One and Only by Jenny Holiday (5)

When Cam ambled into the lobby of the CN Tower at 10:03, Jane was already there perusing brochures. She had changed into another pair of curve-hugging skinny jeans, and she was wearing a form-fitting black T-shirt and a pair of leopard print flats. The woman certainly had a lot of flats. And T-shirts. Last night, at the bar—and in his bed—she’d been wearing a sort of fancy T-shirt, made out of silk or something, and of course she’d had a blazer over it for the not-in-bed portion of their evening, but it had been a T-shirt nonetheless. He was starting to realize that the jeans-T-shirt-flats combo was her thing. As uniforms went, it wasn’t bad. It worked for her.

“This is a total racket,” she said, looking up as he approached. “They basically want fifty bucks a head if you want to go to both observation decks.”

He took the brochure and peered at it. “Or we could do this EdgeWalk thing, and that package gets you into everything else, too.” It was stupidly expensive, but, hell, he had his “tuition” savings burning a hole in his pocket. And life had been a little short on thrills since he’d gotten back from Iraq.

“I knew you were going to want to do that.” She put her hands on her hips. “Because I’m starting to understand: You. Are. Insane.”

“Not your thing?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Let me count the ways. Numbers one through two hundred and ninety-five are the dollars it would cost me. And then there’s the part where you’re paying them to dangle you off the freaking CN Tower, Cameron!” She grabbed the brochure back from him and read it aloud, her voice getting higher. “A hands-free walk on a five-foot-wide ledge encircling the top of the Tower’s main pod, eleven hundred and sixty eight feet, or a hundred and sixteen stories, above the ground.” Then she shook the brochure under his face.

He took it back from her and read on. “Yeah, but also there’s the part where ‘trained EdgeWalk guides will encourage participants to push their personal limits, allowing them to lean back over Toronto with nothing but air and breathtaking views of Lake Ontario beneath them.’” He was taunting her now, but she was kind of irresistible when she was incredulous.

“What part of ‘insane’ did you not understand? Do you need synonyms? ‘Crazy,’ ‘deranged,’ ‘delusional.’ Anything ringing a bell here?”

“You don’t have to do it with me.” He shrugged. “But think how many brownie points this will get you with Elise. You do this, and it’s like you’re the valedictorian of babysitting.”

He’d hooked her. He could tell by the way she tilted her head and squinted her eyes at him. She was searching for a rebuttal, but she didn’t have one. “I’m not babysitting you.”

He raised his eyebrows. She didn’t seem to remember that she’d admitted as much at the bar last night.

“So the whole valedictorian of babysitting thing doesn’t apply,” she added.

“You were probably the actual valedictorian, anyway,” he teased.

“Salutatorian. Wendy was the valedictorian in our high school.”

“Wendy?”

“One of Elise’s other bridesmaids.”

“You and Wendy and Elise went to high school together?” he asked. He was having trouble imagining Jane as a girl. She seemed like the kind of person who had been born thirty years old.

“Nope, just Wendy and me. I’ve known Wendy since she moved to our neighborhood when we were ten. We picked up Elise—and Gia, the fourth bridesmaid—in university. Gia is four years younger than us, though.”

“And how long ago was university?”

“Are you asking how old I am?”

“I might be.” He wasn’t sure why he cared, except that he couldn’t peg her. She was young-looking, with her smooth skin and her cute, if utilitarian, wardrobe. But in other ways, she seemed so world weary, in a way that went beyond her prissiness.

“So just ask me.”

“Jane, how old are you?”

“Thirty-one.” Four years older than he was. But then his own age felt as un-pin-down-able as hers in some ways. Everyone saw him as the immature boy he’d been for so long. But some of the shit he’d seen made him feel like he was a hundred years old.

She cleared her throat, and he realized he’d gotten lost in his thoughts, so he reached for a joke to cover himself. “Thirty-one is definitely old enough to have your personal limits pushed with nothing but air and the breathtaking view of Lake Ontario beneath you.”

“Goddamn you, Cameron MacKinnon.”

He grinned. “I dare you. But I bet you won’t do it.” Suddenly, he really wanted to see Jane hanging off the edge of this impossibly high tower. He wondered if she’d be a screamer.

Whoa. A shiver ran up his spine as that thought brought to mind a totally different image of her screaming.

“And if I take this crazy bet, what do I get?”

“The satisfaction that comes with having your personal limits pushed.”

She swatted him.

“The breathtaking views, too, of course.”

She swatted him again, harder this time, and he grabbed her hand and held on to it in order to halt her attack.

