My Guys

by Tanya Chris

  Once we had everything stuffed into our packs, he led me to Lover’s Leap where Pam was about three quarters of the way up. She looked stuck and nervous, but Derek didn’t stop to watch her. Derek was watching someone else.

  I followed his eyes to the woman climbing on our left. She was thirty feet off the ground underneath a massive projection of rock. Her body was nearly horizontal, stretched to full extension as she reached a hand over the lip of the roof. Her feet cut loose, that single hand taking her full weight as she swung a leg over the roof to join it.

  As though this were a natural thing to do, she rocked onto the foot at her waist, reaching her other hand far over her head to grab a hold so small I hadn’t even seen it. She stood the rest of the way up into a relaxed stance, then gave her belayer a thumbs up.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Amanda,” Derek answered without shifting his eyes from the woman.

  “It’s Foul Play,” Jenny said. “A twelve. Amanda is the who, not the what.”

  “She’s very good, isn’t she? Does she climb at our gym?” I couldn’t remember anyone who looked like her.

  She appeared to be tall for a woman and broad through the shoulders. Like Jenny, she was wearing a tank top, so I could see her arms and shoulders in detail. Jenny’s muscles rippled beneath her skin with delicate grace when she climbed. Amanda’s bulged like Derek’s. Her arms were lean and hard, no flaps of fat-filled skin waving beneath them.

  “Not our gym,” Jenny said. “I think she’s from Pennsylvania, but we see her on the rock or at bouldering competitions sometimes. Derek has a crush on her.”

  Derek flicked his eyes towards Jenny with annoyance, but only briefly. They immediately returned to Amanda. She was too high to watch easily, so I checked on Pam. She was in the same spot she’d been ten minutes ago.

  Jenny rolled her eyes at me, but her voice when she called up to Pam reflected only patience. “How’re you doing up there?”

  “I’m going to go for it,” Pam said with a deep breath. She took the same step up I’d already seen her take a half dozen times, but then she took another step and another. As she got farther from the bolt, I became more nervous, but Pam seemed to grow calmer. She made a few more moves with growing confidence and then she was at the next bolt, clipping into it with a little whoop. She finished the route quickly from there.

  “I’m going to go find Roy and Katrina,” she said after untying from the rope. “Eight sounds about right for the rest of the day. It’s way too hot for that balancey shit.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant by the word ‘balancey’ but I knew what she meant by the word ‘hot.’ I wished I’d worn a tank top like Jenny and Amanda had. I’d brought about six changes of clothes for our single day of climbing, dithering between them as I packed, but that morning I’d chosen a sports bra and t-shirt. The t-shirt now clung to me damply, begging to be removed, but I couldn’t bring myself to bare both my chicken arms and my non-rigid abs.

  “Go ahead,” Jenny said to me, gesturing at the climber’s end of the rope Pam had just untied from. “You wanted to try a ten. Give it a shot.”

  While I was tying in, Derek’s eyes were following Amanda’s descent. As soon as she hit the ground, he walked over to her. She smiled a wide, buck-toothed smile at him. Her short auburn hair stood out from a headband in a mass of curls and her face was sprinkled with freckles. She was at least two inches taller than he was and nearly as broad. She couldn’t have looked less like Jenny.

  He beamed at her, his shoulders pulled back and his chest expanded.

  “He really does, doesn’t he?” I said under my breath to Jenny.

  “I don’t know if it’s a climbing crush or a crush-crush, but he’s been gaga since the first time he saw her. She climbs better than he does,” she added, as if that explained everything.

  I started climbing, eager to see how this ten felt. I made good progress, congratulating myself, until I reached the spot where Pam had been stuck. Naturally, there was a reason she’d been stuck there.

  How did she do this? I asked myself, taking the same step up and down I’d watched her taking. The next step was so tentative, the holds my fingers clung to so sharp but so small, and there were no pointy ripples for my feet, only smooth hollows. Telling myself that it was now or never, I made that next step up, my toe pressing into one of the smooth hollows.

