Page 36 of Free Fall #1

“It’d just be for a month,” Peggy Jo says. “He’d need to have something lined up for after.”

“Sure.” I don’t mention that I have a plan for that too.

It’s way too early to bring it up to Sejin, but if things keep going well between us, I’d like him to tag along on whatever my next adventure is after I send Heart Route.

He wouldn’t have to continue inconveniencing his cousins, and I’d get a sexy traveling companion.

By stealing Sejin away, I’d become a permanent villain in Jeremiah’s mind. Oh, well. You win some; you lose some.

“If he says no, you’ll have to stay with them,” Peggy Jo says with finality.

“Alright,” I agree.

But I know Sejin will take up Peggy Jo on her offer, and I can’t say the idea of us having somewhere bigger than my van for some regular privacy doesn’t sound appealing. Even if the space will be bedeviled by cats who hate me even more than Jeremiah does.

Once I send Heart Route, I could crash with Sejin at Peggy Jo’s, plan my next adventure, and convince him to come with me.

As much as I’ll miss her, the timing is perfect.

Her absence will reduce my stress for the ascent of Heart Route and allow Sejin and me a chance to play at temporary domestic bliss.

All the comfort, none of the commitment.

Well, almost none of it.

I like having Sejin around. I can see us continuing on this way indefinitely. I hope he can too.

“What’s your plan for the day?” Peggy Jo asks.

“Gonna show you how I can take this dyno. No sweat.”

“Hmmph.” She doesn’t sound skeptical so much as stressed. “ This dyno is not that dyno.”

“I know, and I’ve been working it too.”

“How about the roof?”

I shudder against my will. “Still gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“Have you practiced on the similar roof you found in Tahoe?”

“It’s a bit of a drive…”

Doing serious practice with the roof on the boulder in Tahoe would require me pulling up stakes, so to speak, at the campground and leaving town for at least a few days. It’s not that I can’t go that long without seeing Sejin, but I just haven’t wanted to…

Alright. Maybe everyone’s on to something with the rumors that I’m losing focus.

“I’ll go this week.”

“What about Sejin?”

“He can go too if he wants.”

“He has a couple of jobs, doesn’t he? Plus, he helps his cousin’s boss over at the plumbing business now and again, and he babysits those kids,” she reminds me, like I don’t know my own boyfriend’s situation.

Wait. Boyfriend? Boyfriend? Maybe…maybe that’s what he is…

“Yeah, so?”

“He can’t just say ‘sorry, I’m not coming in to work or helping out around here today because I’m taking off with my itinerant lover.

’ It’s not how real-life works. Not that you’d know anything about that, living in a van and barely scraping by.

If it weren’t for that trust fund from your grandfather, you’d be eating stolen Saltines and ketchup from the Lodge for your meals and foraging for berries in the forest.”

“Lover,” I say out loud, ignoring the rest, especially the mention of my biological grandfather and the surprise of his money. “Hm. Lover. I don’t know about that.” I test the word in my head again: lover. Is it worse or better than boyfriend? I’m not sure. I should ask Sejin his opinion.

“Well, what do you call him?”

“Sejin. Or Doc.”

“Doc?”

I shrug. “An inside joke about some games we play.”

Peggy Jo chuckles. “Oh, lord, you’ve got a nickname for him?”

I shrug.

“I really think you oughta consider putting this climb off a year.”

“You’re telling me other climbers are celibate? Bullshit. Alex Honnold was notorious for his appetites before he married—”

“I don’t know about notorious, but the man had relationships off and on, yes. But when did he get hurt? At the start of a new relationship, that’s when.”

“And when did he free solo El Cap? In the middle of that relationship.”

“So, you’re in a relationship with Sejin?”

“I don’t know. We don’t fuck other people. We agreed to that. We hang out a lot. We like each other. I don’t see why we have to nail this down right now. I kind of have other things on my mind? Like Heart Route. Just as an example of, you know, where my focus is.”

“Right. Look at you, getting all sharp with me.” She clucks her teeth. “I regret taking you under my wing most days, you know that?”

“Then stop spraying about me all over town.”

Peggy Jo laughs. “If I can’t spray about my obnoxious protégé, what good have all these years of mentorship and endless anxiety done me?”

