Renesmee Carlie Cullen is strapped to a strange man, nine thousand feet in the air, waiting to jump out of an airplane. She is, understandably, flustered.
This was all her idea, of course. Not Jake's. Dangerous things are never Jake's idea. Jake is as happy to see Nessie in danger as a sardine is to see a tuna. Jake is sitting a few people back, strapped to a short, blond surfer type. It's too loud in the plane to talk to him, but Ness can hear her dive instructor well enough, as long as he shouts right into her ear.
"When we jump," he is yelling—and it is just barely loud enough for her to hear, over all the wind and the roar of engines—"you arch your spine and throw your head back, and tuck your legs up between mine. Keep your arms crossed over your chest until I give the signal you can uncross. Got it?"
"Got it," Ness shouts back. The pilot of the plane shouts something she doesn't quite catch, but it must mean something to the instructor, because he starts pulling on all the straps that hold Ness to him.
"I want you to sit in my lap," he shouts, "so I can get everything tight." Jake won't like this, not at all. Ness looks around and sees that everyone else is doing the same thing. Jake will have no right to get angry at her, not that that's stopped him before. He gets testy when Ness so much as goes out for lunch with a male coworker; this will make him apoplectic.
"I really need to tighten these," prods the man. With one last glance back at Jake—who is now, she notes with a gulp, glaring warningly at her—Ness wriggles her buttocks against the man and shifts her weight to her legs. He yanks on a strap and then another strap and then hands both straps to her and has her yank on them, and then he hands her a pair of goggles to strap to her face. "I have to make these really tight," he shouts. "I'll loosen them when I open the chute."
Nary glances at the device strapped to the man's wrist. When it read 4 000 he explained that that was the height at which he would open the chute. Right now, it reads 14 000.
I might panic, thinks Ness very calmly. She squirms around again to peek at Jake, who doesn't look nervous at all. And yet he was the one who resisted this idea for months. Every time Ness brought it up, he would assure her that skydiving was not for her. And then he would change the subject. Ness finally got him to agree that this would be her Christmas and birthday present. Jake hates to see anything scary happening to her. He hates to see anything at all happening to her.
Ness turns away.
"Scared?" yells the man Ness is strapped to.
"No," lies Ness.
"We won't die," the man assures her. "Just be sure you tuck your legs, just like you want to kick me in the butt, okay?"
"I will," says Ness.
A light switches from red to blue. A man opens the doors and a mighty wind rushes through the tiny plane, mocking Ness for her trepidation. So fast, everything happens: a few solo jumpers leap from the plane, followed by the tandem pair in front of Ness and her instructor, and then her instructor tells her to lift her legs and let him push them to the door, and then they are at the door, and Ness's feet are together and her hands are crossed over her chest and she's not sure she can do this, the ground is so far away, is there time to back out?
And then the world turns upside down.
Ness tries to remember what it was she was supposed to do—something with her legs, maybe? Kick someone in the butt? She can't even locate her legs; they aren't at the bottom of her torso where she's used to feeling them. She must have left them in the plane.
She manages to get her head up, and she arches her back as much as she can against this unremitting wind, and then she feels two sure hands on her legs, tucking them up and under. At least her instructor knew where to find them.
There are two brisk taps against her upper arms, and Ness throws them out like she's hugging the sky. She looks down and is surprised that it doesn't frighten her in the least to see the earth so far away. What frightens her is having no body. No matter where she looks, she can't see her body. And she can't feel her body, either. Only wind. It is strangely liberating, to be disembodied like this. When has her body ever caused her anything but trouble?
There is a sudden jerk and then gravity switches back on again. Ness looks down and sees her body—oh well, that's still there, then—and she looks up and sees a bright yellow parachute. She takes an experimental breath and is pleasantly surprised to find she can. Her mouth tastes strongly of ozone and of that crazy wind. The wind is gentle and loving, now, playing sweetly with the bits of hair that have escaped her braid.
"I don't believe in god," chants Ness calmly to herself. "I don't believe in god." Then, because she can't believe she's really doing this, she begins screaming it, loudly and with enthusiasm.
After a few seconds, she stops to refill her lungs, and in the pause she hears her instructor laughing at her.
"Shout it loud enough, maybe he'll hear," he says.
He has an accent, something sharp and rolling and delicate all at the same time. Why didn't Ness notice that before? She was probably too nervous. But nothing bad can ever happen to her again, and so she is bold and unafraid. For once.
"Where are you from?" she asks.
"Chile," the man answers. That explains the vague impression she had of dark hair and skin, but she wasn't paying close attention before the jump and doesn't really remember what he looks like. All she knows is that she trusts him with her life, and that he made her laugh twice on the way up to 14 000.
"What are you doing in LA?" she asks.
"Skydiving," he says cheekily.
Ness lets out a surprised laugh which pulls a long string of laughs behind it, one after the other. Her heart feels light as a cloud. She throws her arms out and throws her legs out and takes in a great lungful of 3 700 air and then screams at the top of her lungs, "I don't believe in goodddd!"
The Chilean man directs her attention to a loop of canvas and asks her if she wants to steer. Ness grabs hold of the thing, and then the same loop on the other side, and when she pulls it gently the sky and the earth turn in the other direction.
"How often do you do this?" she asks the man as she turns the earth and sky in a lazy figure-eight.
"Maybe ten times a day," he says. "Good, yeah?"
"Good," she agrees.
She turns them so that Jake is in view, a little way above them, and then she turns them so that he is gone and they are alone again.
