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Twenty-Three
HAYDEN
“You ready for this?”
Reese smirked as he nodded, waving me off with his usual swagger. He hadn’t done this before. None of us had. But he’d treat it just like everything else in his life: as if he were an expert, a pro. Someone who’d done a thousand jumps from a thousand airplanes, rather than this being his very first one.
“How do you thinkshe’sdoing?” Reese asked.
He was talking about Brooke. She and Devin were behind us by about twenty minutes, in a different aircraft.
“She’ll be fine,” I told him. “I haven’t seen her balk on anything, yet. Inside the Race or out.”
He nodded his full agreement. “She definitely rolls with stuff, I’ll give her that,” he said, adding a grin. “A real trooper.”
Down below, the landing zone was coming into view: a dozen or so solar-powered light fixtures, illuminating a spectral circle in the middle of nowhere. All around it, stretching for miles in every direction, the desert was complete darkness.
“Shit…” I heard Reese swear over the constant drone of the plane’s twin propellers. “That looks so tiny from up here.”
Our half-day off had ended early in the afternoon, when were flown from Hawaii back to the States. Rather than land in some city on the west coast, we’d passed straight over California and touched down at a little airstrip somewhere in the Nevada desert.
And that’s where we’d been clipped to skydive instructors, via a tandem parachute jump.
At night.
Into the middle of fucking nowhere.
It was exactly the kind of thing the Insane World Race might do, including letting us live off sand and cactus-juice for a day or so before telling us where the next golden bell might be hidden. But that was the game. It was all part of the stuff they put you through.
We’d discussed Brooke at length of course, weighing her strengths and weaknesses. As a teammate she was already radically different than Melissa. More calculated and precise, and more prone to think something through before jumping in with both feet. Her patience would serve us well in the more cerebral challenges, but she had yet to prove herself in the more raw, visceral sense. In that respect, our past partner had definitely been one badass bitch.
Yet when it came to sportsmanship, we really didn’t know what to think. Melissa would’ve been more likely to kick that lost plank even further beneath the platform, whereas Brooke had pointed it out to one of our strongest competitors. Then again, alliances might be important. Just because we hadn’t forged any the first time we’d run the Race didn’t mean they couldn’t be vital to getting us further along, especially with this level of competition.
And we’d discussed Brooke in other ways, too. Ways in which she wasmuchmore than just a teammate. Ways that had awakened long-suppressed yet very intense feelings and emotions, bringing us instantly back to more than a year ago, when the three of us were probably the closest we’d ever been.
Brooke had taken us back to that wondrous time without even knowing it. For a sun-soaked week we were able to go back in time. Do all the same things we missed doing so much with a shared girlfriend, falling into all our old habits. Only this time we were doing it with someone even more receptive, more flexible. A sharp, spitfire of a woman who was definitely more loving and appreciative of us as a whole.
Cutting our vacation even one day short was brutal, especially with all we had planned for her. Sexually, yes — we’d missed out on one epically-planned final evening. But emotionally…
Emotionally we’d decided to make a move. We’d planned on inviting her up to Minnesota to stay with us for a little while, and see if the magic between us wasn’t just a byproduct of being spoiled by paradise.
Instead, Noah had happened. And of course,this.
“What happens after we land?” Reese elbowed me, squinting through one of the small, porthole windows.
The landing zone was a lot bigger now, but still 13,500 feet below according to the altimeter strapped to my wrist. And I could see lights leading off, into the desert. Tiny red ones, blue ones, white ones…
“Fuck if I know,” I shouted over the wind, as the big rolling door on the side of the aircraft was abruptly pulled open.
Oh shit.
“Ready for this?” my tandem instructor shouted into my ear, echoing my words from three minutes ago. He shifted us forward, to what looked like the third position to jump.
“As long as you know where the ripcord is,” I yelled back.
“You’re pulling the ripcord, mate,” he grinned over my shoulder. His Australian accent seemed to have gotten heavier somehow. “Not me.”
We’d been given fifteen minutes of instruction. That was it. If we managed to pull the ripcord ourselves, in or around the proper range of six-thousand feet, we were golden. If not…
