The Solid Grounds Coffee Company

by Carla Laureano

  “Morning, you two.” He beamed at them, a big blond puppy. “Wanted to know if you need a ride back to Bogotá this morning.”

  Right now, bugging out of Suesca didn’t sound like a bad idea. “Sure,” Bryan said at the same time Viv said, “No thanks. I’m climbing La Bruja today.”

  Bryan stared at her. “Not by yourself, you aren’t.”

  She lifted an eyebrow and planted her hands on her hips. “And since when have you had any say over what I climbed?”

  “As your former instructor, I do have some say. And unless you’ve suddenly advanced in your climbing ability, La Bruja is way over your grade.”

  Jack finally figured out he was stepping in the middle of something bigger than a climbing dispute and started to back away. “Okay, mates. We’re leaving at eight if you change your mind.”

  Vivian never took her eyes from Bryan. “Go if you want. I’ll find someone else to belay for me.”

  Bryan snorted. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “You doubt my climbing ability?”

  “No, I doubt your beta. I’ve watched these guys. None of them have even come close to sending that route. They wouldn’t know a crimp from a hole in the ground.” It was, he could admit, a little unfair; there were decent sport climbers among them, but La Bruja was the most difficult trad route in Suesca, and Bryan was betting any information they’d given her was colored by their need to impress her, not firsthand experience.

  “Then come with me.” Her eyes held a challenge.

  “What game are you playing at?”

  “No game. I came here from Peru and I’m not leaving until I climb.”

  “So do Azul.”

  “I’m not interested in Azul. You in or what?”

  He knew that look. Knew that stubborn glint in her brown eyes. It was one of the things he’d loved most about her, one of the things that made her an excellent climber. She was going to do this with or without him. And however angry and hurt he might be right now, she was better off climbing with him as a partner than without.

  Bryan shook his head. “Fine. You win. But I lead.”

  “I lead.” Her eyes silently dared him to argue. “And to be clear, I got my beta from Alejandro, the guide at the shop. It’s solid.”

  “Fine.” He held up his hands. She was a good climber. As long as she placed active pro in the right spots, she’d be okay. And he’d be there on belay to catch her when she inevitably fell—as he’d always been.

  They silently ate their breakfast of protein bars, trail mix, and coffee, the strain palpable. The whole time Bryan shoved down his feeling of betrayal and what felt like the awakening of his long-dormant conscience. He’d done many things in his life, but sleeping with another man’s fiancée was in an entirely different class. If he felt this betrayed, how would Luke feel? And how long would it take for him to find some loophole to cancel Bryan’s sponsorship contract if he found out?

  He needed to finish out this day, keep Vivian safe on the crag, and get out of Colombia. The more space he put between him and Suesca, the easier it would be to pretend this whole sordid thing had never happened.

  * * *

  The sun was just beginning to shine down when they approached the route, loaded with their gear and a full thirty minutes ahead of the other climbers, who were just starting to poke their heads out of their tents. Bryan was used to hot climates where an early start was an advantage; here, the temperature stayed chilly well into the morning.

  Vivian didn’t meet his eye as she pulled on climbing shoes and set her gear. Bryan checked the length of lead rope for any frays or weaknesses before he handed it over for Viv to tie it onto her harness with a figure-eight knot, then double-checked her knot. It was a routine, not a doubt about her competence—two sets of eyes were always better than one. More skilled climbers had decked out because of a simple mistake.

  “All right, so let me see your rack.” He nodded toward the collection of cams, nuts, and slings hanging from her belt, ignoring the flash of amusement that crossed her face at the comment. “You’ll need more active pro for this one.”

  She arched an eyebrow at him. “This coming from Mr. Passive Is Best?”

  And here they were, retreading old arguments over whether active or passive protection was best, when in reality it was whatever best suited the rock and the route. Had he not been so irritated at her at the moment, he would have found it funny. “There’re some cracks that won’t take a hex or a nut, and you’re not going to want to worry about conserving cams. Trust me on this one.”

