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 on 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.
A voice came over the loudspeaker. “Okay, everybody, get ready! Zero-g coming up in ten seconds!”
Her heart rate kicked up another notch, and she squeezed Hunter’s hand so hard it must have hurt him.
And then, just like that, she floated up into the air.
She was still holding Hunter’s hand. But except for that, she was . . . untethered. Released from something she’d taken for granted from the moment she was born.
Gravity.
She hadn’t realized how heavy her arms had always been, hanging off her shoulders like dead wood. Every bone and muscle and cell in her body had been pulled down all these years. Even her hair had been a burden to her scalp, the weight of it tending earthward like everything else.
And now all that weight was gone. Just gone.
Her hair was floating. Her body was floating. Her organs were floating in her body.
Even her heart.
Hunter was grinning, and she realized that she was grinning, too. She grabbed his other hand, and then they were facing each other and she was laughing, drunk with the euphoria of this extraordinary freedom . . . freedom from a burden she hadn’t known she was carrying.
“Feet down!”
That, they’d been told, was the warning that gravity would soon return—in case any intrepid zero-g cowboys had flipped over.
Had it really been twenty seconds already?
She and Hunter positioned their feet toward the floor, still grinning like fools. The return of gravity was gentle, giving them time to lie down before the g-force increased.
There wasn’t even a question of where they would look this time. They kept their eyes on each other, waiting for the hypergravity to give way to another bout of weightlessness.
Up they floated again. This was how it felt to be a spirit . . . or an angel.
“I want to do a flip,” she said, and Hunter laughed.
“Okay,” he said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
He grabbed onto one of the straps affixed to the wall so she could brace herself against him, and she did it—a somersault in the air. Then she used his shoulders as leverage to swing her feet up to the ceiling so she could hang there with her eyes on his but upside down, their faces and their grins inverted.
“Feet down!”
By the time they hit the fourth parabola, a few of their fellow passengers were throwing up. One guy had to go back to the seats and belt in, and he sat there clutching a white sickness bag in front of his face and trying not to move his head more than he could help. A few others were pretty sick as well, huddled with their vomit bags, and she wondered during the next hypergravity interval if Hunter would soon be joining their ranks.
But he didn’t. He seemed as enthusiastic as she and the other passengers were—the ones lucky enough not to get sick. It was like being in a bouncy house with a dozen eight-year-olds, only a million times better.
It was like every dream of flying she’d ever had.
They’d been warned not to stray too far (intentionally, anyway) from their original spots, not to try to swim or zoom around the cabin, since it would be all too easy to kick another weightless adventurer in the face. But on their last parabola, she knew she’d never forgive herself if she didn’t break that rule.
Just before gravity released them, she said to Hunter, “We’re going to be Superman and Supergirl.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Just follow my lead.”
When they floated up from the floor for the last time, she oriented herself so that she was crouching sideways with her feet against the wall of the cabin. Hunter followed her example, and she guessed he knew now what was coming next.
They pushed off gently, and then they were flying, their hands still clasped and their free arms outstretched like airborne superheroes, until they reached the opposite wall.
She’d felt a lot of different things in her twenty-four years. But never, not once, had she felt cool.
She turned to Hunter and grabbed his other wrist, and they spent their last few seconds of free fall facing each other with both hands clasped.
“We are so cool,” she told him.
He grinned, his eyes never leaving hers.
“Yeah, we are.”
During the flight back and the celebration afterward for weightless “graduates,” she couldn’t stop talking. Neither could the other passengers. They were giddy, exhilarated, jubilant, and they regaled one another with the experience they’d just shared until the party at the airplane hangar broke up. Then they shook hands and even hugged like old friends, despite the fact that they’d been strangers just two hours ago.
But as she and Hunter settled into their rental car—he’d wanted a Mustang convertible even though the drive from the airport to their hotel was only half an hour—they didn’t say anything for miles.
The dry air of Los Angeles was very different from the soft, lush air of Hawaii, but it blew her hair behind her as they drove with the top down, and she was glad Hunter had chosen this car.
She wasn’t ready to let go of the sensation of freedom.
“You didn’t get sick,” was the first thing she said after several minutes on the road. It was loud enough that she had to raise her voice, and he had to raise his to answer.
