by Sophie Kent
But she was afraid the tropical breeze would grab her up and whisk her off to someplace where her memories would swirl around her like a hurricane, that they would smother her if left to the movements of the wind.
If she were honest with herself, she realized, she was afraid to leave the goddamn room. If she left the sanctuary it provided, or Kevin’s protective presence, what would happen when the memories came flooding back to her? She closed her eyes.
A moment later, she felt Kevin flop down on the couch beside her. He smelled good, and the feel of his strong arm as it encircled her shoulders, the solid heat and comfort, it made her sigh just a little too wantonly.
“So, black-eyed girl, what do you wanna do now?”
Susan shot him what she hoped was a scathing look, and angled away from him on the couch. “That’s not funny.”
Kevin leaned back into the couch, his smile smug. “Kinda is. I mean, looks like you took up boxing while you were in your post-wedding coma.”
Susan lunged for him, but he was off the couch and jogging across the room before she laid a finger on him.
“Not fair!” she complained. “When did you get all agile?”
“Um...er...”
“Tough question?” Susan straightened up and locked Kevin in her sights.
He stood there for about thirty seconds looking absolutely miserable. He turned and walked toward the kitchen. “About the time you met Mark.”
His voice was fading as he walked away, so Susan stood and followed him to the kitchen area. “So you got bitten by a radioactive spider, and now you’re Spiderman?”
He smiled as he turned back and gave her a quick glance. But the smile seemed to take effort.
“You know I’m an X-Men fan. If I was a superhero, I’d be Wolverine.”
“How could I forget? You had that half-naked poster in your room until you graduated. I thought...well, I thought...”
Kevin had pulled a bottle of water from the fridge and was chugging a few gulps, giving her a weird look as Susan lost use of all her words. How could she tell him she’d actually thought he was gay? She couldn’t. Not in a million years could she say that to him. She wasn’t Liz, she didn’t go around hurting people’s feelings--especially people she loved--for the hell of it. If she told him what she’d believed about him all those years ago, she might lose him. She couldn’t bear the thought of it. She couldn’t imagine life without him.
Susan’s face burned with embarrassment. The pit of her stomach felt like it was ready to fall out. She gasped at the pain she caused herself as she bit her bottom lip. Now if she could just look into his eyes and lie well enough to keep him from leaving her.
“You thought what?”
She shrugged her shoulders lamely. Her face may be hot, but the rest of her was stone cold and stiff as a board. She felt like she was ready to crack apart into a million pieces.
“You thought I was gay, didn’t you?” He smiled.
“Well...yeah.” Relief flooded through her just seeing him smiling about it. She sighed. “Until you started asking me out every day for a week straight.”
Kevin cringed, his eyes going all puppy-dog cute. “I asked for a whole… I…” He shook his head. “I only remember asking once.”
“Liz would say you repressed it. Or maybe you’ve just got a selective memory. I’d say repressed.” Susan laid her hand on his face. “You okay? I didn’t mean to...” She had to stop. She suddenly felt very warm. Just touching his cheek, the unshaven scruff, the firm line of his jaw, the feel of him--he felt quite alarmingly like a man. She shuddered as her body responded to that new realization.
Immediately Kevin flashed his million-watt smile and shook his head, abruptly ending that brief moment of physical contact. “Thought I was supposed to cheer you up, not the other way around.” Suddenly Kevin grasped Susan’s wrist and started pulling her to the front door. “I just thought of something that will cheer both of us up.”
“What?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Yeah, but what is it?” Susan hated the whininess in her voice.
Kevin stopped pulling and shot her a wickedly arched eyebrow. “You do know the meaning of the word, don’t you?”
“Funny.” Susan growled, but Kevin continued, sliding the French glass door open and pulling her through. “But where are we going?”
“To risk our lives!” Kevin crooned as he slammed the door shut behind them.
