It’safunnyfeeling to fall.
Both the physical and metaphorical action of the word equally as peculiar.
As I fell down the cliff, elbows catching on saw-toothed rocks and feet kicking out in desperate search for the ground, I realized that falling–in every iteration of the word–was a paradox.
You’ve never been more free, your body free-falling, gliding, soaring through the air, and yet, I’d never felt more ensnared in my whole life than during that fall.
Falling is a trap of the mind, tying it down with ropes weaved of terror as it screams and flails and cries for release. Once you’re falling, you can’t stop falling, and that’s the trap. Whether physically or metaphorically, the fall is inevitable once it's set in motion.
Falling in love, for example.
I’d never been in love, but I’d heard and seen enough about it to know that once you’re in, there’s no stopping it until it's too late. Until you’re flying off the cliff with your heart in your hands, and all you can do is hope that someone catches you. If not, your heart will catch your fall and obliterate at the bottom into a mangled, bloody mess and leave you crippled beyond repair.
That was about to be me. Mangled. Bloody.
So so bloody.
I’d only been falling for maybe two seconds, but it felt like years. The wind whizzing past my ears as I plummeted was blaring and ominous as fuck. My eyes refused to focus. Everything was a blur of dirt and death.
Halfway down the cliff, my searching feet caught on the lip of a root that jutted out like a handle. My chin found the handle next, bouncing off of it like a rubber ball and clashing my teeth together in a collision that rang a painful tune between my ears.
In a reaction of pure instincts, I shot both hands up and tried to grasp that root. My left hand clipped it, fingertips dusting with sandy grime and damp earth.
My right hand, however, clenched for dear life until a pop went off in my shoulder socket, and the pain spiraled the rest of the way down my body with a high-pitched yelp ascending above me.
With my last-ditch grip on the root, I’d slowed my descent to something survivable as I practically slid the rest of the way down to the bottom.
Survivable didn’t mean painless though.
Sharp cries of agony escaped my mouth as rocks slashed my knees and gashed my palms. I shoulder-rolled to the end of the hill until my back met flat ground and all of me came to a stop.
Holy fuck.
I laid there, gasping for breath that had been kicked out of me through the fall. Each plea for air was stabbing as I struggled, choppy gobs of nothingness clotting my lungs.
Just over the edge of the hill, a dark head of wild hair with eyes bright enough to challenge the stars shot into view.
“Scarlett!”
I parted my gasping lips to tell him I was all right, but nothing came out except wet sputters of desperation.
“Don’t move!” Reyes yelled down to me.
Muscles in my throat strained as I worked to breathe, struggled to relieve the stinging in my lungs as they sought out oxygen that simply wasn’t there. The stinging in my chest clawed up to my eyes as tears pricked and flowed over, wetting the sides of my face as I stared up at Agent Reyes. He twisted and turned every which way, looking for an easy way down.
When he didn’t find one, he did something that finally forced a cutting inhale right through my bleeding body.
Shock propelled me up onto my elbows, a cry for him to stop sitting thick in my throat. Before I could get it out, Reyes had thrown himself over the edge of the cliff, arms holding himself up just off the fringe. His hands anchored his body off of the eighty degree incline, and terror beat at my chest as I glimpsed the severe cut of his determined face as he looked down.
And then he fucking slid down the uneven slope of the cliff, arms propped above his head to help control the momentum at which he went.
I had fallen in probably three or four seconds total. Agent Reyes’ feet hit the ground and was kneeling down in front of me in less than ten.
“When did you become Indiana fucking Jones?” I wheezed, eyes stuck on him.
“Don’t speak,” he muttered through thinned lips as he looked me over.
“I—”