Zipper Fall (15 page)

When I didn’t need to pretend I could not see the tears because they had finally dried, I stirred next to him. “Would you like to tell me what happened?”

W
E
SAT
at the dining room table, facing one another, our legs carefully retracted under our respective chairs. I scooped up another helping of jasmine rice and saag paneer—a creamy-smooth spinach dish redolent of coriander—using a piece of flat naan bread, all buttery and supple in my hand. The fragrant spices tickled my nostrils as I ate.

“This is so good,” I said, heaping another forkful of rice onto a bite-sized piece of flat bread and topping it off with the green spinach goo. A piece of soft, white cheese peeked through the green, and again I inhaled the aroma of Indian spices before leaning over the plate to eat the overstuffed morsel.

Thank you, Reyna, for remembering my favorite food ever.

“How did you know what I’d like?” I asked him, hiding a smile, playing coy.

“I have my ways,” he said, not quite smirking, watching me eat with undisguised satisfaction. His smile was like a ray of sunshine that broke through the clouds, and I welcomed it while being aware that the heavy mood from before hadn’t quite lifted yet. I observed him carefully from underneath my eyelashes. He sat up straight and strong, his fork toying with a shrimp in the mild and creamy tikka masala
sauce, orange with saffron and tomato. His rice was mostly untouched. Soon, the frown mark between his sharp, angled eyebrows reappeared and his jaw tightened again, setting his mouth in a straight line.

Time to try another tack. “Tell me about Celia and her climbing.”

He reached for his beer and sucked some down. “Celia was all I had left of my family. My older sister—a bit overbearing, but she meant well, you know? Her only focus was climbing, really. She wanted to go pro and live off endorsements and write articles for climbing magazines, but the field’s just too competitive. Everyone wants to do that.”

I nodded. “Yeah.” She’d been chasing the ultimate rock-bum’s dream.

“The shirt you’re wearing is one of two she bought in a small Sierra Nevada gift shop right after she climbed Mt. Whitney. She was eighteen then. It was her first big solo climb. She did a route graded as 5.4 III. Does that mean anything to you?”

“If you fall, you die. You better have a partner and good gear. Takes experience, expect half a day to get up.”

“Okay. She did it without a partner, and that’s pretty good, even though it’s rated at ‘intermediate lead, beginner follow.’ Whatever… I haven’t made it to that level yet. Just, she gave me the shirt ’cause she bought it way too big and she was clearing some old things out. She was so happy and so proud, way back then. She climbed that, and much later, she even did El Capitan and all kinds of other nasty, notorious faces, and a few years back, she started to solo all of it. With safety gear, you understand, but still, climbing alone is risky, and I always worried about her. She was chasing her goal a bit too hard, I thought, so I got her an accounting job with Provoid Brothers. That’s what she went to school for.”

I quirked up my eyebrows with interest. The news articles had made a big deal out of several deaths in the accounting department of Provoid Brothers before the company went under. Three accidents, two suicides.

He saw my reaction and nodded. “Yeah. Well, not too long after she started working there—just part time so she could take long weekends and climb—she and Risby Haus got together. He was the VP of our collections department, reporting to the VP of Operations, so he was pretty high up the ladder.” Jack paused and took a drink of beer. He looked like he was going to say more but then thought better of it, and continued. “They’d go out climbing on the weekends. He’d never done it before, so she was teaching him. I hardly saw any of her when she was going out with Haus.” Jack drained the rest of his beer, and I got up, walked to the kitchen, and got us two more cold bottles. He accepted his drink with a nod, twisting the cap off with a firm, angry gesture.

“Just about when things were starting to go to shit at Provoid Brothers—it had been a total media circus, mind you—they went on a level 5.3 climb off in West Virginia. It was an easy weekend trip. The wall wasn’t too tall or too hard. She could have free-climbed it if she wanted to.”

I frowned. “Wait, you mean—”

“Yeah. Like with no safety gear at all. She was pretty confident. I know it’s not good practice, but she and her buddies did that at times, just for the thrill of it.”

“Did she have a death wish?” My voice was quiet and serious as I asked.

“No. No, she seemed happy. Real happy. Young, in love… she had so much to live for, you know?” He turned his head and studied the curtains to the living room balcony for a good long while.

I gave him some time; when he turned his gaze back to his beer bottle, I prodded again. “So. What happened?”

“She was the lead climber, and Haus was supposed to be belaying her. Except she fell—just three feet before she reached the top, too. She died at the scene. Three hundred and eighty feet is pretty high up when you crash on the rocks below.”

“A third of that is plenty enough of a fall to kill you,” I commented.

“Yeah…. I drove out to see it. There were ledges and stuff—lots of places with good cover. She fell off the one and only possible place where there was nothing to catch her on the way down.”

“And Haus?”

“He made it to the top on his own and walked down the easy side of the mountain. There’s no cell signal out there. No witnesses. There’s no way to tell what really happened.”

I took a sip of my beer, shoving my food aside. To climb with someone was to put your life in his or her hands—especially if you climbed the lead. “So he was belaying her—and when she fell, he didn’t arrest the fall?”

Jack’s face was still, as still as though carved of stone. “He said the rope just slipped between his fingers. He didn’t know what went wrong. He seemed really broken up over it, too.” Jack was staring at the table, a furrow between his eyebrows, flipping the beer cap in his fingers. Up and down, up and down.

“Do you know what type of a belaying device she was using?” I asked. That would have made a difference, especially if a beginner panicked.

“It’s there somewhere. In her things, y’know.” He waved his hand around as though we were at his place, surrounded by countless boxes of Celia’s things. “I started climbing two months after she passed, just to see if I could figure out what might have gone wrong. Never had the time to dig into it, though. I’ve been working crazy hours since we got our little company launched…. You have no idea what that’s like. There’re nights I sleep at the office and shower at the gym across the street….” He let his voice drift off, suddenly looking worse for the wear.