###
Susan had to jog to keep pace with Kevin’s gait. She would’ve let him go off alone, but he had a death grip on her wrist. Keeping up with him, barefoot, wasn’t that hard on the smooth granite walkway leading from the hotel down to the beach. But once on that soft, hot sand, her feet started to slip and slide, digging too deep and causing her to momentarily get stuck in the sand. Kevin jerked her free, dragging her along, tripping, until she got her feet back under her again.
She tried yanking back, but it didn’t even slow him down. She considered biting him, but she’d have to catch up to him first. Susan thought of a movie, The Quiet Man, where John Wayne hauls Maureen O’Hara across the beautiful Irish countryside, against her will, dragging her behind him like a caveman whenever she lost her footing.
That’s it. She wasn’t Maureen O’Hara, and no matter how unexpectedly macho Kevin seemed, he was no John Wayne. She put on the brakes. Or tried to, digging both feet into the sand and pulling back against Kevin’s forward march.
It didn’t even slow Kevin’s progress. So she tried yelling. “Kevin! Stop! Now!”
He turned to look at her, bewildered. “What?”
“You’re dragging me like I’m a dog...or a two-year-old!”
“So?” His face was sober, not a hint of a smile.
“So stop it!”
“Can’t,” he said turning to start walking again. Susan could feel her bare feet plowing through the hot sand. “If I leave you to your own devices, we’ll be cooped up in the room the entire two weeks, and you’ll just lie in that damn bed all day.” He stopped and turned to face her. “Now what kinda friend would that make me if I let that happen?”
“The kind of friend I ever call back again,” Susan said, waving that off. “The kind who understands sometimes that’s exactly what a woman needs. To just lie around and mope for a while.”
Kevin stared into Susan’s eyes for a still, thoughtful moment, then smiled. “Nah, nobody’d wanna do that!” And he turned again to charge across the beach, dragging her once more.
“At least tell me where you’re taking me.” Susan gave up with putting on the brakes--it wasn’t doing a bit of good. And between the jogging and trying to pull back on Kevin’s procession, she was getting winded.
Kevin stopped, and Susan fell against his shoulder, staggering to gain her balance after the abrupt stop.
“We’re here.”
Susan leaned over, gasping for breath, looking around her and not registering the significance of where they were. All she saw was more beach. It was nice, but nothing special, certainly not surprising. . “So...where is ‘here’?”
He didn’t answer her, so she looked up to him from her stooped position and saw he was staring at the sky. She stood up straight and followed his gaze, searching for what Kevin was looking at, and with a jolt, she found it. High in the flawless tropical sky floated a bright red paraglider, a cable running from it down to a gleaming white speedboat cutting through the ocean froth.
It looked pretty, like a kite--but then it hit Susan what Kevin was planning.
“No way!” she bellowed as she turned and tried to bolt back up the beach to the safety of the hotel.
But Kevin still had hold of her wrist, and even though he wasn’t squeezing very hard, it was enough to keep her right where he stood.
“This isn’t fair!” she whined, pulling hard, crouching down and pulling to get herself free with every ounce of her strength. “You outweigh me by a hundred pounds!”
“Ninety pounds, maybe..
.you’ve gained some the last five years.”
What an asshole! Didn’t he know how paranoid she’d been the whole last year about her weight? Some best friend he was, not even listening to her as she groused about all the dieting she’d had to do just to fit into her wedding dress. Just the thought of that dress made her see red, a volcano of molten anger surged up through her veins. She flopped on the sand and shoved her feet against the side of Kevin’s leg, pulling wildly to get free.
“Let go of me, you muscle-bound troglodyte!”
The look on Kevin’s face as he looked down on Susan was bemused, which made her all the more enraged. He shrugged and released her wrist, sending her crashing back into the soft, hot, white sand with a sudden huff of expelled air.
Susan lay there, looking at the big blue sky, the blissful looking paraglider sailing through the silky air currents with such ease. Kevin dropped down beside her, stretching out and gazing up with her.
“I’m afraid of heights,” Susan said in a flat, trembling voice.
“I remember.”