“How about this?” she asked, not taking her hand back and getting right in his face. “I do this demented EdgeWalk thing with you, and you forgo today’s booty call. Or tonight’s. Or whenever you were planning it.”

He whistled. This woman knew how to bargain. He was, frankly, taken aback. But also kind of impressed. He hoped Elise knew what a first-rate nanny service she was getting.

“Because, really, if you’ve slept with one random, you’ve slept with them all,” she went on. “But how often do you get to dangle from a one-hundred-and-sixteen-story building with a bestselling young-adult author? I’ll post us on my Instagram.”

Shit. He was going to agree to her nefarious terms. What was the matter with him?

“Come on,” she wheedled. “Tit for tat.”

Well, at least he could go down swinging. So he took her arm, steered them toward the ticket windows, and said, “I think you mean tat for no-tit.”

Jane was really scared. Like, really, really scared.

Even the elevator was freaking her out. By the time their guide explained that the ascent would take only fifty-eight seconds, her stomach had already been left behind on ground level. She jerked a little and had to restrain herself from grabbing Cameron’s arm.

He must have noticed, because he shot her a concerned look. She summoned a smile she feared looked as fake as it was.

“Let’s do this first,” he murmured in her ear when the guide announced the stop for the glass floor.

“Yes!” she said a little too vehemently. Because a glass floor was nothing compared to, like, being tethered to the outside of a building more than a thousand feet in the air, right?

Wrong.

“Ack!” She did grab Cameron’s arm this time. They were standing at the edge of a glass-paneled floor that showed them the view straight down the hundred and sixteen stories to the street below.

“It’s kind of wild, isn’t it?” Cameron said mildly, leaning over like he was on an actual ledge. “It’s like your brain knows the glass is thick, and it’s perfectly safe, but…”

The more he leaned forward, the harder she pulled back on his arm. He was exactly right. The rational part of her understood there was nothing to fear. There were kids gleefully jumping up and down on neighboring panels, for heaven’s sake.

“But sometimes you’ve gotta open your eyes and jump,” he said, breaking out of her grasp and jumping backward so that he landed on one of the glass panels.

She could have kept her hand on his arm, followed him out onto the glass, but she didn’t. As their fingers slipped past each other, a twinge of regret pinged around in her chest, but it was swept away as someone on the next panel shrieked in laughter.

Cameron was grinning, too, looking down at his feet.

She turned and walked away, her heart beating as if she had walked out on the glass. She busied herself reading an interpretive panel on the wall that informed her that the glass floor could hold forty-one polar bears, or thirty-five moose, or three and a half orcas. So there was basically no way, short of the apocalypse striking, that anyone was falling through that glass. God, what a wimp she was. Children were doing this. Her face heated.

For no reason at all, she suddenly remembered a time she tried to have some friends over after school in fourth grade. This was before Wendy had started at Jane’s school, back when Jane was…not an outcast really, but struggling to find a place to fit in. Of course, she had fixated, the way kids do, on the pretty, popular girls, thinking that befriending them would make her life so much easier.

So much happier.

Part of her knew, even then, that it was a mistake to invite them over. Having people over was usually too much of a risk, given that she never knew what state her father was going to be in. But she’d talked herself into it. She had told Daddy, coached him, begged him even. Explained the stakes. Promises were made.

But of course she knew the minute she opened the door and he greeted them with a high-pitched “Hi, girls!” that she had been naive to think he could lay off the drinking for even one afternoon. She’d learned her lesson that day: taking risks was usually not worth it.

“Hey.”

She inhaled sharply, startled out of her memories. But the shame was still there. She just didn’t know if it was the same old packed-down crud or a fresh new layer.

“So I’m thinking maybe we should just hit the observation deck and call it a day?” Cameron said gently, resting a hand on her shoulder.

“What about the EdgeWalk?” she asked.

“I can do it another time. And I’m sure they’ll give you your money back. People must change their minds all the time. We can just call off the bet.”

What went unspoken was that he recognized her for the chickenshit she was. And that he was being so nice about it was worse somehow than if he’d whipped out his usual jerky banter.

She glanced at her watch. Ten minutes until their assigned start time. She thought of those girls who had never come back to her house but had later been over-the-top with expressions of sympathy when her father died. “Nope, let’s do it.”

Cam felt like a dick. Which wasn’t all that unusual, really, but this time he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. There was no way this could end well. And it felt like his fault. Which was ridiculous. Yeah, he hadn’t initially grasped exactly how much of a scaredy-cat she was, but as soon as he’d realized that the glass floor alone was making her start to come unhinged, he’d tried to pull the plug on the whole thing.

