“We’d make a good team then; that’s my strong suit.” A pub quiz would be a good second date if we made it through this one. My wheels were already turning.
She smirked at me, but it faded quickly. “You aren’t even scared, are you?”
“Not regular scared,” I told her. “I’m scared shitless.”
She frowned at me. “You don’t seem scared to me. Regular or otherwise.”
“I’m a really good actor.” I shrugged my pack-wearing shoulders. The parachute felt very light. Should it be this light?
She giggled at me. “That’s certainly true.”
Even though this was tandem skydiving and I’d be essentially just a passenger, there was some trepidation. I was kidding when I said I was scared shitless, but there was still an eager thrill. Signing the waiver had felt extremely real. I was glad my agent wasn’t around. He’d hate that I was doing this.
It wasn’t every day I got this far out of my comfort zone. I’d always been interested in skydiving, but I’d never gotten around to it. I’d been thinking that it would be fun to do a not-so-socialite activity with Cindy since she probably spent a lot of time at trendy restaurants, but this had not even been on my radar.
“Well, I’m scared,” she admitted. “I don’t get out much. Especially not like this.”
“Then you’re a good actor too.”
She flushed, but she was. Her hands weren’t shaking. She wasn’t pale or nervous looking. If anything, she seemed mildly amused by all this. Like it was not what she expected, but in a pleasant, novel way.
“I’m really not,” she told me. “Actually, Tommy, you should probably know—”
The flight instructor interrupted just then. He was a bombastic, gigantic redhaired man with the exact kind of personality you would expect from someone who throws himself out of an airplane twice a day—a bit crazy. “Okay kids, last chance to pee before wheels up.”
We were abruptly herded out into the nearby airfield and loaded up into the small plane. The instructors were continuing to talk to us the entire time, but I managed to grab Cindy’s hand as we walked. She looked up at me, surprised. Then she smiled and my world realigned itself.
This was going well so far. At least, I thought it was. I’ve heard that fear can be an aphrodisiac. I never thought it was true until now.
Cindy’s long hair was braided and then coiled at the back of her head with a scarf for the jump, her eyes were bright, and her cheeks were very pink. She looked excited, and even though her smile was a bit forced, she kept looking up at me with an expression that said she was happy. I was happy. We still barely knew each other, but I felt like we were on the same wavelength.
“What would you be doing right now if you weren’t here?” I asked her.
“Nothing nearly this interesting,” she laughed. “I’m really quite boring. More ordinary than you could ever imagine. Almost a shut-in.”
“I don’t see how that’s remotely possible for a socialite,” I told her honestly. I found my time with Cindy extremely interesting so far.
She blinked her big, hazel eyes at me. “What makes you say that?”
“You’ve got the adventure bug,” I told her. “It’s obvious. I used to be like that.”
Before Hollywood beat it out of me, that is.
“The adventure bug?” she asked. “I don’t understand what that means.”
She seemed to think it might be a bad thing. It wasn’t. It was the opposite of bad.
“Wanderlust,” I explained as the plane took off around us. “I used to be just like that. I wanted to see everything, eat everything, drink everything, act in everything, learn everything. I had this insatiable appetite for the whole world.”
Her lips parted. “And you think I’m like that?” Her expression shifted. “You barely know me. You couldn’t be more wrong.”
I shrugged my shoulders. I wasn’t wrong. I could see it all over her face. She was young and hungry for the world. “I can guess,” I told her. “How about I guess about your life and you tell me if I’m wrong?”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Those are betting words, and I bet you’re going to get every single guess wrong.”
“So… okay?” I asked.
“Sure. But prepare to be wrong.” Her expression was disbelieving.
“I’ll take that challenge,” I told her confidently. “Being an actor is all about observing people to become them. So, I’ve gotten pretty good at my guesses about people. Let’s see… what’s first? Oh, I know. You live with your family, true or false?”
“True.” She rolled her eyes. “But that barely counts as an insight. Plenty of people live with family.”