"How do you feel?" asks the man. "You have to puke?"
"Nope," says Ness. "I took a Dramamine. I'm good as gold. I've never been so good. Never ever ever." There is a rush of something through her bloodstream that feels suspiciously like drugs, but in fact it is adrenaline. "Jake didn't want me to do this," she babbles on. "He doesn't want me to do most things. He likes it when I stay indoors, so I won't breathe in dirty air."
"Your dad?" guesses the man. Ness laughs delightedly.
"Might as well be!" she says brightly. Then she says, "I don't think we should land. Can we just stay up here?"
"I wish we could," says the man, "but gravity only pulls in one direction. Sorry."
"The sun's got more mass than the earth," says Ness. "Why doesn't the sun pull us up?"
"Because," says the man, laughing as he plays along, "the earth is closer, and gravity is a lazy son of a bitch."
"I'd rather have the sun," mutters Ness.
"Maybe next time," says the man. Ness throws her head back, against the man's chest, and takes in a big wobbly breath of air. Falling out of a plane has a way of putting things in perspective. She doesn't want to land. She doesn't want to walk back to Jake's car, and then let him open the door for her, and then sit down and strap her seatbelt and have Jake check it anyway because he doesn't trust her to do it right. She doesn't want to drive for an hour back to the city, silent when she wants to be talking, talking when she wants to shut up. She doesn't want to edit her own thoughts to make them palatable for her boyfriend, who is beautiful and who loves her but who spent too much of his life feeling abandoned. She doesn't want to go back to Jake's apartment and make love with him and then go to sleep in his arms and then wake up in his arms and then spend the rest of her goddamn life in his arms.
"There won't be a next time," says Ness morosely, but she says it quietly. The sun is setting soon and it is blinding her. It is as close to the ground as it ever gets. Maybe it's close enough she can reach it. "I don't want to land," she says again, and she looks down and the ground is measurably closer, much too close.
"How many jumps do you have left today?" she asks, trying not to let her voice waver, trying not to feel so despondent. Skydiving was a terrible idea: look what it's done to her perspective.
"This was the last one," he says. "After this I'm taking off."
"Taking off where?" asks Ness. Taking off. She loves the way he says it. Taking off, like an airplane. Back into the sky.
"Home," he says.
"Then what?" Ness asks, desperate for him to say something like Then I will feel shut down and stamped out, and she will know it's not just her, everyone feels this way all the time.
"Who knows?" says the man. "Maybe go for a drive. It's still early."
"A drive," says Ness. "Sounds perfect."
The ground is too close, and getting closer. The ground will pull her back. It always does. She will always remember this day as the one time she tried to leave the earth. Oh, yes, she'll say at parties, standing beside Jacob Black, her handsome fine devoted husband. Yes, I went skydiving once. What a blast!
"Are you okay?" asks the man. Both his hands come into view to take over the steering before they land.
"No," says Ness, eyeing the slender nut-brown fingers. "I'm terribly afraid."
"Of landing?"
"Yes."
And then the ground wins: Ness stretches her feet out in front of her and they slide fifteen feet over the ground on their butts, finally coming to a stop. Ness's instructor unclips them from each other and helps her to her feet.
"Are you sure you're going to be all right?" he asks her, incongruous light-brown eyes lighting up his dark-skinned face.
"What's the worst that can happen to me now?" she non-answers, a little hysterical. Jake is drifting down gently a few yards away. Ness holds out her hand and takes the Chilean man's hand and shakes it warmly and says, "Thank you for this."
He contemplates her bloodless face for a few seconds and says, "You just jumped out of a plane like it was nothing. You did good." And then he smiles, and his smile is an understanding one.
Ness is about to respond when she feels her upper arm being gently but firmly held, and Jake guides her away from Nahuel and the sky that she wanted so much to keep.
"Can't you be alone for five minutes without flirting with everything in sight?" he hisses at her.
"I wasn't flirting," mutters Ness. Jake doesn't listen. Ness plants her feet and says, "I have to go to the bathroom."
"Hurry up," says Jake. He is tight-lipped and angry. He will want to make sure she knows how much she wronged him, talking to another man when she had no reason to. He stands large and still and taps one foot impatiently.
Ness hurries into the bathroom, locks herself in a stall, and flips open her phone. She scrolls down the list of her contacts until she reaches the one that says Uncle Emmett. She presses Call.
"Emmett?" she whispers into the phone. "Can you meet me at Jake's place in like an hour? I need your help with something."
"Sure thing, Ness," he says. His voice is deep and reassuring.
"And Emmett?"
"Yes?"
"Bring your truck, will you? I need you to help me move some stuff out of Jake's apartment."
He asks, "How much stuff?"
"All of it," says Ness. She hangs up, uses the toilet, washes her hands and then goes out to meet Jake. She sees Nahuel over Jake's shoulder, bundling up the parachute. He looks up at her and smiles. She smiles back.
"What's funny?" asks Jake grumpily.
"Nothing," says Ness, wiping away her smile and storing it somewhere safe. "It's just that I still feel like I'm falling."
This was just a short one-off so I would have an excuse to write about my first skydive (I was honest to god strapped to a handsome daring Brazilian guy with a groovy sense of humor and an unusual-to-me name. I very seriously considered leaving my husband to run away with him. Then, because I would rather destroy fake relationships instead of real ones, I imagined the whole thing as a fanfic and here we are!). Review to let me know what you think. Feel free to leave suggestions for other stories. Thanks for reading!