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She swallowed hard.
“I was going home anyway,” she said. “Just not on this particular flight. I had about four more days until I left, but I got a call yesterday that my dad was almost killed in an accident. He’s okay…but he’s banged up pretty bad.”
Worry crossed my features. “What happened?”
“Some lady pulled out in front of him when he was on his motorcycle,” she answered. “He hit her going about thirty miles an hour. She got out and was all ‘my back,’ ‘my neck,’ all the while my father was on the ground.”
The words ‘my neck’ and ‘my back’ were hauntingly familiar to my reason for leaving.
I was telling her my story before I’d thought better of it.
“I hit someone in my police cruiser before I left,” I said, swallowing hard. “I was driving, heading back to the station for my end of shift change, and was making a U-turn. Got almost completely turned around when some bitch pulls out of the Starbucks parking lot on her phone. I couldn’t stop in time and ended up barely tapping her. I’m talking zero damage to the police cruiser, and a dent in the door, one about the size of a golf ball, of her car. At least where I hit her.”
“And let me guess,” Piper said. “She got out of the car complaining about injuries?”
I nodded. “You bet. God, she laid it on thick, too. She spilled her coffee on herself. A coffee that she most assuredly did not have in her hands when she was hit. One of her hands had been on the steering wheel, the other clutching her phone, and she’d been glancing in my direction.”
“As if she knew what she was about to do,” Piper said.
“Exactly,” I said. “But I’d had a malfunction in my dash cam earlier in my shift. And from the way it looked at the scene, she was completely on the road. And since I didn’t have a green ‘turn’ light, it looked like she had the right of way over me. And to top it off, she conveniently had a friend in the car behind her that ‘saw the whole thing’ and ‘I was a maniac’ and ‘I was driving way too fast and looking at my phone.’”
Piper’s mouth fell open just as the plane’s wheels left the runway.
“You’re shitting me,” she said. “What happened next?”
“Next, I was suspended pending an investigation,” I continued. “Without pay.”
“What?” she squawked. “Why?”
“Because it hadn’t been my first incident. And the chief really, really doesn’t like me. I was a punk ass kid and got myself into trouble. My brother happens to be really good friends with the chief, and we’ve never really gotten along all that much. I think everyone thought that me going into the Air Force, my attitude would change, that I would become all nice and shit. But I didn’t. And when I got a job at the police station after I got discharged, I knew that he really wasn’t sure when it came to my attitude.”
“You? An attitude?” she snickered. “What were the other incidents?”
“Roughed up a few too many assholes,” I said. “Everyone is all singing ‘police brutality’ and shit. Honestly, I just wanted some kind of justice. I’m fuckin’ sorry that I was a little rough on a piece of shit that felt up his eighteen-month-old daughter. My goddamn bad.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“Should’ve killed him.”
My lips turned up into a small smile.
“Yeah,” I said as the plane leveled out. “I wish I could’ve.”Chapter 2I wonder if you look both ways before you get on my nerves.
-Text from Piper to Pru
Piper
I woke stiff as a board, my neck was hurting, and we were already bouncing up and down as the wheels touched down on the tarmac.
The bouncing made my face press against something soft and hard, and I groaned as I opened my eyes, taking in my surroundings.
Somehow, I’d curled myself into a ball in my seat.
Well, mostly my seat.
Everything but my head, anyway.
My face was resting comfortably in the man’s lap at my side.
And my face was inches away from something bulging and quite large, even in its non-erect state.
I swallowed hard and sat up stiffly, trying hard not to blush.
Sweeping my mass of crazy, curly hair out of my face, I turned to look at the man that I’d fallen asleep on for God knew how many hours.
“We’re here?” I asked curiously, voice husky from disuse.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Ready?”
I looked at all of the men that were unbuckling their seatbelts in a damn hurry to get off the plane just like we were.
“Oh, yeah.” I sat up and lost his heat, hating it.
“Good,” he said. “We gotta get off first otherwise we’re going to be stuck behind all of them. And our plane leaves in twenty minutes whether we’re on it or not.”
