“Of course not. You’re one of the least messed up people I’ve ever met—especially considering what you went through as a kid. But I do think you avoid some experiences, and I wondered if you ever thought about why.”
His jaw felt tight. “What, because I don’t want to be in a relationship? There are good reasons for that, and they don’t have anything to do with my childhood.”
Airin didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “I shouldn’t have said anything. Forget I brought it up.”
That pissed him off even more.
“So all this time you haven’t been talking to me, you’ve been studying me instead? Nice.”
Airin stopped walking, which meant he had to stop walking, too.
She turned to face him. Even in a T-shirt and flip-flops she managed to look fierce, her stance wide and firm, her hands on her hips.
“You make it sound like this last month was my fault. Like we’re not talking anymore because of something I did. But you’re the one who rejected me. You kissed me, and then you said nothing was going to happen between us. And yes, I’ve been avoiding you, but it’s not like you objected. You’ve been avoiding me, too. We sleep across the hall from each other, and I hardly ever see you.”
It was true. Although if Airin thought out of sight meant out of mind, she was wrong. He thought about her every damn night, and a lot of those nights ended with him spilling into his hand as he imagined going into her room and sliding into her bed.
“You’re right,” he said after a moment. “I have been avoiding you. The truth is, I want to fuck you. I want to fuck you, and I know it’s a bad idea, and it just seemed easier not to spend time with you. Because whenever I do, that’s all I can think about.”
She stood absolutely still, staring at him with wide eyes. As he waited for her to respond, it occurred to him that using that word—fuck—was another kind of aggression. Another attempt to scare her off, to warn her away.
A word that crude was miles away from the elegance and grace that seemed to form the core of her being.
You and I don’t belong together, a word like that said. You and I don’t fit.
“I think about you in bed at night,” she whispered.
Shit.
“Don’t tell me that, Airin. Jesus. Now I’m going to have that image in my head.”
She took a half step toward him, and the scent of her hair came to him on the breeze. “You said you didn’t want anything to happen between us, but you didn’t tell me why. Tell me now, Hunter.”
Because I’m reporting on you to your mother.
That was the most obvious reason, and it was the one he couldn’t tell her. But there was another reason.
“Because even if I did want a relationship, I suck at them. And you deserve more than someone who’ll hump you and dump you. Especially for your first time.” A sudden thought occurred to him. “If it still would be your first time. I mean . . . I don’t want to assume . . .”
One corner of her mouth quirked up. “You think I had sex with someone in the last month? I know we’ve been avoiding each other, but I’m pretty sure you would’ve noticed if I had a guy in my room.”
He shrugged. “Hell, what do I know? We made out on Waikiki Beach. Maybe you went to the guy’s house. Maybe you got a hotel room.”
Now both corners of her mouth were up. “Nope. I’m still a virgin.”
Then her smile faded, and her eyes searched his in the twilight.
“I’m still a virgin, and I’d like not to be one. I’m not asking you to marry me, Hunter. But maybe you could show me what I’ve been missing.”
His hands curled into fists. What the hell was she doing, offering him everything he wanted like this?
I’m reporting on you to your mother.
You deserve more than a roll in the hay.
They were both good reasons. But as he stood there staring at Airin, the woman he fantasized about every damn night, he knew there was another, deeper reason to resist his pull to her.
I’m afraid.
It was another thing he could never tell her.
Afraid of what? she’d ask.
And that was a question he didn’t know the answer to. A question he didn’t want to know the answer to.
He didn’t want to lie to her, but he couldn’t tell her the whole truth, either—because he didn’t know what it was himself.
So he settled for telling her part of the truth.
“I can’t,” he said.
She looked frustrated, and boy could he sympathize.
“Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then she sighed, deep and long, and started to walk again.
He fell into step beside her.
“We’re still going to the store?” he asked.
“I see no reason to abort our mission,” she said. “Besides, I’m hungry and I want yogurt.”
He felt his muscles starting to relax. “Okay.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes, but it wasn’t an awkward silence. Somehow, even though neither of them had gotten the answers they wanted, they’d moved past where they’d been to a better place.
“I missed you,” he said suddenly, bumping her shoulder with his arm.
“I missed you, too,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something, but things have been weird between us, and I didn’t know if you’d say yes. It’s a work-related favor.”
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Whatever you need.” He paused. “Which is what, exactly?”
They’d reached the market, and as they paused outside the door she grinned up at him.
She had the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen.
“Just remember you’ve already agreed to do it.”
“Agreed to do what?”
“Come with me on a parabolic flight.”
There was a swooping sensation in his stomach, like when your foot tries to land on a step that isn’t there.
A parabolic flight. His Achilles’ heel.
He sighed. “Is there any chance, any chance at all, that you’d accept a substitute for that favor?”
She looked thoughtful. “I guess you could sleep with me. But that wouldn’t really be work related, would it?”
