Riding on Air
Authors: Maggie Gilbert
Maggie Gilbert
For readers of Jenny Downham, John Greene and Maureen McCarthy, a poignant young adult romance about following your dreams and realising what really matters.
What can you do when your own hands are the enemy? Hold on tight, for as long as it takes.
Melissa has secrets. Sure it's pretty obvious she has Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, but no one knows how bad it is or how many pills she takes for the pain. She's determined to make her horse Jinx into a champion and she dreams that her childhood friend William will one day see
her
, rather than her condition.
So when William asks her out and Jinx is shortlisted for selection in an elite training program, it seems Melissa's dreams have come true. But when her secrets are exposed, all those dreams come crashing down around her. Can William ever forgive her? And can she learn about letting go in time to truly ride on air when it matters most?
Maggie Gilbert can't remember a time when she didn't want to be a writer, even when she was otherwise occupied. She's been an executive editor, an equestrian journalist and worked with horses for the Modern Pentathlon event at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Currently she's an administration officer with an Agricultural Society by day and a writer of romantic stories by nightâan ideal combination. She lives on a property in country NSW with her family and dogs.
I owe way more than âthank you' to my familyâparticularly my gorgeous husband, Scott, and my own lovely step-daughters Alicia and Caitlinâfor their unflinching support and encouragement and for making many, many cups of coffee. Thank you to awesome writing buddies Erica and Jo for advice, brainstorming and whip-cracking as required: payment will be made in Cheezels and chocolate as usual. Kirsty, thanks so much for reading outside your genre and telling me it worked. Thank you Lilian Darcy for invaluable mentoring. Valerie Parvâyour constant belief means more than you know. And thank you to Romance Writers of Australia for professional guidance, Kate Cuthbert for saying yes, Alyson Russell for making this a better story and all at Escape for making it so.
In memory of an extraordinary high school English teacher, Miss Best.
Every aspiring writer should be so lucky.
Also Available From Escape Publishingâ¦
The reins whipped through my cramping, useless hands, the buckle catching my swollen knuckles with a see-you-later smack that was
really
going to hurt. After I was done with falling off, of course.
The ground rushed to meet me and despite a defensive tuckâperfected by practiceâI hit with a thud that slammed me breathless. Molten-pain firecrackers went off in the joints of my shoulders, knees, hips and elbows as I hammered into the sun-baked pasture of the pony club's cross-country course. There was grit in my mouth and dirt puffing up around me in a dusty cloud. But my stupid traitor hands were at least safely curled against my chest. Not too bad, considering. Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis: the gift that keeps on giving.
Something brushed past my face, more dirt speckling my skin. I blinked grittily, getting a blurred image of a swishing black tail and departing hooves. My horse Jinx, giving an excited buck as he exited the scene at speed, was leaving me literally in his dust.
My cramped lungs expanded again and my eyes cleared as oxygen poured back into me. But oh crap, how that made it hurt. I started the post-fall post-mortem: I could see, think, wriggle my toes and my fingers (cautiously) and my skull was apparently uncracked. Initial impact estimates suggested bruised to broken on the hardness scale.
I'd had worse. I sipped in another cautious breath and lay still, with my throbbing hands held carefully against my chest just in case whoever had been following me on their horse towards the jump had somehow missed me taking a dive over Jinx's shoulder and was still coming.
It wasn't really Jinx's fault. He'd just gone eagerly through the virtual bolt-hole I'd left open for him when my crocked up hands quit as we cantered towards that jump. We'd come in too flat and too fast and he'd clipped the fixed top rail of the jump, made a stumbling landing on his nose from which he, athletic genius that he was, had spectacularly recovered, while Iânix the athletic, let alone the geniusâhad not.
“Melissa, God, are you OK?”
My instructor, Sally, was breathless. What little voice she had was thin and high. She was no doubt expecting to find me smashed like a pretzel at the bottom of the box.
“Mmm,” I said noncommittally. I thought I was OK. I
wanted
to be OK. But I wasn't sure, not yet.
“Does anything hurt?”
I snorted. Stupid question from someone who should know better. And she did know. She'd known me since I was five, even before I was diagnosed.
“Hang on a minute,” I said. I lay there, waiting for the familiar ugly-hot pain burn in my joints to die down enough for me to tell if I'd actually broken anything. All pain kind of blurs together when you're so used to it. I breathed in and out, the strap of my helmet digging into my jaw.
I heard the murmuring commentary of the other kids and the explosive, impatient snort as one of their horses cleared its nostrils. In another life I might have been embarrassed to have fallen off; humiliated to be lying there with Sally hovering anxiously over me and the low drone of a quad bike growing steadily louder as it approached across the bumpy paddocks. But in this life, I was too relieved. I was too relieved that the pain was fading and the breath going more easily in and out of my lungs to care if the other kids thought I was hopeless. More than they already did, anyway; they think I'm weird because arthritis is supposed to be a Granny's disease. If that wasn't bad enough, I like dressage better than jumping and sporting. So I've got ugly hands and I do a sissy sport. Miss Popularity I'm not.
