Logan smacked himself repeatedly in the forehead with the heel of his hand. Lip-locking with Miss Celery had not, not, not been a good idea.
Yes, he found himself inexplicably attracted to her. Yes, he’d been guilty of deliberately making her uncomfortable in the seminar. But it had backhanded on him in a most unexpected way. He’d noticed that the more hot and bothered she became, the more aroused he got himself.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. He was supposed to be firmly in control, not uncontrollably firm.
And why was he interested in kissing someone who was using and double-crossing his grandmother? That was the part he really didn’t get. Because he just didn’t buy her story about not being involved on the college’s behalf.
Logan told himself to put her out of his mind. What he needed to focus on at the moment was his job, and his job today was to be a competent tandem-master to the overweight, green-faced kid who sat next to him.
Bart Olson, nineteen years old, was about to make his first jump ever, strapped securely to Logan’s back.
He’d explained it to Bart: Once the plane got to a level of 12,500 feet, their pilot, Mike, would circle the drop zone and give the okay. They’d open the door and brace themselves for the onslaught of freezing air.
Then the group of five who were practicing the formation would jump, one at a time, in five-second intervals. After they’d gone, the individual parachute would go.
Finally, Logan and Bart would make their leap. Tandem jumpers always went last.
Logan took a look at his student’s face and shook his head, suppressing a smile. The poor kid’s teeth were chattering in fear, and his hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists.
The group of formation jumpers grinned in sympathy. “Hey, kid,” one of them shouted, “you’ll be fine. You’ve got the best instructor I’ve ever met.”
“Yeah?” warbled Bart. “Have you ever made a bad jump?” he asked Logan.
“Had a bad spill once, but it was my first jump and that was a long time ago. Ten years, okay?”
Bart’s green face drained to white. “So… did you break anything?”
“The tib and fib of one leg. My hands took most of the damage. Snapped a couple of bones that popped through the skin. Looked like damn bone claws until the doc got to work.”
Bart swallowed convulsively.
Logan shrugged. “Not tryin’ to scare ya, kid. Just being honest. Never have broken anything since. I was stupid. I flared too early, tried to run it out, and then tripped and fell. Tried to break my fall with my wrists, snapped them, and then fell on my face.”
The kid’s eyes were now wild.
Logan clapped him on the shoulder, and told him, “You’re not gonna do that. First of all, you’re with me for the next ten jumps, and I’m not gunna let that happen to either one of us—I’m a lot more skilled now. Second, I’m gonna train you better than I was trained. And third, you’re a better listener than I was at your age. I was fearless, and that’s just dumb.”
The kid nodded.
“You, on the other hand,” Logan continued, “I can smell your fear. And it’s going to make you smart. You’re going to remember what I tell you.”
Bart’s eyes remained wide, and his stomach quivered. Logan wondered if he was going to back out at the last minute. It had happened before—a full-grown man had screamed like a colicky baby and beat on his shoulders until he’d backed both of them away from the door. It was rare—most people who didn’t have the guts wouldn’t even get on the plane—but it did happen.
The other thing that happened occasionally was a nice case of the hurls. Logan really, really didn’t want to get puked on today, but as he looked at the kid, with his green face and quivering stomach, he had to admit it was a possibility. Ugh.
The plane touched altitude, and they watched the others make their jumps without further conversation. When the last individual had gone, dropping down and away into the prop blast, it was their turn.
Logan gave Bart the signal, and they moved to the door, Logan gripping the bar immediately inside it. The kid didn’t shriek or pound on him, so Logan released the bar and leaned out. As they dropped, he immediately turned toward the front of the plane, riding the prop blast. Then he turned them into position for a tandem fall: belly-to-earth.
God, he loved the adrenaline rush, the exhilaration of it, and he exulted in it for a brief couple of seconds, until he felt the kid’s puke soaking into his neck. Aw, hell.
Then they were enveloped by the familiar feeling of weightlessness. As Logan had tried to explain to Bart, you really didn’t feel as if you were falling, you just… floated.
Though you were whizzing through the air at approximately 120 mph in a free fall, you had nothing to judge your speed by, so you couldn’t tell.
After sixty seconds, Logan checked the altimeter on his wrist and signaled to the video guy with a wave-off that he was about to pull the cord for the pilot chute, the smaller chute that would stabilize them before he opened the main canopy. Done.
And now Big Bertha. Done.
For the next three minutes, courtesy of gravity, Logan and Bart floated down to the earth. Logan steered them in expertly, pulling the brake toggles down toward his knees with perfect timing. They hit the ground, skipped a few steps in the grass, and felt the drag of the parachute landing behind them.
“That was sooo cooool!” Bart shouted in his ear. But after they’d unhooked from each other, he had a hard time looking Logan in the eyes. He was obviously remembering his stomach’s midair rebellion.
Logan could smell it on himself now, but refused to let his face register any disgust. The poor kid didn’t need to see it. He grinned at his student, instead. “So, you liked it, huh?”
