I am Ryan Poitier Sharpe.
I am bold and fearless.
I show people how to live life to the fullest. Pushing limits is in my blood, right?
So why am I so terrified? Why are my heels tapping a strange song on the floor of the plane? I need to relax, trust myself. My body is humming, but I can’t tell if it’s pure fear or the ghost of me inside, longing to fly free again.
I can do this.
I must do this.
It will prove to everyone who I am. That I’m back.
It will prove to me . . .
. . . the only thing that matters?—?I am alive.
Everyone is seated in two long rows. I’m glad to be in the very back of one, so that my trembling might only be felt by the person in front of me. I keep my eyes closed for the eternity it takes us to climb to fourteen thousand feet.
Someone has opened the jump door. The engines throttle back. The plane lurches a bit in the wind.
Burbles of laughter erupt from me as we dip and sway, and a few people gasp.
The guy in front of me turns around. “What could be funny?”
I don’t know. It’s all funny. It’s terrifying and hilarious.
I don’t answer him. He’s looking at me like I’m crazy.
“Only thing funny is the boss’s brain,” he says. “Bright idea, going ahead with this weather.”
“You didn’t have to get on the plane!” I yell over the noise.
Dom is suddenly standing over me. “Neither did you. Stand up.”
As if on cue, everyone stands and begins checking each other’s equipment.
“Slow is fast,” I hear a girl next to me mumble as she fixes something on her rig. Dom moves behind me to perform the same checks on my gear. “If this means you’re coming back to yourself, then I’ll trust you,” he says against my ear. I turn my face toward him.
“How did you know it was me?”
He rolls his eyes and grins. “I know this body.” His fingers cling possessively to my hips. He taps on my newly painted helmet. “But the tiger gave you away.”
Heat warms my cheeks. Despite all our times together, Dom feels like a stranger to me. His familiarity with my body is unnerving but scintillating, too.
“Let the demo team and other jumpers go first, and then go out right after them, okay?”
I nod, swallowing down my fear, but the plane pitches to the right and terror courses through me again. I realize I’m clutching Dom’s hand. He kisses my cheek. “You got this. Have fun, tiger.” He heads to the doorway.
Everyone but me is huddled in a pack near the open jump door. They need to go out in a group to be able to track to one another in the air and get into formation. Spatters of rain have made the doorway slippery with wetness. Yvon continues in slow flight, and Dom calls out a count. Our eyes meet, and I see the barest hint of a smile.
The plane does a sudden drop in the increasing wind from the storm. I was slowly moving toward the doorway, but that drop stops me. Lightning cracks outside the window. In its spectral glow, her face looks in on me.
“Go!” Dom yells to the team over the wind.
Bodies fly out the door, and my own body is pulsing with admiration and fear. With every beat of my heart, I hear her voice.
Death whispers, Go, go, go.
She’s challenging me.
I take another step, but as the last of the team hurls itself out of the opening, the plane lurches again. Dom is supposed to jump with them, but he’s still in the plane and staring at me with an anxious look on his face. I hear an incessant buzzing sound from the front of the aircraft as the tail dips lower. “Goddamn it!” Yvon yells. “Stall warning! Get out! Get out!”
Terror pushes me flat against the wall. Opposite me, rain coats the windows with rivulets, and another crack of lightning illuminates the sky outside the plane. In that eerie light, her face stares at me.
“Get out!” Yvon yells again.
I shake my head. I’ll stay in the plane. No way am I jumping into the rain and lightning, right into her arms.
Strong hands vise my biceps, and before I can protest, before I know what’s happened, Dom forcibly throws me out of the airplane into the rain.
Twenty-Two
MY BODY TRIES to curl in on itself. I remember being in freefall once and wondering if I wasn’t real. If I could be someone else’s dream. I want someone to wake up now, to make this nightmare end, but a lucid alarm within me trills and forces me to open my eyes. Needles of rain hit my lips and chin. I am falling so fast, it’s as though it’s raining up into my face. My right arm jerks, and I realize Dom has tracked to me and has hold of one of the grips on my jumpsuit. We are plummeting together toward the ground. He holds his free hand out and gives me a hand signal. His fingers are spread and his palm is in a flat position.
I don’t understand. Panic is a blindfold. Panic is mind bleach. Panic has frozen me.