“Them disowning me and telling me that if I was going to have a baby, then I was adult enough to live on my own… it killed me,” she confesses. “But I couldn’t hide the truth. I was excited to be a mom.” Her eyes meet mine briefly. “And that feeling of everything happening for a reason only bloomed more after I gave birth. I felt it when David would say something surprisingly smart and too wise for his age when he was a kid, or when he accomplished something hard for the first time. I felt it when he aced a test or had a hit in a baseball game. And now, when I see him with Julia, and with a son of his own…” She smiles, shrugging. “He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. He’s my whole life.”
I smile. “You’re the best mom I know.”
“Better not let Clara hear you say that,” she teases, arching a brow at me.
“Ah, she’d probably agree with me,” I say, thinking about my mom and how many times she’d broken down to me, saying she should have been there for me more. I know she never meant to be as absent as she was, but with my father’s job and constant entertainment of clients, it was easy for her to get lost in it all.
I don’t blame her. I just wonder what it would have been like to have someone more present.
I shake my head, tapping the notebook with the pen in my hand. “Okay. So, kayaking, getting high, what else?”
Amanda and I spout off ideas, tossing the creative branch back and forth until we have a full page and it’s bleeding onto page two. There’s everything from go on a real date, from Amanda, to have a movie night, me. Some of it may seem boring to a person who has lived a normal way of life, and other things are a bit braver, like get a tattoo and climb a mountain.
“I think we should also write in amendments for spontaneous ideas,” I say. “Or rather, ideas for each other.”
“Like?”
“Like… I really want you to try meditating with me, even though that’s not something you listed.”
She groans. “Ugh. Sitting in the dark, in silence, with nothing to do but listen to my crazy brain race?” She shakes her head. “Hard pass.”
“It’s more than that,” I say on a laugh. “Come on — you’ll want to do the same to me sometime, too. There’s going to be something you want me to try that I don’t want to try. And I expect you to force me.”
“Oh, is that your kink?”
She winks, and I give her a look, all the while trying to ignore how the word kink sounds rolling off that sweet tongue of hers.
“I think this is the only way we really break out of our routine and our comfort zone. We’ve got to be pushed.”
“Fine. Spontaneous is allowed. But only because I want to make you drive with the windows down and Taylor Swift’s Red album up at full blast.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Instant regret.”
That earns me a laugh, a sweet, airy one that sounds like wind chimes on a summer breeze.
“Okay,” she asks. “What do we do first?”
“Hmm… I vote climbing.”
“Climbing. Okay. When?”
I check my watch, noting that it’s only seven. “Has Dr. Simmons cleared you for physical activity yet?”
“As of my three-week checkup yesterday, I’ve been cleared for just about everything. He said walking as much and as consistently as I have been has helped a lot, and that everything is healing up nicely.” She pauses, making a sort of scoff through her nose. “Still don’t understand how I was cleared to have sex before I was cleared to vacuum, but whatever.”
I smirk. “Alright, then. Let’s go right now.”
“Right now?”
“No time like the present, right?” I ask, standing and offering her my hand to help her up.
Her mouth gapes. “But I… I’m not ready. I don’t know if I can.”
“You can. I promise. And you’ll never be ready if it’s up to you. Luckily, it’s not. Now,” I say, wiggling my fingers until she lets me take her hand. I pull her to stand, holding her steady. “Go get changed and stop arguing.”
I smack her ass playfully as she passes me on her way to the window, and she gasps, turning to swat me in the chest and nearly losing her balance in the process.
“Hey! It’s a friendly gesture in sports.”
“Mm-hmm,” she says, narrowing her eyes, but she can’t hide the smile that curls on her lips as she ducks inside the window.
And I can’t hide how badly I want to smack that ass again.
AMANDA
“There is no way in hell I can do this.”
I stare up at the rock-climbing wall, a bland, beige thing covered in different-colored hand and foot grips that look like a rainbow of death from this perspective.
“You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for,” Greg says from beside me, his gaze crawling up the wall, too.
“I don’t mean the rock wall,” I say, turning to face him. “I mean this epic wedgie.”
I point to said wedgie, given kindly by the harness one of the employees strapped me into. It cuts right up between the legs and is anything but forgiving.
Greg looks where I’m pointing before letting out a sharp laugh, and then he nods back toward the counter. “Come on. Let’s get some chalk on and give it a try.” He pauses then. “Are you sure you feel up for it, though? I don’t want to push you if your injury—”
“I’m fine,” I say, dragging out the last word like a little kid. “If anything hurts or feels like it’s stretching in bad ways, I’ll come back down. Promise.”
He presses his lips together, but doesn’t argue further, and then we’re listening to the employees walk us through the basics of climbing as we chalk our hands and get strapped in for our first route.
“You go first,” I say to Greg when we’re all ready to go.
“Chicken.”
I just stick my tongue out as he chuckles, and then his muscular arm stretches overhead, massive hand curling around the first grip as he pulls himself up. Every muscle in his back and shoulder flexes with the movement, and then the other hand is up, grabbing a higher grip. He hikes one leg, foot balancing on a grip and highlighting the fact that his ass is just out of this world.
And I bite my lip to keep from whimpering.
Now I’m really glad I asked him to go first.
With his focus locked on what he’s doing, I take the opportunity to stare without worrying he’ll catch me and it’s then I realize that line I’ve drawn between us is pencil thin. I watch every muscle as he climbs — which he does effortlessly, or so it seems, his arms and legs moving in time as he rapidly ascends the wall.
Thirty-four. He’s thirty-four, his body as lean and fit as it’s ever been, I’d wager. He doesn’t know the pain of his knees giving out on him yet, or how it feels to just sleep wrong and have a back thrown out.
He rings the bell at the top, and then smirks down at me with a challenge in his eyes before rappelling back and making his way down.
“Your turn,” he says simply when his feet land beside me.
I sigh, hanging my hands on my hips and staring up at the wall.