The first time she spotted me I didn’t even know her name. I was on the overhang in the back corner, the purple problem with the awful sloper at the top, and I felt a hand land flat on the small of my back, not pushing, just there, and a voice said “I’ve got you, go.” So I went. And I fell, obviously, because it’s a terrible sloper, and she caught me under the ribs and set me down like I was a box of something she’d been asked to deliver.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Sure. You’re pulling with your arms. Use your hips.”
“Is that a pickup line?”
“It’s beta,” she said, and walked off, and I stood there with my face hot, watching the back of her tank top, the stripe of chalk across her shoulder blade where she’d wiped a hand.
That was in August. By October she’d done it maybe fifteen times. I started to suspect she was waiting for me. Tuesday and Thursday nights, after I got off work, I’d lace up and she’d already be there by the mats, hair in a messy knot, forearms like rope, pretending to look at her phone. Her name was Dani. I learned that on the fourth or fifth time, when I asked, and she said “Dani, you can say it, it’s not hard,” and I said it, and she looked at my mouth when I did.
I’m bad at this. I’m bad at wanting people. I just sort of stand there and let it happen to my face.
So tonight. Thursday. The gym was dead because of some game on, maybe six people left by nine-thirty, and the lights over the lead wall had already gone off. I was on the same fucking purple problem. Finally had the hips thing. Got my right foot way up on the volume and rocked over and my fingers closed on the sloper and I held it, I actually held it, and I yelled something stupid and let go and dropped into her arms.
Both of her arms. Around my waist, from behind, my back against her chest, both of us breathing. She didn’t set me down.
“Top,” she said into my ear. “Look at you.”
“I’d have done it earlier if you’d told me about the hips.”
“I told you in August.”
“I wasn’t listening in August.”
“What were you doing in August?” Her thumbs had found the strip of skin between my shirt and my leggings. Chalky. Warm.
“Looking at you,” I said. It just came out. I felt her laugh through my back.
“Yeah?” she said. “Yeah. Okay.”
The guy at the desk yelled that they were locking up in fifteen. We both heard it. Neither of us moved. She turned me around by the hips, slow, and her hands were white to the wrist, and she put one on either side of my face and left prints on my cheeks, I found out later in the mirror, two perfect handprints like I’d been in some kind of ritual. She kissed me. Gritty, chalk in my teeth, her mouth tasting like the gummy things she ate between attempts. I grabbed her shirt in both fists and she walked me backward until my shoulders hit the padding of the wall.
“Locker room,” she said against my lip. “Women’s. There’s nobody.”
“There’s the guy at the desk.”
“He’s watching the game on his phone. He doesn’t care if we die in there.”
The locker room smelled like feet and shampoo and the sweet bad smell of the hand soap. Fluorescent hum. One of those wooden benches down the middle. She pulled me in by the strap of my sports bra and shoved the door shut with her heel, and then we were on the bench, me in her lap, my knees either side of her thighs, both of us still in shoes.
“I’ve been thinking about this for like two months,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say, and she said “me too, shut up,” and pulled my shirt over my head, and my bra with it, one big sweaty tangle. The cold air hit my nipples. She just looked, with her mouth open a little, and said “oh my God,” like I’d done something clever.
“Don’t.”
“I’m going to. I’m going to do this for a long time.” And she put her mouth on me, her tongue flat and hot, and chalk on her hands streaking down my ribs, and I made a sound I’ve never made in public, in my entire life. I put my fingers in her hair and the knot came loose and the whole mess of it fell over my wrist. She sucked until I was grinding against her thigh, shamelessly, through two layers of stretchy fabric, the seam of my leggings catching right where I needed it.
“Look at you,” she said again. “Barely touched you.”
“Shut up, you’re touching me plenty.”
“Mm. Not where you want.”
“Dani.”
“Say it again.”
“Dani, please.”
She got her hand down the front of my leggings and flat against me, over my underwear, and I swear to God I could feel how wet I was before she did. She stopped. Smiled with her whole stupid face. “Oh,” she said. “Okay. So that’s what that’s been.”
“What’s what?”
“Every time I caught you. You’d go all,” she squeezed her fingers, “and I’d think, she’s just embarrassed. You were soaked, weren’t you.”
“Not every time.”
“How many times?”
“Not telling.”
“I’ll find out.” And she did something with her wrist and I stopped being able to talk.
The bench was too narrow. She figured that out about the same time I did, and she stood and dragged me up and bent me over the end of it with my leggings around my knees, and I braced my palms on the wood, leaving two more white handprints, and looked back at her over my shoulder. Her shirt was already off. She had a little bruise on her ribs from some fall. She was breathing like she’d just sent a project.
