by Mia Ford
I heard myself saying that, all of those years ago, and shook my head with disgust. I hadn't had a whole lot of expectations about what this new flight and crew would be, but I sure as shit hadn't expected anything like this.
Chapter 7: Jess
It was a nice room, as far as hotel rooms went. There had been a time when I had been in love with hotels, the same way that I was still in love with planes and flights themselves. I had loved the anonymity of hotels and the fact that they were only stopping off points between the many spots on a person's travels. I had loved the possibilities they had represented and what they might mean for me some day.
A lot of that allure had worn off after a couple of years of working as a flight attendant. The anonymity that I had once loved often frightened me when I woke up in the middle of the night. It always made me long for my own little home back in Seattle. Having a daughter made the hotels harder as well. Every night that I spent in some random hotel room was a night when I wasn't at home with Emma.
It was a necessary evil associated with a job I genuinely loved, but it was still painful. Children grew so quickly, and every time I was gone, I couldn't help but wonder what part of Emma's growing up I might be missing. One of the things I hated the most was having to call her and Sophie and tell them that I wouldn't be coming home when expected. The guilt that shot through me when that happened had made me feel sort of sick to my stomach every single time.
As I flopped down on the stiff bed to make my latest call, it was no different. The phone rang four or five times, and I started to think that maybe there would be no answer, and I would be allowed to leave a voice message instead of talking to a person. It was the easy way out, and I knew it, but I was tired and feeling entirely too jittery from the way this trip had gone.
“Hey, sister, what’s up?”
“What’s up with you?” I asked Sophie, closing my eyes and preparing for the fact that she might not be too pleased with my news. “You sound a little bit breathless.”
“I’m sure I do,” Sophie said. “I’m playing tag with Emma, and she takes it very, very seriously, to say the least. Not only that, but she’s super-fast, too! I like, legitimately have to haul ass to keep her from catching me.”
"Sophie!" I admonished.
“What? What’d I do?”
"Nothing, but did you ever think about just letting her catch you? Do you really have to win against a ten-year-old?"
“Hey, my house, my rules,” Sophie said. I could hear the smile in her voice. “Besides, she won’t get any faster if I let her win all of the time, will she?”
“No, I guess she won’t.”
“Now stop trying to distract me,” she said. “What’s up with you? I can tell there’s something, big sister. I can hear it in your voice.”
“No, it’s nothing, Sophie. Nothing’s really wrong. I just…”
“You aren’t coming home today, right?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I sighed, feeling sort of sick to my stomach delivering the news. “Something like that. I’m really sorry, Sophie. I would be back tonight if I could. This one is just completely out of my hands.”
“Of course, it is.” Sophie laughed, making it clear that she didn’t mind watching over Emma for another night, at least. “It’s not like you make the flight schedules, right?”
“I guess that’s true.”
“So, what happened?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Why the delay? And where did they stick you, anyway?”
“Dallas. It’s not half bad, really. I kind of like Texas.”
“Ugh, too hot. So how come you got stuck there?”
It should have been an easy question with an easy answer. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it would have been. I always told Sophie the truth about my trips and Emma, too. The only times when I fibbed a little or chose to leave things out were when I thought something might upset them. I was pretty sure this was one of those times.
The fact that I couldn't be honest only made it more difficult for me to decide what to tell my sister. The story I had gotten, the part I definitely didn't feel the need to tell my family, was that our return flight had been delayed because of damage to the plane. It was routine for the mechanics to do a thorough looking over of a plane after it had been in the air, and I knew they paid even closer attention to the planes that had been through poor weather. Our plane had been one of those, and the storm Drew had steered us through had been even worse than either one of us had thought.
There was enough damage evident to the mechanics that our flight crew had been sent back to hotels where our rooms had been re-booked. We would be returning to Seattle the next day, and most likely on a different plane altogether. That was just a standard part of my job, and one I had long ago made peace with, but there was no need to worry Sophie over it. Not to mention the fact that she tended to have a big mouth and would almost certainly have told Emma everything I told her.
“Um, Jess? Did you like, go to sleep or something? Because I gotta say, that’s not something people generally enjoy on the phone. Like, it’s not going to help you in your dating life or anything like that.”
"No," I said with a laugh, feeling out of sorts and much too tired. "And thanks for that, by the way. It sounds like you and Emma are ganging up on me about the whole dating thing."
"We actually haven't talked about it, but I'm definitely going to bring it up now. I'd also love to tell her why you aren't coming home tonight, if you think you might be up to telling me."
“Oh, right! It’s one of the pilots.”
“What about him?”
“He got sick.”
"Yikes. That's a bummer. You never really think about pilots getting sick, do you? I mean, obviously they do, but you don't really think about it. Kind of like rock stars, I guess."
