Page 115 of Waking Olivia

It’s created a wedge between us, one he feels but can’t identify and one I understand but won’t explain.

Summer comes and Will gets me a job working the desk at the tour company. It should be ideal. We drive to work together, and I love when he comes into the office between climbs, the way his whole face lights up when he sees me. We ride home together. Sometimes we stop on the way to hike or to climb. Sometimes we make dinner, and sometimes we rush straight to our messy bed and remain there for hours, only leaving once hunger pangs set in. But the wedge between us is growing, and because of that we argue, and the arguments are less playful than they once were.

It’s July. He pushes an article toward me about a group of ultramarathoners in Seattle, and I push it back without reading it.

“I thought that’s what you wanted,” he says, the words clipped and precise.

“I don’t know what I want anymore,” I reply flippantly, pushing away from the table.

That muscle in his jaw pops. “What exactly does that mean?”

“Who knows where we’ll be in a year?” I reply, busying myself scrubbing a counter that’s already clean. “We can’t know, so there’s no point in discussing it.”

“Iknow, Olivia,” he hisses. “I know that wherever you are in a year, I want to be there too.”

I say nothing. I don’t meet his eye, knowing what I’ll see there.

“You don’t even know that much?” he demands. “You’re so uncertain about us that you don’t know if you want to be with me in a year?”

I glance at him and he looks so wounded I have to look away. “It’s not that simple,” I reply.

“Yeah,” he says, heading for the door. “It actually is.”

The door slams and the glass-framed pictures vibrate in protest. I grip the counter so hard that my hands ache.

I don’t know what to do. I can’t tell him the truth. I can’t trust that he’s safe with me. I also can’t keep him in this permanent limbo, never sure whether I’m planning to stay, assuming I just don’t love him enough to commit.

I need to let him go, yet even the hours I spend waiting for him to come home are torture. I need to let him go, and it’s going to kill me when I do.

He comes in late, far after we’ve normally gone to bed. “I thought you’d be asleep,” he sighs. It’s the first time he’s lookedunhappyto see me and it makes my chest ache.

I stand, blocking his path, resting my hands on his arms. “I love you,” I tell him. “You know that. I love you more than anything in the world. I just…” And here I trail off because I don’t know the rest of that sentence myself.

He pulls away from me. “It’s late. I’m going to bed.”

“Will,” I plead. “Don’t do this.”

“I’m not doing anything, Olivia,” he says without inflection. “You are.”

He goes to bed and I remain on the couch. I have the nightmare again and wake to find him scooping me up and bringing me to bed, but in the morning he doesn’t say a word to me.

He drops me off at the office, with a kiss on the forehead that feels more obligatory than willing.

I spend the day watching my phone for a text from him, scanning the parking lot for his car. By mid-afternoon, that sickness in my stomach has grown. I’ve always heard from him by now.

If he’s mad, if he’s done with me, that’s good, right? It means I can leave and maybe he won’t care, or he’ll at least care less than he would have. I pick up my phone to text him and put it back down. Why try to fix this when it has to end? Why console him or console myself when we’ll just have to go through it all again?

There’s this restless, painful energy inside me as if I’ve had way too much caffeine on absolutely no sleep. I can’t stop pacing, moving, my hand reaching for my phone and jerking away.

I’ve just picked up the phone and begun to type when Mike, our boss, emerges from his office. I put the phone down guiltily, but he doesn’t even seem to notice.

“Jim just called,” he says, in a voice of forced calm. Jim is another guide who often works with Will. “There was an accident.”

My body shakesas I sit in the passenger seat of Mike’s car, on the way to the hospital. Mike knows nothing except that a bolt came out and Will fell.

Which means he could be paralyzed. He could be in a coma. He might already be dead.

The terror I feel is worse than any nightmare, a fear so acute that I refuse to believe it’s happened. A small, irrational voice in the back of my head suggests I find a way to end this—throw myself out of the car,anything—so I won’t have to endure the piece that comes next.

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