  For once, she didn’t argue and rummaged in her gear, then clipped a few more cams onto her harness. Old-timers who’d started climbing before spring-loaded camming devices existed looked at them as cheating; Bryan figured if it was a choice between a cam or a fall, he’d pick the cam every time.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Ready.” She checked her rope again, chalked her hands from the pouch on her belt, and approached the rock with a look of determination.

  “On belay?”

  “Belay on,” he replied.

  “Climbing.”

  “Climb on.” He stayed in position near the wall, feeding rope through the belay device and his hands to give her enough slack to get up to her first anchor point. He’d always loved to watch her on the rock, partly because of her gorgeous body displayed in climbing tights and a skin-tight T-shirt. The thought of that now set a sick feeling in his stomach; she wasn’t his to ogle, no matter what he might have thought the night before.

  Mind on her climbing, he reminded himself. Vivian made short work of the first fifteen feet, her technique steady and confident. He began to relax as soon as she took the first cam from her harness, placed it precisely in the crack where he would have, and clipped herself in. Now he had a belay point, so he took up the slack while she looked for her next hold.

  She was climbing respectably, placing more pro than strictly necessary, which told him she’d taken his warning seriously. Except she hadn’t yet reached for another cam after the first, choosing to place hexes and nuts where she could fit them. “Set a cam before the overhang!” he yelled, but either she was too focused on her next move to hear him or she was ignoring him outright. Stubborn woman.

  She was at least seventy feet up when she realized she’d gotten herself into an untenable position. He checked the slack on the rope and waited for her to work out a solution. There—thanks to her flexibility, her handhold became a foothold and she could lever herself upward with the power of her legs. She was going to send it on her first try. Unbelievable.

  Then Bryan saw the mistake, but it was too late to help her correct: her leg had crossed between the rock and the rope, the anchor below holding it taut against her thigh. Her left hand held steady near her foot, right side pushing upward to the next handhold, and then . . .

  Vivian screamed as her supporting leg slipped off the rock.

  Bryan automatically prepared himself for a soft catch, but there were bigger problems. The rope flipped her upside down so she was plummeting headfirst down the side of the rock. Every hair on his body lifted in dread. He jumped just as she hit the end of the slack and braced his feet against the wall, a move that should have helped soften the catch and dampen her swing back into the wall.

  The nut she’d placed earlier popped out of the rock and zippered the next two out with it.

  “No, no, no.” Bryan barely managed to get back on his feet and yanked the rope through the brake as fast as he could, silently praying that one of the anchors would catch before she hit the deck. Then finally, the slack ran out and the rope caught on the cam and held.

  Vivian careened into the side of the rock with a sickening crunch, where she hung, her limp body dangling thirty feet off the ground, unmoving. Drops of blood fell in slow motion and spattered the dirt at Bryan’s feet.

  “Please,” he mumbled, running the rope through the brake to lower her slowly to the ground. “Please be alive. Please be al
ive.” She never wore a helmet—Bryan rarely did either—but now he wished with every ounce of him that he’d insisted on it before she’d attempted La Bruja.

  Finally, she was on the ground. He unclipped and ran to her side, carefully laying her out flat on the dirt. Blood matted her dark hair and something about her lower body looked wrong, crumpled, but her chest still rose and fell. He put his fingertips to her neck and found her pulse, surprisingly quick considering she was unconscious.

  “Help!” he screamed. “Ayuda!”

  It could have been moments or hours later, but a crowd began to form around them. Alejandro, the guide from the shop near the base camp, pushed his way through and checked her pulse and breathing as Bryan had, then pulled out his cell phone. He dialed the emergency number and then explained the situation to the dispatcher in calm, rapid Spanish. “She’ll be okay,” he said to Bryan, but it was an empty reassurance. No one knew whether she would be okay or not. They hadn’t seen how she’d whipped into the wall, too out of control to break her own fall.

