Lessons In Gravity

by Megan Westfield

  The many physical discomforts made it impossible to focus. And made it impossible for her to stop thinking about Josh. She’d do her best to avoid him for the rest of the time until the Sorcerer, but they would inevitably cross paths. When they did—

  Her heart grew granite hard just thinking about it. It would kill her to be around him, pretending to be nothing but an acquaintance after all their time together last night.

  But what if Josh assumed she would keep sneaking around with him here in Yosemite? If that was the case, she’d have to explain the crew-talent rule and why she couldn’t risk it. And to say no to Josh if he was still interested? How could she possibly turn away from his kiss? Or the opportunity to wrap her arms around him? Would she physically be able to?

  Through the camera, she watched Theo look down at Madigan and wink. She was out of patience for his games. There had to be a bylaw in the Cinema Guild about being forced to film without a tripod for this long.

  Theo screamed and plummeted from view. She gasped and then screamed along with him. The camera rolled off her shoulder and almost slid out of her hands.

  She made herself look down. Theo’s head was only six feet lower than it had been. And he was grinning at her like the Cheshire cat.

  “Okay up there?” Madigan asked.

  “Fine,” she snipped. They’d done that on purpose.

  “That’s enough for today,” Madigan said. “Let’s head back and get dinner started.”

  “Good,” Theo said. “My arms are about to fall off.”

  No kidding.

  April put the camera in her backpack and rappelled down. She helped the guys pull the ropes, and they started back to camp.

  “Let’s talk about Theo’s fall,” Madigan said as they walked.

  A debrief? She had very little energy left to concentrate. Was this really necessary right now?

  “How’d you feel when it happened?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “You screamed,” Theo said.

  “So did you!”

  “So might one of our climbers,” Theo said. “But you don’t want to be screaming if one of them really falls. You have to keep your head. Always.”

  “We’re working with the top climbers in the U.S. on this film. These are guys—and girls—who are tackling the hardest routes there are, but they don’t succeed without failing hundreds of times first. They have great control of their fear, but you’ll be able to tell when they’re on something that scares them. As the cinematographer, you’re praying to see that emotion, but when it happens right next to you, a thousand feet in the air, it can be hard to keep your cool.”

  April thought of Josh. There’s no way she’d be able to keep her cool if something bad was happening to him. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep her cool even if everything was going normally. To her, the mere fact of him doing the climb was something bad happening.

  This was yet another reason her time with Josh at the gala had been a bad idea and why it was crucial that she avoid him now: to be emotionally capable of filming him on the Sorcerer, she had to be able to lock away her feelings so deeply that she didn’t feel any differently about him than she did any other rock climber. She wasn’t sure how she was going to manage that, but she had to. Otherwise, it could be a very dangerous situation next week on the Sorcerer.

  Back at the van, they stowed their gear away. The guys were still going on about the nuances of rock-climbing cinematography.

  “You’ll be sweating and shaking,” Theo said. “But hopefully not shaking too much, otherwise you’ll ruin the footage. I almost puked once.”

  “When was that?” Madigan asked.

  “Filming Barbara Gregory. She missed a hand jam and took a sixty-foot whipper.”

  “See, April?” Madigan said. “You have to separate yourself from what the climber is going through but still be engaged enough that you can capture the scene.”

  “Yeah, like with Barbara, I saw what was going to happen a split second before it did,” Theo said. “Even if I had the time to react, there’s this line you can’t cross. You’re just the cameraman. Or camerawoman. You can’t tell the climber where to put her hands. That’s her skill. Her talent. Her risk.”

  “Not that you wouldn’t say anything if you saw something that was blatantly unsafe,” Madigan said.

  “Was Barbara okay?” April asked.

  “She broke three ribs, but otherwise fine,” Theo said.

  Danny was on his laptop at the picnic table when they got to the campsite. “There’s weather moving in,” he said.

  April and the guys gathered behind him and looked at his screen. She didn’t know much about satellite imagery, but the red and yellow gob in the middle of the Pacific Ocean didn’t look good.

  “The big concern is the routes getting wet,” Madigan explained. “It can take a long time for them to dry. It could really affect our filming schedule, and it would definitely delay Josh’s Sorcerer climb.”

  “We’ve been lucky with weather so far, and we might stay lucky,” Danny said. “It’s hard to tell where this system will go once it hits land.”

  Theo got some beers out of the bear box and handed them around. April and Madigan started dinner. Tuna mac, but mixed with salsa to change it up.

  As April started opening the cans of tuna, she subconsciously scanned the woods for signs of Josh. Would he walk through the campground on the way back from wherever he was today? Would he come to dinner tonight? She was dying to see him, but she knew she couldn’t.

  “April!” Madigan called. “You just drained the tuna into your beer!”

  She looked down. Indeed she had.

  “Want it?” she asked. “It’s the new big thing in L.A.”

  “You should drain those over in the fish-cleaning room. We don’t need any Ursus americanus visiting tonight.”

