“I still think you should talk to her. Maybe you can work through your childhood and get to a better place?—”
I interrupted her by reaching over the bar and grabbing her neck, pulling her to me for a quick kiss. “Got to run. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
“Okay.” I could see the disapproval written all over her face. Here I was, yet again, running from a conversation. Frankie didn’t understand how maddening my mother could be. She wouldn’t take any responsibility for driving a wedge between Nathan and me. I would rather not deal with it. Maybe pushing her away wasn’t healthy, but it was easy.
My arm flexedas my fingers held on to the small hole on the side of the rock. I was only about six feet in the air, but it always felt higher without a rope.
“To your right,” Giles called from underneath me.
“Got it,” I said, moving my hand to the hold he was calling out. The weight of my bottom half moved too far away from the rock’s edge, and I felt myself slipping.
“Shit,” I mumbled, two seconds before I let myself drop onto the mat we’d set up below.
“That was a good path,” Giles said, smacking my shoulder. “I think if you had caught your foot at the same time you moved holds, you would have gotten there easily.”
“Next time,” I said, flexing my fingers and pulling off my helmet. “Let me give my hands a break.”
Giles nodded. “Man, it’s good to be out here like this. I don’t have anyone else that likes doing this stuff with me.”
“Let’s get as many sessions in as we can,” I said.
“Can’t believe you’re leaving soon. It’s been great havingyou. You seriously have to come back at the beginning of next season.”
“I’ll be here if you’ll have me,” I said with a grin. It felt like someone else was making the plans. Mentally, I knew future me would be excited to return to Key Ridge for next winter season, but present me couldn’t look past the immediate future.
Giles seemed to sense my shift in thought because he paused before saying, “Mattie thinks Frankie is making a mistake. Leaving.”
My eyebrows pinched together. “A mistake? It’s her dream job.”
Giles shrugged. “I only know what Mattie tells me. She seems convinced Frankie doesn’t really want this.”
“Well, that’s for Frankie to figure out,” I said, feeling defensive over her. She’d worked her ass off for this.
“That’s what I told her,” Giles insisted. “I don’t have siblings, so I don’t get their dynamic.”
I thought about my own dynamic with Nathan. How we’d never seen eye to eye growing up. And now, even though he was my total opposite, I tried to reserve any judgment for him and chalk it up to our differences. Just because the way he walked through life wasn’t like me, didn’t mean it was any better or worse. That had taken a couple of decades to figure out, but now that we both had come to that understanding, we were better off for it.
I placed my helmet back on my head and pulled the straps of my climbing gloves tighter. I positioned myself to try the climb again, wanting to escape this conversation with Giles.
His motive for telling me Mattie’s thoughts about Frankie probably came from a good place, but the thought was fucking with my head.
I placed one hand into the first crevice and hoisted myself up the rock face.
There was no way Frankie was making a mistake. She was so sure of herself—always. She wasn’t the type to get sucked into the small-town charm and end up staying for good. That wasn’t her. And it wasn’t me either, for that matter.
My body hugged the boulder as I swung my left foot up to propel myself a few feet higher.
If Frankie told me she wanted to stay, would that change things for me?
The thought nagged at me as I navigated a particularly challenging part of the rock face with very small handholds.
“Careful. That’s a hard line,” I heard Giles call from below me.
It wouldn’t change things for me. She was great, but I wasn’t ready to settle down. One girl, one job, one place? That wasn’t for me.
A loud crack sounded above me. I barely heard Giles yell, “Watch out!” before my gaze jerked up and a large rock came hurling at my head. It knocked my helmet clean off.
Shit.Had I not strapped that?