But no. Jane was fronting with false bravado. She was all blustery determination, pasted-on-smiles, and overly loud small talk with their fellow adventurers as everyone lined up to be fitted into their harnesses.

She was also awfully cute in her orange jumpsuit. The same jumpsuit that made the rest of them look like awkward rejects from a Ghostbusters casting call somehow hugged her curves just right.

They were all being strapped into harnesses that had cables in the front and the back that fastened to a track in the ceiling that ran the length of the room and then continued on outside. The guides who would make the walk with them were fastened onto a parallel, outer track.

“The platform outside is five feet wide,” the main guide said. “That’s about as wide as your average sidewalk. Have you ever fallen off a sidewalk?”

That got a mixture of genuine and nervous laughter. Cam eyed Jane. He shouldn’t know her well enough to be able to tell, but underneath her breeziness, she was terrified. He understood. He himself was feeling that same zingy anticipation that always preceded a dangerous task on tour. It was human nature. Even though here, unlike in the Middle East, you knew you were perfectly safe, some reptilian part of your mind whose job was self-preservation was screaming, “danger!” It was like the glass floor, but more.

Which was why he was worried. He leaned over to whisper in her ear. “You okay?”

She nodded, too vigorously. He rested his hand on the small of her back.

“Okay, here we go!” shouted the guide as he threw open the doors and the wind, which was something fierce coming off the lake, whipped in. Several among their group started squealing. In fact, pretty much everyone had some kind of audible reaction as they stepped outside.

They were toward the back of the line, and Jane was shaking. He could feel it through her jumpsuit. He consoled himself that even if the worst happened and she went hysterical, or passed out or something, the setup was such that they could tow her back inside using the track and cable system.

Unlike at the glass floor, and unlike nearly everyone else in the group, she was totally silent as she stepped onto the grate that was the floor of the outside platform. He’d thought going behind her made the most sense, so he could steady her if need be, but he saw now that the better choice would have been to go first, so he could watch her face. He was tempted to ask her to turn around so he could see her eyes, but if she was actually okay, in some kind of Zen zone, he didn’t want to puncture it.

She was gripping the cable running up the front of her harness with both hands, but so were most of the people ahead of them. Hell, it had been his first impulse, too, as he stepped out. But he reached for her again, and the moment his hand made contact with her back, she let go of her cable with one hand and wrenched his arm around until she was holding his hand with a pretty damned impressive death grip. Now that they were out on the walkway that circled the tower, they were side by side, so he could see her face. Yep, she was scared shitless.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he said, looking out over the lake, his own heart pounding. “No glass, no walls, just us and the sky.” As cliché as it sounded, when you were up high like this, it gave you a kind of perspective on life. Let you rise above all the bullshit. Hence his affinity for towers and observation decks.

Jane was taking deep, shaky breaths, but at least she was breathing. After they shuffled partway around the deck, the guide began walking the participants, one by one, through an exercise where they turned their backs to the view and leaned back, putting their bodies at a sixty-degree angle relative to the tower, making them look a little like they were frozen in place while skydiving.

“Jane!” said the guide, a young outdoorsy dude who had somehow managed to learn everyone’s names. “You’re up!”

“You don’t have to do this,” Cam whispered. Indeed, there had been a woman ahead of them who had refused and was currently plastered against the inner wall of the tower hugging herself with her eyes closed. “We’ll consider the dare fulfilled.” Why he added that, he had no idea. Win or lose, she would never know what—or who—he did after they parted ways.

She shook her head as she turned and followed the guide’s instructions to bend her knees and inch backward until her heels came to the edge. When she was crouched in the ready position, she looked up at him and echoed what he’d said to her downstairs.

“Sometimes you have to open your eyes and jump, right?”

And she fell backward and screamed.

God, she was gorgeous. She was laughing even as she screamed, and the super-saturated bright blue of the sky and lake behind her made everything about her pop. Her wide eyes were jades, her hair, much of which had escaped her ponytail and was flapping around in the wind, mahogany fire. How had he ever thought to describe any aspect of her as muddy? She was a goddess, frozen in place as she plummeted to Earth, like the universe had stopped her before she could fall all the way and sully herself by mixing with the mortals below.

“Your turn,” the guide said to Cam.

He followed the guy’s instructions, turned, and fell. It was his turn to laugh-scream. It was the fear of falling, the relief of not falling, the cold silent sky blanketing the city below them. It was Jane, turning her head to look at him with her mouth hanging open as she hooted and grinned. It was all those sensations swirling as if they were being churned together by the wind that whipped around them.

Unlike most of the others, Jane wasn’t holding on to her cable. She had her arms spread wide, like in that stupid Titanic movie. So he mimicked her pose, spreading his arms, too.