  She gathered the can opener, tuna, her tuna-juice beer, and dish soap and headed for the scullery room where she’d filled the five-gallon water container her first day on the job.

  She unloaded her arms and poured the tuna beer down the sink.

  “Hey, there,” Josh said.

  She whipped around, and there he was, leaning against the doorframe. She was going to explode with happiness and relief.

  He kicked the door shut behind him and kissed her. She longed to wrap her arms around him, but her hands were still covered in tuna juice.

  “Just a second,” she said. She squeezed dish soap onto her hands and scrubbed them under the faucet.

  “I should do the same, thing,” he said. His hands were dusty from climbing, nearly black in places, and his knuckles and nail beds were caked in white chalk.

  Their hands mingled under the stream of water as they rinsed the soap off. She shook her hands dry while he patted his on the underside of his shirt. “I wish we could have spent the day together.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and looked into her eyes. “I wish we could spend every day together.”

  Her heart raced in response. This was very much not over. Not yet.

  He scrunched his nose and frowned. “You know, it really stinks in here.”

  She laughed and pushed the door open. They stood outside next to a big pine tree.

  “Are you coming to dinner tonight?” she asked. “We’re having tuna—obviously—with mac and cheese and salsa.”

  “I already told some of my buddies I’d barbecue with them, but you should swing by later.”

  Yeah, right, she was going to hang out with the biggest climbing celebrity in Yosemite National Park in front of a bunch of other climbers. The gossip would reach Danny before morning.

  “I have an econ test coming up. I’ll just be studying at my truck after dinner,” he added.

  Meeting Josh alone was a different story, but she needed to give herself time to think about what she was doing after her heart slowed down and she had a straight head.

  “I’ll see if I can get away,” she said.r />
  Chapter Nineteen

  It only took April halfway through her bowl of tuna salsa mac to decide there was no way she was not going to see Josh tonight, even though it was the opposite of what she should do. After dinner, she went into her tent and changed into running clothes so the guys would think she was going for a jog.

  “I’ll be back in a bit!” she called to them as she started toward the main road.

  “If you wait just a minute, I’ll join you,” Danny said. “A run sounds great right now.”

  “I’m just going on a quick one. Probably only two miles.” Two measly miles wouldn’t be worth the effort for Danny. She didn’t wait for his answer before jogging away.

  “Light’s getting low, watch for bears!” Madigan called.

  Even though she didn’t have much time, she took the longer, more concealed way to Josh’s camp, which was a fire road on the opposite side of the search-and-rescue camp. Her whole body was throbbing from filming today, and the jostling from the jogging was almost unbearable. She rounded the back side of the camp and there was Josh, swinging in his hammock and reading a textbook.

  “Hey,” she said, brushing up alongside him.

  He smiled as he closed his book. He stood and wrapped his arms around her.

  “I’m so glad you came.” He buried his face in her hair. “You smell like raspberries.”

  “It’s my shampoo. Pomegranate.”

  There was a ridiculous turquoise jar candle burning atop the grill on his fire pit. “I see Michelle hit you up at the gala, too.”

  “What’d you get?” he asked.

  “The citronella bullfrog. It’s on back order, though.”

  “Danny would just die if he knew.”

  “For sure.”

  He hugged her tighter against his body.

  “Josh, I have to tell you, I’m not allowed to be doing this.”

  He took a quick breath and held it. She pulled back so she could see his face. His brows knit together in concern.

  “Why?”

  “I signed a contract.”

  “A contract for what?”

  “Employee conduct. It’s standard for crew. To prevent this from happening.” She motioned between the two of them. “I can’t get fired. I have so much school debt, and getting a job after my internship is going to be practically impossible as it is.”

  “It’s not because you don’t want to?”

  “Want” wasn’t the right word. The contract was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of why she couldn’t. But he looked so impossibly sad…and she did want to. Badly. “No.”

  His body relaxed a little. “What if no one knew? What if we made sure?”

  “How could we possibly? Everybody knows who you are.”

  He turned her hands over, a frown on his face as his thumbs smoothed the new calluses forming on her palms from this afternoon. “Come on, get in.” He tugged her forward.

  She hesitated. “In the hammock?”

  “What, you don’t trust my knots?”

  “It doesn’t look very sturdy.”

  He sat down in it to prove otherwise. When she didn’t move, he yanked her hand and she fell into his lap. He kicked his feet up and pivoted back, pulling her down. She clung to him as the hammock swung wildly, sure it was going to flip and dump them both on the ground.

  Soon, the swinging slowed to a gentle rock, with the sides of the hammock pressing them into each other. Their mouths were instantly together, and she was pouring her whole heart into the kiss.

  I wish we could spend every day together.

  “My god, April,” Josh said, gripping her arms and pulling her in for another one.

  She kissed him until her bottom arm went numb, and then she twisted around, wrestling for space in the tight cocoon of the hammock until they were both lying on their backs with their shoulders overlapping. Josh slipped his arm beneath her and grabbed her hand. “I promise you I’ll make sure no one sees us. We can be careful.”

