Lessons In Gravity

by Megan Westfield

  “Josh, please—”

  “You are the only person I’ve told about my family other than Vic. You’re the first person I’ve dated since I left home. You are the only person I’ve loved, ever. You gave me hope that someone, someday, might not only love me but love me unconditionally.”

  Tears streamed down her face.

  “Don’t you know that I would do anything for you?” he asked, letting go of the blade of grass he was still holding. He looked at her, his hazel eyes damp and searching. “I tried to leave, but I couldn’t. I turned around at El Portal to come back here and think.” He swallowed. “I came back here for you.”

  Her stomach dropped, and her heart floated free. She didn’t know it was possible to love someone this much. She reached for his bandaged hand, holding it carefully, exactly as he had held hers that night before the gala.

  He cupped her face with his good hand, wiping a tear away with his thumb. “I watched the movie you made. I see us how you see us. How you see me. I came back because I believe you.”

  Her face followed the light pull of his hand, guiding her lips to his. It was the falling and the spinning of the very first time all over again. The return to something so familiar, so right. She opened her mouth to his tongue, her heart racing. She leaned into him as he wrapped his arm around his waist.

  His shoulders tightened. She stopped kissing him. “This is hurting you.”

  “I’m okay,” he said, gripping her hand so she couldn’t pull away. But even as he did so, he winced in pain.

  “You’re not okay.”

  “I’ve been better.” He shifted his broken leg. “I didn’t take any painkillers this morning.”

  So he could drive away from here. From her.

  “You’ve only been out of the hospital a day,” she said. “You need to rest. And take some medicine.”

  She walked out to his truck on the shoulder of the road and brought back painkillers and a bottle of water. She helped him ease on to his back, then laid her head on his chest.

  “I think I know what you heard at the hospital,” he said. “Lars asked me when I was going to get back on the Sorcerer. Didn’t you hear what I told him?”

  “No.” She hadn’t waited around to hear his answer.

  “I told him I wasn’t planning on it. The truth is, I don’t even know if I can climb anything again.”

  She gently fingered the pins sticking out of his bandaged hand. With anyone else, she would have agreed. Because he was Josh Knox, he would be healed and back at it in six months.

  He rolled cautiously over onto his side to face her. “But if I can, I will promise there will never be another free solo. I decided that the day I woke up from the coma and you were there, waiting for me.”

  “You don’t have to quit climbing for me. Didn’t you hear what I said earlier? I’m okay with—”

  “Hey, now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” He laughed. “I did not say I’d quit climbing for you. I said I’d quit free soloing.”

  She smiled. “Oh, I see. So no free soloing, but what about free BASEing?”

  “No more free BASEing, either.”

  “What about highball deep water bouldering?” she asked.

  “That’s quite some lingo for a nonclimber.”

  “I do my research.”

  “There will always be a rope. How about that?”

  “Climbing with a rope, that’s child’s play. Who wants to do that?”

  His eyes sparkled in the sunlight as he laughed. A smile lingered on his face as she laced her fingers through his, and in that moment she knew everything would okay between them.

  Josh took off his hoodie and bunched it under his head as a pillow. “So, I’ve been meaning to ask. How’d you get back here so fast?”

  “I flew my dad’s plane.”

  “You flew the plane?”

  “Yeah. To the Mariposa airport.”

  “You fly?”

  “It had been a while, but I did fine.”

  “Terrifying.”

  “Not really.”

  “And what after that? How’d you get the rest of the way here?”

  “I hitchhiked.”

  “You’ve turned into a real Yosemite bum, April Stephens.”

  “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

  The corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile.

  Then she was kissing him, her hand slipping up his shirt, running across the warm granite of his abs. His hand was under her shirt, too, on the skin of her stomach, her waist, her lower back. All of his touches were brand-new again. His mouth moved to her neck, sending tingles down her spine.

  She pulled away just enough to see his smoldering eyes. “Theo told me Danny wanted you to stay here with us until we’re done shooting.”

  “He did. You saw me leaving. I had turned him down.”

  “But you could change your mind.” She kept her eyes locked on his. “Will you change your mind?”

  Amusement flitted across his face. “On one condition. Scotty’s having a fire tonight. And I kind of need a date. Someone to make sure I am sufficiently social in case any millionaire benefactors stop by.”

  “Me?” She put her hand to her chest. “I would be honored.”

  “Good. I really want you to meet my friends.”

  “So then, you’re going to stay?”

  He reached for a section of her windblown hair, twisting it in his fingers. “Yes, I’ll stay.”

  The most enormous smile broke free across her face. They were going to be together.

  “But what after that?” she asked, her eyebrows tightening.

  “Our trip up to Tuolumne?”

  “I know you know that’s not what I mean.”

  “Well, it depends.”

  “On me?”

  “Yeah.”

  She dropped her head onto her arm and scooted closer until their foreheads were touching. “What if I wanted you to come to Seattle with me for postproduction?”

  He pretended to think. “Then I would say yes.”

  She slid her lips over his and kissed him gently, then harder, deeper.

  Josh’s touch was firm, but stiff, like he was trying to protect his healing injuries. Lying on his side was uncomfortable for him, even with the painkillers starting to take effect. She nudged him over on his back. He put his arm around her and squeezed her shoulder.

  “April, I’m really sorry about your dad and how you had to be right there to see it happen.”

  She swallowed hard against the sudden lump in her throat.

  “I knew about your dad before you told me today,” he said. “After you’d been gone a couple of days, Vera gave me some printouts of articles about what happened.”

  Her throat was still knotted up. She nodded against his chest instead.

  “I’ve always had this sense that there was something more going on with you. That we were alike somehow, that you understood me. But it didn’t change the fact that you’d disappeared.”

