· Jace ·
I hold her hand as the plane clears the runway then noses upward toward its destination of fourteen thousand feet. She's scared, her fingers gripping mine nearly as tightly as her other hand grips the bench we sit on. Even after everything she's told me, she's still the same Merri, it seems. When I cut away her terrible confession, she's still that boldly terrified woman who'd walked into my shop weeks ago and nearly taken my breath away.
As the plane continues to climb I wonder to myself: does all that other stuff really even matter? It's been here all along, I just hadn't know about it. What makes anything different now that I do?
The simple answer is: nothing.
Nothing has changed, except for my newly acquired knowledge of why she's tried to so hard push me away. And why she'd thought we couldn't be together. Isn't what I've wanted all along? To knock down the barrier she'd built between us?
I rub my thumb lightly along hers then meet her eyes when she looks up at me. This is Merri, I think as I watch the familiar shadows swim through those deep pools of green. This is the same woman who'd never done anything spontaneous. The same woman I'd played in the mud with like a little kid. The same woman who saved my sister, saved my business, and saved my heart when it had nearly been crushed by the weight of my own problems.
She is the woman who'd cried in my arms, who'd given me the most tender kiss I've ever known, who'd given with all her heart, despite the consequences to her own. This is Merri, and I want to be with her still.
I turn slightly toward her then cup her face in my free hand. When she closes her eyes, I bend down and kiss her tenderly then pull her against me.
"I don't want to be your friend," I repeat the words I'd said last night. Her arm slips around me then clutches at me tightly as I continue. "I still want more than that with you, if you'll have me."
As the plane levels out, I pull away and look down into her wide eyes. I smile at her as I speak over the droning of the engines.
"I am in love with you, Merri Lonán. I may have lost sight of that for just a little while today, but it never left."
Tears well up in her eyes and as she opens her mouth to speak, one of the instructors interrupts her. I turn to look at him and I know our tender moment is over. This is it. We are readying to jump.
My heart lurches in my chest. Have I done enough? Have I said the right things? I told her what's in my heart, the things that even the truths she'd confessed could not drive away. But is it enough to make her change her mind?
My first conversation with Daryl comes back to me in that moment, the conversation I'd had with him in the back yard when he and Mrs. Hallard had unintentionally met me for the first time. "You might change her mind about something if you work hard enough at it for a few years ..." he had said. But I hadn't had years, I'd only had a few brief moments. Will they be enough to sway her decision?
God, I hope so.
As the students all begin to rise and move toward their respective instructors, it physically pains me to let her hand go.
"Merri," I call out and when she looks back at me, I slowly lift my hand to my chest to cover the center buckle of my own harness. "If you fall, I fall."
I have to look away from the panic in her eyes. For the first time, I'm not willing to coax it away. I feel guilty for putting it there but not guilty enough to take it back. This is my closing argument, my last appeal, and I've intentionally gone straight for the heart. If she really does care for me the way I think she does, it will be enough.
As I move to my instructor and she moves to hers, we are both fastened securely to their harnesses. When the door opens and the cold wind rushes inside, I take a deep breath to stave off my own panic. Moments from now we will be falling a thousand feet every six and a half seconds, and in six minutes I will know everything I want--or don't want--to know. This will be the most excruciating six minutes of my life, and I'm terrified.
"Your first jump?" my instructor asks in a raised voice over my shoulder.
"Yeah," I shout back over the roar of the engines and the whipping of the wind.
"Don't worry, I've never lost a student yet. Just enjoy it while you can--it doesn't last long!"
I wonder after today if Merri's instructor will be able to proudly boast the same thing. I take a deep breath as we move toward the door and I watch the first pair leap out and disappear. Merri is somewhere behind me, preparing to do the very same thing. The next pair disappears into the whitewashed blue beyond and then I am balanced before the door.
There is no turning back, no time left to dissuade her if it's still needed. No time--
I am sucked out into the wide expanse of nothing, my final thoughts left back in the plane with Merri as I begin my free fall toward the ground and whatever news will await me when I get there.
***
· Merri ·
I watch as Jace disappears, along with the man he is tethered to. My heart lurches in my chest, but my sudden panic is not for myself. I inch forward with the man behind me. When the toes of my shoes slip past the edge of the plane's gaping maw and into the vastness beyond it, my heart suddenly begins to pound. My hands curl into tight fists. My breathing stops.
The wind rips viciously at me as we leap together, screaming in my ears until I can hear nothing but it's voice. My mind can focus on nothing, it is all too much. The plane speeding away. The clouds I can nearly touch. The unimpeded horizon. The ground so far below. The wind yanking at my clothes, my hair, my skin. Too many sensations.
I open my mouth and scream, but the sound is snatched away and flung somewhere far above me. I close my eyes against it all and try to focus on something, anything.
Cue balls. Mud holes. Hellish spiders. Moonlight.
My hand creeps to the buckle, the one that can send me tumbling in true free fall if it is released, the one that can end this madness that is tearing my brain apart. As I feel the cold metal beneath my palm, a thought--a face--flashes into my mind, and his words are plain, though the wind fights to deafen me to them.
"I'm here, you're safe... If you fall, I fall... We can be broken together... I'm in love with you... Just breathe."
For just a moment my hand tightens on the clasp that holds me secured in the cage and to the man behind me. And then I release my grip, letting my fingers slowly unfurl, pressing my palm against it instead.
Jace's words play again and again in my mind, and when I am finally jerked hard upward, the hateful current that had been screaming in my ears immediately ceases.
Slowly, I open my eyes.
Across the sky are people suspended from brightly colored nylon canopies; they float through the air like exotic feathers cast far into the sky and adrift on the currents of the wind. I gasp, the first full breath I've taken since before I'd climbed out of Byron's truck.
It is beautiful.
Somewhere amid that fantastical display is Jace. He is seeing this, feeling this, right along with me. That thought, and the mantra of his words, stops my mind's own free fall. When my feet finally touch the ground five minutes later, I am smiling. A real smile, the kind I feel not only on my face but deep in my heart as well.
My legs tremble as my instructor unfastens our tether, exclaiming how well I've done. When he steps back for the man running toward me, my smile widens; I lift my head, offering my joy to Jace.
He slings his arms around me and pulls me roughly against him, then picks me up from the ground. He buries his face in my neck, letting out a harsh breath that sounds like a relieved sob. When he lifts his head, there are indeed tears in his eyes, and when he dips it down to kiss me they fall to my cheeks like hot rain.
I slip my arms around his neck, pulling him as close as I can. For the first time there are no secrets between us, nothing marring this perfect moment. I am finally free to love him in return.