  Suddenly I knew what the word ‘balancey’ meant. It meant that I was standing up using balance alone. My hands glided over the wall of rock but found nothing to latch on to. My foot threatened to pop free of the hollow. Only the fact that the wall tilted ever so slightly away from me made it feasible. Finding myself fully erect, my weight balanced on that tentative foot, I realized that it wasn’t over, that I needed to do that same move three or four more times before I’d reach the next spot of white chalk that visually signaled a good hold.

  My legs grew shaky from the effort of doing one-leg presses and I fell. I looked down at the last bolt. If I’d been leading, like Pam had, I’d have taken a long fall, but for me it was no more dramatic than falling in the gym. I hung on the rope until my legs felt less rubbery, then I finished the route.

  “You want me to clean this?” I called down from the top, eager to show off my new skills.

  “Go ahead,” Jenny said. “I think we’re done for the day.”

  Back at the car, we found Pam and Roy and Katrina. Conrad and Leon were still climbing.

  “They’re hard core,” Roy said. “Me, I’m ready for a beer.” He pulled his t-shirt away from his body. “They said don’t wait.”

  “We should hit the road,” Katrina told me. “I need to get a good night’s sleep tonight.”

  “You guys are leaving?” Jenny asked.

  We explained about Katrina’s competition tomorrow and then Derek asked why I was leaving.

  “We’re in the same car. And the same tent.”

  Originally I’d been glad to have an excuse to leave after one day. Now, I was sorry to go. I’d had so much fun. I’d climbed a ten—even if I had fallen off of it—and I’d learned how to clean an anchor and coil a rope. Who knew what I could do with a second day?

  “Any of us can drive you home,” Derek said, “and there’s room in my tent. Jenny brought her pup tent.”

  “Because you encroach,” Jenny responded. “Be warned, Lissie—you’ll wake up in the morning with your face smashed against the side of the tent and Derek using half your sleeping bag.”

  Since that sounded kind of nice, I decided to stay.

  Chapter 14

  Back at the campground after a long dinner and a couple of drinks, everyone headed straight to bed. With my headlamp clipped to a hook in the ceiling of Derek’s tent so that it cast ambient light, I smoothed out my pad and sleeping bag next to his. I wished I’d brought something cuter to sleep in than flannel pajamas bottoms and an oversized t-shirt. I also wished I could take a shower. After a hot day of hiking and climbing, I was sticky and smelly.

  I found a handwipe in my pocketbook and used its woefully inadequate surface area to swipe at a few of the more offending spots.

  “OK if I come in?” Derek asked, his voice coming from directly outside the tent.

  I unzipped the flap and scooted away from it to give him room. He maneuvered around me to the far side of our small shared space and turned off his headlamp, tucking it into a side pocket.

  “Do you need a minute?” I asked, moving towards the door.

  “Nah.” He pulled his shirt off over his head and slid into his sleeping bag. A few moments of contortion later he pulled his shorts out from under the bag and threw them to the foot of the tent. “I’m good.”

  I assumed he had boxers on, but I couldn’t tell. His unzipped sleeping bag covered him from the navel down—his stomach, chest and shoulders tantalizingly bare above it. I crawled into my own bag, unzipping it slightly. The temperature had cooled when the sun went down, but it was still a pleasantly warm night for early
June.

  We faced each other, no more than a couple of inches separating our sleeping areas. I wondered if I’d get any sleep. I put my hands into my bag before they got away from me.

  “You’re so tan already,” I observed, my words going where my mind had been—to his body.

  “I’m part Asian. This is as light as I get.”

  “I didn’t know that.” My mind pictured that sweet caramel color extending the rest of the way down his body.

  “My mom. She’s a mix of all kinds of stuff.”

  “I bet she’s beautiful.”

  “And smart and strong and a lot of other things.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “My dad’s crazy about her,” he said, as if his father could have no higher calling.

  “So loyalty runs in your family.”

