She would miss him for the rest of her life.
“You’re shaking,” he said. “Let’s go in my truck. It’s warmer.”
She wasn’t shaking because she was cold. She was shaking because she was petrified.
They took off their shoes and crawled across the tailgate into his truck. He closed the back and cracked the side windows. The crisp night air flowed in, mixing with the scents of chalk, metal climbing gear, ropes, and fabric softener.
With the curtains drawn, it was too dark to see. She heard Josh take off his jacket and crawl under the blankets. She did the same.
His hands felt for her waist, and he pulled her to him, giving her a sense of what it was like to be a climbing hold beneath his powerful grip.
“How are you feeling about tomorrow?” he asked.
“Me? How are you feeling about it?”
“April, don’t underestimate what you’re doing. It’s really high up there. Most people couldn’t do that. Especially considering that you and I—”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I practiced with Theo today. You just focus on the climb.”
“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” he said. “I just wish I could be right there with you.”
You will be, she thought, clenching her muscles to prevent her body from shuddering.
She scooted closer and rested her forehead against his. His eyebrows were tense. “How are you feeling about tomorrow?” she asked.
“I’m just looking forward to having you all to myself afterward. You’re going to love Tuolumne.”
“Stop it, Josh, really.”
“To be honest, I’d be a lot happier right now if the climb was already done.”
Her veins ticked nervously. “I’m sure that’s normal for the night before.”
“Not at all.”
Her insides locked up with horror. “You don’t have to do it. Our film, all the media—we don’t matter. No one will be mad if you change your mind.”
His fingers twisted her watchband slowly around her wrist. “I know. But I’m still going to do it. I just have to stop thinking about it so much.”
He tucked his forehead into her collarbone. His hair smelled faintly of campfire smoke. “It’s all about the feeling. The lack of feeling. How everything falls away and it’s just me and the rock. It’s been harder for me to get there lately.”
His words lingered across her neck. When the heat faded, she was chilled to the bone. She could not lose him.
She ran her hands slowly up his arms and across his chest, wanting to memorize every detail. How the skin on the inside of his bicep was baby soft and warm despite the granite hardness beneath it, and how the intricate muscles of his forearm danced against her shoulder every time he touched her face.
She laid her hand over his, tracing his fingers one at a time. He was right there with her, but still, she ached for him. How would she muster enough willpower to go back to the campsite tonight?
He closed his callused hand around hers and lowered the knot of their hands to the tight, safe place between their bodies.
“Will you stay with me tonight?” he asked, his voice tinged with desperation.
Was it possible he was as scared as she was?
“Please,” he whispered.
“Okay,” she said. “But we need to get to sleep. It’s already late.”
His shoulders relaxed. “Deal.” He kissed her and then sat up. “I’ll find you some clothes to wear.”
He dug through a bin at the foot of his mattress and handed her a pair of warm-up pants and a T-shirt. Her eyes had adjusted enough to make out the big white Esplanade logo against the fabric of the T-shirt. She squinted. The red fabric of the T-shirt from the first interview.
She sat up and pulled her sweater off. “You’re making me wear the problem shirt?”
“Consider it payback.”
She laughed, but she was also aware that Josh had removed his shirt. The moon had slid out from behind the clouds, and there was enough light now to clearly see the smooth, clean skin of his upper body as he unzipped his pants. She couldn’t keep her eyes off him. He looked over at her and suddenly she was too shy for the simple task of unbuttoning her shirt and replacing it with his T-shirt.
She fingered her top button, struggling to pop it free. As she reached for the second, Josh moved closer to her, his fingers slowly sliding the second button through the hole. He exhaled as he felt for the next button, his warm breath flowing down her open shirt and making her heart beat wildly.
His mouth moved onto hers as his fingers felt for the fourth button. The rest of the buttons were a blur, and she was only vaguely aware of him pulling the shirt off her shoulders and freeing her arms. She ran her hands over his bare stomach and up to his chest, where his heart was racing like hers. She spread her fingers across his chest and dragged them back down to his impossibly hard abs, where she followed the thin line of fine hair down to his partially open pants.
He yanked her back to him, and they collapsed onto the mattress. Their mouths collided, hot and deep, as she coaxed his pants off. He unzipped her jeans, and she wiggled out of them without their lips ever losing contact.
She’d thought she’d been consumed by him before, but she had been wrong. This was consumed. She was absolutely no longer in control of her own body.
His tongue pushed farther into her mouth as she cut her bare legs between his. Josh’s hands were everywhere, pulling her tighter, tighter to him. Still, it wasn’t tight enough. She twisted her legs around his body. His hips pressed into her urgently, and she could feel that he was hard.
“Do you have condoms?” she whispered.
His breaths were shallow and fast. “I think so.”
He rose up to his knees and felt along the canopy’s high shelf. Her body trembled without his touch. She pulled the blankets around her to stay warm.
Josh riffled through a tackle box on the shelf and then looked inside an old coffee can. “Sorry,” he said. “Let me check one more place.”
