Suspension

The suspension cables groaned above me, a sound like something ancient waking. I'd been working this bridge for three months, and still, the vibration traveled through my gloves, into my hands, settling somewhere in the hollow space behind my ribs.

"You going to the memorial?" Sarah asked, not looking up from her tablet. We were suspended three hundred feet above the water, our safety cables clipped to the same line. She'd become something like a friend in the way people do when they're the only two anchors for each other's loneliness.

"Which one?"

"Julian's. His sister said they're scattering him at the old quarry pool. Where you two swam that night."

The harness dug into my hips. A year ago, Julian and I had been swimming in that flooded quarry—water black as crude oil, moonlight struggling through the trees. We'd stripped to our underwear, drunk on whiskey and the terrifying freedom of it. We weren't lovers, exactly. We weren't friends, not really. We were two things drifting in the same dark water, briefly touching.

"He told me about that night," Sarah said softly. "Before he—before the end. He said you saved him. That you pulled him up when he went down."

I watched the river below, surface glittering like mica. "He pulled me up too."

"You never said."

"Some things don't make sense in words."

Sarah reached out, her fingers brushing my wrist where the safety cable clipped on. A small touch, electrical as a live wire. In that suspended space between us, something shifted. Maybe we'd been swimming together all along—two people trying not to drown, gripping the same cable in the dark.

"I'll go with you," she said. "To the scattering. If you want."

The wind picked up, carrying the river's metallic scent. Somewhere in the distance, a swimmer cut through the water, a single dark stroke against the current. I watched them disappear beneath the surface, then rise again, breaking into air.

"Yes," I said. "I'd like that."

The cables sang above us, holding everything.