“You’re not the guide.”
“No. I’m the one who saw the rock.”
The office was quiet except for the drone of the mini fridge and the distant murmur of the river through the open back door. I was standing four feet from him. My clothes were still damp. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat, and it wasn’t the hum—it wasn’t the pull toward the next risk, the next proof that I was alive. It was something that scared me more than Dead Man’s Pocket.
Stillness. He made me want to stand still.
That had never happened before. I’d spent my whole life moving—filling every day with motion, because motion was the opposite of the hospital bed, the nebulizer, the sound of my mother’s voice in the hallway.
And now a man sat on the edge of a desk, a logbook open, pen in hand, and I wanted to stop. Not stop living. Just stop running.
“Wells?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know how to do this.”
He set the pen down. Closed the logbook. Looked at me with the same unhurried focus he’d given the river.
“Do what?”
His voice had dropped. He already knew. He was giving me room to say it because I needed to speak it out loud.
“Stay,” I said. “I don’t know how to stay somewhere. I always leave. I book the trip, I do the thing, I drive to the next place.”
“Okay.”
“But I don’t want to leave.” My voice cracked—not dramatically, just a fissure in the wall I’d been building since I was nine. “And that terrifies me more than anything on that river.”
He stood up. Slow, deliberate, giving me time to step back. I didn’t step back.
He was close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his skin. His eyes were lighter up close—green-brown, the color of river water over mossy stone.
“Then don’t leave,” he said. “And don’t worry about the staying part yet. Just be here right now.”
His hand came up and brushed the wet hair off my neck—slow, careful, his fingers trailing the line of my jaw. I stopped breathing. Not the asthma, not the old familiar panic. The opposite. My body going quiet because it had found the thing it had been running toward all along.
“Right now,” I said.
“Right now.”
He kissed me. Or I kissed him. It happened the way the river happened—a force meeting a force, neither one yielding, both finding the line through each other.
His mouth was warm, with a faint taste of river water. One hand cupped my jaw. Mine pressed into his chest. The mini fridge rattled softly. The river murmured through the open door. The world outside kept moving without us.
I kissed him back harder. He made a sound against my mouth—low, rough, the sound of a man who’d been holding something back and had just decided to stop.
His other hand found my hip and pulled me in. The full-body contact sent a shock through me, made the rapids feel like flat water.
He pulled back just enough to look at me. Breathing hard. Eyes dark.
“Lincoln.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never lost focus on the water,” he said. “Twelve years, hundreds of trips, every section of this river. I don’t get distracted.” He held my eyes. “You distracted me today. You’re the only person who’s ever done that.”
“And I saw the rock,” I said.
