Valentine's Day. Nicola Marsh

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      But he tempered the banality of the words by swooping down behind her and latching onto her throat with his lips. For a bare heartbeat. Then he was gone again, gathering up his scattered clothes and rummaging in his suitcase.

      She thought about running back to her room to change but, really, when you’d been awake the whole time it qualified as the same day, so slipping back into her day clothes felt acceptable.

      Plenty of time to change later.

      Though her eyes roamed back to Zander’s big beckoning bath. She really hadn’t had much chance to get clean while they were in there. Quite the opposite, in fact. She did her best to wrestle her secret, satisfied smile into submission.

      It wasn’t dignified to gloat.

      The rush and bustle of getting out to Göreme’s airfield in the still-dark of morning did a fine job of distracting her from thought, just as Zander’s talented lips had done all night. Whether kissing her or murmuring conversation. It hadn’t all been lascivious. They’d lain, tangled together and curled in blankets, and talked about anything that came to mind until one or other of them—or the conversation—had turned sensual again and then there was no talking for quite some time.

      On arrival at the open balloon fields, four enormous bulbs glowed in the dim morning light. They lay, powerless, on their sides, and the roaring gas fires slowly filled them upright. The palest of the four lit up like its own sunrise.

      ‘That’s ours,’ Zander said, coming back to her side, his digital recorder in hand.

      They crossed to the enormous basket that was tethered to the ground and Georgia said a quick whisper of thanks for its size. They might look tiny in the sky but on the ground they were enormous.

      She was entirely distracted and romanced by the lumbering bulbs taking shape along the roadway. Looked as if their dawn flight would be a balloon convoy. But while groups of ten and more waited for the other baskets theirs was just the two of them and their pilot.

      Nice work, Casey.

      ‘Are you my private?’ A uniformed American woman stepped forward.

      ‘EROS radio station,’ Zander confirmed.

      ‘That’s you. Come on aboard and I’ll give you the pre-flight information.’

      By agreement, Zander recorded the whole safety presentation and the pilot put on an extra-thorough show for the media. But by the end of it Georgia certainly felt very sure about what to do if the balloon failed, and absolutely certain that it would not. The whole thing was far more regimented and controlled than she’d expected.

      ‘I get motion-sick,’ she volunteered out of nowhere and Zander looked up, surprised.

      ‘We have bags,’ the unfazed pilot said ‘but you won’t need them. You’ll see. It’s as though the planet is moving and we’ll be standing still.’

      Zander threaded his fingers through hers and the gentle gesture filled her with the same golden glow that kept their balloon aloft. She tightened her fingers around his as the pilot closed the door.

      ‘Ten minutes before sun-up,’ the pilot announced. ‘Let’s get you guys in the air.’

      Zander curled Georgia into his body and stood behind her against the basket edge in the centre of the basket. She felt both sheltered and protected.

      The balloon didn’t rise straight up as she imagined it would when the ground crew dropped their tethers—then again her entire experience of hot-air balloons was from The Wizard of Oz. Instead, it skirted along, centimetres above the ground, and slowly those centimetres became meters and then Georgia got a sense of what the pilot had promised. As soon as they had some height, it suddenly felt as if the earth had started to treadmill below them and they were stationary, just hanging there in space.

      The pilot gave the gas its voice and the entire balloon inhaled the burst of flame, long and steady. It rose again. Then she killed the flame and silence resumed; the only sounds were the clinking of guy ropes and the distant squeals of the passengers in the balloon ascending behind them.

      Theirs breathed enormous gulps between long silent stretches and climbed and climbed in pace with the sunrise.

      ‘Do you want to describe what you see?’ Zander murmured against her neck, crossing his strong arms around her and holding the running digital recorder below her chin.

      Golden light fingered out from the horizon and the deep blonde colour of the earth began to glow with a vibrancy and a gentle kind of fire. Georgia described the stunning scene, punctuated by the occasional breath of the balloon, and full of words like God and heaven and other-worldly. And whole and healing and soul-breath.

      Zander and the pilot remained silent, letting her speak.

      They flew over Göreme and then left it far behind as they floated over the lunar-like deserts. A distant mesa grew bigger and bigger as they approached but the pilot kept the balloon level though the others in their convoy all lifted. Georgia’s adrenaline spiked and Zander’s arms tightened around her, but at the last moment the pilot fired the lungs hard and their balloon soared up and over the lip of the mesa and the vast plains of Anatolia were revealed before them.

      Tears filled Georgia’s eyes.

      Zander recorded the balloon’s respiration as they drifted over great clefts in the earth and the rolling, twisting, ancient tortures of the granite and sandstone crust. He interviewed the pilot and got some close-up sounds of the clanking guy ropes and a passing flotilla of geese, generally capturing the atmosphere of this amazing experience for his listeners.

      Though of course that was completely impossible to do.

      This was as close to angel flight as she was going to get.

      ‘What are you thinking about?’ he murmured, back by her side and pocketing the recorder.

      She spoke before she thought. ‘Dying.’

      He twisted around to look at her face. She laughed. ‘I mean what it might be like after you die. Ascension. I’m thinking it would be like this. So...gentle and supported. No fear.’

      ‘I didn’t know you were so religious,’ he murmured.

      ‘I’m not, generally. But it’s tough to be up here and not wonder...’

      They fell to silence, but Zander eventually broke it.

      ‘I remember wondering... I thought when I was young with so many people queuing up for communion there must be something in it.’

      She tipped her head half back and contacted the strength of his chest. ‘You’re Catholic?’

      ‘Sufficiently Catholic to have had mass at my wedding, but not to get up early every Sunday for one.’

      He was close enough and smart enough to interpret the total stillness of her body—as still as the balloon felt in space—correctly.

      ‘You’re married?’ she whispered.

      The pilot shifted away to the СКАЧАТЬ