I Left Long Before You Looked novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Yellow Hold

In Seattle, Cal puts Wyatt on a climbing wall where nobody minds how slow he is. Then Sadie walks across the gym floor, four days late.

On my fourth night in Seattle, my roommate Cal strapped a harness around my hips and told me to climb the orange route.

"It's a 5.7," he said. "It's a staircase with opinions."

"I can't run," I said.

"Nobody's racing. It's a wall, Wyatt. It doesn't know you limp."

I had known Cal for ninety-six hours.

I had answered his ad for a room in May, and on the video call he had said one thing that made me say yes.

"I'm not looking for a fun roommate," he'd said. "I'm looking for one who pays on the first and doesn't eat my yogurt."

He was twenty-three, wiry, and wore a beard he trimmed wrong on one side.

He had also fed me for four days without once asking why I kept turning my phone face down.

The gym was a converted warehouse with a ceiling so high the lights hung down on chains.

Walls of colored plastic went up forty feet.

People in chalk-white hands hung on them, laughing, falling softly into rubber floors.

I stood at the bottom of the orange route and looked up.

My left leg had been told it was slow since it was eleven years old.

"Foot on the blue one," Cal said. "Trust your feet. Rest on anything that's big. Everybody rests on the big holds, the pros too."

I put my foot on the blue one.

I climbed three holds, and the leg held.

I climbed six, and my lungs started to burn.

I stopped on a big yellow hold with both hands wrapped around it and breathed.

Below me a woman in her sixties, chalk to the elbows, was watching me from the floor with her arms crossed.

I braced for it.

Everybody watches the slow one.

"Good," she called up. "Stay there. Take your time."

I stared down at her.

"I mean it," she said. "Nobody comes up here to be fast. The ones who rush are the ones I pick off the mat."

I stayed on the yellow hold until my breath came back.

Then I reached for the next one.

It took me a long time to get to the top.

Cal lowered me down with the rope hissing through the belay device, and when my feet touched the floor, my arms were shaking.

I laughed, out loud, for no reason.

"You're a crier," Cal said.

"I'm not crying."

"You're a little crying. It's okay. I cried on my first one, and I was nineteen and had a girlfriend watching."

"Do you have a girlfriend now?"

"I have a rope, which is better. It's never late."

The woman with the chalk arms came over and held out a hand.

"Good climb," she said. "You've got a heavy left. You'll want to work that."

"It's a bad leg," I told her.

"It's a leg," she said. "Come Tuesday."

I walked to the water fountain.

I had spent eleven years being told to hurry up.

On the wall, nobody had told me anything.

I filled a paper cup and was drinking it when Cal said, quietly, "Wyatt."

I turned around.

He wasn't looking at me.

He was looking at the front desk.

Sadie was standing at the front desk, with a duffel bag at her feet and a rain jacket I'd never seen.

She had a clipboard in front of her, the waiver you sign on your first day, and she was bent over it, writing.

She hadn't noticed me.

Her hair was wet from the rain, and she was thinner in the face than four days ago.

She signed her name at the bottom.

Then she looked up at the girl behind the counter and said something, and the girl pointed across the floor, toward the orange wall.

Toward me.

I put the cup down on the fountain.

"I'm leaving," I said to Cal.

"Is that her?"

"Yes."

"The pajamas?" Cal said. "The Chicago pajamas?"

I had told him that much, the first night, in the dark.

"Yes."

Cal looked at Sadie, and then at me, and then picked his chalk bag up off the floor.

"I'll tell you what," he said. "I'm not going to say a word. I'm going to stand right here and hold your rope bag."

Sadie started across the floor.

She walked straight through the climbers and the chalk and the colored plastic, without looking at any of it.

She stopped three feet from me.

She had her hand on her own wrist.

"Your mom gave me Cal's address," she said. "The man downstairs said you'd be here."

"I blocked you, Sadie."

"I know." She swallowed. "I came four days after you left. I know exactly how late that is."

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend