She rolled her hands to illustrate. Which just seemed to make him more panicked.
“I’m trying, I’m trying. I swear to god I am. And some kind of god actually exists to me at this point, so you know that I must be telling the truth.”
“I know that you’re being extremely weird right now.”
“Okay, but not so weird that you’re going to stop being my friend all over again, right?” he said, despairingly. And then with even more despondency in his voice: “Because if I’ve blown it already over innuendos I definitely did not mean to say, I might lose my mind just a little bit.”
“You haven’t blown it, and you don’t have to lose your mind. Just, you know. Calm down.”
“I will. I totally will,” he insisted. But he still looked flushed. He still looked jittery. As if the whole thing had unsettled him far more than it really should have. And when she went to hand him the rope to tie around her middle, he didn’t seem to want to do it.
He just stared at it in his hands. Then stared at her waist. Then back at his hands again. And all in a way that made her want to shake him, and say,I am never going to get the wrong impression here. I barely even got the wrong impression over your hand almoston my butt while we accidentally watched a live sex show. That was all nothing, so why would I ever think anything more about this?
But of course she couldn’t.
That would only draw attention to the weirdness.
So instead she laughed and nudged his arm and said, “Come on.”
Then watched him visibly swallow, and reach toward her, in the slowest and most agonized way she could imagine. As if shehadsaid she believed his sexual innuendoes, and now he was terrified of making the situation worse. Of making her moony-eyed, over his big hands on her body.
Instead of how she actually felt: like stone, like a rock, like a completely immovable mountain. She didn’t care that he slipped the rope around her, so gently. Or that she felt his fingers brush her skin, where her sweater rode up at the back. And it didn’t matter to her that every breath he took seemed all hot against the nape of her neck.
Not to mention shaky.
Man, it was really shaky.
He sounded like he’d recently run up a hill. Helookedlike he’d recently run up a hill. She could see perspiration gleaming on the curve of his throat, out of the corner of her eye. But still she didn’t react. She didn’t do anything but stand there, frozen, until he finally, finally pulled away.
And if she let out her own breath in one long almost-gasp when he did, well. That didn’t mean anything. Nothing meant anything. It was fine, everything was fine. Nothing to see here, she thought, as she turned to face him.
Or at least, she tried to turn to face him.
But he suddenly appeared to be at a different angle.
A very low angle.Did you just step into a hole, she almost said.
Then she saw the startled look on his face. And the way he was scrambling for the trailing end of the rope. And realized what was going on, about a second before he gasped out, “Holy shit, it’s happening.”
Because it was. She looked down and saw that her feet were no longer touching the grass. She floated a foot above it—and shewas still climbing, slowly but surely. Another ten seconds and she was going to be beyond his grasp.
Though there was nothing she could do about it.
She’d been so wrapped up in the idea of Seth holding her in place, and pulling her back down, that she hadn’t really thought about how she would steer this thing. She had just wanted to try, and now she was going to actually end up so high that death somehow happened. Possibly by her getting beyond the point where oxygen existed.
“Seth,” she yelled, as she did the only thing she could think of. She tried to point the handle of the Hoover down. Only somehow, she didn’t quite get the angle right. The whole thing veered violently to the left. It sent her skimming six feet above the grass, fast enough that it made a bubble of giddy joy rise through her.
Though terror soon took over.
She seemed to be headed for the trees.
And Seth definitely did not have hold of the rope. She could hear him behind her, scrabbling for it. Trying to pounce and snag it, and completely missing.Yeah, like now is the time for you to lose that supernatural grace and skill and speed, she thought at him. But knew even as she did that it wasn’t fair at all. He’d just spent the last hour going through emotional upheaval, inadvertent sexual innuendo, and trying to touch someone without giving them the wrong idea.
Of course he was suddenly clumsy.
She would have been clumsy too, if she weren’t already the clumsiest person alive.
She tried to turn back and just somehow ended up climbing higher. And steeply too—to the point where she had to really hang on. She had to get an arm around the Hoover’s handle and squeeze the bag tightly between her thighs.
