Runway Romance (Love in the Air Trilogy)

by Merri Hiatt

  “Most of them are still living with their parents and going to school.”

  “That’s what I mean. It almost seems like they’re doing the kid a favor by not bringing them into that kind of environment.”

  “The parents, grandparents really, end up doing all the heavy lifting.”

  “You got that right. What are they gonna do? Kick their child and the baby to the curb. No way. So, everyone hunkers down and puts in the time and effort to raise the kid the best way they can.”

  “Except the fourteen year old who thought babies were so cute.”

  “Of course, Kate’s not fourteen.”

  “No, she isn’t.”

  Jenny pulled a midnight blue tank dress from her closet. “With a belt and my red stilettos?”

  “You’ll be the most beautiful roadkill on the tarmac.”

  “Hey,” Kate said, entering Jenny’s bedroom.

  “Hey. How’re you feeling?” Jenny asked.

  “Not sure. Weird.”

  “Weird how?” Patricia said.

  “I think the baby’s trying to talk to me, tell me what it wants.”

  “What’s it saying?” Jenny asked.

  “It’s all jibberish.” Kate sat on the end of the bed, picking up the dress and fingering the material. “Is this what you’re wearing when you meet Rich?”

  “Yeah. What do you think?”

  “I think you want to make with the sexy time with your new luggage-carrying boyfriend.”

  “I’d settle for a truthful conversation about this whole marriage thing.”

  “Come on, you’re telling me if he grabbed you and started kissing you -- rubbing his body against yours and telling you how much he missed you -- you wouldn’t cave right there and let him devour you?”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly say that. He is an amazing kisser, though. I just need answers. My head is swimming with all these doubts, but underneath I desperately want to believe in him.”

  “Spoken like a true enabler,” Patricia said.

  “I know.” Jenny sighed. She held the dress up to her body and looked in the mirror at her reflection. “But I’ll be a damn hot-looking enabler.”

  “That, you will.”

  “I have to get going,” Kate said.

  “I can be ready in thirty seconds,” Jenny said.

  “Me, too,” Patricia chimed in.

  “Thanks. I think I’m going to go alone. I need time to think. Not that you wouldn’t give it to me, but I also need the quiet, so I can really focus on the baby.”

  “If you need us, call,” Jenny said.

  “For anything,” Patricia added.

  Kate nodded, then headed for the bathroom to throw up. “I’m not sure if that was nerves or morning sickness.”

  “It’s late in the day, I’d say nerves,” Patricia said.

  Jenny retrieved several sealable plastic bags from the kitchen. “Here. In case you need to urp again while you’re in transit.”

  Kate stuffed the bags into her purse. “Here’s hoping I don’t need to use them.”

  They both stood at the front window and watched as Kate drove away.

  “You’re looking a bit green around the gills. Do you need a puke bag, too?” Patricia asked.

  “Maybe. I’m having second thoughts about meeting Rich. Maybe I should just wait.”

  “For what? I thought you wanted answers?”

  “What if I don’t like them? What if the answer is that he’s a lying, cheating, conniving, two-timer?”

  “Then you’ll know for sure.”

  “I don’t want him to be a lying, cheating, conniving, two-timer!”

  “I know. None of us do.”

  “You’re spending a lot of time not canoodling with Malelough.”

  “He’s great fun to have sex with, but we don’t really have a lot to talk about. I don’t get all his philosophy talk. When I suggested a movie, he went into this big thing about Hollywood actors being overpaid. When I mentioned professional sports paying their players huge sums of money, he went off on a tangent about how they at least have skills. I didn’t want to fight about it, but he was so wrong. Actors have skills and they have to study for years to be good at their craft.

  He seems a bit, well, shallow. I know that makes me sound horrible, but it’s true. Sometimes I just start kissing him so he’ll shut up!”

  “You do not.”

  “I do! I cannot wait for him to get on the plane back home.”

  “I didn’t know I was such a bother.” Malelough stared at Patricia, anger making his eyes even darker.

  “I think I’ll leave you two alone.” Jenny tried not to walk too quickly as she hurried out of the room, then parked herself down the hallway by the bathroom so she wouldn’t miss a word.

  “Why did you suggest I come here if you didn’t like me?”

  “I didn’t suggest it, you invited yourself. I just said yes. I figured we’d have some time away from each other and it would be fun to see you again. Then you show on my doorstep two weeks early.”

  “If I’d have known you were an intellectual, I wouldn’t have ever started a relationship with you.”

  “I am by no means an intellectual, but I do know a little bit about a lot of things. How is it that you seem to know practically nothing about anything except far-out philosophies that don’t make any sense?”

  “My other girlfriends never seemed to mind.”

  “That’s because you’re great in bed.” Patricia winced. “I didn’t mean that like it sounded.”

  “You sure as hell did. You know, I didn’t hit on you because you’re smart. You have a hot body and I wanted to get in your pants. That’s all it was for me. If I had to put up with your incessant talking one more minute, I’d have gone insane.”

  “Incessant, now that’s a big word. Do you know what it means?”

  “Do you know what this means?” Malelough raised his hand, bending two fingers to display the gesture every mother told their child never to make.