“Rock stars of the sky?”
“Ugh, so corny!” Sophie groaned.
“Hey, I do my best. Do you think you could tell Emma for me? I don’t want to interrupt her fun.”
“Sure, no problem. And hey, whatever bug the pilot’s got, try not to catch it, okay? The last thing we need is for you to come home and get us all sick.”
I agreed and hung up the phone, uncharacteristically glad to be done with the conversation. What I had told Sophie, minus the part I'd left out about the damage to the plane, hadn't been a lie. The funny thing was, it sort of felt like one. I couldn't stop thinking about the way Fred Stevens had gone to the bathroom on our flight and just disappeared.
He had been gone for such a long time, and the fact that he had managed to hit his head badly enough to have to be bandaged up struck me as seriously odd. Then there was the matter of what I had smelled, of course. There was no way I could forget about a thing like that.
He had smelled of alcohol. Whiskey to be exact. No matter how many times I replayed things in my mind, I couldn't make that fact any different. I was accustomed to paying attention to things like a person's smell. I was of the opinion that it helped me to do my job better, and I had found it to be true on more than one occasion. I knew how to spot a person who had been drinking, and Fred Stevens was definitely one of them. What I wasn't sure about was how, if at all, his drinking played into our flight not being able to take off that day.
Stop it, Jess. You’re only giving yourself a case of the willies. And you don’t need any more of those, now do you?
No, I was right about that. I was already just about as nervous as a woman could be without having a total mental break down. I stood in front of the hotel's mirror, wishing it was full length. The dress I had on was nice enough, but definitely nothing sexy. I wanted to beat myself up for that fact, but at the same time, it wasn't exactly like I had been expecting to go on a date. Hell, I still wasn't even sure that I should go at all.
One second, I would feel okay about it, and the next, I would be positive that it was the worst idea in all of the world. What I should have done was blow off the date and g
one and found a museum or something. It would have been the smart thing to do, and I knew it, the same way that I knew it wasn't the way the evening was going to play out.
I didn't date pilots, and yet on this night, that was exactly what I was going to do. There was something about Drew Larson that I couldn't shake off, and it wasn't just his looks. There was something solid and at the same time mysterious. although there may have been women out there that could resist the lethal combination, I just wasn't one of them. I may have been playing with fire, and I knew it, but I had no intention of pulling back.
Chapter 8: Drew
As dinner dates went, this one had to be high up on the list of successful ones. It had been a long time since I had gone on anything a normal person might consider a real date. I made a point of not dating. I made it my second job to avoid getting roped into actual dates.
Something had gotten into me on that plane, though, and I had broken that rule. Maybe it had been the adrenaline from successfully maneuvering the plane through that fucked up storm. Maybe it had been something else. I didn't know, and at the moment in the cockpit, I didn't care.
I had asked Jess to have dinner with me, and when our flight had been delayed, we'd gotten the perfect opportunity to do just that. A quick Google search had helped me figure out where to take Jess, and for three hours, the two of us had sat in a restaurant, eating, drinking, and getting to know each other better. I had fully expected to come out of the date disenchanted with her, no longer interested in her in any way. I had been dead wrong.
I had been physically attracted to her from the moment I laid eyes on her, but now, I felt a more cerebral attraction as well. To put it plainly, I liked her. I liked her for more than just her tits and ass. There was something different about her, and it was something I wanted to delve a little deeper into.
If I had stopped to think about it for very long, I probably would have hauled ass in the opposite direction of her once I noticed my added level of interest. Instead, I did the exact opposite of that. As I escorted her into the elevator of our hotel, I slipped my hand around her waist, placing it on the small of her back. She flinched but didn't pull away.
“So, any chance you’re not completely tired yet?” I asked her.
“That depends,” she answered, somewhat cautiously. Her voice contradicted the way she swayed back slightly into the palm of my hand. “Why do you ask?”
“Because it turns out I’m not tired. I was earlier. I was fucking exhausted earlier. I’m pretty sure I could have slept for two days straight. Stressful flights do that to me.”
“But not now?” she asked. “You just stopped being tired?”
"It would appear so. I was wondering, if you aren't currently wishing you could sleep for a thousand years, if you might want to continue our evening for a bit? No hanky panky. I'm not trying to suggest anything like that, but maybe a drink? There's a fantastic mini-bar in my room. We could have another drink together if that sounds like something you might like."
What the hell was wrong with me? I had asked plenty of women to come into plenty of rooms with me. Every single time, I had asked with no good intentions. I had asked them into my room with the express intention of fucking their brains out, and I'd never been nervous during the asking. But now? For some reason, I could hardly get the words out, and once I did, I couldn't keep myself from rambling. The only reason I could come up with for the nerves was that I thought she would say no, but even that didn't explain it completely. Usually, I didn't care about a woman's response enough to be nervous, which in my experience had always helped me to get a yes.
