Page 95 of A Winter Wedding Adventure
The thought that she might be appreciating his yoga muscles provided extra motivation. He didn’t look up or down, tried to clear his mind of everything except the muted echo of other climbers in the hall and Kira’s voice, speaking to the others in the class.
‘Focus on the placement of your feet, not your hands. Once you’ve got more conditioning, hands can do more, but you don’t want to injure your fingers at this stage.’
The rope wobbled in front of his face, but he appreciated the reminder that Kira was down there making sure he wouldn’t fall. The next grips were within reach, so he stretched and pushed. It wasn’t climbing; it was a puzzle for his hands and feet and brain that added a light strain on his muscles as time ticked by.
His knuckles began to ache and his knees were wobbly, but he didn’t stop to think. The next grips were in his sights and Kira was watching him. Maybe she didn’t care what he thought of climbing, but he was?—
A foot away from the ceiling. Christ, he was at the top! His head spun and all the strength in his legs gave out as realisation hit him.
‘Porca puttana!’ His voice was choked. He lost his grip on the wall and fumbled for the rope, his foot sliding off the grip and leaving him hanging, limbs flailing. The harness dug in and he grunted at the discomfort.
Kira’s calm voice reached his ears from a long way below. ‘You see what he did there? He lost focus. It’s obviously not too difficult to get yourself up the wall with simple grips, right?’
He snorted, but they probably couldn’t hear him.
‘The difficult part is convincing yourself you’re safe and talking down the panicking animal brain that thinks you’ve put yourself in danger.’ Only the tiniest hitch of her breath betrayed that she was taking his whole weight in her harness right now.
The longer he hung suspended, the less it was his animal brain in control and the more his embarrassment cortex took over.
‘Can I come down now?’
‘Do you remember what you’re supposed to do?’ she called up, definitely some amusement in her tone.
He took a deep breath. ‘Sit in the harness, feet on the wall.’ He had to give the wall a bit of a shove to get back into position, but he found some grip with his shoes and when Kira let him down a metre, he managed to plant his feet and walk stiltedly down – all while stubbornly looking up. Down made him too dizzy.
By the time his feet reached the mat, his entire body was the consistency of crema pasticceria and he was shaking violently. Squeezing his eyes shut, he leaned heavily against the wall and waited for the adrenaline to subside.
‘Fuck,’ he whimpered with a choking laugh.
He sensed her next to him before he felt anything and when he wrenched his eyes open, she was staring up at him with a light in her eyes that gave his spine more substance.
‘You did great.’
That melted him into a puddle at her feet – at least his sloppy smile made him feel as though that were the case. ‘Thanks.’
‘For an absolute beginner,’ she added. ‘But for the man who hurt himself trying to grab an icicle, you really smashed it.’
He grinned at her. ‘I’ve come a long way.’
Her smile faded and she regarded him thoughtfully – with a hint of wariness, but she wasn’t about to bolt. ‘You have.’
‘Can I… talk to you after this?’
She nodded and said his favourite word to hear from her mouth, so softly, another person might not have heard it. ‘Okay, opera boy.’
38
Kira was jittery, as though she’d been one of the beginners making her way up the wall for the first time.
After struggling through the pep talk which closed the class, without remembering anything she said, there was nothing left to protect her from whatever Mattia would throw at her next. Two months ago, if an ex had walked into the climbing gym and said they wanted to talk to her, she would have run the other way screaming, but she’d spent weeks thinking about him, agonising over all the things that had made their time together different from anything she’d previously experienced, even with Christian, before she’d learned to shut people out.
But Mattia, with his angel bone structure and compelling voice, had refused to be shut out.
Her chest was tight, her throat swollen up and whatever he wanted to say, she wasn’t ready, but that’s what being brave was for. He’d just climbed a wall in her gym, looking rather fine as he did so. She would try to bear her nerves, her embarrassment, her fear – and the giddy excitement that was threatening to choke her.
As the others in the class headed for the changing rooms, sprightly with adrenaline, Mattia swung in her direction with a purposeful stride until the toes of his rubber climbing shoes were half a foot from hers.
She opened her mouth to say something – probably to babble about the class and mock him gently, so he remembered she was prickly and grumpy and not worth his time – but he lifted a hand to her face, brushing her hair back from her forehead, his fingers stretching along her jaw and his thumb pressing gently on her lips.