  “Now that’s classy.”

  “I’ll have my bags backed in twenty minutes.” Malelough turned around to make his way back to Patricia’s bedroom.

  Jenny scurried into the bathroom and shut the door quietly.

  “Make it ten!”

  The floor, then the ceiling shook as he stomped up the stairs.

  Jenny poked her head out, making sure the hallway was clear, before joining Patricia in the living room. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” She stifled a laugh. “This house has certainly seen a lot of action lately.

  “Must be something in the air.”

  “Or something in us.”

  “Nah, it can’t be us. It’s got to be them, men. They bring out the worst in us.”

  “And the best.”

  “That’s the problem. We can’t live with ‘em…”

  “And we can’t live without ‘em.”

  Malelough stomped his way across the living room with his suitcase in tow. “The next time you’re in the Bahamas, don’t call me.”

  “Not to worry. I’ve already deleted your number from my cell phone.”

  Malelough sat on the front porch until his taxi arrived and then left without another word.

  “Ya know, if we try really hard, we can screw up whatever relationship Kate ends up in and we’ll be three for three,” Jenny said.

  “An admirable goal to strive for,” Patricia said, shaking her head. “We do seem to have a way of turning a good thing into a sow’s ear.”

  “Isn’t that supposed to be a sow’s ear into a silk purse?”

  “Yeah. We just seem to do it the opposite way.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Patricia and Jenny found themselves glancing at the kitchen clock every few minutes.

  “She should be home by now,” Patricia said.

  “I know. I figured an hour for the appointment, an hour of thinking about whatever the doc said and then an hour of driving around stewing about whatever she
decided.”

  “It’s been five hours.”

  “Should we call her?”

  “She knows we’re here for her. I wanted to give her time. I don’t know.” Patricia looked at the clock again. “We could text her, that wouldn’t be too intrusive.”

  Jenny picked up her cell phone. “Ring.”

  “That’ll help.”

  “I just don’t want to bug her, you know. If she needs space, I want her to have it. I don’t want to smother her.”

  “Have another cup of coffee.”

  “Are you kidding? I’ll be up all night peeing as it is.”

  “Then one more cup won’t make much of a difference.”

  “All right. Filler up.”

  By eleven o’clock, Jenny and Patricia had moved to their favorite recliners in the living room.

  “That’s it. It’s officially been seven hours since her appointment, I’m calling her,” Patricia said.

  “Good. If you didn’t, I was about to.”

  Patricia made the call. The sound of “Back in Black” by AC/DC seemed to come from the front porch. “What the… I’m hearing it in stereo.”

  Jenny peeked through the curtain to find Kate sitting on the porch swing by the front door.

  “Is that Kate?”

  “Yeah. I wonder how long she’s been sitting out there?”

  “Hey.” Kate answered her phone.

  “How are you?” Patricia asked. “Wait. We’re coming out there.”

  “How long have you been home?” Jenny asked as she walked through the doorway. Kate was wrapped in the blanket she always had flung over the passenger’s side seat of the car.

  “We’ve been going nuts. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I really am.”

  “You look calm.”

  “I’m not pregnant.”

  “What?” Jenny and Patricia said in unison.

  “I’m not pregnant. The doctor said it must have been a false positive reading. She said it happens all the time.”

  “But what about your period?” Jenny asked.

  “She said it could be because of all the time zone shifting I’ve been doing lately or stress.”

  “How do you feel about that?” Patricia asked.

  “At first I was relieved. I really didn’t want to make any kind of decision and I hadn’t made up my mind what I was going to do if she confirmed the pregnancy.”

  “And then?” Jenny said.

  “Kind of sad. It’s weird, but I’d begun talking to my belly as if there was a baby growing in there. I mean, I didn’t even want kids. It was like there was two of me. Me, and then this little Mini-Me.

  After our conversations about babies, I started to think maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to be a mom. I’d do a lot of things differently than my parents did. Not everything, of course. My parents were great, but they were really strict. I never understood why they didn’t trust me more.”

  “Maybe because you lied to them, snuck out of the house and got busted for smoking beer and pot,” Jenny said.

  “Well, yeah, there was that.”

  The three women looked at each other without speaking for several minutes.

  “What now?” Patricia asked.

  Kate shrugged her shoulders. “Back to life as normal, I guess.”

  “I can’t tell if I’m disappointed, relieved or hopeful that you’ll find yourself pregnant again soon,” Jenny said.

  “I know, right? When it’s all in the abstract, wondering stage, it’s different. Then, when you think it’s real, you have to take a hard look at your life: your priorities, finances, mental readiness, maturity level, and, of course, the father.”

  “Why didn’t you come in when you got home?” Patricia asked.

  “I just wanted some time to think. Sorry if I worried you. I didn’t mean to be thoughtless. I appreciate all your care and support. It’s times like these that you really find out who your friends are. I’m glad to count both of you as true friends.”

  “Group hug!” Jenny exclaimed as they wrapped their arms around each other and squeezed.

  “I am tired, though. I think I’ll head to bed.”

