Heartbroken Heights Page 2

  “You want—" Chloe had to take a second to sternly remind herself exactly why David wanted her number. “Sure, but don’t worry about looking too hard.”

  They exchanged numbers while Stacey packed both her and Chloe’s gear into the Subaru. Chloe sneaked a peek at the name he put into her phone. David Corrigan.

  David held out his hand. “I’ll give you a call if I find it. Chloe,” he added, glancing at his own phone for her name.

  “Thanks David.” His strong, callused hand enveloped her own in a friendly handshake, then he headed off toward the campsites.

  Chloe turned toward the car to see Stacey wiggling her eyebrows. “Stop it,” she ordered before slipping into the driver’s seat.

  “He’s totally into you,” Stacey insisted.

  “No, he’s not!” Stacey let it rest when Chloe turned the music up. The park lights flashed by, guiding them back to the main highway.

  There was no way. There was just no way that a guy like that—handsome, strong and active—would ever be into a girl like her. She could never scale cliffs like those other girls who had been with him, and it was pointless for her to even daydream.

  But daydream she did, and she remembered too. She remembered his strong but gentle hands, the expressiveness in his eyes whenever he spoke, his genuine smile and his determination to make sure she was okay. She remembered all these things, and even though she couldn’t have them, that didn’t mean she didn’t want them now that she’d had a taste.

  Chapter Two: David

  Short and stunted bush, red and rocky soil, wet patch where water from a bottle spilled, more short and stunted bushes, some rocks…

  “David!” Jess called, belay device in hand as the rope slipped from the carabiners at the top of the route and landed in a neat pile on the rope bag. “Want to give this one a go?”

  “Let someone else go first,” he responded, his breath stirring grains of red dirt as he leaned close to the ground to prod something foreign to the canyon. It was just a sliver of the wrapper of a chip bag, but he scooped it up and pocketed it to throw away later.

  “What are you looking for?” Julian asked, sitting down on a nearby rock to take off his climbing shoes.

  David swooped down triumphantly. “This, actually.” He held up a little pocket knife, admiring the delicate metal engravings on the handle. “One of the girls we ran into yesterday dropped it.”

  “One of the girls you ran into,” Julian corrected him with a grin. “Wasn’t getting her jacket enough?”

  David shrugged. “We’re down here anyway. I figured it wouldn't hurt to look around a bit.” He located his backpack in the mix of gear and tucked the little knife away securely into a pocket with a zipper. “So how was it?”

  “Huh?” Julian upended a handful of peanuts into his mouth.

  “The route.”

  “Oh. Not bad. There’s a fun heel hook about halfway up if you can find it. It makes one of the crux moves easier.”

  A passing hiker stared at them, his eyes darting between the climbers and the trail until he was too far away to hear their words. David knew what had caught his attention. Climbing lingo was second nature once you took up the sport, but to someone who had never done it before, terms like “crux” and “heel hook” probably made no sense at all. They were actually quite intuitive, though. A crux was a particularly difficult point in a route, and a heel hook, well… you just hooked your heel around part of the rock to stay on the wall. Not that confusing, just foreign to passers-by.

  “I’ll try it next, then.” David wandered away from Julian to figure out where he had set down his climbing shoes. This route should be easy for him, being far below the grades he normally had to work hard to complete, but that didn’t mean he planned to climb complacently. Complacence wasn’t safe fifty feet off the ground.

  His collapsible camping chair settled as David sat down to wait for his turn to climb, and he leaned his head far back, filling his lungs with revitalizing, cold, fresh air. These were the days he loved—the days where he spent his time under the sun, climbing or relaxing as he chose and experiencing everything this beautiful world had to offer. The company might change—he might climb with different people every time he hit the walls—but Mother Nature would always reach out to embrace him.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of it? Seeing different faces all the time?” Julian had asked once about a year and a half ago. The answer David had given Julian was “no”. The real answer was “sometimes”. Occasionally, David’s travels brought him to a place so wondrous and beautiful that a deep, sorrowful ache to share the place with someone he loved throbbed in his heart.

  David had someone like that once. A woman who would try anything and go anywhere. A woman who liked to lie on her back even on the hardest rock and point out shapes in the clouds. A woman who loved David and loved that he loved her back.

  David shook himself when Avery called to him, “Want to go next? I figured you could go and then you could belay me.”

  “Uh… yeah, sure,” David agreed hesitantly. Everyone else was either already on a route or walking around with the guidebook in hand, so David had no excuse not to belay Avery—no excuse that Avery would accept, anyway. If David refused, he would have to explain why, and he didn’t want his friends to walk on eggshells around him for the rest of the trip.

  Once David had completed the route (easily, as he had anticipated), he prepared to belay Avery. Beads of nervous sweat coated his forehead until his friend completed the climb and David lowered him safely to the ground.

  See, nothing happened. Nothing is going to happen.

  Shortly after Avery climbed, the group picked up their gear to move to another section of the canyon. This was how all climbing trips went. Find somewhere with easy warm-up routes, pack up and move somewhere harder, break for lunch, tape up scraped fingers and get back on the wall, stop in the evening for dinner and sleep, then repeat the cycle the next day. Sometimes, David even liked to throw a nice midday nap into the mix.