“I know,” he said. “I didn’t even think about it until we landed. I guess the secret is to go with someone you care about more than yourself.”
The words seemed to reverberate in the air around them. A beat went by, and then Hunter said, “Shit. You know what I mean. Someone you’re worried about more than yourself. It was your first time, and I wanted to be sure you were okay. I guess that distracted me enough that I didn’t feel sick. You know?”
“I know,” she said.
But as silence fell between them, a new kind of euphoria was spreading through her.
“What about you?” he asked after a moment. “You’re a natural. You were born to go into space, Airin Delaney. You have a stomach of iron.”
“I guess I have to have something of iron to make up for my shitty heart.”
“Your heart isn’t shitty. Your heart is strong. Just like the rest of you.”
The compliment felt overwhelming.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
It was seven o’clock when they got back to the hotel. As they walked through the lobby Hunter asked, “Do you want to grab some dinner? There are a couple of restaurants in the building to choose from, or we could go out someplace.”
She shook her head. They’d reached the elevator bank, and she reached out and pushed the Up button.
“I think I’m just going to get room service. I want to take some notes on the day, capture my thoughts and impressions while they’re still fresh in my mind. Is that okay?”
“Of course. Yeah.”
The elevator doors opened, and they stepped inside.
“That’s absolutely okay,” he continued as they rode up to their floor. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, then.”
There was a note of relief behind his words, and she smiled to herself as they walked to their rooms. They were across the hall from each other, just like at home, and after their respective key cards had unlocked their doors, they looked at each other.
“So . . . good night, then,” Hunter said.
“Good night.”
He turned to go into his room and then turned back again. “It was quite a day.”
“It sure was.”
“Are you sorry it’s over?”
“It’s not over yet,” she said, and he looked confused for a moment before nodding.
“You’re going to be making notes. I guess you’ll be reliving the experience, right? So . . . yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow. Sleep well.”
He went inside. She stood looking at his closed door for a moment, thinking about the plan she’d conceived in the car and wondering if she really had the guts to carry it out. Then she went into her own room.
It was a typical airport-area hotel: devoid of personality and with more beige than any human being needed, but more than adequate for a traveler’s needs. When she’d made the reservation she’d booked the highest-end suites they offered, figuring the Jacuzzi tub might help Hunter recover from what she’d worried would be a hellish day of motion sickness for him.
Now she was glad of the luxurious bathroom for her own sake.
The Jacuzzi was wonderful. The bubbles created a kind of effervescence that reminded her of being in zero-g, if only because any blissful physical experience would have reminded her of being in zero-g.
She soaked for a long time, and when she was ready to get out, she shaved her legs more slowly and carefully than she ever had before, aware of the curve of her calf and the line of her shinbone and the challenge of the areas around the knee and ankle.
She’d brought one nice dress with her in case they went out to dinner or something, but it wasn’t what she wanted to wear tonight. It was simple and black and appropriate for every occasion except the one she needed it for.
She was going to seduce Hunter Bryce, and she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
Well, unless he really did say no. It wasn’t like she could force him or anything.
Oh God. What if he said no? That was a kind of humiliation she might never recover from.
But if she thought about that, she’d lose her nerve. And she’d been weightless today, damn it. Anything was possible.
She needed to focus on what to wear.
It wasn’t like she had a lot of choices, other than the black dress. Jeans, a pair of navy cargo shorts, T-shirts, and cotton blouses.
After standing for what felt like a long time in front of her open suitcase—she hadn’t bothered to hang anything except her dress and one blouse—she made a decision.
She dug into the zippered pocket on the inside of her case and pulled out a bra and panty set. It was pale pink satin edged with lace, and while it was simple, it also fit her really, really well. It wasn’t the nicest lingerie she owned, but it was the nicest she’d brought with her, and it was, she hoped, enough to get the job done.
She stood at the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door and brushed her hair until it gleamed. She decided to skip makeup since her cheeks were pink enough without it—her pounding heart was delivering plenty of blood to flush her skin—but she put on clear lip gloss.
Her hands trembled so much as she applied it that she was glad she hadn’t attempted a makeup job requiring more precision.
Then she put on the white cotton hotel bathrobe and went across the hall.