  Derek sighed and rolled over onto his back, the sleeping bag shifting further down on his stomach so that the taut pit of his navel was clear against the hard background of his abs. I wanted to stick my tongue in it.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up a touchy subject.”

  “It’s stupid to be loyal to someone who’s not loyal to you.” He put one of his arms behind his head and the sleeping bag shifted again. “Did you have fun today?”

  “I really did, and I learned a lot too.”

  “I should have been teaching you more, like Pam said. I know it’s not right to do it all for you.”

  “I guess it’s a man thing—thinking women need help more than they do.”

  “It’s not that,” he insisted, rolling back towards me. “I don’t think that. I told you my mother is smart and strong. She never raised me to think women weren’t capable of taking care of themselves. I just like to.”

  “Like to what?”

  “Take care of you.” He lifted a hand and used it to brush back my hair, the hand lingering for a moment as our eyes met. Then he dropped it and rolled over onto his back again, staring up at the nylon over our heads.

  I rolled onto my own back, confused. Did he literally mean me or women in general? Derek never hesitated to be helpful to anyone, but there was a subtle difference in the way he helped me compared to the way he helped Katrina—as though he were personally concerned with my well-being.

  Nate claimed that Derek had more-than-friendly feelings towards me, but just now, when it had seemed both inevitable and appropriate that he would kiss me, he hadn’t.

  “Is Emily like that?” I asked. “Like your Mom? Strong?”

  “Yes.” He reached up and tapped my headlamp, making it swing over our heads, the light shifting shadows across the floor. “Oedipal or whatever, I know.”

  “Nothing wrong with your mother being a good role model.”

  Alex incorporated some of the best traits of my father, like his quiet strength and his practical intelligence.

  “If Emily wasn’t like that, we’d never have gotten together. She asked me out—one of those Sadie Hawkins dances. There was no way I could have asked her out. She was the most beautiful girl in school.”

  He sat up, the sleeping bag falling away. Beneath it his green-and-blue-plaid boxers peeped out, the waist band low on his hips. He rummaged through the pile of clothes at the foot of his sleeping bag and pulled out a wallet. Flipping it open, he extracted a photo and held it out to me.

  A younger Derek, his hair longer in front so that it hung down into his eyes, his shoulders slighter beneath the fitted black dinner jacket, had his arm around an all-American girl with blonde hair tumbling in waves past her shoulders. Emily looked at the camera with cool blue eyes and a light smile. Derek looked at Emily.

  “Our first date.”

  “She looks like an angel.”

  “Not an angel. A lot of things, but not that.” He took the photo from me and tucked it back into his wallet. “I shouldn’t still be carrying this.”

  “You loved her. Even as early as that picture.”

  He didn’t disagree with me.

  “Did she deserve it?”

  “I thought so.”

  “What happened?” It was the question I’d wanted to ask before but hadn’t

  He sighed and rearranged himself back into his sleeping bag, propping his head up on his arms behind him. “Maybe we were just too young. We started dating sophomore year in high school. When we graduated, I went away to school. Emily stayed at home. Community college. Her grades were good, but finances were a problem,” he clarified, as though he was afraid I’d think less of her.

  “I came home almost every weekend to see her and things were fine. I missed her during the week, but we talked every day and I knew it was temporary. Once we graduated, I figured ... Anyway, after two years at the community college she went away, to Colorado.”

  “Why so far?”

  “It was the right school for her. I understood that. It was just ...”

  “Far.”

  “Yeah.” He took a deep breath and grew silent. I could see that the next part of the story hurt.

  “We saw each other at Christmas break and I knew right away something was wrong. I was ecstatic to see her and she was only—” he shrugged “—pleased. And uncomfortable.” He paused and I knew what was coming. “She finally told me she’d had sex with someone. Got drunk and it just happened, she said. We’d been apart too much, she’d been too lonely, she hadn’t meant to, everyone else was doing it.” He lapsed into silence. His eyes flicked back and forth across the ceiling of the tent as though he were searching her face for answers.

