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“Yes. A picnic-sister dress. I think I’ll avoid that since I want a guy to jump my bones.”

The way that he looked at her was fierce. “Is that right?”

She hadn’t gotten this far with him by holding back, and she felt driven by something now. By the impending date. By what Gideon had said to her. By the restless need she felt whenever she looked at him. By Quinn’s warning. By the impossibility of it all.

“I do. Yeah, I mean that. I would like that. Who doesn’t want that? Everybody wants sex. It is a fundamental truth of humanity. People do crazy things to get sex. Empires have been destroyed for sex. Helen of Troy. The face that launched a thousand ships.”

“I didn’t realize that I had signed up for the world’s weirdest sex talk. But yeah. Admittedly, people are notoriously poor decision-makers when it comes to sex, but I didn’t take you for one.”

“I went to high school with him. Maybe it’s a long-held fantasy of mine.”

“Is it?” he asked.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Just climb the rope, Rory.”

She let out a long, slow sigh.

Nothing bad was going to happen to her. Now, on that climb they were taking tomorrow, something might happen. They had to hike on an extremely narrow path. And she could fall to her death. She had pretty much gone over that a hundred times.

So, that was a very real possibility. For the rope, though, the odds were she wasn’t going to get up high enough to fall and hurt herself. So it wasn’t harming herself that she had to be concerned about. It was just humiliation. And what was a little humiliation in front of Gideon?

“You won’t think less of me if I fail?”

She hadn’t realized she’d said it out loud until his face shifted.

“There is no failure here. I have trained men who were already at a certain level of physical conditioning to do this kind of thing. I’m good at it. But you admittedly don’t have rope-climbing experience. If you’re not able to get to the top, it’s not a failure. It just shows where you are right now. And if you want to keep working at it, you could. But there’s no failing. You worked really hard to get where you are, and wherever you are today is just a progress report. Join a gym when you get to Boston, keep going till you’re happy with where you’re at. This is the problem. You know your own strengths, and you know what you really want. Rory, I think you must’ve read two hundred books that year that I drove you to school.”

“Two hundred and five.”

“I bet you some of those people that could whip up that rope in gym didn’t readone. Count me in that camp. Everybody has their different strengths. And they have to work at other things. I’ve read more in the last couple of years than I ever have. Mostly nonfiction, but I discovered something that I enjoyed. I’m never going to be as fast as you, or it might take a few more years of practice, and maybe I will be. But it’s not inherently better or worse. It’s just everybody has those natural inclinations, and you can build them as you want. And no, I wouldn’t think less of you if you failed. But youcan’tfail today. Just showing up was already a success.”

“Why aren’t you a motivational speaker?” She was only kind of kidding.

“Because I’ve been through a lot of things that are not particularly motivational.”

“But you are standing here,” she said, not having any idea what he meant, but knowing it didn’t matter. Because he was an inspiration all the same.

“Yeah, but Icrawledover. Across broken glass. So. People don’t really like to hear that, or watch you keep on picking glass out of your skin.” She was about to say something to that, when he regrouped and changed tone. “Come on. Up the rope.”

She looked up, and she grabbed hold of the rope.

She remembered what he had told her, what he had shown her. He used his feet to help, and he said that she would probably need that. Because her lower body would likely naturally be stronger than her upper body.

And so she began to go. Climbing, pulling up with her arms and following up with a scooch from her legs.

Up, and up. Her shoulders were screaming. A week of lifting tiny weights was hardly enough to prepare her to haul her whole ass up a rope.

Thank God it was kind of a skinny ass because it wasn’t that heavy to lift.

Halfway, she thought she was going to throw up. Or simply let go.

She felt herself beginning to slip. “You can let go,” he said. “I’ve got you.”

And she did.

But it didn’t feel like quitting. It felt like something else. Like being okay with a limit. Accepting where she was at.