by K. C. Crowne
“There you are,” he said as if nothing in the slightest was amiss. “I ordered a little something from room service – tomato juice and shrimp smoothies.” He picked one up and extended it toward me. “I know it sounds like the grossest thing imaginable, but it’ll do wonders for your headache.”
There was so much righteous determination flowing through me that I didn’t even feel petty enough to be mad at him. With that in mind, why would I turn down some hangover advice from the good doctor? I took the glass and stared down into the thick, soupy, blood-red liquid.
“Now,” he said. “You might want to just sip—”
I cut him off by bringing the glass to my lips and titling my head back, guzzling it down. The drink was rich and almost meaty. When the glass when empty, I shoved it back in his direction.
“That…that’s one way to down it.” He took the glass and set it on the table. He looked over my shoulder at the bags I’d brought out with me. “I see you’re ready to take off. Our flight’s not scheduled on the runway until two, so I figure we can chill out here, then maybe grab some lunch and—”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ve got my own way back.”
He was confused, tilting his head to one side. “What?”
“I got another flight. It leaves soon, so I should head out.”
“Wait, hold on – you’re leaving? But I’ve got the private jet. Why did you get your own ticket?”
“Just felt like I’d seen enough of Vegas.” And you. But I kept that part to myself. I’d wanted my departure to be bloodless, totally drama-free.
“You’re kidding, right?” He chuckled, as if he finally understood the joke. “Anyway, go ahead and run some errands or whatever if you want. I’ll be here. Just come back before noon so we’ve got enough time to get to the airport.”
I didn’t bother explaining the reality of the situation to him. “Yeah, sure.” I turned, grabbing my bags. “See you around, Doc.” I tossed the words over my shoulder before opening the suite door and stepping out.
I still hurt, but I’d made my decision and followed through with it. I was done with Gavin. Now and forever.
If all went according to plan, I’d never see him again.
Never too late to do what I should’ve done all those years ago.
Gavin
Seated alone on the private jet, I was hung up on Gia. I slipped my phone out of my pocket, checking for a text or call or any other sign she’d be there. But there was nothing. The screen was blank. I hadn’t seen her since she’d stormed out of the suite with her bag.
She’d said something about taking her own flight back to Colorado, but she couldn’t have possibly been serious. I couldn’t believe she’d pay for a flight when this was free for her.
I drummed my fingers on the armrest, my eyes on the runway as other private jets took off and taxied. It was a little before we were supposed to be in the air. Right in the middle of my thoughts, the door to the cockpit opened and the pilot stuck his head out.
“Dr. Davenport,” he said, his eyes hidden behind mirrored aviator sunglasses. “I don’t mean to rush you, but we can’t wait on the runway forever. If we don’t take off soon, they’re going to make us park and let some of the other planes get through.”
I chewed my lower lip in frustration for a long moment. “She knows what time the flight is. She’ll be here soon.”
The pilot ducked his head back into the cockpit for a moment as if checking something before coming back out. “We can wait five more minutes. After that we either need to take off or reschedule the flight. And I can tell you right now, we won’t get out of here today if you want to do that.”
I took out my phone, checking again for any sign from Gia. Nothing. Then I had an idea. I opened the website for McCarran Airport and checked for the flights that day. Gia had said she was planning on taking a different flight out. The more time that passed, the more it looked like those hadn’t been empty words.
There were two that left at around the time she’d said she was leaving.
Which one?
I took a quarter out of my pocket, closed my eyes, and tossed it into the air. Heads was for the one that left at two, tails for the two-ten.
Tails.
My decision made, I bounded out of my seat, and hurried to the cockpit in order to let the pilot know I was cancelling the flight. Twenty minutes later, I was in the back of an Uber, bag on my lap, headed toward McCarran Airport.
What the hell was I doing? There was no need to try to catch her flight. After all, we were going to the same city. But the way she’d left that morning had me ill at ease. There’d been a strange finality to how she’d gone, a proud smile on her face that seemed to say she’d made a plan and was ready to follow through.
It didn’t sit right with me.
I arrived at the airport and checked in as quickly as I could, glancing around as I waited in line at security for any sign of her. But I spotted neither hide nor hair of the lovely Ms. Stone.
Security took fucking forever, reminding me of why I flew private whenever I got the chance. Once I was through, I grabbed my bag and hurried to my gate, passing the gate of the other flight to Denver just in time to watch the plane pull away from the jetway. I paused for a moment, knowing there was a fifty-fifty chance Gia was on that flight.
Nothing to do but get on my plane and see if she was there.
When I arrived at the gate, I looked around again – no sign of her in line. My seat was for first class, and luckily there was no one in the seat next to me. But once I had my bag stowed, I didn’t waste a second getting up and sidling up and down the aisles, looking for her.
“Hi,” I said, stopping by one of the flight attendants – a surprisingly pretty blonde. “Has everyone boarded the flight?”
She flashed me a grin, one I recognized when it appeared on a woman’s face – she was interested. But at that moment there wasn’t a single woman on my mind other than Gia.