  Today, there was no time for naps. David and his group climbed almost from dawn till dusk, leaving just enough daylight to escape the looming walls they had spent the day climbing and pick their way back to their campsite to get dinner going. Avery offered to make chili and everyone gladly took him up on his offer, cracking open a few cold ones while they got the fire going.

  Once the chili preparations were well underway, the fire crackled merrily and the group sat around drinking and telling climbing stories, David excused himself. He fetched the knife out of his backpack in his tent, extricated his phone from his pocket and traipsed off toward a low rock wall just visible in the darkness to escape the noise.

  In the light from the lowest setting of his headlamp, David examined the knife once more, this time flipping it open with his thumb. His time spent in the outdoors had familiarized him with many brands and makes of knives, but he didn’t recognize this one. It might actually be custom-made, which would explain why Chloe had looked so disappointed to lose it.

  “Wasn’t getting her jacket enough?” The knife glinted in the pale light again and again as David turned it over restlessly. David had been the one to suggest they give the climbs at the base of that cliff a try. No one else had been much of a proponent of the idea, since they had already warmed up and the guide book showed nothing down there graded hard enough to challenge a group of expert climbers. David managed to convince them so that he could look for this little piece of metal and plastic in his hands.

  Why? Why had he wanted so badly to find Chloe’s knife? He didn’t know her. He hadn’t even gotten her name until she put it in his phone. Sure, she was a beautiful woman, but David knew plenty of beautiful women.

  David closed his eyes against the darkness, leaving his mind free to recount their meeting on the trail. David had just been standing there, waiting for the two women to pass so his group could continue, and then Chloe tripped over the pad underneath his crossed arms. Catching her arm so p
erfectly was the product of years of practicing a sport that could be both calculating and reflexive. He intended to apologize once, steady her and move on without another thought, but then he saw that look—that long, wistful and loving look that Chloe cast over the landscape even as she mourned the loss of her jacket. It was the same look an author might give a book, or a mother might give her child. The fond sparkle in her brown eyes mirrored the way his heart felt every moment he spent in the great outdoors.

  Knife. Return knife. The reason he had snuck away from his merry group intruded upon memories of Chloe’s face, and he lifted his phone… then hesitated again.

  Text, call, text, call, David wondered, making a chant out of the words in his head. Call it is. Maybe he was getting a little old-fashioned at thirty-one years of age, but he always preferred calling to texting. Usually, he didn’t have to think about the decision this hard, though.

  He pressed the little green call button next to Chloe’s number, held the phone to his ear and waited in the darkness, the rock rough against his back. Hopefully she hadn’t gone to bed. Today was Monday, after all, and most people had to work tomorrow morning.

  “Hello,” Chloe responded, her voice filled with that slight confusion that always surfaces when someone you know calls, but you don’t know them well enough to answer with something more familiar.

  “Hi, Chloe.” David closed the knife with the same thumb he had used to open it. “Hey, we did end up climbing at the base of that cliff, and I found your knife. It’s got carvings on the handle, right?”

  “Oh my gosh, really?” The delight in her voice made every second he had spent convincing his group to climb those particular cliffs worth it. “Yeah, that’s it!”

  “Cool. I’m not sure where you live, but I’d be happy to mail it to you.”

  “Oh no, I can come get it! I live in Reno,” Chloe explained.

  “Well, then I can bring it to you actually. I was planning to head into Reno to pick up some groceries in a couple days. It’d save you a trip out here.”

  For a moment, the only sound was the wind whistling through the canyon’s cliffs and weaving through the low brush. “You’ve already gone through so much trouble to find my things,” Chloe started.

  David cut her off, protesting, “No, no, it would be fine. I’m going to Reno either way, so I might as well bring the knife. When I figure out exactly what day, I’ll text you and get your address—if that’s okay, of course.” He didn’t want to press her to give out personal information.

  “That would be perfect actually, thanks. Again," Chloe added.

  “Alright. Talk to you soon, then.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  When David hung up, he found that he shared that parting sentiment. In fact, he shared it more than he should, and that realization stopped him in his tracks.

  He could hear the friendly banter of his group from here, but the voices sounded muted and distant. They sat around the fire, raising plastic cups and ladling bowls of chili. They might even wonder where David was if he stood out here alone in the dark long enough.

  Five years ago, David would have been sitting in his camping chair beside that fire with his wife by his side. In fact, it was almost five years ago to the day that he had been doing exactly that in Red River Gorge, Kentucky, one of the most popular destinations for climbers in the United States. He and Leanne had always loved climbing there and visited the gorge many times, staying at the pizza-place-turned-campsite that catered to climbers.

  Then, one afternoon, David had let his wife try a climb she badly wanted to try, even though not many climbers ventured up that particular section of rock wall. She made it nearly to the top, then fell. No big deal, lead climbers fall all the time… or at least, that was what David thought for the first few feet. But then she kept falling. And falling. And falling. Then she hit the ground, eighty feet below where her fall had begun.

