“Aw, you made me dinner.” Spencer leaned sideways to give him a kiss. Flynn opened a second can for himself and they both dug in like the ravenous beasts they were. For a while there was nothing but eating and drinking and taking in the slow dimming of a summer evening in Yosemite with the heaviness of exhaustion weighing them down.
“Probably could’ve hit the top if we’d pushed a little harder today,” Flynn observed.
“Yeah, but then we wouldn’t be here. And this way, we’ll top out tomorrow with enough time to hike back down to the valley before the sun sets on us.”
Their friends never stopped teasing them about the time he and Flynn had had to sleep at the top of a formation in Red Rocks because they couldn’t find their way off it in the dark. The joke was that they’d wanted to get in some wilderness bump-and-grind, but the truth was it’d been a cold and scary night. Kind of beautiful, and at least they’d been together, but definitely not intentional. They didn’t need to get lost to enjoy some outdoor loving anyway. Just lost enough that no one was likely to find them.
“Ever think we’d be here?” Flynn asked.
“You told me we would be. Remember that day at Tsuzura-iwa? You said there were a lot of things I could do with my climbing career besides comps, and then you said maybe someday we’d be on a big wall together. And here we are.” Spencer gathered up the empty cans, licked their forks clean for later usage, and stashed everything carefully away. There were no recoverable oopsies in big wall climbing. It was a long way down.
“Are you sorry you’re not in Paris?”
“No, not really.” There’d been a point about a year and a half ago when he’d had to make a decision—go back into training for the competition circuit and make another run at gold or carry on as he had been.
His initial plan of taking six months off to climb without a training regimen or a coach had stretched out for a lot of months beyond that. These days he climbed more of what he wanted to climb, which turned out to be very little plastic. When he did go to the gym, it was to work with the kids climbing club or to have fun with his boyfriend on a rainy day. There were no stopwatches or burn charts involved.
“How about you?” he asked Flynn. “You could get back into it now that you’ve graduated.”
“Nah.” Flynn stretched himself out long on the portaledge, putting his head in Spencer’s lap. Spencer raked his fingers through his curls, fluffing them back up after a long day of being crushed beneath a helmet. “I’ll be glad to have more time to climb, but—”
Spencer’s snort interrupted him.
“What?” Flynn asked.
“You think working-Joes get more time to climb than students do? You’ve got a harsh awakening coming, baby. You’re going to wish you’d stuck to a career in climbing once you’ve tried nine-to-five for a while.”
“We’ll see.” Flynn’s big green eyes blinked up at him. “There’s no predicting the future, but I hope it’ll be with you.”
Those words and the deepening shadows told Spencer it was time to get his show on the road. He shifted Flynn off his lap and waved both arms wildly overhead to signal a friend he had planted down in the meadow. An air horn sounded, telling him his friend was in position to capture what he was about to do. Assuming he could do it without killing anyone.
He endured Flynn’s heckling grin as he awkwardly got himself onto one knee on the shifting canvas platform, then pulled a carabiner from the zippered pocket of his pants and clipped it to the portaledge’s main connection point overhead. The ring he’d bought dangled from it—shiny, silver, smooth, and round.
“Oh my God,” Flynn said with a hand to his mouth. “Is that—”
Spencer only made it halfway through the proposal he’d rehearsed before Flynn tackled him, nearly sending them both over the edge of their tiny home in the sky. There was a lot of terrifying jiggling as they frantically righted themselves and their gear, all accompanied by a mix of kisses and laughter.
“If there’s video of our portaledge collapsing—” Spencer threatened when he had Flynn trapped securely under him. He waved an arm overhead, and the air horn returned his salute.
“Did you seriously invite the media to film this?”
“Not the media. Just a friend. Just for us. I thought we might like to watch it later.”
“I can’t believe you proposed.” Flynn held up his hand where a silver ring sparkled as brightly as his eyes.
“Hey, you’re my meal ticket now. Gotta lock you in. Who ever thought you’d be the stable one?”
“We’ll see,” Flynn repeated. Like I said before, there’s no predicting the future. But this right here is all I ever wanted.”
It was all Spencer had ever wanted too. He just hadn’t known it. There were two round thing made of silver he treasured above anything else, but if he had to choose between them, he would choose the one currently on Flynn’s hand. He’d won more in Tokyo than he could ever have imagined.
“Love you,” he told his fiancé.
“Love you too,” his fiancé responded.
Overhead, the sky darkened to purple, then black. The stars came out and the fly went up and two very tired, very dirty boys fell asleep together, doing what they loved best with who they loved most.
~The End~