Read Free Fall for Free Online Page A

a woman with your run-down six hundred and ten square foot apartment, it was key to pick one who had spent her entire adult life living in a van.
    "How long have you been waiting out there, Darb?"
    When she peeked back around the refrigerator door, she had a foot of celery hanging from her mouth.
    "You mind if I eat this?" She didn't wait for an answer but vanished behind the door again.
    "Since this morning. I was headed south and I thought I'd stop by."
    "Shit, Darby why didn't you call? I could have had someone let you in."
    He heard the clinking of jars as she continued her exploration of the fridge.
    "You know how expensive long distance is, Tristan." Her hand suddenly appeared over the door and pointed in the general direction of her backpack.
    "If I'd called, I couldn't have afforded to buy that." He looked down at her pack. As unarguably the finest woman mountain climber in the world, he knew that Darby had never bought a piece of equipment in her life.
    Manufacturers fell over themselves to give her stuff for free.
    He alone had over three thousand dollars worth of her cast-offs.
    "Uh, the pack?"
    "No. Look inside."
    He unzipped the top and pulled out the bottle of wine wedged between a pair of sweatpants and six cans of tuna.
    "Who says you can't get a decent bottle of wine for under five dollars,"
    Darby said, kicking the door of the refrigerator closed and dropping a handful of food on the counter.
    "Mmmm. Chateau de Ghetto."
    "Sandwich?"
    "Sure."
    Tristan walked into the kitchen and reached around her for a corkscrew before noticing the screw top.
    "I think I'll save this one, Darby.
    Why don't we open one of mine?"
    "Whatever."
    "So where have you been?" he asked, working a corkscrew into a thirty-dollar bottle. He'd suffer this shit apartment, he'd drive a beat-up car, he'd even eat meat loaf three times a week, but life was too short to drink cheap wine.
    "Last I heard you were in Borneo. That was, like, six months ago or something."
    "Yeah, Borneo. I went in with the idea of checking out these huge, really steep limestone cliffs they've got over there." She held up her mustard-covered knife and used it to illustrate the severely overhanging nature of the rock.
    "Anyway, I was there for only like two weeks when I got dengue fever.
    Ended up staying with this tribe of reformed headhunters till I got better. Spent my twenty-seventh birthday sitting in a river to keep my temperature down and watching for snakes."
    Tristan nodded knowingly.
    "Best birthday you ever had, I'll bet."
    She grinned, but didn't let her concentration waiver from the sandwich she was creating.
    "Yeah, it was pretty cool."
    "Well, you didn't have dengue for six months."
    She shook her head.
    "Nah. I started feeling better after a few weeks.
    Finally got to go check out those cliffs. They're epic I've got to climb one. I was on my way out drinking a beer in Miri that's Malaysia when I ran into some people from National Geographic who were heading into the jungle to try to study one of those Borneo rhinos."
    Tristan walked into the living room and dropped into a chair, strangely exhausted by the conversation. Sometimes he felt like he'd aged twenty years since he'd quit climbing and returned to the real world.
    "You all right, Tristan? You look kind of tired."
    "I'm fine. Borneo has rhinos?"
    "Yeah, they're really amazing. Smaller than an African one, but really hairy. I don't think any nonnative had ever seen one."
    "I assume they have now."
    Her face lit up.
    "Oh, we got some amazing pictures. I'll have to show you my slides."
    She poked at the sandwiches until all the vegetables fit inside the edges of the bread, then brought them over. After accepting a glass of wine from him, she sat down on the floor with her sandwich in her lap.
    "So what about you? Still in school? Weren't you getting a masters in taking over the world or something?"
    "It was a law degree," Tristan said.
    "Whatever."
    "I dropped out. Got a job."
    She rolled her eyes