Bart nodded, his face red but his eyes glowing. “Uh…” he began. “I’m really sorry—“
“Happens all the time, bub. Don’t give it another thought.” He put an arm around the kid’s shoulders and gave him a man-to-man slap on the back. “Let’s get the chute packed.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Logan dragged his lawn chair into the seminar room and shrugged apologetically at Marie. “Sorry, I’m not tryin’ to be obnoxious or anything, but I ain’t sittin’ in one of those torture devices the college supplies as desks.”
Marie looked at one of them, then back at him, and nodded. She made his mouth water today, dressed in a long royal blue skirt that hugged her slender curves. It had a slit in the back of it, so that her legs played peekaboo when she walked.
The snug sweater she’d paired it with was really very modest, but clung to her willowy torso in a most appealing way. He discerned the ridges of her bra under it…oh, damn! He was doing it again, giving her the one-eyed once-over, when he’d promised not to.
Her brown eyes flashed at him and those perfectly formed pink lips compressed. Two spots of color accentuated the freckles high on her cheeks.
Okay. He’d sworn to behave himself, and behave he would. It was just that he could remember exactly how she’d tasted. Like sweet vanilla, with a touch of nutmeg. She’d been delicious, and hesitant, then passionate.
What bothered him was the shame he’d seen on her face afterward. Had he put it there, or was it something she carried around inside?
Was it due to professional or personal reasons? He wasn’t sure. But he couldn’t forget the taste of her, or the texture of the fine, delicate skin on her cheeks, or the tremor that had rippled through her when he stroked the shell of her ear with feather-light touches.
He forbade himself to look at her body any longer, and was soon distracted by more slides of his grandfather’s work. Today, instead of lonely cityscapes, Marie was projecting a series of nudes with unbound hair. They assumed odd positions, not sexual, but private.
Naked, he thought, not nude. Natural, not idealized. They were pale and vulnerable against dark interiors, and always gazed, faces unseen, at an open window. The women had a peculiar dignity, in spite of their lack of clothing, but neither the rooms nor the suggested view outside their windows held any warmth or promise.
They were alienated figures, figures trapped in their circumstances, not resigned, but not desperate, either. They were lonely. Achingly lonely, and drawn against architecture and wide spaces that seemed far more important than they.
Marie put one nude in juxtaposition with the male figure.
The woman was inside, but leaned toward the wind billowing past her curtains. She crouched on an unmade bed as if she were slipping out of it, stirred by the forces of nature.
The man sat outside, on the stoop of a commercial building that was nameless, as if the business done inside didn’t really matter. He was fully clothed, but had folded his arms across his body in a gesture of self-solace.
They both looked as if they wished to escape the mundane, the daily grind of their lives.
But whereas the woman looked toward nature, the man simply turned his back on commercial culture. He seemed hopeless; she seemed mesmerized.
When Marie turned the lights on, she suggested that all the students pull their desks into a circle. It was only then that Logan began to understand he was in trouble. Tanya, Jennifer, and Deirdre had all given him saucy greetings before class had started, but he’d been too busy looking at Marie to notice that he was under siege.
Pushing all thoughts of his grandparents out of his mind, he now recognized that he was in mortal danger.
Tanya wore no bra in the air-conditioning, and had become adept at jiggling her luscious fruit whenever he looked her way.
But shifting his gaze to Jennifer was no better: she’d applied some kind of shiny lip gloss that made her mouth appear wet with juices. Her tongue was much in evidence, too. He averted his eyes.
Deirdre didn’t seem the type to—Mother of God! He squeezed his eyes tightly shut until he was sure she’d crossed her legs again. Sharon Stone had nothing on Deirdre.
Where were their mothers? Their fathers? Their keepers?
Desperately, he looked elsewhere in the room, praying for innocence or chastity. What met his eyes was not reassuring.
A blonde in a squeaky-tight pink sweater took her time slowly peeling and eating a banana, while the girl next to her wore sprayed-on black leather pants and sat with her legs splayed open, stroking her own thighs.
Alarmed, Logan blinked hard and swiveled his head to find the wholesome, preppy girl who always wore her short bobbed hair in a plaid headband. Damn! His eyes scurried away from her, too, when he got a load of the tiniest tennis skirt ever manufactured. Her long, tanned legs looked ready to strike and wrap around their prey: him.
He felt like a helpless bunny surrounded by wolverines. These women wanted to hold him down and have their wicked way with him. His mind shied away from an image of himself, missing for days, found by the law, naked and bruised and handcuffed to a dorm-room radiator.
There had to be someone in this room who wasn’t ready to take a bite out of him… his eyes fell, with supreme relief, on the girl with the buzz cut and the nose ring. He’d never seen such a beautiful sight in all his life, even though she’d added a safety pin to her left eyebrow and was cleaning her black-painted nails with a Swiss army knife.
He shot her what he thought of as his most appealing grin.
Her eyes darkened with hostility, and she clamped the knife between her teeth to send him an international gesture. Then she went back to cleaning her nails.
