Blown Away (A Romantic Comedy) (Five More Wishes Book 1) (7 page)

In a burst of either bravery or stupidity, I release his head and reach as high I can, swinging the knife above me, trying to cut the balloon to shreds. I manage to reach it, but the balloon is tougher than I thought or the knife is duller than I thought because I can’t make any progress. I slice at it, but the balloon seems to bounce away. I give it one more whack with everything I have, but I lose my balance and the knife goes flying out of my hand and over the side of the basket.

For a split second, I worry that I’ve killed someone with my clumsiness, that some poor shlub is going to get stabbed to death by the knife I’ve sent flying to earth. I don’t worry for too long. A second later, I start to go over, too. So, screw whoever I might have impaled. The only person in the world I’m worried about is me, me, me. In the blink of an eye, I’m hanging off of Cade’s shoulders at a ninety-degree angle with his head wedged in my crotch. It doesn’t stay there for long.

“I’m going over!” I scream.

Cade’s strong hands are like vises on my legs, but even if he were Superman, there’s no way he can save me from falling overboard. I’ve completely lost my balance, tumbling forward, my crotch up and over his head and falling fast out of the basket toward a terrible death.

It’s the ultimate cliché, but my life is flashing before my eyes. I see the whole thing from my premature birth right up until my premature pregnancy. After the replay of the highlights, my mind shifts to the life that I’ve left to live. My unborn baby. I want to call her Beryl…Okay, I can work on the name. And then there’s Cade. I’m going to miss Cade. We would have had a great life together. Sure, he can be aggravating, but a life with him would be a fun kind of aggravating with lots of laughs and adventures. Scratch that. I don’t want any more adventures. In my flash of clarity of consciousness between life and death, I’m sure of one thing: A life with Cade would be a life full of love.

So, this is how it ends. Death by splat. Totally unfair to end my life before it even begins. I feel shorted, ripped off, like the sucker who bets on a sidewalk card trick performer. My card never comes up.

Oh, well. No use dwelling on tragedy. I accept my fate. I’m going to die. My body is going to flatten like I’m the star of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. The fall is going to break every bone in my body. I don’t have a medical degree, but I bet that’s going to hurt.

I’m over the side of the basket, about to make a perfect impression of a bird, when I toss my acceptance aside and my survival instinct kicks in. My inner bitch rises to the surface, and I decide to fight back.

Finally.

I swing my arms and attempt to defy gravity, but I keep falling. Gravity is a tough bastard. I wish I did more ab exercises in my life. Or at least some ab exercises. Any ab exercises. But no, I have no core strength, and I can’t manage to lift up my torso and save myself.

“Hold on!” Cade shouts.

“Hold on to what? Air?” I shout back. I have nothing to hold on to, but Cade is doing a good job holding on to me. He manages to grab more of my body and begins to pull me from the abyss. It’s hit or miss for a moment, but miracles do happen, and Cade saves me.

Finally safe, we fall in a heap inside the basket with my back wedged up against the cooler. “The knife?” Cade asks after a minute.

“I hope I didn’t kill anyone.”

He sighs and slaps his forehead.

I don’t blame him. It’s totally my fault. We don’t have the knife, no way to rip the balloon, no way to save ourselves.

And it’s all my fault.

“It’s not my fault,” I say. “Totally not my fault.”

Cade gathers me to him and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have forced you to do that.”

“Oh,” I breathe. Even as we’re about to die, he’s looking at me like he’s on Weight Watchers, and I’m a Costco-sized cheesecake.  I could melt into him and merge our two selves to make one really great person. “We’re going to die.”

“Everyone’s going to die.”

“Yes, but they’re going to die later. We’re going to die now.”

He doesn’t say a word. What can he say? It’s a done deal.  We’re going to fall off the side of a mountain or drown in a deep lake. It’s not going to be pretty. I throw out a wish to the universe for a miracle. Come on universe, give me a nice juicy miracle to save our lives.

I close my eyes and make a wish, as if it’s my birthday, and I’m about to blow out my candles. I wish with all my heart and then I open my eyes. Cade is still looking at me, like he’s trying to memorize my face.

No miracle happens. It’s just him and me floating in the sky, waiting to die.

