“So you’re afraid of heights, huh?” Seth laughs lightly, his broad shoulders bouncing as he puts the bottle to his lips, but he’s not at all making fun of me. “I guess asking you to go skydiving with us tomorrow is out of the question, then.” He sets the bottle on the table.
“Uh, well, yeah, I’d say that’s not gonna happen.” I take a quick sip, making a slight face as the beer sours on my taste buds. “But Luke has really helped me out a lot with my fear of heights.”
“He’s good like that,” Seth says with a nod and winks at me. “I guarantee you that if you give him a few months, you’ll be jumping out of planes and shit.”
I laugh corrosively and choke a little on my beer.
“That’ll never happen.” I point at him, shaking my head.
He grins and takes another drink.
I leave it at that because something tells me Seth is the type of guy who believes what he wants, confident beyond my understanding, but not in a conceited way, just a positive way. And if he’s ever wrong, he laughs it off, sucks it up, admits it, and just tries to be right about the next thing. Seth is a strange one, I admit, but I can’t find a single thing about him that I don’t like. Not even his habitual brief encounters with girls, which anyone who’s never even officially met him can see a mile away. I picture him as the type who tells them up front that it’s a one-time thing. It’s their own damn fault if they ignore that and think they can change him.
I notice the scar running along the side of his head again, though it’s kind of hard not to notice.
“How did you get that?” I don’t have to point at it for him to know what I’m talking about. “BASE jumping?”
He chuckles. “Nah. If I got it BASE jumping, it probably would’ve opened my head up the rest of the way.” He laughs and swigs a quick drink—I don’t laugh, I just swallow nervously. “Got this one rock climbing. Misjudged the terrain, grabbed some loose rock, and one about the size of my fist”—he makes a fist with a rather large hand—“came off with it and knocked me unconscious. If I hadn’t been secured in my harness, I would’ve fallen about three hundred feet.”
I wince.
Just as I start to ask Seth more about BASE jumping (because the comment he just made about it planted another dark seed in my brain), Luke and Kendra walk into the kitchen.
Luke comes straight over, leans down behind me and kisses me on the cheek, his way of thanking me without words for insisting they make up.
Kendra sits in a chair on my right.
“So we’re cool,” she announces. “He’s still an ass because he won’t go skydiving with us tomorrow, but”—she grins at me—“since I like his girlfriend, I’ll let it slide.”
I blush and smile back at her. Girlfriend—I like the sound of that.
Luke gets two beers from the fridge.
“I’ll go next time,” he says. “While Sienna is here I’m spending all of my time with her.”
“She could go with us and watch,” Kendra says. “It’ll be fun.”
Luke hands Kendra a beer, and then instead of taking the empty chair on my left, he helps me out of mine, sits down on it, putting me on his lap.
Already I’m shaking my head, rejecting the skydiving idea.
“She won’t be able to see much,” Seth points out.
“No,” Luke says, “I don’t think that’s her idea of fun—don’t let them talk you into it; there’s plenty of other stuff to do.”
I swallow nervously and speak up.
“No offense, but Luke’s right,” I say. “It’s just not my idea of fun; sounds really terrifying, to be honest.”
“Well, you don’t have to jump or anything,” Kendra says.
My expression darkens a little and I shake my head. “I’m just not into that BASE jumping stuff—sorry.”
Kendra waves a hand at me, brushing my comment off. “Nah, it’s not like BASE. Skydiving is really safe; you see eighty-year-old ladies out there doing it.” She looks over at Seth quickly. “Remember that one lady who jumped like three times?”
Seth and Luke laugh, nodding and pointing their beers at each other.
“I remember her,” Luke says.
“That was pretty insane,” Seth adds.
Luke rubs my leg with the palm of his hand.
“Skydiving is safe,” he says, “but don’t worry about it; I want to do whatever you want to do, all right?”
I begin to contemplate it: OK, it’s not BASE jumping, so maybe I should go and at least watch; they say it’s really safe, and if eighty-year-olds can do it, then it must be. Besides, maybe watching them will help me a little more with my fear of heights.
“I don’t know. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to go.” I can’t believe I’m saying this. “I-I mean, not to jump, of course, but I think I’d like to go and watch.”
Kendra looks at Luke and then at Seth. Seth looks at Luke and shrugs and swigs his beer. Luke’s hand squeezes my waist again.
“Sienna, if you don’t—”
“No, I’m really OK with it,” I cut in. “If you want to go, I’m all for tagging along.” If that’s true, why do I still feel this dread in my heart?
Come on, Sienna, you can do this, I tell myself. I know I’ll probably never accept the BASE jumping, but I at least want to be supportive in the other things Luke loves to do: cliff-diving, a little dangerous surfing every now and then, skydiving—I want to make an effort to accept these things, because Luke’s worth it. And I have to remind myself that when it comes to heights, my fears are more irrational than most people’s.