Susan turned her head. “Then, what the hell?”
Kevin’s face was serene, still, and he started smiling that irritating smile again. “What better way to take your mind off your troubles than to face your greatest fear?”
It sounded like it should be a line in a movie. One of those life-affirming movies, starring Jack Nicholson or Meryl Streep. It was so outrageous, yet made such instant, inscrutable sense. Susan turned back to the sky and watched as the paraglider dipped for an instant, and then rose back up, even higher than it had been before.
“It’s beautiful,” she murmured, more to herself than to Kevin. She wanted to know what it was like up there, flying through the air, the entire world stretching out below her.
“And so dangerous,” he said. “I mentioned the risking our lives part, right?”
Susan groaned and shook her head. “Yeah, you mentioned that.”
Chapter 4
SUSAN FELT PEACEFUL, if not a little amused, as the guys running the paragliding outfit strapped her into a harness and lashed her to Kevin so her shoulders were firm against his chest. She marveled at how the thick pull line seemed to make sounds like it was made out of metal, which comforted her quite a bit.
But she flashed back to the first thing the two paragliding guys had her and Kevin do: read and sign a release form. She hadn’t done more than glance at it before she signed. Mark would’ve had a fit, but he didn’t have a say anymore. In truth, she was sure that if she’d read the release, she would’ve balked and not signed.
That alone would’ve ended Kevin’s crazy up-up-in-the-air idea. But right then, it felt like her idea too. That was until the speedboat started to pick up velocity, and the guy not steering gave the metal links that connected them to the lead line, and the line to the boat, one last check. That’s when panic struck.
Susan could feel herself start to hyperventilate. She knew she was about to scream, begging for them to stop the boat, to let her go. And just at that exact second the guy hit a button, releasing the extra line holding them down, that also released the parachute strapped to Kevin’s back.
With an abrupt leave-your-stomach-at-the-door jolt they were forty feet in the air. Someone was screaming like they were being murdered. It took a moment before Susan realized it was her. She slammed her eyelids shut, squeezing as hard as she could. She couldn’t take it, the way getting ripped from the boat and up into the air made her feel so defenseless. Without the thinnest sense of control. Susan thought she was going to die, which horrified and comforted her. The horror was probably just some knee-jerk reaction to impending death. Some genetically imprinted warning device that said, don’t do this, stupid!
The part of Susan that was comforted was the one that didn’t want to go on any more. That didn’t want to keep remembering how it felt getting stood up at the church. That didn’t want to go back and have to explain to her co-workers what happened--to see their open pity. Or face her mother, God forbid. That part was happy to be forty freaking feet in the air with the only thing keeping her from certain death, a well-used parachute.
That part was sure that this was the end, and it breathed a great sigh of relief. The whole nightmare would be over soon.
Susan felt the heat and pressure from Kevin’s arms, wrapped firmly around her where her belly met her rib cage. She felt his chest heaving and his heart thudding against her back and realized she had a death grip of her own on Kevin’s forearms.
“Are we dead yet?” she screamed.
“Nah.” Kevin’s voice was in her ear, yet his words seemed to streak away with the pounding wind. “But if you open your eyes--”
How did he know she had her eyes shut?
“You’ll see that it looks like heaven.”
Her whole body trembled, stiff and tight, bracing for impact. She had a hard time registering what he’d said.
“Really...it looks like...heaven?”
“Close enough. So are you gonna look or what?” Kevin snapped.
It was the first mean thing he’d said since he’d been back--the old, fun Kevin, who told her how it was, and it automatically made Susan start to relax. She opened her eyes slowly, apprehensive until the dazzling blue of the ocean snapped them wide open and made her jaw drop in shock.
“It’s so...” Susan just shook her head. The sight was too beautiful; she could not find a word worthy of it.
Kevin slid his arms from around Susan and gently grasped her wrists, pulling them out until they were fully extended from her body. It was like she had wings, was flying like a bird and was as free as one too.
