Page 33 of Love In Translation

She wished. “No. I lost my words. I stood there and I couldn’t speak, not in Spanish or Italian or French or German.”

“Ah...shit.”

“I asked to be excused and they sent in another translator. My boss referred me to a psychologist, who diagnosed severe burnout and work-related stress. They recommended a four-to six-month break.”

“So where are your words?” he asked, his eyes on her face, looking into her. “Have they come back?”

Rheo rocked her hand from side to side. “Sort of. I mean, I can speak the languages again, but I’m not understanding as quickly as I need to. I’m second-guessing myself, and I have no confidence in what I’m doing. I’m not nearly ready to go back to work, and if that doesn’t change soon, I won’t have a job at all.”

Fletch had furrows in his hair from her fingers, and his bare chest glinted with silver moonbeams. “What’s stopping you from getting back to the level you were at?” he softly demanded.

“I’m scared I’ll make a fool of myself. I’m scared to fail. I’m scared I won’t be as good as I was.”

“That’s a lot of scared, Rheo,” Fletch said. He poured more wine into their glasses before sitting with his back to the view. “Fear can be a great motivator, but you have to keep control of it. A little can go a long way, and too much can be destructive.”

“You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” Rheo said.

His smile seemed strained. “I do. Fear is the one thing I can talk about with great authority. I’ve lived with it and danced with it. We’re old acquaintances.”

Rheo moved from her seat to sit cross-legged next to him, her knee resting on his thigh. “Will you tell me, Fletch?”

Maybe if she looked at the emotion through his eyes, she would see it differently, learn how to work with it or cage it.

She placed her hand on his thigh and bit her bottom lip. “It’s fine if you don’t want to talk. You don’t have to, obviously. I just thought it might help me make sense of my situation.”

Fletch took a huge swallow of wine and bent to place his glass on the floor next to his feet. “Since you have little interest in outdoor activities and less, I presume, in explorers, I need to ask whether you heard about the earthquake and avalanche in Nepal in 2015?”

She didn’t live under a rock, she told him. “An avalanche annihilated the base camp at Everest, right?”

“Parts of it,” Fletch agreed. “I was in base camp at the time, preparing to summit Everest.”

Holy shit.Rheo stared at him, her eyes wide. She recalled the news footage of the flattened tents, the ice-covered faces of the survivors, and the shock and desperation in their eyes. Given half a chance, her parents and Carrie could’ve been there—all three had expressed a burning desire to hike into base camp, soak up the atmosphere, and walk a little of the path that took climbers to the top of the world.

“I’m not going to describe the noise, loud and terrifying, or the screams. I briefly thought my life was over, and I’d die at the bottom of the mountain I’d come to conquer. We caught the outer edges of the avalanche, and one of the tents belonging to my team was obliterated.”

She needed to ask. “Did you lose anyone?”

He shook his head. “No, but some of my team were injured. A broken leg, a concussion, cuts, and stitches. When the worst of it was over, those of us who could walk and function helped out. We wrapped up the dead, carried the living to medical tents, and coordinated food and shelter. There was a lot to do.”

“I can imagine,” Rheo murmured. Such a lie. She couldn’t begin to.

“We were stuck there for some time, and when there was nothing more we could do, we hiked out. It took us a couple of weeks to walk back to Kathmandu, and we passed through decimated villages. Kathmandu was unrecognizable. There’s something about a natural disaster that shakes you to your core.”

Rheo rested her forehead against the muscled ball of his shoulder.

“On the plane flying out, I didn’t think I could go back. And I didn’t, until last year.”

“Why did you go back?”

He took some time to answer. “I made a few promises to myself as a teenager. One of them was to climb Everest, preferably without supplemental oxygen. After the avalanche, I couldn’t face going back, but I knew I would betray my younger self if I didn’t.”

Rheo watched his face in the dim light, as the moon had disappeared behind the one cloud in the sky. His expression was remote, and she knew talking about his Nepalese experience wasn’t easy. And God, she loved him for doing it, for trying to explain his experiences with fear so she could deal with hers.

“We raised more money—it costs a fucking fortune to climb the peak—and we went back last year. My Nepalese Sherpa kept asking me if I was in the right frame of mind and whether this was something I wanted to do. He was a wise old guy and knew I wasn’t fully committed mentally.”

“Were you scared?” Rheo asked.

“No. I was fuckingterrified,” Fletch admitted, his eyes clashing with hers. “I didn’t want to be there. I was on constant high alert for any rumblings suggesting an avalanche was coming down the peak. I was a basket case. In hindsight, I think I was suffering from a little PTSD.”

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