“We’re just closing up,” she said. “And we’re about to give the sign for everyone to buckle up.”
I sighed in frustration, shaking my head. I’d picked wrong. Gia was on the other flight.
“You’re in first, aren’t you?” she asked, that smile still on her face. “My name’s Steffi. I’ll be taking care of you.” She put a special emphasis on taking care of you.
The girl’s game was so obvious it almost made me want to sit her down and give her a few pointers when it came to the subtle art of seduction.
“Great. Thanks, Steffi.” I turned to leave, but she placed her well-manicured fingers on my wrist.
“If there’s—”
Anything you need, I thought, knowing where this line was going.
“Anything you need…please, come find me.” She winked before turning around and standing up on her tiptoes to reach for one thing or another, inviting me to ogle.
I didn’t even stick around to look. I hurried to my seat and slid into it, fastening the seatbelt and giving the armrest a restrained, but frustrated thump.
What the hell was she thinking? We were a man and a woman who had a bit of history and were having a little fun, taking advantage of the fact that we’d happened to come back into one another’s lives. So, why the fuck was she acting so strange about it.
I crossed my legs and turned to look out of the window, the whirr of the engine growing louder and louder. The captain came onto the PA and let us know we were about to take off, that we’d be in Denver in two hours, blah blah blah.
The expression on her face as she left the suite that morning was burned into my memory. Looking back, there was something about that expression, something harsh and final. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like it was a look meant to let me know she never wanted to speak to me again.
But the look wasn’t the only thing about our time together I found myself thinking about. The second I closed my eyes she’d be back, flashes from our night of lovemaking playing in my
mind like the sexiest dirty movie of all time.
I remembered the way she’d looked on the glass table, her tight skirt pulled up to her hips as I fingered her, coaxing her closer and closer to orgasm with each curl of my fingers and slow circle of my thumb around her clit. I remembered the way her chest rose and fell, faster and faster and faster as she drew closer to the point of no return.
I remembered the way her body tensed as she came, the way she moaned softly and sensually, that ecstasy-laden whimper that made it sound like the pleasure was so intense she might burst into tears.
And then I remembered the way she looked in bed with me, how her breasts bounced back and forth as I pounded her with wild abandon, filling her with my cock again and again. I could almost feel the soft ripeness of her thigh as I held her leg against my chest, the impossibly tight warmth of her pussy gripping me, bringing me to an orgasm of my own as I drained my cock deep within her.
“Sir?”
“Huh?” I looked around, snapping out of a daze.
Steffi was leaning toward me, and I was damn near certain she’d undone one of the buttons of her blouse to give me a good look at the red bra she wore underneath.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your rest, but we’re at cruising altitude and I wanted to see if there was anything I could get you.” She leaned over me, her tongue dragging slowly across her lip.
Hell, I could’ve snapped and pointed to the bathroom and said now and she would’ve obeyed.
“I’m good. Just gonna sleep through the flight. Vegas really took it out of me, you know?”
The disappointment on her face was immeasurable. “Well, if you change your mind…” She stood up and stuck out her ass while sauntering down the aisle.
Steffi was out of my head the moment she was out of my sight. All could think about was Gia, and how there was the very good chance I’d totally blown it.
Then again, what had I blown? Not like I’d had anything more in mind than a quick night of fun with her. And that’s exactly what I’d gotten. She might’ve been pissed that morning, but last night she’d been all about the two of us screwing like the horny high schoolers we’d been back in the day.
I’d assumed all I’d needed was to scratch an itch, to get her into bed once so I could put her behind me again. But the more I thought about her, about our night together, the more I realized I wanted, needed, to get her into bed again. Just the thought was enough to make my cock solid as a slab of steel.
Gia still on my mind, I drifted in a strange half-sleep, tossing and turning in my seat and waking up to the sounds of the fasten seatbelt sign turning back on. Steffi sauntered by, raising her eyebrows one last time as if to say, “last chance, big guy.”
But I just wasn’t interested. What the hell was wrong with me? A gorgeous woman was throwing herself at me and all I could think about was a girl who’d left me behind like a cheap date after our night together .
And right as we hit the runway, my phone buzzed in my pocket with a text from Gia. My heart raced as I swiped across the screen and opened the text.
Back in Nickle Creek. Think it’s a good idea if we don’t see each other again.
I was angry. And more than that, a strange feeling that I wasn’t used to gnawed at the pit of my stomach – worry.
I never worried. In fact, I took pride in my ability to handle any situation, no matter what life might throw at me. But the idea of never seeing Gia again…it worried in a way I hadn’t been in a long, long time.
Once we landed, I grabbed my bag and hurried off the plane. I took an Uber back to Nickle Creek, stopping at my place to get one of my cars.
I wanted to see her. She might’ve been dead-certain of never speaking to me again, but I wasn’t about to let her go that easily.
The sun was setting, slipping below the mountains in the distance. Worry and excitement and anger warred inside me in equal measures as I drove toward her apartment.
If she was going to tell me to screw off, then so be it, but like everything else I did in life, it’d be on my terms.
Gia
“You seriously just…left?” Kenna was in total disbelief.
