Title: Descent
Twenty years ago, they chose the sky over each other.
Caleb and Tess are a legendary ballooning team. Precise, professional, and perfectly distant. For two decades they have flown together, slept in separate beds, and buried the one summer when they thought they could be more. Their unspoken agreement: keep the math clean, keep the mission alive.
Then the stratosphere turns against them.
A freak cold-core low traps their capsule in a terminal sink. The helium contracts. The envelope begins to leak. As they drop through the freezing dark, they start throwing everything overboard... sandbags, cameras, seats, insulation, the very wiring of their life's work. Nothing slows the fall.
The math becomes brutal. The only remaining weight is the weight of their own bodies... and the flight suits that have kept them safe, and separate, for two decades.
To survive, they must strip to the skin. To keep from freezing, they must press together in the hollowed-out shell of their capsule. And to finally break the silence, they must answer the question they have both been avoiding for twenty years: what if we chose each other this time?
Descent is a tight, high-stakes survival romance about second chances, the physics of falling, and the courage to jettison the armour that no longer serves. Expect explicit consent, immersive sensory detail, and a love story that lands as softly as a balloon on calm water.
Includes: Neurodivergent-friendly sensory grounding, explicit verbal consent, forced proximity, survival sex (framed as necessary for thermal regulation), and a final line that proves the math finally works.
The only weight they were carrying was literal, not emotional.
Word count: 7,155