I looked at her sidelong. “I never claimed my insights would be revelatory. Just accurate.”
Cindy shot me another smile, this one broader than before. “I suppose that’s fair.” She was warming to this game, probably curious to see if I was as good at it as I promised. “Do another.”
“You’ve got at least one parent that micromanages your life to an absurd, almost pathological degree. True or false?”
She blinked. “That’s true. How can you tell just by talking to me?”
I smirked at her. “I recognize the subtle signs of deep frustration,” I told her. I thought of my own dad. As his firstborn, he’d been especially keen to micromanage me. “In fact, I bet you’re extremely bored most of your days. You thought coming to LA would be exciting and fun, but it hasn’t been. Not at all. True or false?”
“True,” she told me. She looked a little bit sad. “But if you’re bored, then you’re boring.”
“Did you just make a Harvey Danger reference?” She nodded. “Then you definitely aren’t boring.”
She smirked. “Are you sure I’m not boring? Maybe you were right at the beginning and I’m a good actor. Maybe I’m not even a socialite living on daddy’s dollars, bored out of her privileged little mind and dragging herself around LA looking for a thrill. Maybe I’m nobody. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m an elaborate liar.”
“Are you insinuating actors are boring?” I teased.
She laughed at that. “You aren’t boring,” she told me. “Far from it. Especially when compared to present company.”
I used to be interesting. Back when I was more like Cindy. These days, I wasn’t so sure.
I had something clever to say, but I didn’t have a chance. Our ginger instructor was starting to rustle the class to the back of the plane. Cindy swallowed hard.
“You can still back out,” I told her. “We don’t have to do this.”
She pouted at me. “Just because I’m scared doesn’t mean I don’t want to try.”
“Now you don’t sound like a spoiled little socialite at all.”
“I’m not a spoiled little socialite,” Cindy told me.
“That might be the first true thing you’ve said so far.”
“You’re right. It might be.”
“Then who are you?” I asked her, genuinely interested to hear the answer. Who did Cindy think she was?
“Maybe I’ll tell you on the ground,” she whispered.
The time for talking was over. My tandem partner was hooking me up. Cindy’s partner was helping her as well. I looked over at her, wondering who she was and if she knew how deeply she’d pulled me under her spell. My heart was racing, but it was only half about the jump.
I wanted Cindy. I’d been interested in her before, but now I was fascinated. She was clever, quick-witted, and funny. I was more than happy to throw myself out of a plane if it meant I could talk to her some more on the ground. I was silently thankful to whoever planned this date. Because if this experience didn’t bring us closer, I didn’t know what would.
I grabbed Cindy by the shoulders, kissed her, and then turned around and jumped out of the plane.
11
Cindy
Skydiving doesn’t feel that much like falling. It feels more like flying. They’d told us that on the ground, but it
had been hard to focus through my nervousness.
When you step out of an airplane, your body accelerates from going zero miles per hour to one hundred and twenty miles per hour in ten seconds. This is the scary part. The plane disappears in a blink. Your stomach had no warning that it would be moving so quickly and struggles to adapt.
Then you take a breath. The world didn’t end because you’re moving quickly, zipping through clouds. The air is rushing around you, louder than a freight train. But the world is still there, flickering and vast. You can’t even comprehend the speed or the growing sense of freedom as your body starts to adapt. Above, the sky is infinite. The earth below you is getting bigger, but slowly. It gave me a moment to think about the kiss.
It was a good kiss. A great kiss. The kind of kiss that finishes out a Hollywood movie. The kind that sticks in your mind for a long time and makes your heart pound. Even as I hurtled earthward at terminal velocity, that kiss was what made my stomach do flip flops. Screw skydiving. Kissing Tommy Prince was my new, dangerous thrill.
It wasn’t my first kiss, but it was my first good kiss. My last kiss had been with my high school boyfriend Travis. We’d been at the prom, and I’d been breaking up with him. His decided lack of good kisses had been a contributing factor in our breakup. I learned later that he was gay. We were still friends.