He knew she wasn’t serious. But the truth was, those two things—the idea of sleeping with Airin and the idea of a parabolic flight—were alike in one way.
They combined temptation with dread.
Parabolic flights were NASA’s way of creating weightlessness on Earth. They were used to train astronauts to maneuver in free fall and to test equipment before it went into space. High school and college students competed for opportunities to conduct zero-g experiments, and scientists took advantage of the opportunity, too.
It was a pretty simple operation. A jet plane followed a parabolic flight path—up and down, up and down—to create periods of weightlessness followed by periods of hypergravity, when your weight was nearly double what it usually was.
The first few parabolas were always great. In fact, the taste of free fall during the twenty-second intervals could be addictive. That’s where the temptation came in.
But then came the fourth parabola, and the fifth, and . . .
There was a reason those planes were nicknamed vomit comets.
He wasn’t afraid of the flight itself. He was a pilot; he trusted the technology and the process. What he was afraid of was the physical weakness it revealed in him. A weakness that, as a pilot and astronaut, he’d never expected to have.
He was susceptible to zero-g motion sickness.
You adapt when you’re actually in space, astronauts who’d logged time on the ISS and in low-Earth orbit had told him. You just have to be up there long enough for your vestibular system to get used to free fall.
He’d adapted to everything else the military and the space program had thrown at him, and he was sure he’d eventually adapt to this, too. But in the meantime, par
abolic flights were the bane of his existence.
Airin was studying him with her eyebrows up. “Val was right. She told me you hate parabolic flights, but I didn’t believe it. I was sure you couldn’t be afraid of anything flight related.”
“There’s a difference between hating something and being afraid of it,” he practically growled, realizing as soon as the words were out of his mouth that he’d tacitly admitted to the first thing.
Airin smiled. “Great. Then you’ll come with me? It won’t be on a NASA flight, because I’m not in training and I don’t have a micro-g experiment I want to conduct or anything. I’m going on one of the commercial zero-g flights.”
“Seriously? Those things cost five thousand dollars per passenger. For a ninety-minute flight that includes about seven total minutes of weightlessness.”
“Seven minutes is plenty. That’s about what Alan Shepard experienced on America’s first spaceflight, so it’s good enough for me. But yes, it’s pricey. I don’t know if I ever truly appreciated being rich until I started doing research on these flights.”
“Your ribs have only just healed up. Are you sure you can—”
“The day before Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, he cracked two ribs when he was thrown from a horse. He didn’t tell anyone in case they scrapped his flight. He had to rig up something with his flight engineer so he could close the cockpit door.” She paused. “My ribs are fine, Hunter. The doctor cleared me.”
“Okay, but—”
“So will you come? I bought two tickets because I want to go with someone—ideally, someone who’s experienced it before. Val and Dean can’t spare the time for a trip to California, but Val said you’ve got a few days of vacation coming up.”
“Yeah, I do. But I wasn’t planning to spend it going to California for a parabolic flight. I was planning to spend it living the life of a beach bum on Kauai.”
She clasped her hands in front of her. “Please, Hunter. Please?”
He imagined Dira’s reaction to the news of her daughter’s latest adventure. Man, she’d loathe the very idea of it.
The thought of being the one to tell her almost made up for going on a parabolic flight himself.
Almost.
He sighed. “Yeah, all right. I guess I can spend my vacation on the vomit comet.”
Airin turned to go inside the store, but he reached out and took her by the shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The words contained more than he’d meant them to. He’d meant to apologize for the awkwardness of the last few weeks, and that was probably what Airin heard. But he knew he was also sorry for other things.
I’m sorry I kissed you. I’m sorry I stopped kissing you. I’m sorry I’m not kissing you right now, because that’s all I want to do.
“That’s okay,” she said, and he could tell she was responding to the first, most obvious thing. “I’m sorry, too.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
She smiled up at him. “I know. But it seemed like the polite thing to say.”
As the two of them went into the store, he knew things were good again. The awkwardness between them was gone, and they could move into the dynamic they should have been in all along.
Friendship.
It was the best result he could have hoped for. It was the best thing for both of them.
And maybe if he repeated that often enough to himself, he’d start to believe it.
Chapter Eighteen
Airin’s heart was pounding. They were seated in the zero-g plane, which looked like any other passenger jet from the outside. Inside, though, it was a different story. The only seats were in the back, about ten rows in the rear of the aircraft. The front part had been gutted and was padded on the floors, walls, and ceiling like an insane asylum.
Not exactly a reassuring image.
Also not reassuring: the antinausea injection she and Hunter had been given an hour before the flight had taken off.
“It doesn’t help,” Hunter had muttered.
“What?”
“The shot. It doesn’t help. About two-thirds of the people who go up in this thing will still puke.” He’d paused. “Or maybe it does help. Maybe without it, a hundred percent of people would puke.”