Mostly I was just relieved that this fall could be my get-out-of-jumping-free card. I'd come to pony club camp for the golden chance to have a dressage training session with Petra Hein, a Sydney-based instructor formerly from Germany. Not only was she a champion international rider who'd been shortlisted for the Olympics, she was now the coach and head selector for the Australian National Junior Dressage Squad. I would
kill
to get into that squad. Petra has never come down here before and I doubt she will again anytime soon. And Jinx and I don't get up to Sydney very often. As in never.
But first, I had to survive the jumping, something Jinx is also very good at, but me, not so much. They like you to do all the different sports at camp, although the decision to do the jumping classes suddenly didn't seem the best idea; the ground I'd just hammered into was
really
hard. We hadn't had much rain lately so the ground was like rockâhard on horses' legs and riders' heads.
I lay on that hard ground a bit longer, blinking dust out of my eyes as the pain eased from knife-stab to dull squeeze. There was pain, sure, but nothing unexpected. Nothing beyond the well-known and unloved hot spots.
I knew I had to get up. Jinx was probably charging around the horse yards like a snorting galloping fool and I didn't want him to damage himself. Or anyone else. Of course, thinking about getting up was one thing, but actually doing it wasn't going to be that easy. It never was.
The quad bike rumbled to within a few feet of where I sprawled in the dirt and the engine cut off. A faint puff of dust and fuel-scented air wafted over me and I wrinkled my nose against a sneeze. I might not have broken anything, but the last thing I wanted to do was aggravate all those waiting bruises.
“Is Melissa hurt?”
The back of my neck crawled. Maybe I could be mortified in this life after all. I should have known he'd be the one to come to my un-rescue on his mechanical charger. I have that kind of luck. God, why didn't you kill me in that fall?
“Melissa?”
His voice was coming closer. No, not GodâWilliam. If God
is
hanging out down here in the body of a teenage boy, I doubt he's in William. More like Zac Efron, or maybe the guy from that vampire series. Although personally I don't get what's so hot about him.
A lanky body moved in to block the sun and I blinked my watering eyes at the sudden change in light.
“Melissa?”
“I'm fine.”
“Really? Or are you just saying that?”
I blinked some more, still sun-dazzled. Dazzled, anyway. William's face came into focus, dark eyebrows frowning above narrowed lake-blue eyes. Zac who?
My stomach drifted upwards, curled in on itself and flopped back down again as my mouth went dry, leaving my tongue glued in place. William could make me feel like a giddy fool from a distance of a hundred yards just by riding past with my stepbrothers at a polocrosse tournament. Up this close, not only had my spit dried up, my heart was fluttering around as if it had shaken loose inside me and I could no longer feel my feet. This was either a freaked out response to William, or I had a spinal injury that was only just now showing symptoms. Anxiously, I wriggled my toes again. They still worked, so it looked like the William effect rather than crushed vertebrae.
“Melissa? Are you sure you're not hurt?” William crouched down beside me and I swallowed painfully, ridiculously aware of him. Of how close he was. I could see a patchy shadow of stubble under his jaw and the way his hair waved upwards beneath the brim of his Akubra. His long legs in dust-pale jeans were only inches away. If I simply lifted my hand I reckoned I could touch him where the faded cotton of his shirt collar curled against the tanned skin of his throat. Working some moisture into my mouth, I licked my lips nervously and tried to meet his eyes. My body seemed too big to fit into my skin.
“I'm OK.” I dredged my excuse for a brain for something witty. Nothing came to me. Typical. “I'm OK,” I said again.
William sat back on his haunches and stared at me, unblinking. I couldn't meet his gaze for long. I had to take him in with brief, skipping glances. He must think I was an utter moron. Well, of course he did. He'd known me practically my whole life.
“Can't get up, huh?” he asked me quietly. “Is it just your hands?”
I glanced at him again and then away, digging at my bottom lip with my teeth. Why did he have to see me like this? He was never going to see me as a real girl if he only ever saw me broken.
“Yes,” I admitted, resigned to the indignity of Sally using the radio to call for the waiting ambulance, of being fussed over by everyone until they finally did enough tests to work out I was as OK as I'd ever be. Still cursed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, but uninjured. Just wasting their time.
“If I take your arms, will it help? Or will it hurt you?”
“It'll help.”
“You better say so if it does hurt you,” he said, reaching for me.
As his big, strong hands slid around my pathetically-skinny upper arms, I don't think I could have uttered a word even if he was about to pull them right out of their sockets. That he was actually touching me seemed to have blown some kind of fuse in my brain. His palms were hot on my bare skin, like a brand.