I was pretty damn proud of the way I’d handled myself. I shrugged and said, “I just left.”
“As in, strolled right out the door and told him to screw off?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking. I told him to screw off with a text when I was on the plane. I know it sounds kind of cowardly, but the last thing I wanted was to give him a chance to talk me into changing my mind. The guy’s a prick, but he’s a smooth operator when he wants to be.”
Kenna sighed as if she were still processing everything I'd told her in the last ten minutes. “I don’t know, Gia.”
“You don’t know what?”
“I don’t know about you just ditching him. It seems like that’s a bad way to leave things, you know, incomplete.”
“No, it’s actually the opposite.” I was seated outside on my balcony, the little space heater next to me giving off warm, toasty heat. Slippers were on my feet, and I was glad to be home.
“The opposite? How do you figure?”
“Because I needed things to be done between us. And what better way to do it than to send him a text saying we should never see each other again?”
She let out a grumble, as if she didn’t quite think it would be that simple. “I don’t know. I just can’t see a guy like Gavin getting a text like that and going, ‘Sure, guess I’m never talking to the love of my life again.’”
I laughed. “The love of his life? Come on. We were a couple in high school, he broke my heart, and now he wanted the ego boost of being able to hook up with an old flame years later. It’s not that serious.”
“If you say so.”
Kenna had a way of seeing right through bullshit. And I could sense she was getting the impression I was putting up a great big wall of it. But I wasn’t in the mood to justify what I’d done. Only I knew the contours and details of my relationship with Gavin, so I felt confident saying I was the only one who knew how to put an end to it.
“I know you think I’m being immature or whatever, but you’ll just have to trust me on this one. ”
“Yeah, until he comes knocking at your door.”
I shifted in my seat, suddenly not wanting to talk about the issue at all. I grabbed my MacBook and opened it, clicking the spreadsheet for our company’s next few weeks.
“Anyway,” I said pointedly, effectively ending the conversation. “We’ve got some parties coming up that need to have the finer points sorted out.”
She chuckled, and I could sense Kenna understood she’d made a half-way decent point that I most definitely did not want to deal with.
“Right, right,” she said. “So, we’ve got the McMillan anniversary party coming up.”
“Oh, that’s right. How’s that looking?”
“It’s looking like some easy money. Sixty-year-anniversary, and it’s the older set, so we don’t need to worry about it getting too out of control. As in, no tables of sexy doctors and firemen to get the female guests all hot and bothered.”
Of course, that put the image of Gavin in his too-tight set of scrubs back into my mind. And then that put back into my mind the image of him wearing nothing at all, a cocky grin on his face as he stood across from me in the bedroom where we’d screwed, his monster cock hanging between his legs.
“Hey, G – you there?”
I shook my head, doing my best to banish the thought of Gavin from my mind just as surely as I’d banished him from my life.
“I’m here. Just thinking about this anniversary party.”
“Isn’t it amazing? I spoke with the McMillans yesterday while you were in Vegas and they’re just the cutest freaking couple you’ve ever seen in your life. And can you believe they’ve been together for sixty years? Couples these days are lucky to stick together for sixty days.”
“Yeah, pretty cute, I guess,” I said, forcing a blasé tone
to my voice. “But they’re from a different time, you know? Back then, people had to stay together. I mean, it’s not like they could get divorced if they didn’t get along.”
“Well…”
“Not to mention,” I said, sitting up and raising a finger into the air as I cut her off. “People back then got married right out of high school. So, think about it – you have these couples getting married when they’re eighteen, which is the worst decision you could possibly make.” Gavin and Mariah and their stupid teenage marriage appeared in my thoughts as I spoke. “And then once you’re married, you’re stuck. I seriously doubt many of these couples were actually in love, you know?”
“I’m not so sure about that. When I met with the McMillans to go over what they had in mind for the party, they were all over each other. I cracked a joke that if they didn’t stop necking, I’d have to get a hose. They laughed about it, but I was kinda-sorta serious.”
“Maybe they were still physically into each other or something, but I doubt it’s anything more than that. Real love straight-up doesn’t exist.”
“Wow,” Kenna mused, frowning at my bleak observation. “That’s a hell of a depressing proclamation.”
“It’s true. Love’s some made up thing to sell candy and flowers and corny cards. And I’m not going to waste another second pretending it’s not.”
As I spoke, I realized that recent events were likely fueling my opinions on the matter, and Kenna probably knew it. But it wasn’t like I was in love with Gavin. It was more of a reminder that whatever had happened between us, whatever intense emotions I’d felt for him back in the day had just been stupid kid stuff. I hadn’t been in love with him.
If anything, seeing him again had been good. It’d given me a chance to realize that he was nothing more than an immature jackass – hardly worth the tears I’d shed for him all those years ago.
“Anyway,” I said, wanting to get back on track. “How’s the planning for the McMillans coming along?”
“All good in the hood. It’s just a little dinner at Canetti’s Italian on Broadway, a cocktail party beforehand, and that’s it. Should be some of the easiest money we’ve made.”