“No, baby, no. I’m fine.” He kisses the top of my head.
“But … oh my God, I can’t believe you’re here.” I can’t think straight. My head feels swollen with emotion and questions and stuffy from the tears.
I pull away from his chest, but I don’t let him go and keep my arms wrapped around his waist.
“But I thought—” I look down, the black lettering on his brown T-shirt blurring in my vision.
“Luke,” I say, looking back up into his eyes, “how are you here?”
He smiles softly. “I know I said I’d wait for you,” he begins, “and I did for a while, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to see you.”
I’m confused. I’m not sure he is answering my question. I was asking how he’s alive. Because of Kendra’s letter. But the feeling of being wrapped in his arms again takes over and I don’t care about that right now.
“Sienna,” he says, and our eyes meet, “you’re all I’ve thought about since you left. I need you in my life.”
My gaze strays again.
I want to be with him too, more than anything, but …
He cups my face within his hands, stealing my gaze back. A tear slips down my cheek. He leans in and kisses it away. I’m so overwhelmed with emotion, just knowing that he’s alive, that I can’t truly grasp everything right now: that he’s here, the things he’s saying to me, why I feel like I’ll collapse on the sidewalk and die if he leaves.
Finally it hits me.
“But, Luke … the thought of you … I can’t stand the thought of you—” Sobs rack my body and my hands begin to push against his chest. “I can’t take it! I thought you were dead! I missed you so much! And I thought you were dead!” I scream that word into the night air.
Luke’s arms collapse around me again and he holds me tight. “It’s OK, baby. It’s OK. You never have to worry about that again. Do you hear me? Sienna. Look at me.” He shakes me, his hands around my biceps, the intensity in his eyes so palpable. “You never have to worry about that again,” he repeats, as if to drill it into my head.
“What do you mean?”
He looks into my eyes again.
“I went to Norway,” he says, “but I didn’t jump.”
I just look at him for a moment. Confused. Elated, but confused. “But … but why didn’t you jump?”
A smile appears in his beautiful hazel eyes. His fingers tighten gently about my upper arms, and then the smile finds its way to his lips. “Because … I found something more worth dying for.”
I can’t speak, but my tears say everything that words can’t.
“I’m madly in love with you,” he goes on, “and I couldn’t go another minute without seeing you.”
Involuntarily I suck in a shuddering breath, tears streaming down my cheeks in rivulets. He draws his lips toward mine and kisses me deeply. I cry against his mouth, his tongue warm against mine, his hands cradling my head. The kiss is long and hard and passionate, both of us afraid to let go.
Luke holds me in his arms for a long time, just the two of us standing on the sidewalk outside my apartment building. I close my eyes and picture being back on the island with him. I picture the constant rain, us tangled in the hammock, me walking across his back, shaving his face, throwing mud at him. I picture surfing and hiking and the helicopter ride. I think of everything from the very second I saw him to the last moment we shared.
I never want to be without him again.
But a small detail still haunts me.
I pull away and look up at him with wet eyes.
“If you’re saying what I think you’re saying …” I begin. “Luke, you know you can’t change who you are for me. We talked about this, remember? I couldn’t live with myself knowing that you gave up an important part of your life for me.”
The smile around his eyes becomes warmer.
“But I didn’t give it up for you,” he says. “I gave it up because of you. Because you made me understand that as much as I loved BASE jumping, I realized I loved it because it was something I shared with my brother. After he died it became more a responsibility than an experience.” He takes my hand and we sit down together on the edge of the sidewalk, side by side with our knees bent and our feet flat on the blacktop of the parking lot. He reaches over and hooks his arm around my leg, our shoulders pressed together. “A part of me—the guilty part, I guess—made me feel like I needed to continue doing what Landon loved most. Because he couldn’t do it himself anymore.” He sighs and his arm tightens around my leg. His fingers begin brushing the skin around my ankle. “I actually decided not to jump before I left. I went on to Norway with everybody else, but only to make peace with my brother. After everybody jumped and I sat on that rock alone, eleven hundred feet above the ground, looking out at the clouds, I talked to him. On his birthday. Out loud.” He laughs lightly. “If I hadn’t been out there alone, somebody might’ve thought I was crazy.”
I smile inwardly, and he goes on.
“But I told him all of the things I never got to tell him before he died …
The air was brisk so high up where thin clouds hung in the blue-gray sky all around me. Everybody had already jumped. And they lived. A part of me, more noticeable than usual, was afraid they might not make it, that this would be the jump that killed one of my best friends the same way my brother was killed. But they lived and I was left alone on that rock, just me and the sky and my brother, who I knew was there, sitting next to me.