Read Online Between the Stars and Sky by David James - Free Book Online Page A

and changed like waves or raindrops.
    But Jameson had no one.
    He loved the village, the lake, too much to leave. And there was no one there for him. No one at all. He was very much alone.
    Until he wasn’t.
    One day, as the brightest sky was just beginning to changed to night, Jameson saw a woman standing on the tallest rock where he normally lunched. At first, he didn’t know what to do. She looked like an angel, her dark hair nearly blending with the fading day and her white dress moving in the air like waves on the lake. He was struck so swiftly, so instantly by her beauty he didn’t think to scream as she jumped.
    But she did.
    With no warning, the woman jumped from the cliff to the lake, her arms stretched in front of her like wings. Flying and flying and flying until she landed without a sound in the cool waters.
    Jameson panicked, and hurried over to where she had landed. But he didn’t see her.
    “Help!” he called. “Help!”
    But no one answered, no one came. And the woman seemed to be missing. Was she a ghost? A reflection? A dream come true and gone again?
    “Are you lost, sir?” a voice called in the dark.
    There.
    Jameson almost cried, and with a burst of air he realized he had not breathed since she jumped. But there she was, alive and well and smiling.
    “Are you mad?” Jameson asked her.
    Her smile flipped. “Excuse me?”
    “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “I meant to ask if you were okay, but you shocked me.”
    “I have that effect, I’m told.”
    “Yes, you do.”
    “Are you flirting with me, sir?” Her smile was back. “I couldn’t be,” Jameson said, although his smile was nearly as big as hers. “I don’t even know your name.”
    “What’s yours?”
    “Jameson.”
    “Jameson,” she repeated, tasting the name on her lips, her tongue. “I’m Emily.”
    “Emily,” he said, doing the same. “It’s very nice to meet you. But why did you jump?”
    “To feel alive, Jameson. The greatest things in the world require us to jump. It’s like taking a leap of faith or falling in love. We have to. So I did.”
    “Just like that?” Jameson snapped his fingers.
    Emily shook her head. “It takes time, always time. I’ve been working up to this jump, telling myself that at the end of summer when fall was just beginning, I would jump and find myself in the air as I fell.”
    “Did you?”
    Her eyes locked on his. “I think I might have.”
    Days later, Emily and Jameson were in something like love. When Emily kissed him, his lips tasted of salt and love and danger. Of things that should not make her feel safe but did.
    Like the lake.
    Like the fire.
    “I love you,” Jameson told Emily, his voice raw and rough with the passion of his words. The meaning behind them, he wanted forever.
    A sly smile hit her lips. “I don’t love you.”
    It was then that Jameson knew what death must feel like, must taste like, because his heart was barely beating and his lungs hardly breathing. “You don’t?”
    “No,” Emily told him. “You are my air, my life, my heart. You’re my everything, Jameson. That is not love. That’s something so much more. How can you define something that gives you life, makes your heart beat as though someone else controls it? I don’t love you, but if love is the strongest word we have then that is what we’ll say. I love you I love you I love you.”
    “Let’s jump,” Jameson told her. “Let’s jump again and hold hands and fall together.”
    “Fall together forever,” she said. “Our first jump.”
    “First of many.” He smiled, the air from the lake below them rising around the cliff where they rested. In the light of their small fire, the world looked darker around them as though he and Emily were the only two pieces of light in existence. “Do you think this jump means more than just falling from a cliff into the lake?”
    “Of course it does,” Emily told him. “It means everything, Jameson. Life and love, the two great