My goodness, Noah looked like he could bench-press an entire ship, he was that strong. A cruise ship, full of thousands of people, who weighed extra because they’d all been eating five complimentary meals a day and having free soft drinks . . .
A cruise ship?
An image of a cruise-ship brochure flashed through my mind, and then disappeared back out again before I could even inspect the memory. After following Maxine and Noah around for a while, orientating myself with everything, we found ourselves standing in front of an interesting-looking contraption.
I looked up at the pyramid-shaped rope climber. A big steel structure with a spiderweb mesh of ropes crisscrossing it. A man had just scaled it all the way to the top, like bloody Spider-Man. And then, he’d turned around and come back down, face first, crawling on it as if crawling down the side of a building. He made it look so effortless.
“Wow!” I said as he disembarked. “That looks like fun.”
“That’s actually pretty advanced,” Maxine said.
“Nooooo, it looks so easy.” I walked up to it and pushed the web of ropes with my hands. It wasn’t as tight as I thought it would be and moved around much more than I’d anticipated.
“Don’t let it fool you, just because you see those in children’s playgrounds. This is an adult version.”
“Psssshhh!” I tsked and flipped my head back. I knew I could do this. Much like I knew I could eat a chili. I knew I could climb.
“Well, go for it,” Maxine said, “you’ll never know until you try.”
“Exactly!” I gripped the ropes in my hands.
“Are you going to do that?” Noah asked, coming around the corner. I only turned around to reply to him briefly. That had been the intention, anyway. But it didn’t pan out that way, because when my eyes caught sight of him I found it a little hard to prise them away.
He was sweaty. Wet shirt clinging to him like a second skin. His muscles looked bigger and bulgier than before. Probably from all those jumpy, lungey whatevers he’d been doing. He had these sexy lines of veins that ran up his arms and into the back of his hands and . . .
Look away!I turned my head quickly and focused my attention on the ropes, trying to hide the smile that had swept across my face, quite against my will, I might add. I had not given that smile permission to take up residence on my face like that, but it had. And it was very inconvenient.
I felt a kind of hot flutter in my stomach, another completely new sensation to me. In all my few days of consciousness, I’d never experienced anything like it. It was a little like the bolt that had turned into the wave, but this time it wasn’t residing in my chest so much as residing a little more south of it.I made a quick mental note to secretly add to my list later that I clearly liked men, and muscular ones at that.
“It’s a lot harder than it looks,” Noah said from behind me.
“Don’t worry,” I called over my shoulder, not looking back at him because I was still trying to swallow away the smile that had consumed my face. “I think I’m a climber!” I put my foot onto the first rope and tried to climb, but the thing swung wildly.
“Whoooo!” I hung on and tried to stop it from swinging.
“It doesn’t really keep very still,” Maxine pointed out. “You need a strong core.”
Core?What was a core? I didn’t know what it was, but I was sure I had one.
“It’s okay! I have one of those!” I called, and this time I think I heard Noah chuckle. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. In fact, it only spurred me on. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but eventually I was managing. Although it was starting to hurt like hell. My arms and legs and stomach were burning as if on fire. I’d never experienced such bodily, fiery feelings before. Until this moment, I hadn’t known they existed. Pain, I understood. But this burning, just below the skin, as if my muscles had been set alight,well, that was a new one. But I persisted. Resisting the burn and climbing higher. But when the burn turned into a twitch, a shake, that I could actually see happening in my arms and legs . . .
“OH MY . . . AAAAH!” I yelled as I lost my footing on the rope and disaster struck.
CHAPTER 21
My feet slipped into the mesh and the force of my body drove my legs all the way through, the ropes climbing my thighs until they finally stopped right at the top. The force of it threw me backwards and I reached out to stop myself, closing my eyes tightly, not wanting to see the ground rushing towards me. Only there was no way I was falling, not with my legs so tightly knotted into the rope mesh. So instead of tumbling out of the thing, which would have actually been preferable, my arms and shoulders slipped into two mesh holes and the force of my fall pushed me right in there. Deep, until I felt the ropes cutting into my shoulders. But it didn’t stop there.
My body shook violently, and with each move the ropes kept tightening around me like nooses. And when it was all over, when everything no longer moved, I opened my eyes and looked at the world. I was upside down. Stretched out on my back, my legs wedged in, my arms wedged in, and I was just hanging there.
“Are you alright?” Noah shouted from down below.
“NO! Help!”
“Oh my God!” The usually calm Noah sounded panicked, which unsettled me greatly. Blood rushed into my face and pooled somewhere in my forehead.
“I’m coming,” Noah called, and even though all the blood was making my head feel bigger than I think it really was, it didn’t stop me having the thought that this was rather gallant of him. Coming to my upside-down rescue.
I watched as Noah started climbing the mesh ropes, followed by Maxine, who was rushing up it like a pro. The shaking of the ropes as they climbed, only seemed to wedge me in even tighter. A small crowd had gathered below, most of them large muscle-bound men, some with their shirts off. Some looked shocked. Some were shaking their head. Some were smiling. Finally, Noah and Maxine reached me. It felt like it took two forevers just to get to me.