  “Just hang in there,” he whispered to her, wanting to do something but knowing that moving her would be the worst thing he could possibly do. He brushed her hair off her face and clasped her hand until he heard the siren from an ambulance approaching. Relief rushed through him. He hadn’t been sure if Suesca had ambulance service; he’d never needed it.

  Two paramedics stepped out of the ambulance and carried an unwheeled stretcher to Vivian’s side.

  “¿Que pasó?” the first man asked, looking automatically to Alejandro.

  Bryan quickly explained what had occurred. Had it been any other situation, he would have been amused by the paramedics’ surprise that the gringo spoke their language. The men examined Vivian with little more detail than Bryan and Alejandro had, then the two of them carefully transferred her to the stretcher.

  “I’m going with her,” Bryan said. They nodded and he climbed into the back of the ambulance with her.

  They were minutes away from the camp when Vivian began to stir and cried out in pain. Her eyes opened slowly, but they didn’t seem to focus.

  “Viv, I’m here.” He bent over her and gently squeezed her hand to try to orient her.

  “Bryan?”

  “Yes, love.”

  “Everything hurts.” Tears leaked out of her eyes and slid down her face, breaking his heart more surely than her earlier tears had.

  “I know. You had an accident. We’ll be at the hospital soon and they’ll give you something for the pain.”

  The rest of the afternoon was a blur. They arrived at the hospital, which was a surprisingly modern-looking white-and-blue two-story building in the small town of Suesca. Bryan said he was her husband so they would give him updates. The doctor in the emergency department examined her, pronounced her hip dislocated, several of her ribs fractured, and her skull cracked, and promptly decided to transfer her to Bogotá.

  That trip took over an hour, and Bryan held her hand in the back of yet another ambulance as they traveled to a larger hospital in the capital city. She remained sedated—a mercy when he considered how many broken bones she had.

  And the whole time he prayed, Please don’t let me lose her.

  He was aware of the irony. He’d already lost her three years ago, and once again this morning when she’d announced her engagement to Luke.

  They finally arrived at a hospital in Bogotá, a concrete institutional structure that reminded him of a prison. The paramedics took her into the emergency department, where Bryan was immediately pushed out of the room, despite his repeated insistence that he was her husband. Instead, he paced the faded waiting room, pulled out his phone, and dialed the number he’d been dreading calling since the moment she fell.

  “Luke, it’s Bryan. Vivian’s hurt. We’re in Colombia.”

  * * *

  Bryan sat in the bar of his Bogotá hotel, nursing a glass of whiskey and feeling like he’d been run over by a train. This was high rent for his usual means of travel—even if the exchange rate came out to about sixty-seven bucks a night—but he didn’t have it in him to dirtbag it as he usually did. Despite his simple needs, he was still the son of a successful Denver real estate developer, and right now he wanted something that felt like home.

  Vivian would be okay, or at least as okay as she could get with broken bones and a fractured skull. By now, she would be flying home on the air ambulance plane that Luke had arranged to take her to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles near where they lived together. Where they had been living together, apparently, for the past year—something that Luke had been lying about or at least avoiding the last several times they’d talked. Bryan had relayed the doctor’s thoughts on her prognosis in straightforward terms, not softening them or putting hope on them. Bed rest. Physical therapy. She’d walk again. Climbing would be out of the question for quite a while.

  Explaining why he and Vivian were in Bogotá together was another story. Bryan tried to pass it off as a friendly climb for old times’ sake, but Luke clearly didn’t believe it. Maybe it was something in Bryan’s voice or maybe Luke just knew Vivian too well, but he’d gone silent for a long moment while he considered. Then he’d said calmly, “I appreciate you helping me get her home. But after that, I don’t think we have anything more to talk about.”

  He’d apparently meant it literally, because the notice of termination had hit Bryan’s inbox less than an hour later, almost as if it had already been drafted and was simply waiting to be sent.

