Page 37 of The Woman Left Behind

On the other hand, pride would carry her only so far, and in order to wipe her face she had to release one of the toggles. Not going to happen.

Besides, the effort would have been useless. She couldn’t stop crying. Through the blur of her tears she identified the landing zone, jerkily pulled on the toggles to steer herself toward it. The ground was coming up fast, gaining in speed. She started to pull her feet up, then remembered she wasn’t tandem with Levi now, she had to land on her own feet. She choked on a sob, flared the parachute the way Boom had taught her, and her feet hit the ground.

Her landing had none of the powerful grace of Levi keeping his balance and taking a couple of steps, it was more that she stumbled and went down, hitting knees first then tumbling flat on her face before the billowing chute pulled her to the side. She wanted to just lie there and sob, but there were things she had to do. She struggled to her knees and unhooked, scrabbled around to begin hauling in her parachute, which was streaming across the ground like some kind of giant amoeba. It felt as if the fabric was fighting her, trying to catch the wind again and pull free.

She wanted to let the damn thing go, but controlling the parachute and pulling it in had been drilled into her by Boom. She hauled on it, scrabbling on her knees, throwing her weight back, digging in her heels. Her movements were clumsy, or the chore wouldn’t have been nearly as difficult. She was bad at this, spectacularly bad.

Then she had the damn thing under control. She sat on her ass on the ground, pulled a handful of the nylon to her, and buried her face in it while sobs choked her and her whole body shook.

She knew Levi and Boom were both on the ground, knew they had gathered in their nylon; she heard steps as one, maybe both, of them approached her. She didn’t look up.

“Babe.” It was Levi. A hard hand grasped her shoulder. She twisted away from his touch, scrambled to the side, and managed to get to her feet even though she had to put a hand on the ground to brace herself. She felt a rock under her fingers and before she knew it she’d whipped her arm around and hurled the rock at him.

He jerked his head aside barely in time to keep from being brained with it. He was too close, and she’d thrown thousands of rocks during her childhood. She saw him scowl, saw him start to bark something at her, then he saw her face and closed his mouth. Behind her Boom laughed; Levi held up a warning hand and Boom cut off the sound like slicing it with a knife.

She stood there, crying and angry, clutching a fistful of nylon in one hand and her other hand knotted into a fist. She wished she had a whole supply of rocks to throw at them. She wished she had a hammer to throw at them. She wished she had her car here so she could just drive off and leave them standing here, because she wanted to do a lot of damage to both of them and there was no way she could unless they let her, which took all the fun out of it.

“You jerks,” she gasped in a wobbly voice. She could barely talk, her throat was so raw.

Carefully Levi said, “You should have known we weren’t stupid enough to jump without a parachute.”

“Idid!” she shot back, glaring at him through her tears. “On your orders! So evidently I was stupid enough.”

Boom winced. “Got us there.”

Levi was watching her as if she were a rabid squirrel, about to pounce on him. She’d had all she could take today, she wasdone. Swallowing hard, she turned her back on them and began gathering the parachute up in her arms.

Their ride was there, and silently Jina marched toward the pickup. Logistically she assessed her options: if she got in the back of the king cab, she’d be riding beside one of them, and she didn’t want either of them that close. If she got in the front with the driver, they’d both have to get in back. Good enough. That’s exactly what she did, climbing into the front passenger seat and slamming the door before they even reached the truck. She held the parachute bundled on her lap and stared straight ahead.

She expected to be taken back to that godforsaken Twin Otter—she was ready to blow the damn thing up, except they probably had a replacement—but when the driver asked, Levi said, “We’re done for today, take us to the truck.”

The relief was overwhelming.

During the short ride to the truck, Jina accepted the bitter realization that she had to do something. As much as she felt her dudgeon was justified, that wasn’t the way team dynamics worked, especially not a paramilitary team. Likely none of the guys would feel the way she did, or even if they did, they’d bury it under their guy-camaraderie reaction, with cussing and some insults, then laughing. She felt up to the cussing and insults, but laughing was beyond her right now.

She couldn’t be a girl about this. If she wanted to be part of the team, she had to put up with a certain amount of bullshit. Besides, yeah, if she hadn’t already been so mentally exhausted, she’d have realized the obvious, that they had chutes. They’d even put them on in front of her. She just hadn’t been capable of paying attention right then, and that was on her.

That didn’t mean they wouldn’t pay.

They had nothing to say as they got into Boom’s truck, which suited her fine. She got in back, positioned herself in the middle, which if they’d given that a minute’s thought would have alerted them to the possibility of retaliation. But she’d cried and made them uncomfortable, and they were inclined to leave well enough alone. She wished she hadn’t cried, but she had, so now she’d use the advantage.

She waited, biding her time, looking for the right moment. She wanted some traffic around them, but nothing close behind.

Levi took out his phone and started texting. They stopped at a traffic light; Boom lightly drummed his fingertips against the steering wheel, looking off to the left. The traffic light changed, and they started forward. Jina made a quick check behind, saw the coast was clear; she drew up her knees, yelled, “Look out!,” as loudly as she could, and with all the strength in her legs kicked their seat backs.

Boom slammed on the brakes. “Shit!” Tires squealed and smoked. He and Levi were both thrown forward against their seat belts, and both braced for impact while wildly looking around for whatever was about to T-bone them. Jina was already braced, her legs against their seat backs. The truck slid a little sideways, then rocked to a stop.

Silence.

Slowly the two big men in the front turned their heads to glare at her.

She smiled, buffed her nails against her sweatshirt, and said, “Payback.”

After dragging her weary butt home, Jina showered, washed her hair, put antibiotic salve on her scrapes, drank some hot tea with honey to soothe her throat, then put on clean sweats and crashed on the couch. She had the energy of a noodle, and she didn’t want to think about the day, not even the Levi-kissing-her part. With the TV on and a light blanket over her, she even napped for a couple of hours and woke feeling hungry, so evidently the emotional trauma hadn’t been bad enough to affect her stomach.

Holy shit. She’d jumped out of an airplane—three times. Okay, so she hadn’t jumped so much as she’d been thrown, but still. If she added the altitude three times, today she’d fallen more than the distance from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom. That was quite an accomplishment, but she didn’t think she’d tell her mom about it.

The sun was going down and she was thinking about ordering in a pizza when her doorbell rang.

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