Page 22 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)
A noise like a protest emerged from my mouth before I could curb it. “Why would you even say that, Sebastian?”
“Maybe because you haven’t seemed at all thrilled to be back in my orbit.”
Orbit.
Wasn’t that the word for it?
Because Sebastian’s impossible universe had the gravitational pull of a black hole, and it was just as potentially destructive to my life.
“I just don’t know what to do with you,” I admitted, feeling oddly secure enough to confess the truth with the loud thrum of the plane’s engine obscuring our voices and the press of Sebastian’s body at my back.
“I want you to forgive me more than I want my next breath, but I don’t know how to make that happen, and I don’t know where we would go from there.
If I’d even float away after the weight of missing you and agonizing over you was lifted.
If we’d even be friends at this moment in time.
If I could handle whether or not we would never be more. ”
A long moment of silence followed, and I almost laughed darkly because it took a lot to shock the loquacious Italian into silence.
Before he recovered enough to reply, Gary was beside us with Linnea.
“You about ready to drop?” he hollered over the engine and the roar of wind across the open drop zone.
“No,” I shouted back honestly.
Gary laughed as if I was joking.
Linnea only reached over to squeeze my hand, strands of blond hair ripping out of her tight braid to whip around her face in the wind.
“Be curious, Mr. Meyers,” she coaxed with a twinkle in her eye that might as well have been a gauntlet thrown at my feet. “Be brave. And maybe you’ll experience some of that pleasure you claim to love.”
I glowered at her, which only made her laugh as she turned to hand off her phone to the assistant.
“Can you take a photo for us?” she asked.
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.
“Fuck no ,” 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.
“To help my reputation,” I said, taking the safe way out.
The silence that followed was tinged with disappointment. The ground was drawing near now, a huge field of long, swaying grass that would be our landing zone.
“To help your heart,” Sebastian corrected.
And I didn’t know what to say to that.
When we landed a minute later, Sebastian deftly handled it while I lifted my legs and relied solely upon him not to kill us.
I was still stuck in my own thoughts, trying to make sense of the state of my life.
He undid the clips between our bodies before he dealt with the chute, as if he knew I needed the space now that both feet were on the ground.
As soon as we were separated, I took a step away.
So I didn’t notice that Linnea and Gary had already landed ahead of us and that Linnea had unhooked herself from the instructor until I looked up to see her sprinting across the space between us.
Her yellow-gold hair, released from its braid, streamed behind her like tangled sunbeams, white toothed, wide smile flashing as she pumped her arms.
She looked like she was running toward something.
A victory. A prize.
But I realized, as she was steps away, she was running to me.
I only had a moment to brace myself before she launched herself into my arms, twining her legs around my waist, laughter erupting at our contact like molten lava from volcanic rock.
I held this laughing, vibrant woman in my arms, her head tipped up to stare at me, and felt as if I were living in a dream.
When she tipped her head down, her violet eyes were still laughing, and her cheeks were pinked from the adrenaline and wind burn.
“Did you feel it?” she demanded breathlessly, long fingers plucking at the latch to my helmet before pushing it off my head, then removing my goggles so that nothing was left between us.
“Feel what?” I asked, my hands propping her up at her bottom.
A few days ago, this woman was essentially a stranger.
The daughter of my ex-wife’s oldest friend.
Now, we stood in the center of a field in an embrace like seasoned lovers, and even though I knew it was fake, that Gary had Linnea’s camera out to capture the moment, it didn’t feel fake.
Not Linnea’s blinding smile or the effervescence of her exhilaration.
Not the fact that she wanted to share it with me.
Or the fact that nothing existed for me at that moment but this sunshine girl held in my arms.
“Alive,” Linnea called out, tipping her head back and raising her arms to the sky before suddenly dropping them to join her hands at the back of my head, fingers in the sweat-damp strands.
She leaned close, forehead against mine, nose to nose, her sweet breath over my tongue as if she wanted to secret the words away in my mouth.
“Like you’ve woken up from a very long sleep and it’s time to live again. Do you feel that, Adam?”
Behind me, a body shifted, and I knew it was Sebastian’s hand on my low back before he walked away from us.
“Yes,” I said on a small gasp as both their touches electrified me. The hairs on the back of my arms stood on end. “I do.”
Linnea grinned, the shape of her mouth against my cheek, only her eyes across from mine visibly crinkling from the expression.
“Me, too,” she told me.