But when getting kissed by a guy who’d rather be kissing guys is your baseline and then Tommy Prince is your next kiss, it kind of screws up the whole thing. What do they call that in statistics? I wracked my brain as I hurtled toward the ground. I’d never been that good at math, but… Oh right. An outlier. I laughed and the wind stole it.
My brain was scrambled. I held my arms out wide, like a bird. I was flying, falling into nothing. Free.
“One day,” I’d told my real mom when I was little, back before she left my dad, “I’m going to learn to fly.”
She’d raised an eyebrow at me in between drags of a cigarette. “Don’t be dumb. People can’t fly. Especially not you. Your arms are way too short. You got those from your dad.”
I’m sure all kids say dumb stuff to their parents. But I hope if I have kids on day, I have a better response than my mom did for me. She’d rolled her eyes at me when I told her I’d be the one to figure it out.
“Sshh,” she’d told me. “Cindy, don’t be a dreamer. It’ll only break your heart.”
She’d never wanted kids. She’d said as much in the note she left, which did wonders for my seven-year-old self-esteem. My mom went off to chase her own dreams, not caring if other hearts got broken in the process. She’d just disappeared out of my life and my dad had quietly divorced her and married Marigold within a year or two. Part of me hated my mom. Part of me missed her. Part of me hated me for missing her.
But I didn’t ever take her advice. I was still a dreamer. I was probably also in for a heartbreak. But at least I’d learned to fly.
Was I the same woman as before? The woman from the airplane, and the dry cleaners, and Wisconsin? Was that Cindy still around? Or had she died to wake me up?
I’d been meaning to tell Tommy that I was nobody. But now it seemed less important. Now, all that felt important was getting back in his arms.
The parachute deployed then, snapping me upwards. It felt like upwards anyway. In reality, it was just a little bit less downwards. My chest heaved with the effort of falling more slowly. The deafening, rushing air disappeared into what was almost relative silence. Below me, crystal clear and unbelievably vast, was the earth.
I craned my neck up to see above me. The parachute above me looked sturdy enough. It seemed like it was doing its job. But we were still going down, and quickly.
A circle of white separated a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree ocean of blue sky from the green-brown ground. I’d never seen a view anything like it before, not even in my dreams. We drifted down gently. The blue receded and the green grew larger. Individual structures, trees, and buildings became visible as we got closer. We were still moving quickly, but not like before. It felt more like floating.
Suddenly, I didn’t want it to end. This was all going too quickly. They’d told us to expect this on the plane. Sixty seconds of falling and five minutes of floating. It was too fast. But gravity was relentless. The ground grew bigger and bigger. Trees went from little toothpicks to frightening looking obstacles. But the biggest obstacle was the ground itself.
Um… landing? Had we talked about landing? Because this was going to end one way or another, and I was suddenly not sure what to do. The flying part had been great, but it was about to end in a big way. That ground was going to get me.
“Feet up,” my tandem partner told me. He had to yell in my ear to be heard. “I’ll put my feet down first, then you.”
I obediently raised my legs and then boom, we were motionless. I toppled over almost immediately after, laughing, a bit nauseated and feeling out of my mind.
Tommy was there a second later. He’d hit the ground before me. He helped me out of my harness, and even though there were people around us, strangers, I didn’t care. I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him.
12
Tommy
When she kissed me, Cindy nearly knocked me off my feet. I caught her, steadying her with one of my arms around her waist and the other buried in the long dark hair that had somehow gotten free from its braid during the jump. Her mouth was soft and eager against mine, and my thrumming heartbeat, which had not yet recovered from the adrenaline, ratcheted right back up.
I didn’t know her that much better after this date than I had before. I’d learned today that her last name was Brown. I’d learned that she liked to hang out at a karaoke bar in west Hollywood called Sebastian’s. I’d learned that she was light on the details of her life and heavy on the misdirection and half-answers, but it didn’t matter. Because I’d also learned that I had to have her, and now I knew she felt the same.
