Page 31 of The Woman Left Behind

“Goggles.”

A pair dangled in front of her, and she put them on. Goggles. So it was really about to happen.

“You’ll do fine,” Boom said reassuringly. “Ace has you.” Then the traitor helped Levi shift with her over to the open door. Lips trembling, she looked up at Boom and started to say something, maybe even beg him to help her, but before she could make a sound, Levi heaved them through the open door of the plane—

Plunging into hell.

Face-first.

Jina jerked and stiffened, instantly engulfed in a screaming wind, her head forced back against Levi’s shoulder while her eyes rolled wildly around so that the brown and green of the earth flipped sickeningly with the merciless blue bowl of the sky. She was screaming, too, along with the wind, deep hoarse screams that scraped her throat raw. It was all too much, worse than she’d expected, more than she could handle. The fear she’d been halfway controlling seemed to explode inside her, a great black force that blew out of her chest and expanded in a split second to swallow her whole, and she fell into the black.

“Jina! Babe! Wake the fuck up!”

The black didn’t want to give her up. She didn’t want it to give her up, she wanted to stay right there, insensate and safe. She slowly resurfaced to the distant sound of Levi bellowing the command to wake up at her. The sound got closer and closer as consciousness returned, and she opened her eyes to stare dazedly around. Her head bobbled to the side, but she was able to catch herself, and she realized they were still in the air, still going down. She jerked again, pushing herself back against him as if she could force herself through his body, anything to put distance between her and the approaching ground.

“It’s okay, we’re under canopy, we aren’t falling.”

He kept repeating that, the words meaningless at first, but after a few times they began making sense and she tilted her head back to stare at the huge white mushroom blooming overhead. The movement moved her head against Levi’s chest and she saw the underside of his chin, his strong jaw, deeply tanned and bristled because he hadn’t shaved that morning. Odd how that seemed so obvious, and why she noticed at all, when she felt so sick. Her heart was slamming against her rib cage with such force she could feel her bones vibrating and she thought she might vomit after all. The fear seemed to come in uncontrollable waves, barely giving her time to catch a breath before she was swamped again. A high-pitched keen of distress vibrated in her throat.

“Babe. You’re all right.” His deep voice was right beside her ear, so close she could feel his breath in her hair. “Here, take the toggles.”

“No!” She thrashed her head back and forth, shrinking from the suggestion. The toggles represented this whole experience, and it was as bad as she’d feared it would be. It was awful. She’d never passed out before, but now she felt as if she might faint again, and she didn’t care what Levi thought or if this got her booted out of training. All she wanted was to be on the ground, and all in one piece. Normally her determination would carry her through a sticky situation, but this wasn’t just sticky, it was horrifying beyond her imagining. She’d felt the same way about bungee jumping—not going to do it, no way, no how.

“All right, all right, you don’t have to.” That rough voice was oddly soothing. Maybe he thought he could afford to be kind now that she was very likely out of the program.

Strange how now that they were actually floating instead of plummeting, she could tell they were moving, going down. At least she was upright instead of facedown, staring at her death. She could look out at the horizon—but she didn’t, because what was below her had her in an unholy grip. To escape it she closed her eyes, not wanting to see the ground getting closer and closer; her whole body felt limp, her muscle tone gone, and despite herself she let her head fall back against his shoulder again. Oh dear God, she was held in place by four buckles. Four.Leviwas the one who wore the parachute harness, not her. If the buckles failed, or the straps broke, she was gone.

“When I tell you, lift your legs straight out so they aren’t in my way when we land,” he said. That kind note was still in his tone. She hated him for being nice in the face of her failure. If he’d been this way from the beginning—no, it was probably better that he hadn’t. She didn’t want to like him at all.

She forced her eyes open, because it seemed cowardly not to. The minutes crawled, but at the same time the ground was coming up way too fast. Her breath began hitching in her throat again, and her heartbeat was so fast she was essentially limp in the harness. Details on the ground began to take on sharp clarity, individual leaves on the trees swam into focus, and Levi said, “Legs up!” in that bark of command she was more accustomed to.

Her body obeyed, as she had obeyed so many of his orders. Her thigh muscles shook, but she lifted her legs so she was in an L shape.

It was like seeing her car was about to crash but being unable to stop it. The ground was rushing toward them now, a blurred impression of the black asphalt road, the brown grass, a red cross painted on the ground to make the LZ. A jolt shook her in the harness as Levi touched down, his powerful legs absorbing most of the shock. He made a couple of running steps, then stopped as casually as if falling thousands of feet through the air was an everyday occurrence, and began unhooking them. She was so numb she couldn’t quite absorb that they were on the ground, safe, without any broken bones or anything. She hadn’t smashed herself into red mist.

The harness latches released, and she began dropping, sliding down his body; he caught her, one steely arm around her waist, and said, “Put your feet down now.”

Okay,she thought, everything feeling distant, even herself, as if her mind had disconnected from her body. Still, she put her feet down and he bent down enough to stand her on the ground, then immediately turned around to begin gathering in the canopy.

Jina sat down. She didn’t have any choice about it because her legs folded like noodles, but at least she sat instead of collapsing full-length. The chill damp of the ground soaked into her pants, and in the length of time it took Levi to gather and secure the canopy she began shivering.Wet ground was soft,she thought,and soft ground was good.

She pulled off her goggles and drew her knees up so she could rest her forehead on them and close her eyes. Shutting out the world was a relief; if she could have deafened herself, she would have, to create a total cocoon, but she couldn’t and sound still intruded. She could hear Levi talking—at first she thought he was talking to himself, then realized he was on a headset talking to Boom. Likely they’d been in communication the whole humiliating, terrifying time. Boom knew how pathetically she’d failed.

She didn’t care. For once in her life, she didn’t care that she hadn’t been able to make herself handle what was in front of her. Parachuting was going to be her Waterloo, because she couldn’t make herself go through that again.

I have to.

The inner whisper came up from her depths. She tried to push the words away, because there had never been anything she’d run into before that had so terrified her beyond functioning. Sure, she’d been scared before, she’d hit obstacles before that she hadn’t thought she could get over, but she’d kept at it with dogged persistence that maybe went beyond the bounds of good sense. This was different. This was fear on a primal level she hadn’t experienced before. This almost reached the level ofI’d rather slit my wrists than do that again.

But even below that at the cellular level was something that made her take a deep breath and face the awful truth.

She had to.

She heard Levi’s footsteps come closer, felt him looming over her, blotting out the faint warmth of the sun and leaving her even more chilled, there on the wet ground.

Forcing her lungs to pull in enough air to speak, she raised her colorless face from her knees and looked up at the big man who stood looking down at her. “Let’s go again,” she said.

Ten

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