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Both of Holden’s brows rise this time. “You serious?”
I roll my eyes at his incredulity. I can be fun. Spontaneous. “Yeah. The view from up there is probably amazing.”
“Not when you’re falling to your death.”
My laugh is short and surprised. “This coming from the guy who used tofight for moneyin high school?”
“That was different.”
“It sounds just as reckless to me.”
“You weren’t involved. That’s why it was different.”
I still, absorbing the intensity behind his words. Processing the protectiveness.
“You can be kinda romantic sometimes, you know that?”
Holden grins as he shrugs out of his coat. “I have my moments. Here, hold this.”
He hands me his basketball jacket, then starts walking toward the ladder.
“Wait, what are you doing?” I call after him.
“Climbing it!”
“You just said it was too dangerous.”
“You just said that you want to climb it. So I’m going to check it out.”
I bite my bottom lip, watching him step onto the first rung. Second-guessing my own sense of adventure.
“It’s fine. I wasn’t serious. Let’s just go.”
He grins over one shoulder. It’s a dangerous, destructive one. The same one he used to flash on the Friday nights he’d come home late, drunk on adrenaline and who knows what else. I never thought there would be a day when I was the one who incited that in him.
“Yeah, you were,” he tells me.
“Holden, I’m serious. If you think it’s not safe for me to climb, do you really think I want—”
He starts climbing, a loud rattle echoing through the night air as more space stretches between him and the ground.
“Holden!”
His chuckle is the only response.
It only takes him a couple of minutes to reach the top.
My heart races for every single second of them.
“You were right,” he calls down. “The view’s great from up here.”
I exhale. He still has to make it down, but that seems much more likely now that he made it up there unscathed.
“You coming?”
I eye the rusty ladder. Yeah, this was my idea. And it now seems like a bad one.
“Get your ass up here, Nolan!”
