“I don’t understand.”
“I just wanted to see you in tight clothes.”
Her eyes flared. But instead of getting mad, she threw her head back in a fit of laughter. “You are such a perv.”
“Do you like pervs?” I asked, sounding like a total perv.
She sighed. “I guess they’re starting to grow on me.”
I parked in a dirt clearing in the middle of a field on the top of a mountain. There were a few cars parked, but she couldn’t see the main attraction because we needed to climb down about 100 stairs to get to the bluff where we would take off from. “We’re here.”
She looked around. “Where’s here? What are we seeing?”
I grabbed a backpack out of the back of the Jeep and jogged around to open her door. Extending my hand, I said. “We’re not seeing anything here. We’re doing.”
Cautiously, she stepped out. “What are we doing, exactly?”
I couldn’t have staged it any better than it happened. Just as she finished her question, a glider soared above the edge of the mountain. It was a tandem glider, just like we’d be doing. I pointed, even though she had already seen it. “That.”
CARTER WAS INSANE. I’d suspected he had a few screws loose, but thinking I was going to fly off the side of a cliff with a few scraps of metal and a flimsy piece of polyester, confirmed he was certifiable.
“I’ll watch you do it.”
We’d been standing alongside the Jeep for the last ten minutes arguing. “You’re one of those, huh?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re a sideliner.”
“Elaborate.”
“You sit on the sidelines and watch your life happen. If you don’t play in the game, you can’t get hurt. Spectators are safe.”
“In this case, I prefer safety to hurtling to my untimely death at twenty-four.”
Carter rubbed the back of his neck and stared at me for a moment. “Every spectator who watches an event is watching it because they want to be the player. But they either don’t have the talent or the balls.”
“Well I certainly don’t know how to fly a hang glider. So in this case, you’re right. I don’t have the talent.”
“You don’t need any talent for this. You fly in tandem, with a trained and experienced glider. No talent necessary. You know what that means?”
“What?”
“That you’re a spectator because you don’t have the balls.”
“I have plenty of balls.” I stood taller.
“Yeah. When was the last time you took a risk?”
“I’d say two days ago when I got on a plane to Brazil at the recommendation of a crazy person I met in a bar.”
“Alright. I’ll give you that one. That did take some balls. But when was the last time you had a real adrenaline rush? The kind that pumps through your veins so powerfully that it makes you think you haven’t really been alive before then?”
I knew the answer to that. When you got in that cab yesterday. Only I didn’t have the balls to say that either. “I don’t remember.”
“It’s an experience you’ll never forget. I promise.”
“You do this often?”
“Hang glide? Not so much anymore. I used to do it all the time though.”
“I didn’t mean hang glide. I meant do things that give you an adrenaline rush?”
“I still get one every time I take off. When I’m barreling that plane down the runway at a hundred and eighty miles an hour and I pull back on the yoke to lift the nose and we break from the ground…it’s like the first time, every time.”
“So you’re a thrill seeker.”
Carter shrugged. “At times. Life without a little thrill is boring, beautiful.”
I really like when he calls me beautiful. I couldn’t believe I was even considering doing this. But he was right. The last few years of my life had been pretty boring. And this trip was supposed to be about finding me. Getting answers. He could tell I was reconsidering.
“Come fly with me.” He held out his hand.
“That’s Frank Sinatra, not the Beatles.”
“I know, but I figured it would be more convincing right now than In Spite of All the Danger.” He smiled, and I actually felt goosebumps break out on my arms when I put my hand in his.
THE REQUIRED PRE-GLIDE training class lasted an hour and a half. My instructor really seemed to know what he was talking about, and it put my mind at ease. Well, as much at ease that was possible when you were about to jump off the side of a mountain. And I do mean jump. It was probably best I had no idea that we literally ran off the side of a mountain to take off when I agreed to this craziness. That crazy run was what I was about to watch when Carter came and sat next to me. He hadn’t needed to do the training class since he’d been here plenty of times.