Pressure

I screamed as I dropped through the open air like a meteor, but it was a scream of exhilaration and not fear. The wind resisted, trying vainly to the fight the unconquerable gravity, pushing against me and twirling me in spirals like a rocket crashing to the earth.

Yes!

I was proud of myself as I plunged deeper into the freezing black water. I hadn’t had one moment of terror–just pure adrenaline. Really, the fall wasn’t scary at all. Where was the challenge?

That was when the current caught me.

I’d been so preoccupied by the size of the cliffs, by the obvious danger pf their high, sheer faces, that I hadn’t worried at all about the dark water waiting. I never dreamed that the true menace was lurking far below me, under the heaving surf.

It felt like the waves were fighting over me, jerking me back and forth between them as if determined to share by pulling me in halves. I knew the right way to avoid a riptide: swim parallel to the beach rather than struggling for the shore. But the knowledge did me little good when I didn’t know which way the shore was.

I couldn’t even tell which way the surface was.

The angry water was black in every direction; there was no brightness to direct me upward. Gravity was all-powerful when it competed with the air, but it had nothing on the waves–I couldn’t feel a downward pull, a sinking in one direction. Just the battering of the current that flung me round and round like a rag doll.

I fought to keep my breath in, to keep my lips locked around my last store of oxygen.

It didn’t help surprise me that my delusion of Edward was there. He owed me that much, considering that I was dying. I was surprised by how sure that knowledge was. I was going to drown. I was drowning.

“Keep swimming!” Edward begged urgently in my head.

Where?

“Stop that!” he ordered. “Don’t you dare give up!”

The cold of the water was numbing my arms and legs. I didn’t feel the buffeting so much as before. It was more of just a dizziness now, a helpless spinning in the water.