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“He didn’t have the stomach for it.”
He responded to her joke, but then his smile relaxed into a thoughtful expression. “He didn’t have the—” Coming up empty, he made a gesture of dismissal.
She ate one last French fry, then moved the plastic plate aside and wiped her hands on a paper napkin. “Didn’t have the what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
He dabbed the last bite of his burger into the pool of hot sauce, but returned it to his plate without eating it. He took a drink, shifted in his seat, turned to see if perhaps the bartender had forgotten him. When he finally resettled and his gaze lighted on her, she said, “Rye, this may be the last private conversation we ever have. Make it count.”
“Why?”
“Because, it’s been roughly twenty hours since you knocked me to the ground. That was the high point. Since then it’s been one calamity after another. Aren’t I entitled to take away something meaningful from this experience?”
“You turned down a grope and a damn good sloppy kiss in the making.”
She held his stare.
He relented by exhaling a deep breath as he leaned back in his chair. “Thing of it is, I don’t know how to explain it, any more than I know how to explain my fingerprints. They’ve always been there, and so has the obsession for flight. It goes beyond liking it, or even loving it. It’s…” He paused, searched for the word, and again drew inspiration from his fingerprints. “Ingrained.”
He must have thought that she would comment, or thank him for enlightening her, and that would be the end of it. But she continued to watch him with a listening aspect.
Eventually, he continued. “For as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be up there. I’d spend hours on end as close as I could get to a runway, watching the planes take off. One after the other. Over and over. I never tired of it. Envied the guy in the pilot’s seat. All the time thinking, ‘God, I can’t wait to do that.’”
He looked toward the ceiling as though seeing open sky through it. Coming back to her, he said, “To this day, for that last nanosecond before I pull back on the yoke, I savor the anticipation of taking off. I still can’t wait.”
Her eyes glossed over with tears, but she sniffed them back. “Now, was that so hard?”
“Not very poetic.”
“You’re wrong.” She spoke with emotional huskiness, but even above the cacophony, she knew he heard her.
He sat forward and braced his elbows on the table. “Okay, Dr. O’Neal, your turn. Why did you become a doctor? Did you answer a call to serve your fellow man?”
“Something like that. My mother died when I was very young. Before I understood about incurable illnesses, I was angry at the doctors for not making her well. Wasn’t that what doctors were for?”
“You wanted to do better than they had.”
“I suppose that factored in, early on at least. But becoming a doctor was also—”
“Excuse me?”
She and Rye looked up at the man who’d interrupted them. He was around Rye’s age, but cleaner cut, with hair worn short, and a smooth shave. His Hawaiian print shirt was tucked into his jeans. A Levi’s jacket was slung over his shoulder, hooked on his index finger.
“Rye Mallett?”
Rye shot the bartender a vexed look. “I told him no names.”
“You’re in need of a pilot to fly this lady to an as-yet-undisclosed destination ASAP. Is that right?”
“You instrument rated?”
“Yes.”
“How many hours do you have flying IFR? And what kind of plane is at your disposal?”
“I’m not applying.”