  That had been five years ago, and now, while David had no fear of climbing himself, he hated watching his friends on the wall. That was one reason he didn’t climb with the same people too often. You never know what can happen.

  This trip was kind of an exception for him. Julian was here, the man whom, if pressed, David would call his best friend. Avery was someone David had competed against many times, and he had great respect for the man. Jess had invited David to stay at her house in New Mexico twice for climbing trips. David knew and liked all these people, and he would hate to see anything beyond the typical bumps and bruises happen to them.

  David’s hands pressed against his cheeks and rubbed at his eyelids, but he couldn’t drive away the thoughts. Climbing accidents were incredibly rare with the proper safety precautions—he just had to remember that and learn to sit around the fire and laugh with the others without getting too close, just in case.

  David made his way back to the campsite, managing a smile at the warm welcome he received. He did sit by the fire, but he couldn’t bring himself to laugh.

  Chapter Three: Chloe

  Sitting in her office at her financial advisement job for Sentinel Financial, surrounded by whitewashed walls, tasteful modern art and furniture, it was hard for Chloe to believe that she had walked through the looming natural halls of Red Rock Canyon just a few days ago. This building and office were such temporary constructions, but the canyon had been around for a very long time and would stand for a long time to come. The differences between the two places were so pronounced that when she was in one, it was hard to remember the other.

  Her hike with Stacey would feel like a distant memory if not for David. He had called her on Monday evening with wonderful news—he found the pocketknife her father gave her years ago. Not only had he found it, but he also insisted upon bringing it to her.

  Every time she thought of the knock on her door that would come this evening, excitement tingled her spine. For the knife, she reminded herself. She just couldn't wait to get her beloved knife back. Her anticipation had nothing to do with who was bringing it to her.

  Oh, who was Chloe kidding. At least a little part of her jumped up and down and clapped its hands at the idea of seeing David again. Not everyone would have gone out of their way to retrieve Chloe's things like he had, and she wished she could do something in return beyond stammering her thanks.

  Chloe reached absentmindedly for the paper coffee cup on her desk, clicking through her workplace messaging group at the same time. The cup was too light, and Chloe worried that… yep. Nothing but a few drops of coffee sloshed around in the bottom. Guess it was time to get some more.

  She scooted her chair back a few inches and indulged in a quick stretch before brushing through the New Year’s streamers hanging over her office doorway. All the doors of Sentinel Financial’s offices were decorated with some combination of celebratory colors. Her boss had decided that having a decorate-the-office party a few days before everyone went on holiday break would be good for team morale. He closed the building an hour early, made attendance mandatory and invited all his employees to bring their children and significant others to hang decorations and eat snacks.

  Chloe hadn’t minded it at all, although some others had grumbled a bit. However, when she convened with her coworkers in the lobby and realized that she was pretty much the only person who hadn’t brought someone special, it put a bit of a damper on the proceedings for her.

  Despite having lived in Reno since she graduated from UCLA and got this job a year and a half ago, she felt like she had never really settled down. A few men had asked her on dates and she had even been brave enough to ask someone out once, but nothing had come of those brief encounters.

  It wasn’t their fault. They all had jobs to pay the bills, vehicles for transportation, houses or apartments to live in and even a dog or a cat. Wasn’t that the dream? To have everything that marked the milestones of success in life? Chloe had all those things… almost. She was allergic to both dogs and cats, so she’d have to pass on those as pets. But everything el
se she had made her look like a successful woman in society.

  Success of the body wasn't the same as success of the mind and heart, though, and Chloe still longed to travel. Settling down wasn't a bad thing by any means, but… maybe settling down too soon was, at least for Chloe.

  The coffee machine in the break room slowly filled her cup, and Chloe tapped the counter as she waited restlessly. The tapping stopped and silence overtook the room as a thought struck Chloe.

  David.

  She wasn’t just looking forward to seeing him again, although that was part of it. Even though she had only met him a couple days ago and exchanged only short words with him, in a way, she looked up to him. Admired him. Envied him. He was still out there in Red Rock Canyon, braving the chilly early-January nights to camp with his friends and pursue his sport, while she was alone in this warm, comfortable office with her wistful thoughts.

  Of the two of them, which was really the successful one?

  One of her all-too-common sighs accompanied her along the trip back to her office. Chloe really wished she had more reason to spend time with David, but she was sure they had nothing at all in common. If only she was athletic like the girls in his group, she could ask to try rock climbing or something. She didn’t know how far she would get up a wall, but she was always willing to try new things. If nothing else, she could sit and watch.

  For once, Chloe stayed late at the office intentionally. If she went home at three like usual, she would just have to sit around for three nervous hours while she waited for David to swing by with the knife. Instead, she stayed at work for another half-hour and managed to kill thirty more minutes by making a grocery run.

  That left her two hours. She showered, letting the steaming water wash away the frustration of dealing with afternoon traffic, then spent way too long trying to pick out a shirt that was neither too loose nor too tight to compliment her ample bosom and waist.