It was then she’d started wondering if she should have picked someone else to go on this flight with her.
Hunter’s pessimistic attitude was a direct contradiction to the palpable excitement of all the other passengers. Their eagerness had hardly been dimmed by the lengthy preflight discussion of sick bags—where they were and how to use them in zero-g—as well as techniques to minimize nausea. They’d nodded cheerfully at all the suggestions and continued radiating enthusiasm.
Of course none of them had ever done this before, and Hunter had.
That, too, was not reassuring.
The takeoff was normal. So were the first thirty minutes of their flight, which took them to their designated flying zone. Then they were given a ten-minute warning to unbuckle from their seats and lie down (if they chose) as they waited for their first parabola.
Lying down during the hypergravity part of the parabola—the beginning of the climb, when they’d experience about twice their normal weight—was one of the techniques that had been recommended to avoid motion sickness.
She’d been trying to kid Hunter into a better mood since they’d met in the lobby of their hotel that morning. But he’d stayed glum, and as they’d taken off from the tarmac—the moment she realized it was too late to get off the plane—she’d wondered if going on this trip alone might have been better than bringing along such a determined Eeyore.
Because now she was getting nervous. And as she looked around at the other passengers beginning to unbuckle and move toward the padded part of the jet, she could see they were nervous, too.
“Think of it as an intense roller coaster,” Val had said when Airin had asked her what parabolic flights were like. Then she’d added: “A really intense roller coaster.”
But Airin hadn’t been on a roller coaster since she was eight years old, and that was just a kiddie coaster. She hadn’t done much of anything since that first episode of tachycardia so long ago. She’d read about other people doing things, and she’d dreamed about doing things herself someday, but all from the safety of her mother’s mansion.
How many times during those years had she longed for real experiences? Real adventures? And now here she was, about to subject her body to what astronauts went through in space.
It was an experience the human body often rejected. Hunter had reacted to zero-g with intense nausea, as did many astronauts at first. Human beings weren’t meant to be weightless. It was disorienting, destabilizing.
Like everything else about space travel, it was unnatural.
She was supposed to be undoing her seat belt and moving to the open padded part of the plane. Instead she glanced over at Hunter, expecting him to look unhappy. He’d spent the morning grousing, after all.
But oddly enough, out of all the formerly enthusiastic and now subdued people on the plane, he was the only one smiling.
He squeezed her hand. “How are you doing, angel? You look tense.”
She swallowed. “I am. I can’t remember why I thought it was a good idea to do this. What if—”
“Don’t bother with what-ifs. You’re about to find out for yourself, which is why you’re doing this. And it was a great idea, because you want to go into space, and even if you never get there, you’re interested in studying aerospace medicine. Right?”
She nodded. His voice, so matter-of-fact, was starting to calm her down.
“So don’t you think it would be helpful to know what astronauts experience in zero-g?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“Okay then.” He reached over and unbuckled her belt, and then he grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Let’s do this.”
They found open space on the floor and lay down o
n the mats, which were deep and soft. The noise of the jet engines was loud, but she barely noticed it. She was too busy trying to control her crazy heartbeat and keep her breathing steady and even.
Hunter had told her not to indulge in what-ifs. But the big one was still there, looming large.
What if something goes wrong with my heart?
Before she’d booked the flight, she’d called her doctor in Massachusetts to ask him what he thought and if he foresaw any problems for her—and so he could sign off on the medical form the zero-g flight company had sent her.
He’d told her to go ahead and have a blast.
Nonetheless, she couldn’t shake the fear that something would go wrong. Either the extra g-force or the weightlessness would stress her heart in unanticipated ways and she’d end up in the hospital again, helpless and hooked up to monitors, her world reduced to EKGs and hospital beds and endless trials of medicines and surgical treatments.
Hunter moved closer to her and took her hand. “Take it easy, angel. You’re looking green around the gills, and the fun hasn’t even started yet.”
She shifted closer to him, squeezing his hand as she stared up at the ceiling. There was a monitor up there, telling them what was going on.
One minute to hypergravity. That meant they’d be starting the climb into their first parabola, which would subject them to twice their normal weight before their twenty seconds of zero-g began. She turned her head and looked at Hunter, and he looked back at her.
“You’d better decide now if you want to keep looking at me for the next thirty seconds, because once you feel yourself getting heavier you shouldn’t move your head.”
“I know,” she said, her voice shaking. “Keeping your head still helps prevent nausea.”
“That’s the idea,” he said, the rumble of his voice lower than the rumble of the engines. “So do you want to look at me, or do you want to look up at the ceiling?”
“You.”
“Okay.”
So she looked at him as the plane began its climb. His eyes weren’t grumpy now, the way they’d been that morning. They were warm and comforting, and they held hers with absolute confidence that everything would be okay.
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