“Don’t worry. I can—”
“I’ll pull it,” Yumi says, wrapping a protective hand around the loop over her shoulder.
“Are you sure?”
Her chuckle is, surprisingly, more resigned than anxious. “We already lostThe Adventureverse. Might as well go out doing something I willnever”—she fixes me with a meaningful look—“do again.”
“So you’re telling me this isn’t the beginning of a new bungee jumping phase?”
“No. This is the bungee jumping phase’s last hurrah,” she says solemnly. “After today, I can say I did it. Hated every second, but I did it.”
A rush of pride goes through me, a cascading tingle from my head to my toes. “You did.”
I watch her face as the rules for pulling the rip cord are explained. She’s so beautiful in this light. Unsurprising. She’s always gorgeous, but it’s dusk now—the horizon in a fight between nightfall and sunlight, lavender clouds laced with gold holding back the night sky—and her profile glows in the LED strips that line our glide path. God. I am suffering under the unbearable urge to trace a finger down the bridge of her nose, over her cupid’s bow, down her lips, and across her jaw. And an even more unbearable urge to take the same path with my mouth.
When the instructor finishes his explanation, Yumi turns to find me staring at her. She blinks. “What?” But her face says she knows exactly what.
I raise my eyebrows at her. “You.”
“Me?”
I couldn’t have asked for a better setup. “Ping-Ponganiban.”
A light thwack hits my shoulder. “I am facing my biggest fear. You cannot call me You Me Ping-Ponganiban right now.”
I don’t know what takes over me, but I reach down and bring her free hand to my lips. “Sorry.”
Her eyes go wide at the exact moment the winch beginshoisting us up, so I don’t know if her gasp is at the way we sway as we’re raised or at the kiss.
Yumi was a little wrong about this being less terrifying than any of the other heights. It may be shorter, but facing the ground as you leave it is a distinctly horrible experience—even for the non-fearful among us. I can only imagine how she feels as the whir and clank of the cables shudders through the harness. As the ground pulls away from us and the Top 40 pop song playing through the park’s speakers fades into the background.
“You all right?” I ask, squeezing her hand tightly.
She hums, but it sounds like neither assent nor denial.
My mind runs through a million responses—jokes I could make, silence I could hold—but one thought surfaces over and over again, insisting that I say it. “Hey, guess what?”
The moment stretches and expands, and I notice everything. The crisp, breezeless air. The distant sound of voices. The colorful lights of mainland Singapore just across the strait on the other side of the island. And Yumi, of course.
She turns to me, so close that her breath, warm and vaguely sweet, dances across my face and sends goose bumps down my back. It’s cliché, I guess, but I could drown in her deep brown eyes. It would be a slow death: molasses, La Brea tar pits, quicksand that compresses and consumes. Almost black, like the volcanic soil of Iceland, soft and cool and infuriatingly vast.
“What?” It’s intoxicating, this girl—who has one foot in every future, whose attention is always split, always centered on the thing ahead—focused fully on me for a tiny sliver of time.
I smile. “We’re onThe Adventureverse.”
“We are.” And she smiles, too, as if she’s surprised. Like she hadn’t considered this before. “We’re about toloseThe Adventureverse.”
“We are,” I say through a laugh.
Her voice is softer, more tentative, when she asks, “Do you regret it? Was it the right choice?”
There’s no hesitation in any part of me. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
A grin breaks over her face. It’s wide and untempered and as beautiful as always.
“You?” I ask, trying not to hope for any specific answer.
“Best decision I ever made.” She holds the rip cord aloft. “You ready?”