  She placed her palm on his chest next to her face, feeling the texture of his T-shirt, the rise and fall of his chest. This was Josh. She could talk to him about this. She closed her eyes.

  “I was so resentful about my dad, even sometimes before the crash. I loved him with all my heart, and we were really close, but I didn’t understand how he could love flying more than my mom and me. That he would risk us for his own ambitions. Now, I’m so close to being able to forgive him and move on from that. But I just can’t kick the shadow from being there when it happened. I keep seeing that plane falling. I keep seeing the explosion. I keep expecting to see my father walk out from the smoke. Over and over. Almost every day I see it.”

  A single tear rolled from the corner of her eye, wetting the fabric beneath her cheek. Josh placed his hand over hers, curling their fingers together.

  “It feels like I’m a rabbit in a cage. I can see everything around me, and I’m safe inside, but all these random things make me panic anyway. I have thi
s feeling that even if the door was wide-open, I wouldn’t know how to escape. Maybe I wouldn’t even want to. But I do want to, now. Once I get to Seattle, I’m going to start seeing a therapist again.”

  He squeezed her hand. She watched the clouds beyond the Sorcerer, his breathing steady beneath her head.

  “You did the right thing in not telling me about your dad,” he said, his voice a touch groggy. “I would not have had the mental capacity for free soloing, but I would have done it anyway. If I fell any lower than I did, the chute wouldn’t have been able to catch me in time.”

  He pulled her tighter against his side.

  “I also know that you didn’t back out of the Sorcerer because you were afraid of rappelling. I know you did it for me.”

  She slid her head over to the crook of his shoulder so she could see his face better. He gave a faint smile with eyelids that were drooping from the painkillers. She traced some small swirls on his chest with her fingers.

  Natural, easy, passionate, best friends, comfortable.

  “I love you, Josh. Unconditionally.”

  His eyes were drifting lower. He gave a small smile and reached for her hand, threading their fingers tightly together. Moments later, his body relaxed into sleep.

  She was exhausted, too, but she had also never felt this alive. This free.

  The late-afternoon sun cast warm yellow beams of light across the aspens and into the meadow. She looked up at the sharp tip of the Sorcerer, so high and far away. And, strangely, not as foreboding as it once was.

  An aircraft contrail floated through the puffy clouds overhead, much too high to be heard. She thought about her dad. For once, there was no grief. No anger. No panic.

  She knew, deeply, that he’d be happy that she’d found a passion and career that she loved as much as he’d loved aerobatics. He’d be even happier that she’d found the kind of love that he had had with her mom.

  She felt Josh’s strong, familiar hand in hers, holding tightly, even in sleep. Her father hadn’t walked away from the smoke that day at Saguaro Butte, but she would.

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  Acknowledgments

  First, and most importantly, thank you to my husband, Eric, for not only humoring this mysterious compulsion of mine to write and write and write, but to enable me to do so through the balancing of our jobs, household duties, and care of our little Wild Things. It was our many trips together to Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne Meadows that inspired me to form a novel set in the surreal beauty of this park, and our countless hours of watching rock-climbing movies that sparked my curiosity about what it would be like to be the person filming these amazing and terrifying feats.

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to new adult author extraordinaire Cora Carmack for selecting my manuscript to mentor during Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars contest. I don’t think I’ll ever have a bigger publishing squee moment than when teams were posted and I saw the title of my manuscript next to your name. The insight you shared about story, character, and publishing in general was, and continues to be, invaluable. Your cheerleading was the magic superhero cape that turned three thousand feet of “no” into something that was totally climbable. (And thanks to Brenda, too, for the countless hours she spends creating and running her fantastic series of contests that are such an inspiration and bridge for so many aspiring novelists.)

  I am grateful to my editor, Karen Grove, for championing this book out of the slush pile, being patient with all my rookie questions, and expertly steering my manuscript and ironing out all the wrinkles. I am thrilled that Lessons in Gravity found a home here at the innovative and reader-centric Entangled Publishing, where the new adult genre is supported to the point of it having its own devoted line. Thank you to my agent, Melissa Edwards, for taking a chance on rock climbing and laying the cairns for me in this epic adventure of novel writing.

  I was fortunate to be able to consult with several subject matter experts about some of the technical details surrounding this novel, all of whom were incredibly gracious with their time in responding to my questions. For adventure filmmaking guidance, thank you to Alexandra Kahn of As Inspired Media, Kelly Pope of Pope Productions, and attorney/UCLA MFA directing grad Merlin Camozzi. For aviation guidance, thank you to my pilot sister-in-law, Crissy Field (who aptly shares a name with the historic San Francisco airfield).

  Finally, to my friends and family members, thanks for being such excellent listeners when I gave a fifteen-minute answer to your simple question, “What’s your book about?” and for having more faith in me than I did in myself that you would someday hold a copy of this story in your hands. Thank you to Kelly, especially, for years—and I mean years—of me dominating our phone calls with plot dilemmas and imaginary people. Thank you to Gram-Mer for so many trips to Southern California and taking such good care of the Wild Things while I write.

  About the Author

  Megan Westfield grew up in Washington State, attended college in Oregon, and lived in Virginia, California, and Rhode Island during her five years as a navy officer. She is now a permanent resident of San Diego, along with her husband and two young children. Aside from writing and her family, her great passions in life are reading, candy, and spending lots of time outside hiking, skiing, camping, running, and biking. In their early years of dating, Megan and her husband took lots of weekend climbing trips to Yosemite, where she was first inspired to write a story set completely in the incredible, sublime beauty of the park.

  Connect with Megan Westfield and learn more about her upcoming books at www.meganwestfield.com.

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