Fear, or at least danger, is absolutely an aphrodisiac. There was no doubt in my mind. Not now. My body was on fire for hers. At every place our bodies touched, I felt heat and yearning for more. I breathed into her mouth, inhaling her. I wanted all of her.
People were probably watching. I didn’t care. All I cared about was the feeling of my tongue on hers, and the satisfying pressure of Cindy’s small, soft body against mine. I pulled at her hair, angling her mouth just the way I wanted it, feeling her gasp against my lips and then smile against them. She was lightning in a bottle. Under my fingers, her curves felt like heaven.
I couldn’t wait to see her in my bed. Couldn’t wait to have her under me, gasping like she was, with her little fingers on my body as I took her. In the shower. On the beach. On the dining room table. Everywhere. A thousand dirty fantasies flashed through me, each more vivid than the last.
We needed to be alone. Immediately. And not in all this damn gear. Everything we were wearing was made of nylon and it slipped and shushed against itself. I wriggled my fingers around Cindy’s goggles and got them off her, then the helmet. I had a fistful of the scarf that was in her hair and was right about to start on the jumpsuit when the sound of someone clearing their throat snapped me out of my trance.
It was the ginger giant. I looked over at him, annoyed. He was regarding us without surprise. Cindy turned a bright, embarrassed pink and stepped back from me abruptly like she’d been stung. The loss of her warmth was almost like pain.
The ginger laughed lightly. “Do you want me to leave you two lovebirds here in this field or would you like a ride back to town? Everybody else is ready to go.”
Cindy and I exchanged a look. Then she turned pink, grabbed her helmet and goggles and wordlessly made for the SUV headed toward her side of town. The one headed to my side of town was behind it. This was where the date ended.
“Bye,” she whispered.
“I’ll call you!”
Fuck.
I made a “what the hell?” look at the cockblocking ginger and he shrugged his huge should
ers.
“I only sell the skydiving thrills,” he said, following me back to the cars. “You’re on your own for the other kind. Besides we gotta’ get back before the traffic gets bad.”
“We live in LA,” I grumbled. “The traffic is always bad.”
It wasn’t until I got to the car that I realized I still had Cindy’s white scarf in my hand.
13
Tommy
Tommy Prince [2:45 p.m.]: I had a lot of fun with you today.
Cindy Brown [2:50 p.m.]: Me too! It was scary, but fun.
Tommy Prince [2:55 p.m.]: I wish I’d gotten a picture of you though.
Cindy Brown [2:56 p.m.]: A picture of me? Why?
Tommy Prince [2:57 p.m.]: You looked so triumphant when you got on the ground.
Cindy Brown [3:00 p.m.]: Well I just survived jumping out of an airplane. That’s deserving of triumph, isn’t it?
Tommy Prince [3:05 p.m.]: Of course, it was. I just liked seeing that look on your face.
Cindy Brown [3:06 p.m.]: Maybe next time.
Tommy Prince [3:53 p.m.]: Do you want to do it again?
Cindy Brown [3:54 p.m.]: Skydiving? Sure.
Tommy Prince [3:57 p.m.]: I meant dating me.
Cindy Brown [4:00 p.m.]: Oh. You don’t have to say that. It’s okay.
Tommy Prince [4:05 p.m.]: Say what?
Cindy Brown [4:10 p.m.]: It was just a charity date, Tommy. You don’t have to humor me. I know you’ve got a life to live.
Tommy Prince [4:24 p.m.]: Do you not want to go out with me again?
Cindy Brown [4:30 p.m.]: Please don’t make fun of me. It’s not nice.
Tommy Prince [4:34 p.m.]: I don’t understand. I’m not making fun of you. Did I do something to offend you?
Cindy Brown [4:40 p.m.]: No. Of course not. Don’t think that.
Tommy Prince [4:45 p.m.]: Do you not want to go out with me again? Because that’s fine, I just thought, I don’t know, I thought we had some chemistry. Did you not think so?
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