Page 49 of The Sun & Her Burn

But the assistant was already nodding and taking the photo. We awkwardly shuffled in tandem to face the photographer, and I was surprised when Linnea leaned across to wrap her hand in the chest of my jumpsuit and tug me toward her. She was smiling as she pressed her mouth to mine and the pressure of that happiness sent a zing of electric current down my spine, reanimating me like a corpse under the paddles of life.

Behind me, Sebastian shifted his hand so that it was wrapped around my hip, holding me firmly as I shared a kind of kiss with his friend.

When we broke away, Linnea was still smiling, and Sebastian’s grip was still strong.

“Let’s go!” Gary yelled, and I was still so disoriented from the moment that I complied with Sebastian’s instructions as we moved closer to the opening.

It was only when Linnea lifted her hand in the Hawaiian symbol for hang loose before disappearing out of the plane with a whoop that I realized what was happening.

“Fuckno,” I shouted, but Sebastian was already moving, his laughter loud in my ear as he turned us and fell backward out of the plane.

If I survived and anyone asked me later, I would tell them I fell in stoic silence.

The truth was, I hollered as we free-fell.

Sebastian kept us horizontal. His body flexed into a stabilizing configuration above me. I remembered to mobilize my own body into position and then allowed myself to look down at the ground rushing toward us.

The ocean lay to our left, a bright cerulean-blue expanse that glittered gold under the afternoon sun, and directly below us was the patchwork of grey, brown, and green that made up Los Angeles.

It took my breath away and not just because of my fear of heights.

The beauty of the earth beneath me, combined with the rush of dropping like a stone from the sky, alchemized something in my brain: fear and exhilaration morphed into something that felt an awful lot like peace.

No rumors were threatening a career I loved, no trauma or bad blood between the man tethered to me by straps and buckles, no future looming unknown and ominous as dark clouds on the horizon.

There was just this.

The calm at the eye of a storm.

I felt the wind rush past my ears, muting my hearing; the sun on my face and hands warming me in the cool draft; Sebastian’s strong frame curled over mine, guiding me the way I had not let anyone guide me since I was a boy and lost my mother.

I closed my eyes, and, if I could have smiled through the force of the drop, I would have.

It felt like hours as much as it felt like seconds before Sebastian pulled the parachute, and there was a sharp tug forcing us upward before it relaxed, and we hung like a dust mote, floating slowly to the ground.

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered, as if the words had been lodged in my throat all this time and could only now emerge.

My voice sounded strange to me after the roar of the wind. Smaller than usual.

“It is,” Sebastian agreed in that gorgeous Italian accent. “Bellissima. It is good sometimes, I think, to see the world like this. To know that we are very small in a very large place.”

“Perspective,” I agreed because I knew now why Linnea had wanted me to have this adventure.

She was trying to shock me back to life.

Reanimate a corpse that had walked zombified through life for the past decade, numb and unfeeling but for brief paroxysms of remembered pain and passion on set.

“Yes,” Sebastian agreed. “Does it help?”

With us?I wanted to ask.

But I wasn’t brave enough to do it.

“Maybe,” I said instead. “I think so.”

“Do you see now, why I wanted you to marry her?” he asked, voice almost melancholy as much as it was firm.

The question surprised me.