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We land rightoff the coast, barely twenty feet out in the water. We couldn’t have gotten luckier with our landing if we tried, with only a few feet of water to fall into and a short walk up to the beach.
“What the fuck was that all about?! Why did we just jump out of an airplane? What the hell is wrong with you?” Faye screeches as soon as she’s stable enough to walk through the water without falling.
“Well, I already told you the plane was going to crash, didn’t I?” I reply, still riding the high I’m feeling from the descent. “Wasn’t that a beautiful experience? I remember the first time I jumped from an airplane.”
“You’re fucking insane! Where did the plane go? What’s going to happen with all of our things? Now I have nothing all over again!” she continues to shriek. Her parachute holds her back as she trudges up to the beach through the water, and it’s kind of funny to watch her get this upset when she can barely catch her breath.
“I needed the diversion. The plane will crash eventually, not sure where, though. What matters is that Grisha thinks that we’re dead from the crash. If he’s tracking us closely enough to know the second we touch down in Japan, it won’t take any time at all for him to restragetize,” I reply, dragging my own parachute behind me.
“Couldn’t you have just sent me home from Japan? Now I’m stuck in this fucked up situation with you and none of this even has anything to do with me! I fucking hate you!”
I roll my eyes, refusing to let her bad attitude affect how good I’m feeling. It’s been too long since I went skydiving, and I’m starting to remember why I used to do it all the time. I haven’t felt alive like this in years.
“You’ll get over it when you get all your new shit. You should know better than to think I’m going to make you suffer just because there was a miscalculation in my former plan. Please, you need to trust me more,” I reply.
She turns around and stares daggers through me. “I wouldn’t need to trust you if I were at home in my apartment doing all the boring shit that used to keep me occupied! Now I’m fighting for my life every single day, but at least I get a couple of free Louis Vuitton dresses! God, fuck this!”
It’s amusing to see how angry she’s getting, which I realize makes me a bit of an asshole. I can’t help it though. She has absolutely nothing to worry about or freak out over, yet here she is. I’m probably giving her the most exciting experiences of her life just from knowing who she is.
Once she’s seen the last of me, she’ll always feel like something is missing.
“You already know why I couldn’t do that. I don’t understand why I need to keep explaining this to you. Your life is in just as much danger as mine is now, and I’m trying to do the right thing by keeping you safe.”
She turns around, her eyes red from seawater, fatigue, and rage. “What the fuck do you mean by that? You just threw me out of a plane! There’s no way that you’re going to sit there and act like I’m being ungrateful.”
I follow her up to the beach where she sheds her parachute. It drifts behind her, steadily easing its way back into the waves until it washes past me.
“You need to face the fact that you got caught up in this. It’s like you think I kidnapped you just to take you on a really shitty vacation. Do you think I enjoy jumping out of planes to fake my death? Is that something you think I do for fun?”
She stops in her tracks, glaring back at me. “I don’t know how much more evidence you need that I’m not going to fuck you over. I don’t belong here with you, and I definitely shouldn’t be running away fromyourmortal enemies. I doubt I would even do this for someone I really loved!”
Something about the last part of her statement plucks at my nerves. Perhaps it’s just been too long since I’ve felt the love of a good woman, but right now it feels like she knew the exact thing to say to get under my skin.
“Okay, well bitching at me isn’t going to get you any closer to home. You know what will? Finding a place to stay for the night. It’s getting dark.”
She begins to weep silently, and I roll my eyes to myself. “Jesus, what it is this time?”
“You mean to tell me that you have absolutely no plan? We’re just stranded in Japan until you figure out something better to do?!” she shouts, the noise scaring off a flock of nearby seagulls.
“No, I don’t have a plan. But I’ve done far scary shit in my life. The locals here are friendly, someone should be able to help us. The town is small though, so a lot of people don’t speak English,” I reply, suddenly feeling compelled to collapse into the sand.
“I speak some Japanese, I might be able to find us some help,” she replies, her affect still frustrated but a bit less hopeless.
My ears perk up, and I look at her suspiciously. “Wait, why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t think I needed to. I thought you were going to have us set up somewhere like you said you would. I figured a guy with as much money as you had a translator or something,” she replies, her expression tight and unforgiving as we both approach a sidewalk.
I’m shocked and confused as to why she would have left out this particular detail. Even if she knew I was rich enough to have a translator, how the hell would her Japanese skills not have come up in conversation? And why does she speak Japanese in the first place?
“What is it that you do for work?” I ask.
She pauses before answering, glancing at me as she clearly considers whether she is about to just lie to me. I can see it in her eyes, and the fact that I myself haven’t been transparent with her leads me to believe that she’ll lie out of spite.
“I’m in finance,” she replies with an unenthusiastic tone.
Now she’s gotten herself caught in a web of lies that she’ll have to work too hard to maintain. She might as well just come clean now or I’ll have to humiliate her. “Oh yeah? What kind of finance work do you do?”