“No hanky panky, huh? You sure about that?”
“I’m not sure why I used that term, I can tell you that much, but I am sure that I’ll respect your boundaries. I’m actually asking you if you’d like to have a drink. I’m not using the idea of a drink as a euphemism for anything. Nothing like that.”
“All right, a drink then,” she said. “I’ll have to go to bed eventually, seeing as we’re hopefully going to be flying tomorrow, but I don’t think a drink will hurt any.”
The euphoria that shot through me at receiving her yes was fucking ludicrous. It was just one more thing I couldn't make sense of. So instead of trying to, I ignored it. I had other things to think about, anyway, like the way Jess's ass looked as I followed her down the hotel hallway.
Sweet Jesus, had I just promised not to make a move on her? Had I really? I had, and that made me a stupid, stupid man. Even in her relatively simple dress, a dress not made to make a man think the dirty things going through my mind, she was clearly smoking hot. Her body was thick in all of the right places, the kind of body I wanted to grab with both hands and throw down on my bed.
When she looked over her shoulder and smiled at me, I could feel my dick start to grow instantaneously hard. I had fucked plenty of women in my life, and most of them had been hot, but I couldn't think of one that had looked better than Jess did. And I was the dummy who had promised not to touch her. If there were medals being handed out for stupidity, I deserved to be in the running for one of them.
“This is me,” I said gruffly, clearing my throat and pulling myself out of my filthy thoughts for long enough to stop Jess in front of my room. “Hold on.”
I let her inside and told her to make herself comfortable. Secretly, I wished that she would decide to make herself comfortable by planting herself on my bed, but when she took one of the room's overstuffed arm chairs, I wasn't all that surprised. There were the women who told you they would come in for just a drink and tried to take your pants off the minute you got them into the room, but Jess had never struck me as one of those kinds of girls.
“What’s your poison?” I asked.
“That depends,” she said. “What are you having?”
“I’m deciding between a glass of wine or a whiskey neat. I’ll let you decide.”
“Yikes, not to the whiskey neat,” she said. “I can’t stand whiskey, especially when it’s by itself. Glass of wine it is.”
I poured us two healthy servings of red wine. My body felt like a live wire in the momentary silence. Sexual tension was something I was used to. It was even something I had learned to use to my extreme advantage. But this was something else. I couldn’t have even said what kind of tension this was. All I knew for sure was that it was making me fucking nervous.
“Here you go,” I said, handing her a cup. “Cheers.”
“What are we toasting to?” she asked.
“To an unexpected night off?”
“Sure, I could drink to that.”
She smiled at me as she took a sip, but there was something about the smile that struck me as being a little sad. It was something I could easily have blown off and ignored. Ignoring it was exactly the kind of thing I would usually have done. Instead, I found myself gearing up to ask her about it. Not that I should have been surprised. Nothing about the way I had played tonight had been like my usual pattern of behavior. So why should this be any different?
“Not your favorite toast?” I asked.
“Hm? What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just your expression when I said that. You looked a little bit sad, that’s all.”
“I’m not sad. Not really. It just gets hard sometimes, you know?”
“Which part?” I asked.
“The traveling,” Jess said. “So, I guess all of it, really. I love this job. Don’t get me wrong, but I won’t lie and tell you it isn’t a strain sometimes. Every night like this one is a night when I’m not at home with my daughter.”
“Who is she with?” I asked.
"My sister, Sophie. It's always Sophie, which is awesome. The two of them have a fantastic relationship, and I'm grateful for it, but I feel like I miss so much."
“I can only imagine how hard that must be,” I said.
"Honestly? It sucks. It sucks enough that I think about just throwing in the towel with the whole flying thing and getting a no
rmal job. Except I know that if I did that, a huge part of me would regret it. There's no job like being in the air all of the time. I would miss it. I know I would."
“I would, too,” I agreed, sipping my wine and watching her face closely as she spoke. “Not a doubt in my mind.”
She laughed softly, blushing prettily as she did so. “God, I don’t know why I got so morose all of a sudden. You’re right, nothing wrong with a night off to do something adult, right? It’s just too bad Stevens had to get sick for us to get the forced night off.”
My face must have looked as hard as it felt when she made that comment, because her brow furrowed in concern. It wasn't like I was trying to make a big deal of it or anything, but even the mention of Fred’s name made me want to put my fist through a wall. Even if I'd wanted to, which I did, that was something I couldn't easily have hidden.
“What is it?” Jess asked. “Did I say something wrong? Is Fred sicker than they told me?”
“No, definitely not.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“He’s not sick at all, Jess,” I said. “At least, not the kind of sick you’re thinking about.”