot meet kettle.” Megs pointed straight at him.

  Wait. “What?”

  “I read your interview in the Scarlet Gazette. I watched the Good Day Show with Corrine Roberts in her very fine makeup. If anyone knows what you’re going through, I do—and Ahearn. You’re not the only climber to lose a close friend.”

  “I know that.” Conrad didn’t like where this was headed.

  “You feel guilty that you survived and they didn’t. You wonder if the sport you dedicated your life to is even justifiable in the face of their deaths. You swear you’ll never climb again. You ask yourself what you should have done differently. Would they still be alive if you had done X instead of Y?”

  “Stop! I don’t want to talk—”

  “Here’s the thing—Bruce and the Stenger twins were killed by tons of falling ice. They died instantly, and no force on earth could have saved them. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. You didn’t walk away like we did and leave them there to die. There was nothing you could have done to help them. You were almost killed, too.”

  Something inside Conrad cracked, a fissure opening in his chest, the nearly empty coffee mug falling from his hand to the floor. “I did leave them there. I tried to dig them out, but I couldn’t. I tried. God, I tried. But when the rescue team came, I turned my back on them, and I walked away. I walked away, and I left them.”

  Megs was there beside him, drawing him into her embrace, holding him like a mother holds a child. “I know how it is. I know.”

  For the first time since his father’s death, Conrad wept.

  Chapter 21

  Conrad woke the next morning, feeling lighter despite intense thirst and a raging headache. He sat up, reached for the glass of water on his nightstand, and dra
nk. When he set it down, empty, he remembered who’d put it there for him.

  Megs.

  He groaned as memories of last night flooded back.

  I walked away, and I left them.

  I know how it is. I know.

  Shit.

  He’d made a complete ass of himself. Not only had Megs seen him stupid-drunk, his home a garbage dump, but he’d lost it in front of her and cried like a fucking baby on her shoulder.

  No, he hadn’t.

  Oh, yes, he had.

  Do you like how this feels? Welcome to rock bottom, buddy.

  God in heaven.

  How was he going to face Megs again?

  Even as the question ran through his mind, he knew she wouldn’t say a word about it to anyone, except maybe Ahearn. She wouldn’t even bring it up with Conrad. His secret was safe with her.

  Megs had understood.

  He owed her—big-time.

  He got out of bed and walked naked into the bathroom to take a leak. There on the mirror was a sticky note in Megs’ handwriting.

  You promised me you’d call Esri.

  Meg had understood, but she was still a hard-ass.

  He washed his hands and face and brushed the disgusting taste of cheap beer out of his mouth. Then he put on a clean pair of boxer briefs and walked out to the kitchen, checking out of habit to make sure Gabby wasn’t underfoot, more of his conversation with Megs coming back to him.

  God, I miss Kenzie. I don’t know how I’m going to face this without her. She’s the most amazing, beautiful, sweet, adorable woman I’ve ever known. I think I love her.

  Had he said that? Had he truly said he loved Kenzie?

  In vino veritas.

  “Don’t tell me that,” Megs had said. “Talk to Kenzie. That girl has been crazy about you for years, and you’re an idiot if you don’t fight to hold onto her.”

  Fuck.

  Well, he was an idiot.

  The last thing he’d said to Kenzie, words he regretted, came rushing back.

  Tell Gabby… Tell the little scamp I will miss her.

  Conrad stopped in his tracks and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to shut out the memory of the pain that had filled Kenzie’s blue eyes. He’d give anything to go back in time and shut his own damned mouth. He’d hurt her. Dear God, he’d told her he would miss her puppy—but hadn’t said a word about missing her.