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“What?” she blurted.
“Fight with me,” he repeated, calling out the words over the relentless cascade. “Tell me why we should keep going.”
“I… I’m not sure that we should,” Ellie admitted, stammering out the reply.
“Wrong answer,” Bates returned flatly.
“You said it was a bad idea!” she accused, rising from where she sat at the bow.
“What do I know about it?”
“A great deal more than I do!” she shot back as her frustration rose.
“Since when has that ever stopped you?” he tossed back.
Ellie’s frustration quickly shifted to anger. She narrowed her eyes.
“Excuse me?” she seethed.
“You love telling men when they’re wrong about things,” Bates returned cheerfully.
“Only when it happens to be true!” she retorted.
Ellie’s emotions were a thickening storm that made it hard for her to think clearly. Even through the maelstrom, she sensed that something was off. She didn’t know Bates very well, but she felt as though he was deliberately baiting her. But why would he do that?
The roar of the waterfall seemed to be getting louder. The constant, unrelenting noise drove at her ears and made her head pound.
“Why limit yourself? Tell me I’m wrong right now,” Bates replied—and then smirked at her. “Or are you admitting you can’t hack it out there?”
Fury sparked to life inside of her, and Ellie’s hands clenched into fists at her side.
“Unlike some of us, Mr. Bates, I am capable of acknowledging my limitations,” she hissed.
“Now, see—that’s what’s holding you back,” he called out easily as the water beaded on his skin.
“What is holding me back,” Ellie shouted as she took a step toward him, “is an entire society built on the implied superiority of men! A society that refuses women any sense of agency or competence! What isholding me back,” she continued as she drove a firm, pointy finger into his sternum, “is a legal and professional system designed tosystematicallyexclude women in order to force them into lives of domestic slavery! I can’t just walk away from whatever isn’t working for me. I don’t get to bounce into any job tacked up onto the postings board. I can’t justgive up,secure in the knowledge that there are a thousand other options out there for me. I can’t afford to roll through my life likenothing in it really matters!”
The words spilled out of her like the water rushing over the cliff above—a seething mass of decades of pent-up, simmering frustration—and yet even as she felt them leave her lips, part of Ellie jolted back in horror at just howpersonalthey had suddenly become.
Bates went quiet. That sense of prodding—of someone deliberately riling her up—was suddenly gone.
“You got me, Princess,” he replied. “Just a big, dumb lug over here who can’t take anything seriously.”
His tone was bitter and hard-edged. It slapped up against the wall of Ellie’s anger, which refused to entirely give way.
“I never said that,” Ellie shot back thinly.
“Pretty sure you just did,” he pointed out.
“I was talking about the system!”
The boat spun slowly against the current. The water misted around them as she faced him across a mere foot of the deck. The relentless crash of the falls was an assault against her brain.
“Are you going to make the call here, or what?” Bates snapped.
“Why does it have to be my call?” Ellie pleaded.
“You wanna be in charge, don’t you?” he drawled. “Being in charge meansyoumake the call.”
