Chalk

17

The day I finally got my fingerprints on Edward was the same day we almost died.

Funny how the things you hope for never exactly happen the way you thought they would. There’s no preparation involved, ever. No matter how many different scenarios you imagine, life will just never throw you the ball the way you expect it to. In this particular instance, the ball was a rock and I shudder to think about what would have happened if fate had lobbed it at us any harder.

We weren’t at our typical boulder field that day. Jasper had dragged us along to another spot that was easily an hour’s drive out of town and then another hour’s walk to the rock. When the boys joked that they really only took climbing breaks on their day hikes, they weren’t joking. A large portion of our time was spent hauling all of our gear to a problem, working on it for a while, and then hauling it all to the next one. The boys were each shouldering a crash pad which left me with our backpack, heavy with water bottles and shoes and food. By the time we finally reached our destination I was exhausted, flopping down on the pads at the base of Jasper’s new project, gulping air like I was a fish out of water.

The rocks here looked different, rough and grainy compared to the soft stone I was used to. The pads of my fingers tingled just looking at it, which didn’t really matter much because the boys weren’t letting me climb today anyway. It had been almost three weeks since Edward smashed my hand and while it looked a lot better from the outside, it still hurt from deep within all the muscles and tiny bones. I still slept with an ice pack in bed, cooling my hand to fall asleep and usually woke up with an ice cold bag of water against my stomach. I’d expected as much from Edward, but even Jasper took his side as he examined my hand, turning it over in his as we stood next to the car, preparing to leave.

“You gotta give yourself time, Sparkles. No use in fucking yourself up for good this early in the game,” he scolded softly. I saw Edward smirk over his shoulder at me, right again and I grumbled under my breath as I pulled my climbing shoes from the backpack, tossing them into the backseat and slamming the door behind them in annoyance.

Jasper called this climb The Delicate Place, an apt name for the complex series of holds that scattered themselves to the top. It wasn’t a tall problem, but one that had you scrambling all over the face of the boulder, from side to side, up and down, before you could finally ascend. Jasper sat and stared at the rock face while Edward laced up his shoes.

“You first,” he said to Edward, who clapped his hands together in a white cloud of dust, t-shirt discarded and his hair a manic mess.

“It’s your project.” Edward shook his head, but Jasper quirked an eyebrow at him.

“I’d like to see how you fare, first. I think I’ve got it all wrong.”

Jasper and I stood beside Edward as he lay down on the pad, the underhang he had to  traverse just to get to the face of the boulder shading him from the sun. He spent a while fingering the rock, his face serious before he settled on his holds, testing his grip and placing his feet before he pulled himself off the mat. I watched the muscles in his arms flex and strain under the tension, his abs curled into knots as he pulled himself along the carved out bottom of the boulder. It took only seconds before he was pulling his body vertical, placing his hands sure and soft before him. When he got to the middle of the boulder he paused, wedging his toe and then his knee into divots in the rock and then slowly pulling both of his hands away from the stone. I gulped down my heart, my hand racing up to brace him before I even thought about doing it, terrified that he was going to fall backward.

“Stay back, Sparkles,” he warned me without even turning to look down.

Jasper grinned at me from the corner of my vision, tucking his head to talk low in my ear. “That’s called a knee-bar. Using your legs to brace yourself, if you do it right you can give your arms a break. He has to dyno this next one, and it’s best to be prepared for that sort of thing.”

We watched from below as Edward reached both hands behind himself and tucked his fingers into the chalk-bag tied to his waist. It was settled perfectly between the two dimples at the base of his spine, all the tiny muscles that held his ribs together flexing with the movement of his heavy breathing and I tried to suppress a feeling of dread that was rising in my stomach.

“Dyno?” I stuttered.

“He’s going to have to jump for it.” Jasper pointed to a hold that seemed impossibly far away, a crease in the rock that looked too small, even for my own hands. Edward clapped his hands together in another puff of white and before I could even formulate my concerns enough to voice them, he threw himself at the hold much like he’d thrown himself from my porch.

Launched his body forward from his feet without any warning and somehow, magically, reached that barely-there hold.

Jasper yowled and threw a fist in the air, cajoling Edward on, and I wondered if this was as far as Jasper had ever made it. If he’d ever been able to complete the ‘dyno’ to that hold and had fallen every time instead. It scared me to think of it, him out here alone and plummeting from that spot, because Edward was at least six feet off the ground.

He made it two more holds before he had to campus around a sharp lip of rock and drop down to the level of my head in order to secure his foot into the next hold. It was almost as if he’d gotten the beta on this problem before he’d even seen it, but they hadn’t talked at all about it on the way here at all. He seemed acutely aware of the rock, privy to its secrets and, if you asked me, it almost seemed as though they were having a secret conversation, his face just inches away from the stone.

Before long, he’d danced around nearly half of the gigantic rock without so much as a falter along the way. Jasper was getting more and more excited with every move and we drug the pads around as Edward edged on, the climb eventually sending him upward toward the top lip of the rock. They called this the ‘mantle,’ a jutting edge that was nearly impossible to pull yourself over gracefully. The only one I’d ever encountered, I’d ended up shimmying over on my belly like a floppy worm. I’d seen Edward grab that lip of stone and pull himself over in one fluid movement.

I guess it came with practice.

“Send it!” Jasper called out encouragement, another one of the words they used often enough that I’d figured it out on my own. To ‘send’ was something akin to slam dunking a basketball. While it could mean something as simple as completing a problem, they often used it like a pep-rally, spurring their friends on with a hollered goal. Edward grunted in response and stretched his hands above him, wrapping his fingers around that very last obstacle of stone and that’s when I noticed them.

Four little dots of white just across the top of his hip bone.

There was another one a little ways down where my thumb had pressed against the skin right there above his shorts. The evidence was faint and dry, just the very tips of my fingerprints left behind, and I was so focused on the way they were shifting over his muscles as he moved that I wasn’t really aware of the moment everything went to shit.

In slow motion.

I heard Edward yell something and looked up just in time to see the already falling rock, Edward falling with it.

And I was in the way.

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