  “So you broke up with her?”

  “No.” He collected his thoughts with a deep breath. “I wanted to, I even started to, but I couldn’t. But I couldn’t forget it either. That whole winter break, I couldn’t get it out of my head so that we could enjoy the time together. Then she went back to school and it was worse—not knowing every night if it was happening again, and thinking, I mean, I’m pretty sure that it was. We talked less often and the less we talked the more suspicious I got. She came home for Spring Break and I could hardly look at her. Part of me just wanted to—” He broke off, clenching his fists, rage crossing his features. “She said it would be better if I did, if I could hit her or hurt her or ...” He relaxed his fists, his face softening. “I couldn’t do that, not hurt her.”

  “So then you broke up with her.”

  He shook his head. “She broke up with me. She couldn’t stand it anymore. I don’t blame her.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Not anymore. I should have forgiven her, should have let it go, let her go for the next two years. We were young. I wasn’t her first, but how many people these days go straight from high school to marriage? I could have given her some space in college. Maybe I could have had her back after.”

  “Was she your first?”

  He nodded.

  “How about since then?” I asked. “Is she still the only ...?”

  “I wish she was.” A tinge of self-loathing colored his voice. “After her, things went to shit. She said everyone was doing it, so I did it. Got drunk, got laid. It was easy.”

  I imagined it was. Derek was adorable with a hard body and nice manners. Put him in the middle of a group of drunk college girls and you’d have a whole laundry basket full of wet panties. But Derek didn’t sound pleased with himself the way Nate would have. He sounded disgusted.

  “It totally fucked me for school though,” he said after a minute. “Drinking, not sleeping, hating myself, trying to avoid the girls I’d slept with because I couldn’t look them in the eye. I flunked a class and had to drop others, didn’t even register for some requirements because I knew they’d be hard. My mom was pissed. I reined in the drinking, but then ... then I couldn’t do what had to be done.”

  “Approach them?”

  “Seal the deal. I could talk to them, but it didn’t go anywhere. I’d get a phone number and never use it. One night this girl did it for me—dragged me back to her place. I was practically sober and she was only a
little drunk, not bad-looking, definitely willing. I couldn’t do it.”

  “You didn’t want to?”

  “No, couldn’t. It didn’t work.” He waved a hand down his chest towards his groin to indicate the it that hadn’t worked. “I couldn’t fuck a stranger, not sober.” He fell silent, his need to share winding down. “So the upshot is that it took me five years to graduate and I haven’t had sex since.” He rolled his head towards me and smiled like he’d just remembered I was there. “Sorry. TMI.”

  I didn’t answer, just shook my head. He reached up to my headlamp still swinging from the ceiling and turned it off. I felt his arm drop, so close to mine that static buzzed between us. I threaded my fingers through his.

  Derek fell asleep the way men do, as though a switch had been flipped. In his sleep he rolled towards me, his fingers still laced with mine.

  It wasn’t so easy for me to nod off with his story circling in my mind. One thing was certain. If I wanted Derek, I’d have to make the first move. Either that or get him drunk.

  I rolled towards him, bending my elbow so our arms twined, and let myself drift off to sleep.

  I woke to find my face pressed against the side wall of the tent, partway off my sleeping pad with my hip digging painfully into the cold, hard ground. Derek was curled on his side facing me. I cautiously rotated around until I was facing him, my nose brushing his.

  “Hey.”

  He opened his eyes into mine. Confusion flickered across his face, quickly replaced by a smile.

  “Hey.” His eyes shifted to the tent behind me. He looked over his shoulder at the empty space behind him and grimaced, then scooted back onto his own sleeping pad. “Sorry.”

  “It’s time to get up anyway.” I could hear rustling and whispering outside our tent.

  Derek yawned and sat up. He pulled out a clean pair of shorts from his duffle and wrestled them on under cover of his sleeping bag. He paused for a moment in the doorway to put on his sandals. The sandals, board shorts, and tousled hair completed his surfer boy look. I ran a hand down his back.