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Grayson
A FLUTTERING NOISE IN THE distance wakes me up.
It doesn’t take me any time to remember where I am. You don’t tend to get that deep of a slumber on a dirt floor in a rainforest, the woman of your dreams snuggled up next to you. In fact, although I’d like to get out of here and take a hot shower and I’m achy in places I didn’t know I had, I don’t want this part to end. I don’t want Mila to wake up and decide last night was a mistake. Or go back to the real world and have her realize this isn’t what she wants. I don’t think I could handle it if she did. Well, I’d handle it, but I wouldn’t like it.
The fluttering noise gets closer, and I have no idea what time it is, but by the look of the light-blue and pink sky, it’s not too long past dawn.
Mila shifts, making a little noise as she does. It’s the second time I’ve spent the night with her, but this is the first one where she’s been in my arms. I love it. I loveher. I was kidding myself when I’d thought I was only half in love with this woman. I’m 1000 percent in love with this woman. I love her mind, the way she thinks, the way she keeps me on my toes. I love how she looks, of course; I’m definitely attracted to her beauty, but that’s such a small part of it. I want her—the whole package. She’d probably freak out if I told her right now, so I’ll keep all that to myself.
When the noise gets even closer, I realize what it is: a helicopter.
“Mila,” I say, lightly jiggling the arm she’s lying on to wake her up.
“Grayson,” she says. “What’s going on?”
“I can hear a helicopter,” I tell her.
“What? Really?”
Just as I say this, the noise becomes much louder and a blue helicopter comes into view.
We both get up and start waving our hands at it and yelling, even though I know they can’t hear us over the engine and the thwapping sound of the rotor blade.
“Do you think they’re here for us?” Mila yells over the noise. She looks to be favoring her bad leg, but she’s standing up. So, either her ankle is better this morning or she’s got adrenaline making up the difference.
“I don’t know,” I yell back.
We keep up the waving, both hands in the air, but then the helicopter starts to fly away.
Mila looks defeated, and I get it. I was hoping it was someone looking for us, even though we haven’t been gone a full twenty-four hours.
“Wait,” Mila says. “They’re coming back!”
We wave and yell as the helicopter comes back toward us. This time, it stops and hovers over the clearing, not too far above, but it’s obvious they’ve spotted us. After a few minutes, we see someone being lowered down toward the clearing on a cable.
“Oh, thank goodness,” Mila says, wrapping her arms around me.
“THANKS FOR SAVING US,” I tell Shane once we’re off the helicopter and in a black SUV, the driver taking us over to the hotel.
“What’s money for, if I can’t use it to save my friends?” he says, like a spoiled socialite that he’s most definitely not. Well, he’s spoiled for sure.
It turns out Shane and Nadia didn’t take long to start worrying about us. Once we didn’t show up at the hotel before the rehearsal dinner, they both started to feel concerned. In the end, they cut the rehearsal dinner short, and through Vik, they were able to find the rental car company, which had GPS in the car and gave them our initial location. Then Vik was able to find our last known location on the app. And that’s how they narrowed down the area.
Shane notified the police but chartered a helicopter to start the search himself at the first sign of light. Between the GPS tracker on the car and the last known signal from the app, they were able to track us down. The fact that we’d been in a clearing big enough for them to see us was just pure luck.
Mila sits next to me in the car, our bodies close together. We hold hands as we drive toward the hotel, and after a bit, she falls asleep, her head on my shoulder. Shane, who’s sitting up front, turns in his seat to look back at us and gives me a very knowing facial expression, eyebrows high on his head. I respond with a smile. I may have just been rescued by a helicopter after being lost in the rainforest and restlessly sleeping on a dirt floor, but I’ve never felt better. I suspect it’s because of the woman sitting next to me.
The car waits for us as we grab our things from our first hotel, then we drive over to the Four Seasons, where we’re given key cards, and then head up to our rooms.
Both Mila and I are on the fourteenth floor, and I walk her to her room even though mine is just a few doors down. She’s only slightly limping now, able to put some weight on her ankle.
To everyone else, we probably look like two people who were lost in the rainforest overnight, covered in dirt and smelling like who knows what. But to me, Mila looks beautiful.
She parks her overpacked suitcase by her door before taking a step toward me and placing her hands on my chest, looking up at me. I let go of my bag and wrap my arms around her.
“I just wanted to say that of all the people in the world I could’ve gotten lost with, I’m glad it was you,” she says.
“You sure about that?” I ask, searching her face. We haven’t gotten a chance to talk about last night, about the kissing and all the things that were said. “I mean, I wasn’t exactly a Boy Scout up there.”