She ran two fingers down me, slow, spread me open, and slid them in, and I made that noise again. She was patient about it, which I hated. Pulling out almost all the way, going in again, curling up toward the front of me, and her other hand flat on my back like a spotter. Like she was waiting for me to fall.
“Hips,” she said, and I was fucking laughing, bent over a bench in a gym locker room, and I rocked back onto her fingers and she said “there it is, there, you got it,” and I wanted to die, and I wanted to never ever stop.
She added a third. It stung, then didn’t. I could hear it, how wet I was, the dirty slick sound of it, and somewhere past the door the vacuum started up and I thought, good, good, cover us. She leaned over me and bit my shoulder and I came apart a little, not all the way, just my knees going.
“Not yet,” she said. “I want to see you.”
She turned me around, sat me up on the bench with my back to the locker, and got down on her knees on the tile. Peeled my leggings off one foot, left them hanging on the other. Pushed my thighs open with both palms. Chalk handprints on the insides of my legs now too. I looked down and that was it, I thought, I’m ruined, I’ll never see a climbing hold again without getting wet.
“You’re staring,” I said.
“You’re gorgeous.”
“I smell like a gym.”
“You smell like a gym and also like you.” She put her face in. First lick was wide and flat, slow, all of it, and my head hit the locker door with a bang. Then she found the spot and didn’t leave it. Little circles. Her fingers went back in and found the other spot, and she did both at once, and I was gasping, and I could feel it pulling up from deep in my belly, the heat, the clench, and I said “oh fuck, Dani, wait, wait, I’m,” and she did not wait. She hummed. I came with my hand over my own mouth and the other one in her hair, pulling, probably too hard, my thighs clamping her head, shaking, my heel hammering the bench, a long wrecked wet moan going into my palm. And she kept going through all of it, gentler, until I pushed her off.
She sat back on her heels with her chin shiny and chalk smeared across her cheek and grinned up at me.
“Okay,” I said, when I could talk. “Your turn.”
“Not here.” She wiped her mouth on her forearm. “Desk guy’s going to do rounds. Come on. My car.”
We got dressed wrong. I had my shirt on backward and she had one shoe untied, and we walked past the front desk like two people who’d had a normal evening of climbing. The guy didn’t look up. I could still feel her in my legs.
Her car was a station wagon, a boxy old thing full of ropes and a crash pad in the back, and it was cold, October cold, parked at the far end of the lot under a dead streetlight. She put the back seats down and we climbed in over the pad. The windows fogged from my breathing alone.
I pushed her down on the pad and got her pants off, finally, her skin, her stomach, the soft dark hair at the top of her thighs. She was wet. Obscenely wet, slick down to her knees almost, and she saw my face and said “yeah, so, it’s been two months for me, too.”
“You said you didn’t—”
“I said I didn’t care what you did to me. That was a lie. Please do something.”
So I did. I put my mouth on her, and she tasted like salt and something sweet and exactly like I’d imagined, and she grabbed the back of my head and said “fuck, yes, there” in this high shaky voice I would’ve climbed any wall for. I used my fingers like she’d used hers on me, two, then three, and I curled them, and she arched off the pad so hard her head hit the window. The whole car rocked a little. I felt ridiculous and powerful and filthy. She was cursing, I couldn’t understand half of it, her thighs shaking on my shoulders, one hand scrabbling at the roof for something to hold.
“Slower,” she begged. “No, faster. No. Right there. Right there, don’t, don’t you dare move.”
I didn’t move. I sucked her clit between my lips, soft, and flicked it with my tongue, steady, steady, and she went tight around my fingers, then tighter, then she let out this long broken sound, almost a sob, and her whole body went rigid and I felt her pulse around me, again, again, four, five times, her heels digging into my back, her stomach heaving. I rode it out with her. Gentle at the end. When I looked up she had her arm over her eyes and she was laughing and crying a little, both.
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Christ. I can’t feel my feet.”
“Dani.”
“I’m incredible.” She pulled me up by my shirt and kissed me, tasting herself on my mouth and not caring. “Never spot anyone else.”
“You better not.”
“I mean it. If you fall I’m the one who catches you. I’ve got a reputation.”
“You’ve got a chalk reputation,” I said, and wiped a thumb through the white smear on her cheek, and we lay there in the cold fogged-up wagon with our legs tangled, and I thought, huh. Okay. So this is going to be a thing.
I got home at midnight. Showered, found chalk in places chalk should not be. My phone was on the sink. Three texts.
you left your water bottle in my car
the green one
i’m not giving it back
I wrote:
that’s a hostage situation
yeah it is. ransom is dinner
saturday
saturday is rest day. i could do dinner
dani
yeah
i am not going to be able to fall asleep
then come climb with me tomorrow at 6am. i’ll spot you
you’re not even sorry about that pun
i’m a little sorry
bring the water bottle
bring your hips