  “Oh no, no, no, no, no. We’ve drunk five pots of coffee between the two of us and are totally wired. No one’s sleeping in this house tonight,” Patricia said.

  “Then let’s watch a movie. I’ll make cheese popcorn.”

  “I love your cheesy popcorn.” Jenny looked up to the sky and said, “Yumm-o!”

  “Nope. Hands down, it’s caramel for me.”

  “Cheese.”

  “Caramel.”

  “Cheese.”

  “Caramel.”

  Kate waved her hands in the air. “I’ll make both. Only because I love you so much.”

  “I knew she’d cave,” Patricia said.

  “Me, too.”

  “See, I already know what it’s like to have kids, I have you two.”

  “I resemble that remark,” Jenny said.

  “Come on, Momma,” Patricia said, pulling on Kate’s arm. “You got to make us the poppy corn.”

  “Momma’s coming.”

  They all headed into the house. Patricia rearranged the recliners for better movie viewing and then headed to their bedrooms to grab comforters and pillows. Jenny pulled out the trunk of DVDs and began pouring over the titles. Kate fired up the air popcorn popper and began gathering ingredients.

  “You know what we forgot?” Patricia said after she’d arranged t.v. trays next to each recliner.

  “What?” Kate hollered from the kitchen.

  “Alcohol.”

  “What goes good with caramel and cheese?” Jenny asked.

  “Everything goes good with alcohol,” Patricia said. “How about strawberry margaritas?”

  “That sounds divine.” Jenny had four DVDs in her hand. “Okay, a couple of questions for ya’ll. Do you want to cry?”

  “No,” Kate and Patricia said at the same time.

  “Do you want to laugh?”

  “Yes,” they said again.

  “Do you want to see naked people?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “Do you want a love story?”

  “Of course, but I don’t want people to be dying of some disease,” Kate said.

  “It’s okay if they die, but not of a disease?” Patricia asked.

  “A slasher movie is fine, especially a funny one.”

  “I love B-movies.”

  “Okay, I’ve got it. The perfect movie for us to watch tonight. And, I don’t think either of you have seen this one. Are you ready?”

  Kate poked her head around the corner of the kitchen and Patricia looked up from rearranging her comforter.

  “Club Dread.”

  “What the heck?” Patricia checked out the cover. “Is this supposed to be a scary movie, a sex romp or a funny tropical vacation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Popcorn’s almost ready. We’re just waiting on you for the margaritas, Patricia.”

  “I’m on it.”

  When everything was at the ready, they nestled in for an early morning B-movie extravaganza.

  Patricia left thoughts of Malelough far behind. Kate laughed so hard she declared on more than one occasion, “I just peed a little.” Jenny loved watching her friends’ reactions to the movie and anticipating what was coming next. Even she forgot about the midnight rendezvous the following night with Rich.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Just go! You’re driving me crazy,” Kate said.

  “I have to know if I look okay. This is important,” Jenny replied.

  “We’ve told you for the twentieth time that you look hot,” Patricia said.

  “Smokin’ hot,” Kate added.

  “I don’t know. The dark blue and the red. I feel like a flag.”

  “You do not look like a flag! Punch me if I ever get this neurotic over a guy,” Kate said.

  “There was the time…” Jenny began.

  “I ha
te people with good memories. It’s a quarter after and it’ll take you half an hour to get to the airport. Go!”

  “You’re sure I look okay?”

  “Oh dear God in Heaven, get this woman out the door before I kill her.” Patricia handed Jenny her purse and pointed to the door. “Go!”

  “All right. When did you guys get so bossy?”

  “About ten, ‘Do I look all right’s?’ ago,” Kate said.

  “My offer’s still good to drive you?” Patricia said.

  “Thanks, but I’ll be okay. I’m working on that no fear thing.”

  “It’s your first time driving at night, though.”

  “I think it’ll be easier. At least at night people have their lights on and you can see them coming.”

  “Good luck. Be strong. Let him tell his story without interrupting.” Kate handed Jenny her coat.

  Jenny opened the door then paused. “What if…”

  “Go!” they both said.

  “I’m going, I’m going.” Jenny took a deep breath and headed toward Patricia’s car, grateful she’d let her borrow it for the night.

  “I’m strong. I’ll listen. I won’t interrupt. I won’t settle for less than a superb explanation,” she reminded herself.

  When she reached the airport and parked her car, the nerves returned with a vengeance. She could feel sweat trickle down her back and acid rising into her throat. “Not now! I’m wearing a great outfit. Please don’t throw up. Please don’t throw up. Please don’t throw up.”

  Jenny swallowed hard several times and took slow, deep breaths until she felt calmer. She exited the car and headed for the Ballinger Air flight lounge. She hoped Stacy was working tonight, but if not, she’d bribe whoever was behind the counter for information on Rich’s whereabouts.

  With information in hand, Jenny headed to the underground hallways below Ballinger’s tenth waiting area.

  The guards checked her identification, commenting that she wasn’t on the schedule to be working.

  “Last minute fill-in. It probably hasn’t been entered in the computer yet.” Jenny gave them her best smile and she was given the green light through all checkpoints.