As proof of our demise, the balloon makes a terrible noise, like metal on metal, and we jolt in space. “What the hell was that?” Cade asks and stands up. I follow him. We pass the top of a mountain, and below us is a large, lush field. The balloon makes another terrible noise, and we look up. A metal box, connected to the fire apparatus is blinking red. The fire dims, and there’s another grinding noise, like gears coming to a halt.

“Uh…” Cade says. I throw my arms around him and nestle my head in his chest. I’m not an engineer, but I’m sure the grinding noise is bad. The balloon sounds like it’s shutting down. It sounds like death is upon us.

“I love you,” I say, surprising the hell out of myself.

“I love you, too,” he responds, surprising me even more.

I close my eyes, waiting to drop, just like I would do on a roller coaster, but we don’t drop. There’s no plummeting going on. We don’t even blow up. No explosion. The light flashes, the gears grind, and we float gently down to the open field, surrounded by mountains.

“It’s been programmed to land,” Cade says, looking up at the metal box. “This was planned all along.”

I push back out of Cade’s embrace. “A practical joke?”

“I don’t think it’s a joke, but I think it was planned,” he says, eyeing the cocaine-filled cooler. The ground gets closer ever so slowly, and finally we land with a thump. The basket bounces, and the balloon deflates, getting blown sideways and taking us with it. The basket falls on its side, and Cade holds me, taking the brunt of the fall. The deflated balloon is being whipped by the wind, pulling us along the field like a sled. We may have survived the fall, but I’m not sure we’re going to survive being dragged at twenty miles per hour.

“Brace yourself!” Cade shouts, as we bounce over grass and rocks.

“Do you know something I don’t know?” I ask. There’s no way to see where we’re going, but it’s obvious that eventually we’re going to hit something. I hold tight to him and hope that he’s holding tight to the basket.

A minute later, we finally crash land and come to a stop, bumping into a tree. On impact, we’re thrown out of the basket onto the grass. Cade holds me tight, protecting me from the worst of it.

“See?” he says when we come to a stop. “That was easy.”

We lie on our backs in the grass, catching our breath. It’s a gorgeous day without a cloud in the sky. There’s a light breeze which fills my nostrils with the sweet smell of grass and untouched wilderness. Heaven only knows where we are. We could be in Colorado or California or in some alternate universe. My money is on the alternate universe.

“This just goes to show that we should never be negative, never pessimistic,” Cade says. “Everything turned out peachy.”

“Peachy?”

“I thought it was the right word for the occasion. Are you okay to get up?”

He stands and puts his hand out for me. I take it, and he pulls me up. I’m barefoot, and my skirt is torn to shreds. I touch my hair. It’s like a rat’s nest up there. Cade, on the other hand, looks perfect, like he was just made up by professional hair, makeup, and fashion stylists for a GQ photo shoot. He turns around, probably getting his bearings.

“I think we want to go that way,” he says pointing behind me.

“That way? What way is that way? Is there an IHOP that way? I could go for some pancakes. Or maybe a shoe store is that way? I could use a pair of shoes. I’m barefoot, you know.”

“I don’t know about an IHOP or a shoe store, but I’m reasonably sure we go that way.”

I put my hands on my hips. “You have no idea where we are. You have no idea what way that way is. Admit it. What state are we in?”

Cade raises an eyebrow and shoots me a flirty smile. “We’re in a state with mountains.”

“I knew it. We’re doomed.”

“No, not doomed,” he says, taking my hand. “It’s common knowledge that anywhere in America, a person is only a one-day walk to a Walmart. Three hours tops to a Starbucks.”

“Starbucks sounds pretty good,” I say and yawn. It’s been a hell of a day. The relief of being alive has let the wave of the day’s stress hit me like a tsunami, and now I’m all washed out. If I were a camping kind of woman, I would insist that we stay put and get some sleep, but I’m the opposite of a camping kind of woman. I’m a Starbucks kind of woman, and I would kill for a mocha and a scone.

And a hairbrush.

I hope that Cade’s right about us being a three-hour walk to a mocha.

“I’m sorry this happened,” Cade says, completely out of character. It’s the first time I’ve heard him apologize in all the years I’ve known him, and it rubs me the wrong way. It’s not his fault that we got abducted in a hot air balloon. However, he’s responsible for a whole host of annoying things in my past, which he’s never bothered to say he’s sorry about.

