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This time, being carried seemed non-optional.
“I’m really not okay with that,” I said. “Because I don’t see a ladder. Or a bridge.”
He picked up the lantern and shoved it at me. I took it—and then he took me, picking me up despite my protests.
“I’ll kick you with this cast in your nuts!” I threatened—then I realized I didn’t even know if hehadnuts, which was just the level of absurdity I needed to feel like I was cracking up again.
But before I could fight him further, he’d strung me up in front of him in a sack, the same as I’d wrestled out of earlier—only this time he left a gap for me to see out of, which was horrifying because the first thing we did was turn upside down.
“Oh, fuck!” I shouted, and let go of the lantern.
He sent a zip of silk out to snag it before it was lost, and fastened it to another part of his body, which let me see everything that he’d been up to without me.
He’d...made a suspension bridge of sorts. Like, half of one, across the ceiling, and we were traveling on it right now, like an upside-down train on a train track. Spray from the river below was trapped along all sorts of thinner silklines, glimmering like diamonds, and I realized it was far wider than I could have even guessed; no wonder it’d taken him so long to create.
If I weren’t pissed at being manhandled—or spiderhandled—and afraid of heights, I might have even thought it was beautiful.
As it was though, the second we reached the far side, I shouted, “Set me down!”
I squirmed so he’d get the picture, and he did, cutting me out of the web sack slowly enough to let me lean on him for support with my one good leg.
“Okay, back to being a horsey,” I said, hobbling around him.
I heard him give a great sigh, but he tilted himself nonetheless.
Eleven
SLOANE
I fellasleep on that weird bouncy-muscly between-his-legs part of him again—and again woke up to him rocking me.
“What is it?” I wriggled off of him slightly better this time, less afraid than I had been to use his legs for support, before moving to lean against a nearby wall. But by then he’d positioned the lantern so that I could realize our predicament.
We needed to go up, but up was complicated. There was a tunnel ahead of us, but it was angled, full of rocks, and sure to be rough going.
“Are you really going to fit through there?”
I wasn’t even sure thatI’d fit through there, if I tried.
He’d managed the bridge thing, though. I supposed he’d been a spider-dude his whole life.
Just like I’d always been a somewhat useless rich girl.
I mean, I didn’t start off thinking that was going to be me, right? I wanted to be an astronaut. Or a vet. But then my dad only wanted me to get straight As and didn’t want to admit that sometimes readingwashard because he was a super-genius and I was dyslexic, and ever after that we were just pulling apart.
I’d always thought I was doing some good in the world though—at least people around me were having a good time, right?
Until the island . . .
Spider-dude settled his hands on my shoulders and looked meaningfully at me, pulling my attention back to him.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you need me in one whole piece. I got you,” I said, throwing his little circle gesture in the air. He made it back to me, much more deliberately, and I heaved a sigh. “Fine. What do you need me to do?”
He knelt down, very awkwardly, in front of me—and I figured things out.
This time he needed me to actually ride him like a horse, as opposed to pretending he was an eight-legged chariot.
“Uh, okay,” I said, hobbling over.Good thing I took ballet, because Jesus—I flung my right leg with its cast over his wide and muscular lower back, onto the far side of his torso, and then lumbered aboard.