He stretched over her, reaching through the back windows and pulling out a shower kit. As long as he was eventually successful, his difficulty finding a condom was strangely reassuring, a confirmation that this sort of thing didn’t happen very often.
He unzipped the shower kit and another compartment inside it. Then, she heard the opening of a new cardboard box and the crinkle of a wrapper.
Was she really going to do this? And on the night before the Sorcerer?
He pulled the blankets back, his eyes skimming over her naked body. “You are so beautiful,” he whispered. Then he placed his hands at her waist and kissed her in the middle of her stomach. Embers flared deep in her body.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. No matter what happened tomorrow—or after—she wanted to connect with him in this final, important way.
“I want you to know, this is a big deal for me.”
She let herself get lost in his eyes, which were dark with the night. “It is for me, too.”
He kissed her with a tenderness that turned her bones to liquid. Then he threaded his fingers with hers and slowly, carefully pushed inside her. The world spun, this time in blacks and grays. She was overcome with the sensations of Josh around her, over her, inside her. Nothing else existed but them, together.
…
Slowly their surroundings came back into focus. April shivered as a chilly breeze grazed her damp skin, and Josh pulled his blankets over them. She rested her head on his arm and watched the bottoms of the curtains flutter in the night air. Outside, the crickets and frogs droned on, muted by the occasional rise and fall of the wind through the trees.
Josh twisted a lock of her hair between his fingers. “April?”
“Hmm?”
“Remember when you asked me why I free solo?”
She nodded.
“Do you remember what I said?”
“You said it was for the peace.”
“Wel
l, there’s somewhere else I’ve found it.” He swallowed. “You.”
Her heart surged, and tears sprang up in her eyes. To be here in his truck, under his blankets, with his lungs expanding and contracting against her—it was all she needed in this world. She wrapped her body around him and clung to him like a buoy at sea.
…
April’s eyes popped open. She was filled with the lingering dread of nightmares she couldn’t remember.
She looked at her watch. It was two thirty a.m. on Thursday.
This was the day Josh was going to die.
Chapter Twenty-Six
April silenced her alarm at 4:05 a.m., ten minutes before it was supposed to go off. She was already awake because she had never been able to fall back asleep.
She carefully detangled herself from Josh. The plywood creaked as she sat up. Josh murmured and rolled over. She froze, and then relaxed, seeing that he was still fast asleep. He looked so vulnerable, so human, lying there. So unlike the superathlete who was about to attempt the impossible.
She wanted him to wake up so she could tell him that she was scared. She wanted him to assure her everything would be fine, even if it wouldn’t be.
Instead, she leaned down and kissed him ever so softly on the temple.
Good-bye, Josh.
He stirred and reached for her.
“April,” he said groggily, “don’t go.”
“I have to. It’s time to get on the trail.” The effort to make her voice sound casual was gargantuan. “I’ll see you at the top, okay?”
He closed his eyes like he’d fallen back asleep, but when she scooted toward the tailgate, his grip on her hand tightened and he pulled her back.
“What I’m doing today is risky. Just in case anything happens—”
“It won’t. I know it. You’re going to do awesome.”
“Listen,” he said in a voice still heavy with sleep. “There are two things that I want to tell you. The first is that my real last name is DeVincenzi.”
“Josh—”
He cupped her face between his hands and looked directly into her eyes. “The second is that I love you.”
April let him kiss her and then lingered in his embrace for the count of fifteen.
“I gotta go,” she whispered, and then slipped from his grasp.
…
The shock—physical and mental—hit as she slid off the tailgate.
Her hands were like blocks of cement as she struggled to put her shoes on. The panic raging through her body made her feel like she was being pummeled with stones, like there was cellophane plastered against her nose and mouth, making it impossible to breathe.
She rushed through the dark forest back to the Walkabout site. Spiderwebs broke across her face and thorny branches clawed at her hair. She dodged a swooping bat and sideswiped a tree trunk. Her toe hooked on an unyielding root, throwing her to the rocky ground. She staggered to her feet and kept running.
Madigan was right. She was in no way stable enough to film on the Sorcerer, but she was going to do it anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Sorcerer hike was ruthless, but she didn’t care. She wanted the pain.
“Excuse me, guys,” April said as she squeezed past Ernesto and Russell on the trail.
She pushed her legs until she was practically running. The dew-covered ferns and the tree-striped blackness jiggled in the narrow beam of her headlamp. Her skin was hot and swampy beneath her clothes, but her bare arms were goose-bump cold in her self-generated wind.
The gap between her and the guys widened quickly. Now her own breath was the only thing she could hear, heavy and loud as she pushed up the elevation.
She turned onto a switchback, and the trail steepened into rail-tie stairs. Her pack was fully loaded, and there was an extra fifteen pounds of rope on top that she’d volunteered to carry. Her thighs wobbled under the exertion at each stair. She pushed harder, welcoming the misery.
Her radio earpiece crackled.
Danny: “Just checked the weather. We’re clear until tonight.”
The closer she got to the top, the more frequently the reports came in.
