Chapter 4

“Careful. I might drop you,” the man holding me a hundred feet in the air jokes with a wobbly smile.

It would probably be endearing if it wasn’t absolutely terrifying. I start to scream louder. It’s like a new volume has been unlocked and unleashed inside my soul. It wails out of me in a bulldozing blast that will let nothing stop it on its quest for freedom.

I scream long past the time I realize that he was joking and even deeper into realizing that he isn’t about to drop me. I’m safe, as much as someone being suspended at a height that would liquify my organs should I drop, can be. He’s got me.

I hope.

Eventually, I stop screaming, even though I have no memory of stopping. My lips blubber a mindless gibber of nonsense as I alternate between staring at the handsome stranger and at the deadly fall.

“Usually women don’t start screaming at me until the second date,” he says. His teeth dare to peek out slightly from behind his teetering smile.

My body tenses.

“Why are women screaming while you’re on a date with them?”

Suddenly, his strong arms seem less like a comforting support and more like an iron cage. I’m well out-muscled. Not to mention, hovering in the fucking air.

“Oh no, no, no…” he splutters. “I—er…”

“Is this what you do with women? You take them? You kidnap them?”

“What? No! I’m saving you. I have a cape.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? You have a cape? Is that a threat?”

“God no.” He tries to run a hand through his hair but stops when its gelled shell resists him. “This is not the way I imagined this going,” he mutters.

“What do you mean ‘the way you imagined’? Did you plan this? Did you collapse the building? Are you a terrorist or affiliated with a terrorist organization?” I ask, using my most intense courtroom voice.

While I’m relatively certain he’s not a terrorist, interrogating him calms me down. It’s something I’ve done a million times. It’s something I have control over. I’m good at it. It’s what I do. It brings a sense of normalcy to, not to sound like a broken record, the fact that I’m floating a hundred feet in the air.

Handsome guy winces and tugs at his spandex collar. Truthfully, it’s kind of cute.

“Can we start over?” he asks, his voice cracking again as it goes impossibly high on the last word.

Considering the fact that he’s the only thing between me and plummeting towards a crushed cranium, I’m rather disposed to keep him happy.

“I’ll allow it.”

“Awesome,” he breathes. Then, he clears his throat. “Ma’am, I’m here to save you,” he says in a deep voice that’s best suited to a voice over for the new Robin Hood movie.

I cock an eyebrow.

“Oh no. Not ma’am. No one likes being called ma’am. I know that.” He clears his throat again. “Miss, I’m here to save me.”

Save me?

I pause.

He pauses.

He reflects.

“Shit. That’s not what I meant. I’m here to save you. I’m saving you. Clearly. Look, you’re all saved.”

I pause.

He pauses.

I gesture to the positively terrifying amount of empty air below me that promises certain death.

“Oh, yeah. Don’t worry. I can fly,” he says quickly.

Obviously.

“I can’t,” I say, just in case I need to state the obvious.

He smiles. “They hang suspended how bricks cannot,” he sings. Then, he smiles wider. Like I’m supposed to understand anything about the situation whatsoever.

“I don’t know if it’s the lingering trauma of being inside a collapsing building or not, but I have no clue what that means.”

It’s blunt. I know it’s blunt. I have this book that I got as a teenager when my parents saw I had trouble making friends, it’s called Dr. Debbie’s Guide to Understanding Relationships. There’s a whole chapter about using ‘I’ statements and easing people into criticism.

Screw gentle. Tonight, I’m embracing blunt.

“Just a joke… Hitchhiker’s Guide… got turned into a musical,” he mumbles, turning his head down and away so that he’s not looking at me.

“Right. Hilarious. Anyways, if you could put me down now, that’d be great,” I say in my best please-don’t-kill-me-because-I-didn’t-find-your-song-funny voice.

“Oh no. I can’t do that.”

Fuck.

“So, this is a kidnapping?” I ask. Whatever. Can’t get more kidnapped, can I?

“No!” he practically yells. “Why would you… Do I give off a kidnapper vibe?”

I look him over. While he’s handsome as hell, the spandex isn’t screaming mentally stable.

“Well…”

“You know what? Don’t answer that. I should’ve just told you that I can’t let you down here because the ground might be unstable. I don’t know what caused the building to collapse… it could be a violent attack or unstable ground or any number of things. The point is: it isn’t safe.”

“And do you have a place that is safe?”

He shrugs. He looks away, but then his eyes drift sideways to find my own. He looks hopeful. He looks like those dogs in those videos of the animal shelter when they see someone walking towards them.

“We could go to my place,” he says.

I sigh.

“This really is a kidnapping.”

He scrubs a hand over his face. “Is it the hair? Do I have kidnapper hair?”

“A little.”

“Look, I just want to make sure you’re safe. I’ll take you home right after I get some food into you and know that you’re not in shock or something.”

“So, you’re taking me to a secondary location?”

He makes an exasperated sound that echoes into the air. The air that we’re floating a hundred feet up in. Then, he looks at me and smirks. “Can it really be called a secondary location if the first one has collapsed into a pile of sticks?”

I consider it. I still give it fifty-fifty odds on the fact that I’m being kidnapped, but I appreciate him trying to logic me into it. So much more refined than the whole zip ties in the trunk routine.

“Touché,” I say, a smile finally gracing my face for the first time since I nearly died.

He smiles back. It’s a nice smile, one of honeyed warmth that sends a shiver down my spine.

“I really am here to save you, you know,” he says as we start drifting off west towards the ocean.

“Thanks, but I don’t need saving.”

He smiles again, but this time it’s tinged with a bit of sadness.

Fair enough. I just got rescued from a building that would have crushed me into pieces so tiny that they probably would never have found them all. A building, I might add, that I never should have been in were I not such a hopeless workaholic.

No, under oath, I don’t think I could say that I don’t need saving.

Still, I like that he lets me say it.

As far as kidnappers go, he’s not so bad.