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“I just can’t get over this whole ‘personal jet’ business,” Katie said. She was on her knees in the aisle, rummaging through the drawer between a bank of seats. He wished she would get up. It made him uncomfortable to see her on her knees. “It’s so decadent.”
“It’s not that fancy a p-plane.”
“That’s not what I mean. It’s like, you want to go somewhere, you just walk onto the plane and go. When is life ever that easy?”
“You still need a pilot. And you have to drive to the airport. Some places have security.”
“Plus, no one is making me wear my seat belt, and then there’s the snacks!” She held up a small bag of Cheez-Its. “How can you not think this is decadent?”
“Cheez-Its are decadent?”
“The ability to have Cheez-Its now or at any moment I’d like them during the flight is decadent. Or, if I don’t want Cheez-Its, I can have cookies, or peanuts.”
“You c-can eat what you want on a c-commercial flight.”
“Yeah, but only if I schlep it onboard myself.”
“You’re not c-convincing me this is decadent. You’re just c-convincing me that c-commercial air travel ssucks.”
“That, too. The only downside of having your own plane, as far as I can tell, is that it’s hideously wasteful. I’m trying not to think about our consumption of fossil fuels. Do you buy carbon offsets or anything?”
“I run a c-company in San Jose, ssweetheart. I buy c-carbon offsets every time somebody flushes the t-toilet.”
Katie plopped into the seat next to him with her selections. “That’s good. I’d hate to think of you as the evil corporate type.”
He tried to smile, but with her face so close, it hurt. In six days, Sean had a board meeting to run, during which he would present a new plan to pull the company out of its slump. He’d done the research. No other security agency was offering the kind of social media monitoring he wanted to sell. As best he could tell, no one even had the software to do it yet.
Anderson Owens would be at the vanguard, and the vanguard paid well. It was time to stop screwing around and go home.
“I have to be evil ssometimes,” he said. “Mike isn’t any good at it.”
She reached up, uncertain fingers briefly landing on his cheek, his neck, the side of his face. Her eyes bothered him. Something off there, too.
“You ssstill have a headache?”
“A little one.”
“I think there’s some aspirin in the b-bathroom.”
She smiled sadly at her lap. “See what I mean? Personal jet. I need one of these.” Without looking up, she found his hand with hers and twined their fingers together. “I can’t imagine you ever being evil.”
“That’s because you’re good.”
She met his eyes. “When do you go back?”
He wished he had some means to turn away from her. It wasn’t a blessing, loving someone this much. It was a constant ache, a stitched-up wound always threatening to rip open and make a mess of him.
“Next week.”
She looked out the window. They’d ascended through the rain, and water streamed off the glass in crooked ribbons. “You’ll need help packing up the house,” she said to the sky.
There was nothing spectacular about the words, but they broke him. A crucial support snapped, and he listed sideways into her, wrapping her in his arms, burying his face in her neck. “Help me,” he said.
He didn’t mean for it to come out the way it did, an utterance seamed with desperation, visibly cracked and dangerously vulnerable. He didn’
t mean for her to see him like that.
She only turned and kissed him. “Of course.”
