Partner Games
Page 20

The wind rose and the elevator gave a little shake.
I whimpered and buried my face against Swift’s shirt. “I’m wrong. I can’t do this.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said, voice soft. His hand stroked my braids. “So tell me about the ammonia things.”
Ammonia? I pulled back and stared at him. “What?”
“The dinosaurs. The ammonias.” His lips twitched.
“The ammonites?” I corrected. Was he teasing me? “They’re called ammonoidea. And there’s eight different classes of them.”
“Sounds fascinating. Name all eight for me.”
That was a weird request. “Why?”
“Because it’s distracting you and you need a good distraction.”
He wasn’t wrong about that. I pressed my cheek against his shirt and closed my eyes, thinking. “Well, in the Devonian period – that’s my specialty – there’s four different kinds. Anarcestida, Clymeniida, Goniatitida, and Prolecanitida. Then when you get into the Permian, there’s Ceratitida. Triassic is, um…” I had to think, because his hand was stroking down my back and it was distracting me. “Phylloceratida. And the Jurassic period had Lytoceratida and Ammonitida, but I don’t really study those.”
“Because they hung out with the dinosaurs and you liked your ammonoids in the primordial soup?”
I chuckled. “I don’t know, I really like the very early stuff. I feel there’s so many people who like dinosaurs and are interested in Tyrannosaurus Rex, but to me, that’s like taking a book and flipping to the second to the last chapter. I like to see the early things so we can learn about what evolved and how things changed. And it’s amazing to see something hundreds of millions of years old and how complex it is. Like the siphuncle.”
“The whatty-what-uncle?”
“It’s a thin tube that connected the body to the chambers of the shell. It would pump water out of the chambers and allowed the ammonite to control its buoyancy. It’s marvelously clever and a lot of the earliest ammonites had the siphuncle on the bottom, which—“
The elevator lurched and screeched to a stop.
I whimpered and clung to Swift.
“We’re there,” he said, patting my back. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Are we high up?” I asked in a thin voice as the doors opened. I couldn’t bring myself to look. I clenched his hand in my sweaty one.
“I can’t lie. It’s pretty high,” he admitted, stepping forward and holding the elevator door for me. “But look. There’s a sign-in sheet and a lot of safety equipment, and someone’s going to double-check it before they let you loose. You’re totally safe.”
I trailed behind him nervously, knowing I was being a baby about this. Heights was a common fear. It was something lots of people were scared of. No big deal. The equipment here was safe or they wouldn’t have all those people waiting below for their chance to go down the zip line.
I repeated this to myself over and over again as we signed in. Swift made me sign in first, which was sweet.
I guess he knew that if he went first and left me, I might chicken out. This way, I had to go.
One of the workers arrived and gestured for my camera-man to step aside. “Here. Let’s get you geared up.”
I gave Swift a wide-eyed look of terror and he nodded at me encouragingly. I stepped forward and stood still as the worker had me put on a leg and waist harness and a Y-type strap that went over my back and chest. I stared at Swift the entire time as he was geared up by another employee. He was the only safe thing to look at. There were windows everywhere that showed us just how high up we were.
Then we put helmets on and cameras on selfie-sticks were attached. It was time to go outside.
The employees opened the door and gestured we should go outside, and a gust of strong, brutal wind ripped inside, ruffling my braids. Ahead, I saw a platform and a line, and nothing but air.
I whimpered again, shutting my eyes.
“Come on, Tiny,” Swift murmured at my ear. He took my hand and put his other hand at my waist and propelled me forward. “I got you. We got this. All we have to do is let them strap you to the line, okay? Then you’re going to have a quick ride down to the bottom and we get our next clue. If we do this fast, we have a jump on the others. Won’t that be awesome?”
“Awesome,” I said faintly. Wasn’t awesome. I was going to puke out of sheer terror.
“And once we’re done, we’re about due for a rest stop.” His voice was low and sweet in my ear, all sultry and seductive. “And you know, my offer stands.”
“Offer?” I breathed. Oh, oh, his dirty offer for me to sleep in his room. I thought about it. I thought really hard about it. Georgie would give me shit, but she would understand. I think even she wanted me to hook up. But the timing was so crappy. And I was the most awkward girl ever when it came to being sexy around a guy. Hell, I’d just spent the last five minutes talking about siphuncles and buoyancy in prehistoric cephalopods.
“That’s right, babe,” Swift said, and gave me a nudge forward. Another employee took me by the hand and began clipping me into what felt like a dozen carabiners. “You and me, rest period tonight.”
I looked at the cameras, and the slope that seemed to go on for a million miles below me. Oh god. My mind was a foggy haze. I needed to tell him that I wasn’t experienced. Not like he was expecting. “Hey, Swift?”
“You can go any time now, ya?” the employee said and gestured at the endless ski ramp that I was supposed to go over on the zip line. Hundreds and hundreds of feet straight down.
Yeah, I was gonna barf, but I needed to do this. Georgie needed me to do this. Swift needed me to do this so he could take his turn. I stood up on wobbling feet, and waited at the precipice.
The employee gestured for me to go.
“What is it, Tiny?” Swift asked.
“I’m a virgin,” I blurted.
“You’re what?” His jaw dropped.
The cameraman swiveled around past Swift’s back, and I realized with horror that I’d just blurted out my status to the entire world. Oh shit.
I stepped off the ramp and into the air, and the zip line hissed. I screamed as it flung me down the ski-jump.
Maybe I’d get lucky and it’d drop me off the edge of the planet.
 
 
Chapter Thirteen
 

“Are you freaking kidding me?” — Swift, Team One Percent, The World Races  
“Ha ha. Swift’s been laying all his smooth moves on a clueless VIRGIN. Wait ‘til I tell the guys at home. They are going to give him such shit.” — Plate, Team One Percent, The World Races
 
“Someone please, please, please shoot me now.” — Clementine, Team Beauty and the Geek, The World Races
 
 
To my vast dismay, the zip line did not break and plunge me to certain death, thus saving me from an ultra-embarrassing conversation with Swift. I did contemplate just bailing – leave the race, my twin, everything. Run away into the wilds of Norway and become a goatherding nun. Or something.
But I didn’t. Instead, my cheeks burned with shame as my cameraman hovered and the attendants unbuckled me from the zip line. Someone handed me my next clue – half of a World Races disk.