  Notice of termination. A fancy way of saying he’d been fired, his sponsorship ended, his means of support gone.

  Of course, Luke wouldn’t be so obvious as to name the real reason he was firing him; instead, he couched it in words like exclusivity and conflict of interest, despite the fact he’d been fully aware of the other, minor sponsorships when he signed Bryan. Not that it mattered when the end result was the same. Without Pakka’s support, he wasn’t a professional climber; he was just a deadbeat, traveling the world with his backpack and his gear rack in order to avoid having a real job. He’d become what his father had always suspected he was.

  Bryan let out a sharp laugh and drained the rest of his glass, then gestured for the bartender to pour him another one. What would his father think of this whole situation? Mitchell Shaw was a good Christian man; Bryan’s mother, Kathy, was practically a saint. They’d given up lecturing him about his conquests long ago, but sleeping with an almost-married woman and losing his source of income was beyond what even they could overlook. Consequences of his own actions, they’d say. And now he was going to have to deal with them. When you screwed up this badly, there was no such thing as a second chance.

  “You look like a man who’s had a bad day.”

  Bryan turned his head toward the American who had sat down beside him. Nondescript in brown dress pants and a white shirt, like a Midwestern businessman. Slightly thinning hair on top, sympathetic expression. Bryan was half tempted to give a sarcastic retort, but the man seemed sincere enough, so he just gave a single nod.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.” The bartender poured Bryan’s drink and he took a slow sip, savoring the burn of the whiskey as it went down. Anyone who said that it was smooth was lying, or maybe he’d just turned wholly into a beer man somewhere along the line. In any case, it blurred the hard edges, and right now that was all he cared about.

  The man asked for soda without ice in mangled Spanish, and Bryan quickly translated for him. He looked at Bryan in surprise. “If I had your fluency, my day would be going a lot better.”

  “I’ve spent a lot of time in Central and South America,” he said. “You pick it up.”

  “I don’t, apparently. I’ve made several trips to Colombia over the last couple of years, and it doesn’t want to stick. Old dog, new tricks, I guess.”

  Bryan smiled vaguely, hoping that would be the end of the conversation.

  “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in a
job?”

  Bryan turned his head just enough to look the man in the eye, suddenly suspicious. “A job?”

  “I was supposed to be headed south today, but my translator bailed on me. You know anything about coffee?”

  “I know how I like to drink it.”

  “Do you know how to talk about it in Spanish?”

  “Enough, I guess. Why?”

  The man pulled a business card from his pocket and slid it across the polished bar. “This is my company, Café Libertad. We’re coffee importers, but more than that, we’re . . . I guess you could call us missionaries.”

  Bryan slid it back. “Not interested.”

  “Are you sure? It’s an interesting story, ours. You see, for the longest time, the only option for farmers was coca, working for the cartels. But it brings violence into communities, wedges the farmers right between the government and the rebels, puts them at the mercy of the ‘war on drugs.’ So we come along and help them shift from growing coca to growing coffee instead. For the first time in decades, thanks to the demand for fair trade organic coffee in the States, the same acreage can produce a greater dollar yield than drugs.”

  “Sounds like you’re doing good work,” Bryan said, but he couldn’t force interest where there wasn’t any. He didn’t have it in him today.

  “It is. I’m supposed to be visiting several new farms, seeing about bringing them into the co-op. But again, without someone to translate, this was pretty much a wasted trip. You wouldn’t know anything about wasted trips, would you?”

  Bryan tossed back the rest of his drink and set the glass firmly on the counter. “I don’t know what you want from me, but I’m the last person you should be asking to join some Christian charity.” He gave the man a wan smile, then eased himself off the stool.

  “Are you sure? Because from where I’m sitting, you look like a man in need of a second chance.”

  Bryan paused several steps away and turned. “What did you say?”

  “I said maybe this is a second chance. I only need you for a week, and I pay well. What have you got to lose?”