“I love you, Margo,” he says with the hard authenticity of a man who’s spent his whole life running from the word. “I think I always have, and I know I always will. I know this job is your dream, and I don’t want to take that from you, or try to make you come back, but I just had to say the words out loud. So you’d know.”
“Owen,” I whisper, putting a palm against that face, as if making sure he’s real. “I love you too.”
He brings his forehead to mine and we stay there, as if discovering a paradise in this moment, an escape from all the struggles and pain around us, the trials that led us to this point.
“I don’t know what we do from here. Where we go. But I needed to tell you,” he says soft and low. “I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.”
I smile and try to keep the joy from making me cry, the happiness cracking open inside of me like some long-locked box. “It doesn’t matter where we go anymore,” I say, the words channeling from some deeper place. “As long as we’re there together.”
21
Owen
“Are you sure you know how to do this?” Margo says, gripping my hand tightly in the cargo hold of the plane.
She asked me the same thing the last time we were on a plane together, except that time we weren’t strapped to each other and waiting for them to open the door while we were still ten thousand feet in the air. The last time she asked me that she was talking about something completely different.
“It’s gonna be fun,” I say, kissing her forehead and smiling at her. “Relax. You’re with me, ok?” Margo looks up at me, still nervous, though she manages to nod. I turn to the camera that the other parachutist is pointing at us and wink. “I really hope this video is worth it.”
A lot can happen in two weeks. One minute you’re half-drunk, getting on a plane to the East Coast to try and win back the woman you lost so badly you wonder if there’s any hope at all that you’ll succeed. The next you’re about to jump out of one with that same woman for an extreme dating show. I guess both times I took a leap of faith, but this one is a hell of a lot easier.
Margo quit her job at the New York Month the same night I went there. Turns out some dreams are better than others. We spent one night in the city, making love in her single bed, its smallness irrelevant as we clutched and pressed ourselves against each other, unwilling to let go for a second lest we lose each other again. New York rain lashing against the windows, calls and car horns from the street below our only reminder that the world was still ticking while we existed in a perfect moment.
The next day we took a plane back to Los Angeles, and after a few more days of hiding out in my apartment (why rush the announcement?), I brought Margo back to TrendBlend where she received a welcome like a hero’s return. Melissa was only too happy to rehire her, not least because Brad was fired while I was away. It’s way easier to be shit at your job when nobody’s looking, and as soon as Melissa found out Brad had hired some teenage essay-writer to create a review of a new album, she called him into the office for a vicious reaming about plagiarism and journalistic integrity that they could hear in the building across the street.
The jump supervisor gestures for us to draw closer to the door, where all of our straps, clips, and chutes are double-checked. Margo’s strapped to my front, close enough to me that I can almost feel her anxiety through the layers of the jumpsuit.
“You guys ready?” he calls out over the loud thrum of the engine.
He slams the door open, revealing a sky so clear there’s no question about how high we are, the ground so far away beyond the flossy clouds it’s like looking at a map.
I give a thumbs up, and a second later Margo does too.
“Ok,” he says and we move forward to the door, my hands on the frame, the wind against our faces. Margo pulls her goggles down, and screams from the nearness of the jump.
So here we are, being filmed as we jump out of an airplane for our new web series. Melissa was wrong—for once—the fans didn’t mind the change in focus at all. In fact, they spent the last couple of weeks terrorizing all the comments sections of every other video on the site, asking where the hell Margo and I had gone and when we were coming back.
Margo’s first job as soon as she returned to work was to film a two-minute video with me. A low-key thing at our desks, announcing that the dating vlog was over because we were together now. It wasn’t meant to be a big deal, just a short explanation of what was going on, except it turned into the biggest video of the month, racking up a couple million views and hundreds of thousands of comments.
Melissa didn’t have a choice. When almost your entire audience is begging for a new video series with the hot new couple, you give them what they want. It was Margo’s idea to do the extreme dating series. I guess spending a week chained to that desk in NYC taught her that the last thing she wanted was the expected. ‘I wanna do something really L.A.,’ she’d said. ‘Something fun.’
So we’re jumping out of a plane now, falling into the clouds, the air taking our shouts straight from our mouths, just us. As if our relationship were manifested physically. The cameraman appears before us and we both smile at the lens.
It’s over before we know it, through the clouds, the details on the map emerging. I open the parachute and we float softly down, finding the empty fields and stumbling to a stop as the parachute falls all around us. The film crew quickly follows as we pick ourselves up, unclipping straps and tossing the parachute aside. I pull Margo to me for a kiss, exhilarated and flush with adrenaline, as Tom brings the camera to his face.
“Whoa!” Margo yelps, out of breath and smiling uncontrollably as she pulls back. “That was insane. What a rush!”
“Was it scary?” Tom says, from behind the camera. I notice his knees shaking a little from his own jump, even though he was strapped to an experienced instructor the whole time.
“Not really,” Margo says, then looks up at me and puts a palm against my cheek. “How could I be scared? We should do it again!”
We film the rest of the segment for Tom to edit later, talking about the emotions of stepping out of the plane and falling through the sky, then get out of our jumpsuits and start walking back to the car, parked in the vast emptiness of the airfield where we took off from.
“Why do I feel guilty that this is what I get paid to do?” I say.
“You’re a lucky guy,” Margo winks.
“I definitely am.”
I put my arm around her shoulders and bring her close as we stroll lazily, half-stumbling as she wraps her arms around my waist while we walk.
“Hey, I forgot to tell you—I’m gonna meet Nancy later,” she says.
“Nancy? Why?”
“Louise is on set filming all week, so Nancy said she’d help me find something to wear for the wedding.”
“An apron would probably be smart,” I say, laughing a little. “Who the hell gets married on a horse farm?”
“I think it’s cute! You know, she used to break wild horses,” Margo says, and I try to hide the fact that I already know. “They sound a lot like you.”
“Like me?”