Page 44 of Ruthless Edge

"Watch me. Move your right hand."

I keep moving. Knox stays right beside me, one bar over, talking me through each one. My arms are shaking with every grip but I'm moving. When I get to the bar where I'm sure I'm going to drop, Knox shifts his grip, moves onto my bar with one hand somehow holding his own weight one-handed, and reaches out.

"Grab onto me," he says.

"You'll drop."

"I promise you I won't." His voice is completely certain. "Grab on."

I let go of the bar and grab Knox instead, both arms around his neck, and he takes my weight, all of it, hanging there on one hand above the mud pit with me wrapped around him, and he doesn't drop. I can feel how hard his arm is working but he doesn't let me go. He holds me there, gives my arms a full rest, and doesn't say a word about it.

I press my face into his shoulder and breathe.

I don't know how long we hang there. Long enough. Long enough that the shaking in my arms starts to ease and something tight in my chest loosens, and I'm not going to cry anymore, I'm just tired and he's holding me up and it's enough.

"Ready?" he says.

"Yeah."

He shifts me back to the bars. "Four more. I'm right here."

I do the last four bars myself.

I drop onto the platform at the end and Knox lands beside me a second later and I stand there bent forward with my hands on my knees, breathing, and he doesn't say anything about any of it. He just stands there until I'm ready to go.

The finish line is a giant slip-and-slide. I see it ahead of us and I tell myself that I just need a little further, then I’m done.

Knox grabs my hand and pulls me into a run and we hit the slide together, both of us on our backs. He pulls me into his lap somewhere in the middle and we come down the rest of the slide tangled together, crashing into the inflatable barrier at the end. I can't entirely tell if I'm laughing or crying or both. Knox is laughing too, still half under me, mud-covered and blue and pink from the powder and looking absolutely ridiculous.

We sit in the grass at the finish line and I look at the sky and think about nothing for a minute.

Then someone says, "Emma!"

Laura.

I sit up.

She's near the finish area in a clean outfit, phone in hand, looking like she came to spectate and didn't intend to get her clothes dirty. She looks at me, and I see her eyes move over my mud-caked legs, tangled hair, the shoe I'm still missing, and she plasters on a fake smile.

"Oh," she says. "Emma. Good for you for doing it. I would never be brave enough to go out looking like—" she gestures at me, "—that. I just couldn't."

I stare at her.

Every other time Laura has done this, I've gone quiet. I've let it wash over me and retreated. Today I've been hanging from bars over a mud pit and Knox held my weight with one arm and I crossed it anyway, and I'm sitting in the grass with mud in my hair and one shoe and I don't have anything left to protect.

"Sometimes it's more fun to actually do something than to spend the whole day worrying about how you look doing it," I say. Even. Direct.

Laura does a little surprised laugh. "Oh, I can't help looking pretty in everything I do."

"Laura." Knox's voice, to my left, flat and serious. I look at him. He's looking at Laura. "Emma looks amazing."

The words land.

Laura blinks. "Of course she does. I was just saying⁠—"

"Confidence," Knox says. "Nothing looks better."

"Yes, obviously, I just meant—" Laura shifts. "I didn't mean anything by it. I was being encouraging."