“What did the police say?”

“An accident. While doing an extreme sport, they said. As though she’d been asking for it.” Anger seethed under the surface of his tight, controlled expression.

“So her gear’s in one of those boxes?”

“Yeah. It’s all her stuff. I don’t know what to do with it.”

A change of topic was in order. “You still climb, Jack?”

“I try. When I have the time—you know, to figure out what happened—but I’m just a rank beginner.”

Slowly I pushed my chair away from the table. I met his gaze and held it as I grasped the bottom hem of the venerable old T-shirt and eased it over my shoulders, revealing my hard-earned abs.

“Gaudens… what the hell you think you’re doin’?”

My face was now hidden by his shirt, so I could allow myself a self-satisfied smirk as I flexed my toned midsection just a bit. I wiggled some, pulling the sleeves over my arms before I let the garment fall off my arms. I shook it, turned it right side out, and folded it. “Here. I’m giving it back.”

Jack outstretched his hand and accepted the small, still-warm bundle. As I headed for my bedroom to put something else on, I heard a broken, ragged moan escape him. I spun around.

Jack sat at my dining room table with his face buried in the shirt I just removed. Whether he was reacting to his memory of Celia or my scent, his unintended sound was like a siren’s call and, heedless of the rocks I was about to be dashed upon, I followed it, unwilling to stop myself.

I flattened my palms across his shoulders from behind; his warmth radiated in ample and generous waves as I detected a hint of his defined deltoids under the scratchy linen of his white shirt. “You okay?” I whispered, stroking my fingers from his shoulder points all the way up his corded neck, bumping over the stand-up collar in my way.

He gave a slight shiver and leaned back into me. After placing the blue T-shirt on the table before him, he raised his hands to touch mine. His fingers stroked my forearms, traveling all the way up to my shoulders, and I leaned into his touch, wrapping my arms around his neck.

“Hey…,” I whispered right by his ear, letting my warm, moist breath tickle the sensitive tissue. “Can I take some of this away, at least for a little while?”

He stood and turned, every movement slow and deliberate. He pushed the chair to the side as he did that, and our eyes met as he turned. I wasn’t asking him for a lifelong commitment, but he wavered nevertheless before he let his hands travel from my shoulders on down to my abs, my waist, my back…. He explored my curves with those large, strong hands, his roughened finger pads an exclamation mark in the wake of his hot, heavy touch. His hesitant fingers skimmed my back, tracing fire trails to my sides. I gasped as his gentle touch traced my dips and planes. When he brushed my nipple, my knees almost buckled. “Hug?” he said, his mouth on my neck.

I drew him in and molded my body against his. A few moments later, my eyes closed with pleasure at the sensation of his fingers running through my shaggy mop. He breathed into my loose, blond hair, and whispered one word so quietly, I didn’t think it was meant for my ears at all:

“Goldilocks….”

W
E
STOOD
facing one another in an uneasy détente. His hands were setting my skin aflame with desire, and for the first time, I thought perhaps taking my shirt off in front of Jack gave me more than I had bargained for. His fingers traced my heaving ribs, his thumbs running up my sternum as his fingers caressed my skin.

His faint whisper was still on my mind:

Goldilocks….

Here was the man of my dreams, tall and handsome and just a bit over the line of dangerous, and he dared to compare me to a
little
girl
. My hackles raised immediately. “No girly nicknames.”

“Your hair is so rich and gold, like the sweetest honey any bear would love to taste. You break into houses and make yourself comfortable. You’re cute. It suits you.”

I elbowed him and was surprised when he oomphed and bent over with his hands on his solar plexus. I must have hit him dead on.

“Gaudens… you asshole…. That was a sneaky thing to do.”

“You started it,” I said, even though I felt bad.

“Okay, then. I should be going home. I don’t need this kind of crap from yet another ungrateful malcontent today.” He grabbed his blue T-shirt off the table and headed for the door. The man of my dreams was about to put his shoes on and step out of my apartment, out of my life. Getting him here to begin with took me almost a week, and now I’d blown it.

Damn.

“I’d like you to stay….”

He stopped.

“I’m so sorry. Please stay? That landed in a bad place and way harder than I intended. I didn’t mean it to hurt… not so much, anyway.”

He turned around and eyed me up and down as I stood there with my thumbs hooked over the waistband of his black silk shorts. He didn’t say anything, so I continued.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t take you down as deep as I wanted to. You’re… you’re just a little too well-endowed for that sort of a thing… you know?”

His eyes darkened and I saw him suck in a breath; he was focused on my lips as I spoke.

“I just loved sliding my tongue down like that, though. You were so incredibly smooth… and hard… and hot….”

“Gaudens.” He mangled my name into a promising growl as he closed the distance between us, discarding the precious T-shirt in passing. He slid his large, warm hands up my sides, and I sagged with relief that he wasn’t walking out. He pushed my shoulders into the wall behind me and leaned in to capture my lips with his own, and I felt like melting at his touch, feeling both possessive and insecure. Our kiss was simple; not a lot of tongue. It was a makeup kiss, and we both knew it. “I’ll stay if you want me to.” He exhaled, sharing his breath with me. I felt his back through that fine, tailored linen; the strong erectors, the defined deltoids.

Twist my arm.

“Only if you really want to.” My voice was muffled by his shirt as I inhaled, savoring the scent of his left armpit. Oh God, that man…. A heady scent of spice and musk flooded my senses, almost making me faint with want. Burrowing my nose in there would have been too undignified, so I settled for dizzying, deep breaths.