I snort, and we both let the subject drop. She turns on the radio and some old-timey country music fills the cab of her truck. It’s not horrible. I kind of like the banjo and the harmonies. But I also wish Sejin were here, and he could introduce her to the charm of KPop.

Weird how I miss him, and it’s been less than an hour since we’ve been apart.

I wonder if I can teach him to overcome his fear of heights. I’d like to have him on the wall with me. I’d like to have him most anywhere if I’m being honest.

Maybe that’s love? I don’t know.

But it’s definitely something new.

*

Sejin

“Doesn’t he know it’s your birthday?”

“To know that, I would have had to tell him,” I say, licking the spoonful of icing I’d filched from Leenie’s mixing bowl.

“And why didn’t you?” She pulls Jeremiah’s hand out of the bowl, but that doesn’t stop him from popping his icing-laden finger into his mouth and sucking it clean with an excited little “ooooh.”

“Because we aren’t there yet.”

“Alright, but where are you then? You spend most nights with him now—”

“Not most. Some.”

“Most. And you—Jeremiah, no, that’s enough.” She lifts the mixing bowl up and away from his little reaching hand as I stick my spoon in to snag another dollop. “Sejin, you’re a terrible role model.”

I shove the spoon in my mouth before she can snatch it back. The icing melts over my tongue and I moan. “It’s so good,” I say around the glob. “And it’s for my birthday cake, so…”

“So, you can eat it when it’s on the cake.” Leenie darts a glance at the clock. “Which I really hope I can finish up before Miss ‘Misery’ Sarah Kate wakes up from her nap. She’s been a nightmare with those teeth coming in. Ugh.”

“Did you remember to put the teethers back in the freezer?”

“No, can you grab them for me? Wash them off first!”

I leave her with the mixer and Jeremiah to quickly pick up around the living room, wash off the two teething rings I find in the sofa cushions, and pop them both in the freezer so they can numb poor Sarah Kate’s gums later.

“You never answered my question,” Leenie says, covering the mixing bowl and putting it in the fridge to chill while we wait for the layers of the cake to finish cooling.

I make sure the colored icing and sugar decorations are out on the table and ready for the big event. Jeremiah’s been looking forward to helping with that part all day. “What question?”

I’m going to make her work for it, because I’m a jerk, and also I don’t quite know what to say.

She’s already plenty skeptical of Dan and his place in my life.

She’d been a little too happy when she’d thought he’d forgotten my birthday altogether, not that he didn’t even know about it.

And I get the impression she’d love it if he just upped and went away.

Not that she doesn’t want me to be happy.

She just wants me to be happy with someone who’s not Dan.

Someone who doesn’t free solo, and who Jeremiah doesn’t hate—though I think he’d hate anyone who gets so much of my attention—and a guy who isn’t a little less-than-charming when he doesn’t like the direction a conversation is going…

Someone with a job. Someone who doesn’t live in a van.

Someone who puts me first. Someone who wants to build a future with me. Someone who fits her idea of a “good choice for a life partner.”

You know, not Dan.

And I get it. I do. If Celli was dating someone like Dan instead of someone like Gage, I’d tell her to run for the hills and find herself a good man with a stable job and a solid future.

Not that Gage has a stable job or a solid future, but he’s at least not climbing up giant walls without ropes, and he’s not living in a van.

I mean, he lives with his mother, but he’s only twenty, give the kid a break, alright?

The point is, I get why Leenie isn’t into me seeing Dan, and I get why she keeps poking at me about the state of things with him.

I genuinely don’t know what answer will bother her more.

The one where I’m honest and admit I don’t know what we are to each other really, but I also know I’m not walking away yet.

Or the one where I lie and say Dan has asked me to be his boyfriend and that we’ve both committed to finding a way to make this thing work long-term.

I go for honesty because it’s always the best policy, and anything else is just a test of her reaction, and that’s not really fair.

“Leenie, didn’t you ever date someone and just…let it happen? Did every guy before Martin have to promise love and eternal devotion to get into your pants? Didn’t you just have some fun with a man or two?”

She glances at Jeremiah who’s begun playing with the cake decorations, zooming the packages around on the table like they’re cars. “I’m not saying I didn’t have my share of fun, but you’re not ‘having fun’ with Dan, Sejin, and you know it as well as I do.”

