“The great Adam Meyers?” Sebastian asked with a chuckle. “Scared of jumping out of a plane? Now, that’s a thought.”
Gary, eager to be involved with the celebrities, jumped in, “That’d be hilarious, given you held your breath for like six minutes in the Jonathon Cross series.”
Of course, he remembered that.
But holding my breath in the ocean, a place I’d grown up beside during my childhood in Cornwall, was not at all the same as diving into thin fucking air toward a very stationary, decidedlyhardground.
Sebastian’s arm draped across my shoulders as he twisted slightly to face me. “On the other hand, if youareafraid, don’t worry. I can take your lovely girlfriend up for a spin and return her to you later safe and sound.”
These manipulative assholes.
I smiled at Gary in a way that was all teeth and, apparently, fairly alarming, because he reared back slightly.
“I’ve been in free fall all my life,” I said, and wasn’t that the truth. “A tumble from a plane should be a piece of cake.”
Forty minutes later, after we had been through the consent forms and education seminar, I found myself up in the small aircraft with Linnea across from me strapped to Gary’s front. Sebastian was behind me, his breath hot against the side of my head as an assistant fiddled with the many straps securing me to him and my own emergency parachute.
Dread was a lead weight in my gut, the back of my tongue coated in acid.
“Adam,” Sebastian said low and intimate, nose brushing my ear as he moved closer so no one else could hear us. “I have only seen you so afraid once before, and this is not worth your terror, not like that was.”
“It’s typically inadvisable to bring up someone’s prior panic attack when they may be on the precipice of another,” I snapped.
“Always so dramatic.” He chuckled, and I had to pin my shoulders back to stop from shivering. “This is meant to be fun, Adam.”
“I can’t imagine anything less fun than this.”
“No? Not even seeing me again?” Seb asked softly.
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.