Susan started to laugh, her voice curling staccato from her lips. Her cheeks ached from the width of her smile. She screamed with joy every time the parachute dipped and went back up in the air. When the boat began to slow, and the line started to pull the parachute back to the boat, Susan groaned unhappily. She could’ve stayed up there all day.
###
As the cool night air wafted in through the sliding glass doors of the hotel suite, tickling Susan’s toes, she felt a ripple of immense pleasure roll over and through her. A cool glass filled with a frozen margarita--no salt--was perched in her hand. She’d forgotten how much she loved them. How the sweet-sour taste made her taste buds stand at attention, how the slushy cold texture always made her feel like a kid eating a snow cone. But most of all, she missed the way they made her forget all her problems--that was the alcohol, pure and simple.
Though it was only a temporary cure for what ailed her, she took that cure with both hands and gulped it down until she had a terrific brain freeze.
“Oww!” She slapped her palm against her forehead and gritted her teeth.
Kevin chuckled. “You always do that. You’d think that would be the one thing from college you would’ve retained.”
“Very...oww...funny.” She held out her glass to Kevin. “Another.”
“The magic word, please.” His voice dripped with sarcasm.
Susan opened her eyes and shot him a peeved look, and then, seeing the smirk on his face, smiled too. “Now.”
“That’s my girl,” he crooned as he poured another glass and handed it to her with a raised eyebrow. “So, is this going to be one of those nights when I have to drag you to your bed, or one of those nights when you get us arrested?”
Susan pursed her lips haughtily. She didn’t really remember the nights he’d carried her to bed--though she had an idea he rather enjoyed it. But she did remember getting them arrested. Nothing like too much tequila, a wet t-shirt contest and a “borrowed burro.” That farmer didn’t appreciate the borrowing part. She’d won a hundred bucks riding into the cantina on the back of the burro, dousing herself with a pitcher of water as she humped energetically to the wacked-out Mexi-rock band that was playing that night. Yet when she and Kevin had taken the borrowed burro back, they found a police cruiser waiting for them.
Thank God they’d been in New Mexico for Spr
ing Break instead of Mexico, or they might still be in jail down there. With the hundred bucks they won, and the five hundred they had left for the rest of the week, they only needed to call their parents for the other thousand to pay the fine. “Night’s young.” Susan arched her eyebrow to match Kevin’s.
“Mmm, fun.” Kevin sat back on the other couch and gulped some of his margarita. By the look on his face, Susan could tell Kevin drank about as much as she did, which was a couple glasses of wine on Saturday night. Maybe less in his case, with how fitness conscious he seemed to be.
“We used to drink three pitchers all by ourselves!” she groaned, feeling too old.
“We were younger, our bodies could take it.” Kevin patted his belly, making it stand up in a fake mound.
“Beer belly fraud!” Susan laughed and said, without thinking, “I could have Mark sue you!”
And with that she felt the smile slide right from her lips. Her eyes burned, and her breath caught in her throat, sour and stinging. She saw the look on Kevin’s face. He’d gone from happy and joking to miserable. Obviously her sudden change of mood was easy to see.
As if on cue, Kevin’s cellphone rang. He grabbed for it, but it fell to the floor--he really was drunk already. He fished it from the floor and looked at the readout.
“Liz,” he said, answering it with a “Hello.”
He listened for a few beats before saying, “Ah, nothing really. Just some midnight margaritas.”
Susan looked around the room for a clock. She was surprised it was so late already. Seemed like she’d just woken up.
He said, “Not really.”
Susan could all too well imagine what question he was answering for Liz.
“Sure,” he said, and held out the phone to her.
She hesitated. She didn’t remember much, but she knew Liz had been with her through the wedding fiasco. And somehow she knew Cancun was all her idea too. Kevin shook the phone at her impatiently. Obviously, he still didn’t love talking with Liz.
Susan took the phone, and for a moment she just held it, pondering if she should just hang up. Liz would just call back, and even if Susan smashed the cellphone against the wall, she would find some way of getting a phone to her.