“Last night was plenty fun.”

She rolls her eyes. “You care about him, and I just don’t see the evidence that he feels the same way. You’ve made so many changes for him—”

“I have not!”

“You go climbing with him—”

“I’m challenging myself. And it’s at night, on easy walls. I don’t even really see how high up I am, and he never makes me rappel down. He always agrees to hike out the back way.”

She points a finger at me like she has me now. “You watched a Marvel movie with him because that’s what he wanted, and you don’t like action films.”

“Like you’ve never seen a movie with Martin that you knew you wouldn’t like?”

“Martin’s my husband. This is just some guy you—” She breaks off and looks at Jeremiah and then back to me before she mouths the word “fuck.” “Or that’s how he treats you anyway.

You go out of your way for him. But what does he do for you?

Other than insist that his goals are more important than your feelings, and—”

“Aren’t they though? This is a lifelong dream of his, Leenie. If he met me and within a few weeks just walked away from it? What would that say about him? What would it mean that I even asked him to do that?”

“Did you ask him?”

“Of course not!”

“Does he know it bothers you?”

“Yes!”

“But he does it anyway.” She points at me again like this is her victory.

“Leenie, I know he rubs you the wrong way, and I know you just want what’s best for me, but I think if you really look at what you’ve just said, you’ll see for yourself how unfair you’re being to him. It’s his life’s work.”

“Work—ah, now there’s something he doesn’t do. He has no job, Sejin. He’s basically homeless.”

“Unhoused. Yes, but that’s the lifestyle of a professional climber, you know that.”

“Professional implies he gets paid to do what he does, which according to him, and according to you, he does not.”

“He doesn’t yet,” I clarify. “I mean, if he feels like it’s important to keep money out of his motivations for free soloing, or whatever more difficult climbs he chooses to do, in order to feel like he owes nothing to anyone while going up those walls—if that makes him safer—then what does it matter one way or another? ”

“It matters when you’re working two and a half jobs and sleeping on my sofa, and the man you’re seeing semi-seriously, no matter how you want to pretend otherwise—has no means of helping you into a more prosperous future.”

“I know you want me off your sofa—”

“I don’t!” Leenie exclaims. “I just want you to be happy. And, honestly, Sejin, how can he make you happy in the end? At best, you’ll live in poverty together.

At worst, he’s going to get himself killed and then you’ll be miserable.

Think about how hard it hit you when you lost Lisa.

You don’t want to live through that again. ”

I want to snap back with “you only lose your mama once,” but I keep my mouth shut.

I know she doesn’t want to fight with me, and she only has my best interests at heart.

But I also know I’m not walking away from Dan.

Not right now, and maybe not ever. Like it or not, it seems I’m the seahorse, and I’m on this ride with Dan until the end—bitter or sweet.

I’m sorry it upsets her, though, and my silence seems to break through her burst of anger.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she says to me, moving away from the counter to take my face in both of her hands. I look up at her and she smooshes my cheeks so that my lips pout out. “Let’s not fight on your birthday. We just love you so much, don’t we, Jeremiah?”

“Sejinie loves me too!”

“Yup, he does.” She pushes my cheeks out, flattening my lips, and then smooshes them together again, a laugh coming into her voice. “We love you, Sejin. We just want everyone in your life to love you like we do.”

She kisses my forehead and then turns back to the fridge. “Okay, let’s see about that cake. Ready to decorate, Jeremiah?”

“Yes!” he says, standing up on the chair and cheering. “I’m ready!”

I seize his little legs to make sure he doesn’t fall and smile at Leenie as she brings the layers over, grabs the mixing bowl of icing, and we start to assemble my birthday cake.

Jeremiah only makes a little bit of a mess when he dumps the entire contents of the yellow sugar sprinkles over the top.

But I tell him I like it and turn it into a round sun over the white icing.

It reminds me of a certain egg-yolk sunrise I saw on Pothole Dome.

Like that morning, the cake is destined to be a beautiful memory and, like I’ve tried to achieve with my fears for Dan, I resolve to let the disagreement with Leenie go.

Love—if that’s what the tide of life is bringing in as it rushes between us all—can’t be dealt with logically. Love is just too powerful for that.