One Step Too Far Read Online Free PDF Page B

head. She was bare-foot and wary-looking when she opened the door. He was still in the same dark suit, his brown tie loosened. He smiled and moved past her, as far away as he could get in the cramped hallway and he smelled of beer and damp, it was still raining outside. They went into the kitchen, where the strip light was unflattering, made them both look pale, exposed.
    “Sorry, after all that I’ve got nothing to drink,” she said, and her voice was high-pitched, unnatural. “Would you like a coffee? Or I can make you Horlicks?” And she tried to laugh, but it wasn’t much of a joke.
    Ben said yes, coffee would be great, and then said nothing more as she made it, and she couldn’t think of anything to say either. She slopped the kettle and swore gently as the water scalded her, but she continued pouring and stirring anyway. She took the milk from the fridge, offered him sugar and led him into the sitting room. She put the coffee on the table that she’d hurriedly cleared of the papers and books and crap that normally lived there and sat down on the sofa. Ben sat in the only other chair in the room. The distance ached between them. She stood up again and put on some music – Radiohead. The notes sounded mournfully, expanding into the space. How could it be that she'd sent him a note effectively asking him to be her boyfriend, and he’d been so keen he'd rung her in the middle of the night and now he was here in her flat and they didn’t know what to do, how to take it forward? Conversation eluded them – Ben was shy and Emily was teetering on the very edge of the next stage of her life. She literally didn’t know what to do, how to take that step.
     
    The body dropped like a stone under her. It fell maybe fifteen feet before wrenching violently to a halt, bouncing, then hanging from its ankles. The body writhed and wriggled, its long legs trying to untangle themselves from the ropes that bound them. She looked down, horrified. The shock completely over-whelmed the adrenaline that had been pumping through her and she was now rigid with terror. With a snap the body came free and it turned 180 degrees in the air, the bright red and yellow finally revealing itself, as Jeremy continued downwards away from the plane, slightly more gently now, a little more how she’d imagined it. She looked into the eyes of the instructor and understood now what the training had been about, why she’d been told to sit right at the very edge of the door, half in, half out. “Are you OK?” shouted Greg above the roar of the engine. Emily shook her head. She wished she’d jumped first, so she hadn’t had to witness it from above, because now she couldn’t do it. Greg smiled at her kindly, squeezed her arm, then shoved her hard into the void.
    “What are you thinking about?” said Ben.
    Emily remembered then where she was, here in her hastily tidied sitting room with this geeky parachuting accountant, how parachuting had caused all this trouble in the first place.
    “I was wondering how you can bear to fling yourself out of a plane the second time, once you know what it’s like.”
    “You just had a bad experience,” said Ben. “Jeremy is 6’3” with zero co-ordination, he wasn’t your best role model. He’s not really cut out for parachuting.”
    “It wasn’t just him that terrified me though,” she said. “It was worse being pushed out of the plane – I can’t believe the instructor did that, it’s cruel,” and even as she remembered it, from the safety of her living room, it reminded her of something long forgotten, made her feel unnerved, distressed all over again.
    “He had to do that,” said Ben. “Otherwise you’d have missed the landing area. It was actually perfectly safe.”
    “It really didn’t feel it. I don’t feel safe now.”
    “What do you mean?” Ben said, and he seemed alarmed, as if he’d made a mistake to come here so late after all.
    “I don’t mean like that.” She hesitated