I noticed it too.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Wells.”
“Wells. I’m Lincoln.”
“Lincoln,” he repeated, and something about the way he said it—the way his mouth closed around the second syllable like he was tasting it—made my skin warm in a way that had nothing to do with the August heat.
“What time tomorrow?”
“Eight. Be here by 7:45. Bring a swimsuit you don’t mind getting thrashed, shoes that stay on your feet, and nothing you can’t afford to lose.” He racked the paddle and reached for another one. “You’ll sign a waiver. I’ll do a skills check in the flat water below the put-in. If I don’t like what I see, I’m putting you on a Class II instead.”
“You’ll like what you see.”
I said it without thinking. The words came out with a double edge I hadn’t intended—or maybe I had. His hand stopped on the paddle for exactly one second. Then he resumed the inspection without looking at me.
“Seven forty-five,” he said.
“Seven forty-five.”
I walked back to my car. My heart was hammering, and not because of the rapids. The hum was louder now—the one that lived in my chest, the one that had been there since I was nine years old and a doctor told my parents that my lungs were clear and I might not need the inhaler anymore. The whole world had cracked open like a window someone had finally unlocked.
I’d spent the first nine years of my life unable to breathe. Severe asthma—the kind that put me in the hospital twicebefore I was six. The kind that meant no running, no sports, no sleepovers at houses with cats or dogs or carpeting. My parents had wrapped me in so much caution that by the time my lungs decided to work properly, I didn’t know how to live without the bubble.
It took me until I was sixteen to start breaking away. It started with a rock-climbing wall at a friend’s birthday party. My mother had called the venue beforehand to ask about their ventilation system. I’d gone anyway, scaled the wall, and stood at the top with my lungs wide open and my hands shaking. I understood for the first time that being alive was supposed to feel like something.
Since then, I hadn’t stopped. Climbing, kayaking, skydiving, cliff jumping, mountain biking on trails that made my father’s face go pale when I described them. My parents had shifted from preventing me from living to pleading with me to be careful, which was the same thing in a softer voice.
My mother texted me the weather forecast every morning. My father had started every phone call for the last four years with “You’re not doing anything dangerous, are you?” And I started every answer with a lie.
I wasn’t reckless. I was deliberate. Every risk was researched, every activity was planned, every adrenaline rush was earned. But underneath the planning, underneath the careful competence I’d built around the need for speed and height and roaring water—there was something I didn’t look at very often.
I never stopped moving. I never sat still. I went from one adventure to the next the way some people went from one drink to the next, and the reason was the same. Stillness was the thing I couldn’t face. Stillness was the hospital bed. Stillness was the nebulizer mask and the sound of my mother crying in the hallway and the endless hours of waiting for my chest to stop tightening.
If I kept moving, I didn’t have to remember what it felt like to not be able to breathe.
I started my car. The engine turned over, and through the windshield, I watched Wells rack the last paddle and stand there for a moment with his hands on his hips, looking out at the river. The light was doing something golden and impossible to the water behind him, and he was backlit against it like a man standing at the edge of something he owned and loved and would protect whether anyone asked him to or not.
He turned his head and looked at my car. Looked at me through the windshield. Held it for a beat longer than someone who was just watching a customer leave.
I pulled out of the lot with my hands tight on the wheel and the hum in my chest louder than it had ever been.
Tomorrow, I was going to run the hardest rapids this river had. And the man who was going to guide me through them had just looked at me like I was the most dangerous thing on the water.
Good.
2
WELLS
She showed up at 7:30.
I was on the dock checking the raft’s floor lacing when I heard the gravel crunch under her tires. Fifteen minutes early. I’d have put money on her being the early type, and I didn’t like how much attention I’d paid to the question.
I’d thought about her last night. Not in the way I usually thought about women—passing, surface-level, easy to set aside. I’d thought about her the way I thought about a rapid I hadn’t scouted yet. What’s the line? Where’s the drop? What’s she going to do that I’m not expecting?
She walked down from the lot carrying nothing but a water bottle—swimsuit under a tank top, river shorts, shoes that laced up tight. Proper water shoes, not the sandals tourists wore and lost in the first set of rapids. Her hair was pulled back in a braid that looked like it had been engineered to survive violence.