I open my mouth to yell at him, but he’s too fast for me. He covers my mouth with his, enveloping me in a strong embrace. All of his faults are forgotten as he turns my brain into mush with the power of his kiss. I no longer care that my feet are cold, that there’s a breeze up my open skirt to my hoo-hah, and that we’re probably further than a three-hour walk to Starbucks.

Cade tops the kiss with a boob hand-job, which makes me moan. The sound bounces off the mountains and comes back at me, as if nature is as aroused as I am.

“There. That’s for the road,” Cade says, ending the kiss. I stand in post-kiss euphoria while he rummages in the balloon basket and comes out with the cooler. He takes my hand and starts walking in the so-called Walmart direction.

“Is that wise?” I ask, pointing at the cooler.

“Probably not, but it’s also proof. Don’t ask me proof of what. I have no idea. But it’s a lot of cocaine, and I’m thinking it’s important.”

I agree. The journalist in me thinks it’s important, too, and it will make a great visual whenever we get access to a camera. As we walk across the field, I begin to feel better. At least I’m not alone, and now Cade knows about the baby and is more or less happy about it. And for the topper, he loves me.

“All in all, this has been a pretty good day,” Cade says, giving my hand a little squeeze.

“I understand. I mean, sure we almost died, but at least you had sex.”

“Any day with sex is a good day,” he agrees. “But there was more than sex. I’m rethinking our agreement.”

My skin prickles. What rethinking is he talking about? We agreed to go our separate ways, not to do the whole relationship thing. After all, how could we force a relationship just because I’m crazy fertile, and his sperm are super swimmers? That’s not enough for a relationship. It has to be built on something more. Cade squeezes my hand again and guides me around a rock.

 I’m preparing to lay it all on the line, to tell him that I might want to rethink, too, when the roar of an engine breaks through the quiet field. We turn in the direction of the noise. Far on the other side of the meadow, a large Jeep is barreling toward us. A few seconds later, it’s joined by two other off-road vehicles. Cade pulls me close.

“This is probably not peachy,” he says.

At first I think Cade is wrong and that we’re about to be saved. It looks like the marines or the National Guard are on their way, thundering through the meadow, tearing the grass underfoot and breaking through saplings and over rocks, like they will do anything to get to me and bring me back to civilization where I can brush my hair.

I wave my hands at them and jump up and down. “Over here! Over here!” I shout, happily. They’re so close, I can almost make out their faces. There’s one open Jeep, one Hummer, and another large SUV. I think it’s a Mercedes. I bet it has seat warmers, and I bet if I ask nicely, they would get me to an IHOP and a Starbucks, pronto. Maybe I could get the Starbucks first and bring my mocha into the IHOP. It would go great with silver dollar pancakes. I love silver dollar pancakes with raspberry syrup. Yum.

But as the vehicles get closer, I realize something’s off. The military doesn’t use Mercedes, and it’s quite a coincidence that our maybe saviors just happen to be in the middle of nowhere and are waiting around to save us.

I think back to the flashing light and the grinding noise in the balloon that signaled our landing. It was an awful lot like an automated program. Maybe Cade is right and Samba didn’t forget his cocaine in the balloon. Maybe it’s a gift for whoever’s in the SUVs for helping him escape. Whatever the answer is, I don’t think friends are barreling toward us.

“Don’t wave. Don’t call out,” Cade urges. He grabs my hand and tugs me in the other direction away from the cars. We run full out toward a grove of trees, where we can hide under cover. It’s our best chance to get to safety, even though it’s unclear what the danger is.

“Maybe you should leave the cocaine,” I yell as we run. It’s a good chance that they’re after the million dollars’ worth of illicit drugs in the cooler, and if we leave it for them, they’ll leave us alone. But Cade has other ideas. He holds onto the cooler for dear life as we run. I ignore the rough twigs and rocks under my feet, focused solely on the grove of trees ahead of us.

Of course, there’s no way we can outrun a collection of environmentally-irresponsible V-8’s. We might as well stand still and let them run us over. But there’s something to be said for stupid optimism…it’s stupid. So we keep running toward the trees. I’d like to say we almost make it before we’re cut off, but we’re nowhere close. The trees are still far in the distance when the three vehicles catch up to us and make a circle around us, coming to a screeching halt.