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“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.