Theo: “On top.”
Danny: “At the base with Madigan.”
Michelle: “Josh is awake. Eating breakfast.”
At the top, April wasted no time switching into dry clothes and putting on her harness. Below, she could see Ernesto and Russell’s headlamps just entering the talus field. They still had a long way to go.
She walked directly to the end of the fin, recklessly forgoing the safety line until she got to the anchors at the end. Theo had already rappelled down to check everything out. She sat and waited for him to come back up.
The sky across the valley was alive with magentas and purples. The main road below was empty, and the meadow where Michelle soon would be with all the media cameras was still and pristine.
It was a glimpse of the valley as it had been centuries ago, before lodges and tour buses and 1.5 million visitors a year. Surely, in this kind of beauty, Josh couldn’t fall.
April hugged her knees. When he told her he loved her, she hadn’t said it back. With all her lies and misleading, couldn’t she have just returned the sentiment? He’d opened his heart to her, and she’d left him with silence.
If only she’d been able to think of him instead of herself in the moment. If he did fall, at least he would die thinking that she loved him. Then, this morning, at the base of this terrifying spire, he’d be embarking on his great feat in the glow of the knowledge that the girl waiting for him at the top loved him, too.
He’d been half asleep when she’d left his truck, but now that he was awake, he would be fully conscious of what she hadn’t said. Her silence would invade the very psyche he was depending on to be quiet and blank.
Her father would be so ashamed of her. Instead of boldly breaking the rules and embracing the consequences, she’d waded in so slowly that she didn’t realize she wasn’t testing the waters until she could no longer touch the bottom. Once there, instead of making a decision and sticking to it, she’d betrayed everyone she cared about, sneaking behind their backs, keeping secrets that could hurt them gravely, all in the name of crafting the safest version of life for herself.
She’d taken all of the rewards but none of risk. Her father’s definition of a coward.
Michelle: “Heading to the van with Josh.”
Go back! she wanted to scream through the radio. Go back to your truck, Josh. Tell them you’ve changed your mind.
Russell: “Four of us up on top now.”
April spun around. Russell and Ernesto were taking off their packs. Pull yourself together. Don’t be weird. She transferred her daisy chain onto the safety line and walked off the fin.
“How was the hike?” she asked them.
Russell ran his hand across his forehead, flicking a huge spray of sweat across the rocks next to him. “Do you even have to ask?”
She forced a laugh. “Danny should give us bonuses every time we have to come up here.”
Ernesto snorted. “Or at least free dinner. And somewhere other than the campground.”
Danny: “Josh at the base.”
April stretched her stiff arms and legs. They had several hours before Josh would be near the top, but they would be getting in place soon, so as not to accidentally push any rocks down on him while he was climbing.
Madigan: “I’m anchored in at position two.”
Theo: “Ropes are all looking good, I’m heading back up.”
She, Russell, and Ernesto met Theo out on the end of the fin for a briefing. When it was time to go down, the steps of rappelling off the edge that had once required so much focus came automatically to her. Ernesto was keeping an eye on her, as per Theo’s instructions, escorting her on the short rappel to her fixed spot on the wall.
“I’ll be leapfrogging past you to get set up on top once Josh is done farther below. You’ll film from here until he’s all th
e way over the top,” Ernesto said. “Then I’ll go back down so we can come back up together.”
“Okay,” she said, and he continued down.
April carefully pulled the camera out of her backpack and clipped its tether to her rope.
Danny: “Josh is ready. Is everyone set?”
She looked through the camera and zoomed in at the ground below. Media vans now lined both shoulders of the road, and a crowd of camera crews and onlookers with telescopes and binoculars were clustered in the meadow. A Park Service SUV idled on the road with its lights on while a pair of rangers directed cars though the bottleneck.
Danny: “Hands on rock. We’re a go.”
She turned the camera off and rested it on her thighs. She shifted her feet and settled into her heavily padded harness seat. The one benefit of the Sorcerer being so steep was that Russell was the only member of the crew she could see. Everything that was going on in the reports might as well be happening across the country. At least that’s what she would pretend.
Madigan: “I’ve got it on two.”
Danny: “Filming done on one.”
April’s stomach did a flip. Josh was now too high to change his mind and down climb, and until position six, he wouldn’t be high enough for his parachute to work if he fell.
“He will be fine,” she whispered. He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine.
The radio reports were flowing in fast now, reflecting Josh’s speed on the climb. She wasn’t sure if this was good or bad. He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine.
Across the valley, the sun peeked over the rim next to a waterfall that she could hear whenever there was a lull in the breeze. Hawks circled in the air below her.
Danny: “Filming on five.”
Five! She might be able to see Josh now.
Do not look down. He will be fine. He will be—
She looked down.
She could see him. The top of his unhelmeted head and the red hump of his parachute backpack were the size of an asterisk—too small and abstract to induce panic just yet. She could just make out Theo, too, moving up to film at his highest point. Over to the side, Ernesto was ascending to a position between Theo and Russell.
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