Chapter 35 #2
He held up the mysterious brown envelope, thick with documents, the flap open, and tossed it at me.
The packet landed on the blanketed bed of the plane with a clap, and I stared at the worn edges of the kraft paper and the dangling end of the string tie closure on the flap. A stack of papers glided half out.
“You wanted these for years. Congrats. They’re signed. You’re a fecking free woman.”
Dumbstruck, I stared down at the papers, unable to muster even the smallest word in rebuttal.
“What…”
“Divorce papers.”
I recoiled as if he’d slapped me.
That envelope stared back at me, and all my fight drained away. I’d won my bet with Maeve. I had what I’d come to the States for, and yet my heart bled out under the weight of those papers.
The first few pages flapped and skidded further out.
I reached out a shaky hand just as two pages drifted in a swirl toward the plane’s entrance.
Cillian caught them, his stare dark and sinister, nothing of the man I’d gotten to know and love in them.
It really was over. His threat came back, and for the first time, I wondered if he really had sabotaged the parachutes.
He scrunched the errant pages into a ball and dropped them on my lap.
“Don’t worry. I signed another copy two days ago and shipped it to your home address in Lyon.”
I flinched from the force of the stake he impaled through my heart. Tiny shards broke off and tore my veins open from the inside out. He was bleeding me out. Death or divorce, both results were the same.
Oh, this hurt. At the first sign of hardship, I got tossed aside.
Story of my life. Never worth safekeeping.
Never worth treasuring. So much for love when one little thing could so easily destroy it.
Maybe it was better this way. I could go back to my original plan and find someone better…
if I survived this. Better than what Cillian had shown me?
Was that possible? With him, I learned what it was like to be cherished and adored, and that was worse than never having felt it at all.
Or maybe I should give up on love altogether.
That was better than finding someone new who would make me feel seen, who listened, who made me feel safe, only to take it all away over one little, insignificant detail.
I didn’t need a man. Just myself. I could love myself enough to overcome anything. I’d been doing it this long, after all.
Nobody dared to speak as the plane took off. Not that we’d hear much over the whir of the engine and the drone of the wind. My ears clogged during the ascent, and in a daze, I pushed the crumpled wads of paper back into the envelope. The plane climbed and climbed. It never seemed to end.
I focused on the envelope, on Cillian’s shoes, his legs, and then back again. What was it about me that was so unlovable?
Someone shook my shoulder, and I startled. My tandem instructor stood over me, helmet and sunglasses already fitted on.
“Let’s get you rigged,” he shouted over the roar of the wind as he directed me to straddle the bench, then sat directly behind me.
He tugged at the hook over my left shoulder and clipped it to a ring on his harness.
It drew us closer, close enough to feel his body heat.
This I was used to, having done a couple of tandem jumps in France before switching to solos, though I didn’t have more than thirty jumps total under my belt.
It didn’t make it any less uncomfortable to be attached to a total stranger, especially when Cillian’s parachute-tampering threat lingered in the back of my mind.
The instructor hooked my right shoulder to his harness.
“Hey, no worries, loosen up,” he yelled. “If the parachute fails, at least the last thing we’ll think about is each other.”
Way to make things awkward. I cracked my neck and rolled my shoulders, not in the right mindset to deal with whatever that was. I felt the pull of the harness against my right hip.
“One more,” he yelled in my ear as his hips hugged mine. It was necessary for the jump, but not particularly comfortable. Especially not today. I shifted in place.
I chanced a glance at Cillian on the opposite bench over my shoulder. I expected him to be looking out the window, but his piercing glare was laser-focused on the points of contact with the instructor. His eyes flicked up to my face, and I bared my teeth at the menace in them. Screw him.
His nostrils flared, and his mouth twitched over clenched teeth. He shot up, one hand thumping against the low ceiling, his torso leaning over us.
“Get off her,” he roared over the engine droning, the rattling of the rolled-down door, and the wind.
The instructor yanked the hook on my left hip, undeterred.