  She rested her head in the perfect cradle of his shoulder. “Okay,” she whispered. For now.

  The sky glowed orange and yellow behind the darkening profiles of the pine trees. The hotel had been supremely luxurious, but she’d missed Yosemite. In the openness and beauty of this landscape, she felt free in a way she had never been before.

  If she had her way, she’d stay in the hammock with Josh all night, but she was already well past the seventeen minutes it would have taken her to jog two miles. The light was low, and she hadn’t brought her headlamp.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Already?”

  “They think I went jogging.”

  “Next time, tell them you’re using the internet in the cafeteria or something.”

  She gave him a half smile.

  “Are you shooting tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I’ll be on top like last time.”

  He squeezed her hand. “That’s what I was hoping.”

  …

  At the top of Flying Sheep Buttress, the sun was shining brightly. There was just enough breeze to ripple the surface of the lake and destroy the reflections, and thus, the lake was a solid sapphire gem under the endless dome of the sky.

  She’d gotten up extra early so she could take the secret—but much longer—way to the top. With her camera all set up, she sat next to the same log she had last time, but this time she was prepared to stay awake with a twenty-four-ounce can of Horsepower Juice she’d taken from Theo’s stash in camp. She cracked open the lid, frowned at the menacing purple foam around the spout, and then drank it all down.

  The guys were on the radio constantly as they got ready for the climb. She followed along as they moved into their filming positions and counted down to Josh’s start. Her stomach fluttered each time they mentioned his name, even though it was a roped climb that had been selected more for its aesthetics than its difficulty. Once Josh started climbing, the radio chatter was much less frequent, with all focus on capturing the climb. April got ready behind her camera when she heard the call that Josh was nearing Theo, who was in the highest position. She ran a test clip, just to make sure the lighting was still okay.

  Josh’s fingertips appeared first, followed by a tuft of hair, then his eyes, face, shoulders, and the rest of his body. He stood at the cliff’s edge and shook out his hands. He put them on his hips and looked into the camera lens. “Well, what now?” he asked.

  April groaned. He’d totally ruined the sequence, and she wanted to give him a hard time about it, but the guys would be watching this later, so she just said, “Whatever you’d normally do.”

  He walked in from the edge about ten feet, sat down, and started pulling the excess rope up to the top. “How’d it go?” she asked him.

  “Do you want me to look at you when I answer?”

  “Whatever feels natural.”

  “There isn’t anything natural about having a camera at the top of my climb.”

  “Well, how’d it go?”

  “Fine.”

  “Josh!”

  “Can’t we do this later?”

  “Let’s just get it over with.”

  “Fine.”

  “What were you feeling when you got to the top?”

  “I was excited to see you.”

  She made a mental note to cut this section out before Danny saw it. “And what else?”

  His bangs were clumped into little points from the sweat on his forehead. “Nothing else.”

  “Did you feel relieved to be finished? How about a sense of accomplishment?”

  “Just you.”

  “You cannot say that on camera!”

  “Oh, come on,” he teased. “Wouldn’t it show my personality? Isn’t that what you people are always hounding me about?”

  “Give me two good sound bites and I’ll turn off the camera. We don’t have much time up here.”

  “Just tell me what to say and I’ll repeat it.”

  “No way. It wouldn’t sound right
.”

  “I am completely serious. If said I was thinking about anything other than you when I was climbing, it would be a lie.”

  He untied the rope from his harness, and before April knew it, he’d pulled her in front of the camera and was kissing her.

  “Josh! I’m recording right now!”

  He laughed.

  “I’m going to have to cut this footage out of my log, and it’s not that easy. And where’s Lars? Don’t you need to belay him up?”

  “Lars wouldn’t be able to do some of the moves on that last pitch without aid gear. I told him to just rap down with your crew.”

  Josh held her at arm’s length and examined her. Deep breaths moved her breastbone, which was exposed in the low neck of her jog top. His gaze was unnerving and energizing at the same time.

  He bent his arm, bringing her in close to kiss again. Under the huge, blue sky, with the breeze slipping between the bridges of their noses and across her back, it felt like the whole world was watching, and she liked it. She wanted everyone to see her like this, with him, but of course that could never happen.

  “Why did you say we don’t have much time up here?” he asked when they pulled apart.

  “Well, first, I’m going down the long way, so that’s an extra hour, at least, and I have to meet the guys back at the van at three o’clock. And now, thanks to you, I have to get there extra early to fix this SD card before they ask to see any footage.”

  “Why don’t you just rappel down with me?”

  “I don’t have a harness.”

  “Don’t you?”

  He opened the front compartment of her backpack that she had prepacked last night. He pulled out a harness with a Grigri attached.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think anyone has any idea how crafty you are.”

  “It’s probably better we keep it that way.”

  She looked at his coil of rope on the ground. It was only a fraction of the height of Flying Sheep Buttress.

  “I don’t understand how we can get to the ground with a rope that short.”