Page 70 of You'll Be the Death of Me

It wasn’t hard to see the common thread through it all: Cole.

“Yes,” she told him with a smile.

“Great. Anything I could do to make you even happier?”

They turned a corner and came upon a view of the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, hovering like a mighty orange soldier guarding the mouth of the bay. At this time of night, thetowers were underlit, and a steady stream of traffic made for a golden ribbon going one way and a red one the other.

A wild thought struck Dell.

“Yes. Can we go there?” she asked, and pointed.

Cole followed her extended finger and frowned in confusion. “Where?”

“The bridge. I’ve driven across it a gazillion times and walked across it half as many, but I’ve neverclimbedon it.” She smiled at him with excitement dancing in her veins.

He looked at her with wide eyes. “You want to... climb the bridge?Thatbridge?” He pointed at it in shock.

“Yes. It’s not like we can fall off and die.”

“True, but, Dell, that’s the Golden Gate Bridge, and it’s... very high.”

Dell shrugged. “What difference does it make? Come on. I want to sit on top of one of the towers.”

“Thetowers?” he all but squawked.

She turned to him with her hand sassily on her hip. “What, are you scared?”

“Yes!”

The genuine fear on his face stopped her from sassing more. “Come on, you’re already dead; you need to live a little! I’ll be right beside you. It will be fun.” She looped her arm through his.

“You have an extremely warped idea of fun.”

“Does the bridge have an address? Or is it just ‘Golden Gate Bridge, mouth of Pacific Ocean?’?” she joked.

“I have no idea, which makes this all the riskier. You really want to do this?”

“Yes,” she said with a smile, trying to hide her nerves. It was thrilling, but he was right, it was also terrifying.

“Okay, then. Hold on tight.”

Dell pressed herself to his side and closed her eyes, thinking hard about sitting atop the bridge. She felt the fishhook behind her belly button, and suddenly the noise of the city vanished. A thick silence pushed in around them. If she didn’t know any better, Dell would have thought they were in outer space.

She slowly peeled open her eyes and saw they might as well have been.

The velvet sky was a snow globe of stars around them. The water below, a navy blanket softly rolling and smudged with the bridge’s lit-up reflection like a watercolor painting. She could see...everything. The Marin Headlands and the lights of Sausalito dotting the hillsides to the north, Alcatraz floating in the bay, the moon rising like a fat pumpkin over Oakland to the east, San Francisco stretching in a hilly grid down the peninsula and spilling out to the coast, and the Pacific, an enormous expanse pinned to the starry horizon out where her eyes couldn’t reach.

“Wow.” It was the only word she could summon.

Cole seemed to be equally as stunned. He notably had not let go of her, and was possibly standing closer than when they’d left the ground, but he wasn’t having the panic attack Dell had expected. “I thought it would be windy up here,” he mused.

“So did I. Walking across this bridge is like going headfirst into a jet engine sometimes. I guess we are above it up here.”

“Yeah,” Cole agreed. “It’s peaceful.” The surprised note in his voice told her she wouldn’t be talking him down from anything.

“Perfect place to find some happiness, don’t you think?” shesaid, and started to sit, pulling him down with her. The top of the tower was lined with cables, surely for the bridge maintenance crew to safely walk around on it. Dell and Cole sat squarely in the middle, neither of them brave enough to dangle their feet some five hundred feet above the road, even if they were already dead. The massive cables swooped down before them like roller-coaster rails. Dell could only look so far without feeling her belly drop.

They sat quietly, facing south, and taking in the view. Dell had spent most of her life in the city, but she’d never been above it like this.