Logan took a chance and slid his gaze to Marie, who kept her expression carefully deadpan and repeated her question about the differences and similarities of the two paintings she’d shown last.
When the room remained silent, she sighed. “Do I need to turn the lights off and show the two slides again?”
Logan shook his head vigorously. He was suddenly more afraid of the dark than a four year old. There was danger in the dark—no telling what these teenage sexual predators would do.
“Logan? You have a comment? An insight?”
He thought fast. “Uh. Yeah. Yeah, I do…”
Marie waited patiently. “And that would be…?”
“Uh--- well, the architecture overwhelms the people in both paintings.”
She nodded. “So what does that tell you?”
He stared at her, helplessly. He really hated this psychological art shit. But anything to keep the lights on, or he’d have to crawl into the guerrilla feminist’s lap for protection from the other women.
“Are you seeing any close-ups of the people’s faces?” Marie prodded.
He shook his head.
“Okay, so even though the woman on the left was naked, it’s not an intimate portrait of her, right? You can’t even see her face. And the guy on the right—do you see any real individualizing characteristics in his face?”
“Nope.”
She waited for him to expand on that.
Silence.
She got up and walked ominously to the wall switch.
“No! Wait—he wasn’t a social guy, my grandfather. All he wanted to do was paint. And you can see that in both of those slides. The people aren’t as important as the whadyoucallit—the composition itself.”
Marie’s smile was brilliant, and he basked in the glow for a moment. She really reminded him of autumn, his favorite time of year. It was in her coloring: afternoon sunshine, red and golden leaves, the creamy skin under the sweet freckles like the promise of snow to come.
Autumn was in her whole demeanor, too—crisp and cool, with a cloudless cerulean intellect.
Logan blinked. He was an outdoors kind of guy, but this was a little ridiculous. He needed to get a grip on himself.
“The people weren’t as important as the composition,” Marie repeated. “Exactly. So why do you think they’re there at all? If he didn’t care about them, why put them in?”
Logan objected to this. “It wasn’t that he didn’t care about people. He did. He just couldn’t escape his own alienation. I think he felt trapped, saw people all around him caught fast in the circumstances of their own lives, unable to change anything.”
Marie was radiating some emotion--- pride? And looking at him as if he were a toddler who had just formed his first complete sentence.
“So what you’re saying,” she murmured, “is that he cared very much for others. The alienation we’re seeing in the paintings isn’t out of disinterest, but comes from empathy.”
This was getting a little too intense for Logan. “Uh, yeah. Whatever.”
A frown crossed her face but then disappeared, like a cloud chased by a stiff breeze. She seemed satisfied, for she nodded and moved on to discuss the formal composition of the two paintings and the significance of the window motifs in each.
Logan yawned, trying to hide it behind his hand, but his ennui evaporated as Marie turned off the lights once again. Uh-oh.
Tense, he sat bolt upright for a good ten minutes, and then told himself not to be stupid. Like any of these girls would really try to molest him in class--- “aaahcck! What the hell?”
A hot, sweaty hand had gripped his upper thigh without warning. He knocked it off.
“Logan? Is there a problem? “Marie’s voice inquired.
“No, no. No problem.”
She continued to discuss the angles and planes of the new paintings.
A different hand gave a healthy squeeze to his right buttock. Logan leapt up, knocking over his lawn chair. “Damn it!”
“What is going on?” Marie snapped the question this time.
“Nothing,” he muttered, shooting the woman next to him a glance full of suppressed violence.
She simply gave him a bland stare.
Logan righted his chair, moved it back about two feet, and sat again. Aw, hell. Where had his pen gone? Trying not to creak or cause any further disturbance, he leaned forward and felt along the industrial carpet for the runaway Bic.
He should have been ready for it, should have blocked it like a man, but the vixen got him. Out of the shadows came another set of fingers, and this one flicked his nipple.
“That’s it!” Logan yelled. “Back off, you god damned perverted private-school princesses!”
Marie flipped on the lights, and stood glaring at him, her hands on her hips. “If you don’t stop interrupting my class—“
“I’m in danger of being gang-raped by this gaggle of nymphomaniacs!”
“Logan, I realize you have an inflated ego, but that is ridiculous.”
“Oh, yeah? One of these lovely young ladies just flicked my nipple in the dark. Another one grabbed my ass! How would you react? I’m done with it! I’m done and I’m gone.” Logan slammed his notebook shut and stalked out of the room.
The rest of the class erupted into howls of laughter, while Marie stood stunned in the doorway.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
I've never been sky diving before but i did do my research for this chapter and used that information the best i could. =) With that said, if there are any expert divers out there-- please refrain from sending me flames for my mistakes. I'm sure no one here plans on using the information gained in this chapter to safely jump from a plane. *grins*
I also want to thank [redacted] for the beta on this one. Kudos to you, sweety!
I also want to thank [redacted] for the beta on this one. Kudos to you, sweety!
Admin Note: The name of the beta reader on this chapter has been removed, as they were not complicit in the plagiarism.