Their fingertips brushed. Maybe it was the adrenaline of being out here, but he felt it as a spark, an extra jolt to his already hyper-alert system.

All too soon the guide had them bringing themselves back to standing on the platform.

His hand sought her back again almost of its own accord, though she clearly didn’t need the reassurance anymore.

As if to hammer home the point, she looked over her shoulder at him, eyes shining, and said, “That. Was. Awesome.”

Back in the regular old non-outdoor, non-glass-floored observation deck, Jane felt like a rock star. She couldn’t stop exclaiming over the EdgeWalk. Yes, it had been terrifying, but underneath the fear there had also been a whole lot of other stuff. Exhilaration. Wonder at how strange and beautiful the world was from such a radically different vantage point. Then, utter astonishment when she was hit with a revelation that took her breath away: this was how Stephanie, the protagonist of the Clouded Cave series, felt when she first realized the cave was more than a cave.

They were in the Skypod, the tower’s highest observation deck. It was higher than the EdgeWalk level, so when they looked down, they could see another group of people inching their way around the outdoor platform. She studied the commemorative photo they’d given her, of the group extended out over the void. It was hard to believe she had really done that. “You were right,” she said, still buzzing from their adventure. “Sometimes you do have to open your eyes and jump.” She’d been thinking about that phrase. Most people would have said close your eyes and jump. But not Cameron. He did things with his eyes open.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” He cocked his head.

He’d been lost in his thoughts—they both had been—so she repeated herself. “Sometimes you have to open your eyes and—”

“No, the first part.”

Huh? “What first part?”

“The part where you said, ‘You were right.’”

She swatted him, but she couldn’t help laughing as she did so. “Once. You were right once. Don’t let it go to your head.”

They were facing the city, looking across and down at the shiny high-rises of downtown Toronto. He really had seemed like he was somewhere else a moment ago, and now he was rubbing the back of his neck, like he was tense. She followed his gaze back out to the skyline. “How long have you been back in Canada?”

He answered without looking at her. “This is day three.”

“It must be hard to adjust.” When he didn’t respond, she added, “I mean, look at this. It’s probably like night and day from the landscape you’re used to.” Then she shook her head. “Well, of course it is. That was a stupid thing to say.”

He turned then. “Not stupid. You’re right. Coming back is…hard.”

She opened her mouth to ask more, but he made a beckoning motion with his arm and said, “Let’s check out the other side.”

She followed him. “I read that on a clear day, you can see all the way to Niagara Falls from here.”

They squinted in the appropriate direction but didn’t see anything that looked like it was one of the modern wonders of the world.

“Niagara Falls,” he said. “I’ve never been there. Always wanted to see it.”

She sort of assumed that everyone who lived in Ontario had been to Niagara Falls, but of course Thunder Bay, where he’d grown up, was a lot farther away. And since the family had been poor, he probably hadn’t gone on trips there as a kid like she had.

“It’s really something,” she said. “The falls, I mean. The rest of it is cheese ball central.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the town that’s developed around the falls is a total tourist trap. Casinos, tacky souvenirs, carnivals, that sort of thing. They even have an observation tower, but it’s like the shrimpy little sibling of this one.” She patted the railing. “And I don’t think they let you dangle off the side.”

“Let’s do it.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“It’s not that far from Toronto, is it? What, maybe an hour and a half?”

“Yessss,” she said warily.

“Remember how you just said I was right?”

“Once. You were right about one thing.”

“Maybe two?”

“I’m not taking you to Niagara Falls.”

“No, I’m taking you to Niagara Falls,” he said, like the decision had already been made. “Tomorrow.”

“I can’t. I have…stuff to do.”

“Beyond babysitting me?”

“I’m not babysitting you,” she lied—for the zillionth time.

“What stuff do you have to do?”

“I have my costume for Comicon to finish.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m sure it can wait one day.”

She shook the photo she was clutching. “I have to plaster this all over my author social media accounts.” Which would take all of five minutes. But oh! “I have wedding stuff.” The universal excuse. She pulled out her phone and opened the calendar app. Crap, she actually did have wedding stuff. Calligraphy lessons, to be precise. Lessons Elise had enrolled them in because it would be “fun.” Not because the convenient side effect of the lessons would be a gaggle of bridesmaids armed with the skills necessary to produce three hundred hand-lettered place cards.

Ding.

At that very moment, a new calendar invite popped up.

“Papermaking?” she read aloud. What in heaven’s name?

Then a text from Elise arrived. She swiped over to it.

Another text arrived, this one from Gia,

Jane looked up. “Pick me up at eight tomorrow morning. I’ll text you my address.”