Cillian dove at the man. He pushed Kevin against the wall, dragging me with them. I dangled off the bench by the attachment points, my legs caught beneath me at weird angles.
“I said, get away from my wife.”
“Whoa, Cillian, man, this is necessary for the jump.” Fear tinged his yelled words. “You know that.”
“She’s not jumping with you,” my husband roared in his face. “Take it off. Now.”
“We’ve got less than twelve minutes until the jump run.”
“Now eleven and fifty-five seconds. Get moving.”
“Cillian,” I cried out, “Stop this. I’m fine where I am.”
“’Course you would be. Well, I’m bloody well not.”
“Dude, man,” Kevin tried to appease. “That’s not how it’s done. We can’t simply change the harnesses mid-flight.”
Cillian grabbed Kevin’s shoulder strap and yanked, which hauled me along with them.
“Tell me again that’s not done.”
The instructor lifted his hands in surrender. “Whatever. Fine. It’s your jump, man. You’re certified. It’s not my problem anymore.”
Kevin unhooked me in quick succession, and I tumbled to my hands and knees on the deck.
“You two need some serious therapy,” he yelled.
Honestly, after today, I wasn’t so sure there’d be anything left to salvage for therapy to piece back together.
Kevin shed his harness and parachute off, then passed the loosened rig over to Cillian, who set his own aside. I guessed that answered my question about a possible tampered chute. The relief I felt failed to overpower the stitch in my chest.
“I mean it, man.” Kevin slapped my husband dearest on the shoulder. “Wife. Ex-wife. Whatever she is to you, get your head on straight before you exit.”
“I think I would rather not jump,” I voiced, completely over this shit.
“Too fucking bad,” Cillian shouted. “You’ve no choice in this.”
Kevin’s roguish features winced, but he held his tongue, no contradiction to voice when I knew canceled jumps happened.
Quickly, Cillian slipped his arms through the vertical straps, snapped the other straps in place, and adjusted them.
I scooped up the divorce papers against my chest with gloved hands, ready to show him exactly what I thought of finally getting his signature on them, and hauled myself back onto the bench.
It creaked under Cillian’s additional weight behind me.
Unlike Kevin’s professional approach, Cillian locked my harness onto his at my shoulders and hips with forceful jerks.
I felt him everywhere—my back, my butt, his dick against my tailbone—and it all dragged me to the pits of hell for a round of torture my body had no business desiring.
“Are they everything you ever wanted?” he asked, tapping the papers for emphasis.
I bit the inside of my bottom lip until I tasted blood. “You know they’re not. Stop mocking me.”
“No? But you did it so well to me.”
“You know that wasn’t how it was between us. Not this last month.”
“Do I?”
Our relationship might not have started out with romantic intentions, but somewhere along the way, I lost myself in the idea of us.
The red-light indicator overhead switched to green, and the pilot yelled incoherently from the cockpit. We had reached the jump spot.
“The ironic part,” Cillian leaned in and crowed in my ear, “I signed those papers for you. I planned to propose to you during this jump and make you my wife.”
I gasped and clutched my aching chest. His words twisted the stake in my heart from side to side until the hole he left behind was too large to heal without surgical intervention. I had come so impossibly close to having everything I wanted, only for it to be snatched away.
Our instructor rolled up the door to the open void. The wind, in combination with the drop in cabin pressure, battered at my ears in a deafening roar. An icy blast of air ravaged through the cabin. Kevin waved us over, and we scuttle-shuffled to the door.
I hurled the envelope out of the plane.
“That’s what I think of our divorce,” I yelled over my shoulder.
The papers flew and snapped out of the envelope. Some dropped. Others stuck to the plane. A few swirled back inside the cabin. The rest sailed and soared in a way I never could, dancing in the wind.
“Don’t think for one second that’ll lighten your sentence,” he roared over the wind as he tugged on my shoulder strap. “You’d be surprised how easy these hooks are to remove. Ready to come to grief, síbhean?”
I didn’t have time to argue before he leaped us through the door, and we free-fell to his cryptic words.