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Me: Love you too... and hate you for convincing me to sleep with some random dude.
Iris: Hehehe. It’s good for you to come out of your shell a bit.
Me: Mmmmhmmm
I put my phone in my purse and grabbed my bag. Ethan got into line, and I waited until there were lots of bodies between us before I did the same. He was the last person in the world I wanted to see again but damned if I couldn’t pry my eyes off him. They roved over the contours of his muscular back and his perfect ass.
I wonder what he looked like naked?
I felt like a creepy stalker the way I stared at him while we inched forward to board, but I couldn’t stop soaking in every inch of him, wondering what it must have been like to be naked with him.
Man, I bet he looked good naked. I wonder if his willy is as big as I’m imagining?
As Ethan turned around, my hungry gaze that was clapped onto his ass suddenly locked onto his crotch. With a stunned flutter of my lashes, I looked up, and he captured my lewd stare, giving me a wink to let me know I’d been busted.
With a sharp gasp, I whirled around, dropping my mortified stare to the ground. To avoid another embarrassing encounter with the man so hot that deep down I wished I could remember our interlude, I kept my eyes fixated on the blue patterned carpet until it was my turn to board. The gate attendant scanned my boarding pass before sending me down the jetway to my plane. My anxiety hit unbearable heights as I reached the entrance.
To say I was terrified of flying was an understatement. My constant need for control made me a terrible passenger on planes because I didn’t know what was going on up in the cockpit. Trusting my life to a complete stranger controlling a five-hundred-ton steel tube and making it go hundreds of miles per hour, thousands of feet in the air, was my own personal version of hell. I was practically phobic about flying, and it had taken a double dose of Xanax my doctor had prescribed for the flight to get me calm enough to board the first time. I’d hated the thought of being out of control under the effects of the drugs, but I’d had Jimmy to comfort me and watch over me while I’d sat in a numb stupor as the drugs worked their magic.
Now I was alone, and I couldn’t decide if flying or being under the effects of potent drugs without someone keeping an eye on me terrified me more. Visions of being looped out on drugs and then kidnapped warred with the visions of my plane plummeting to the ground while I screamed in terror. The control freak inside of me had her own panic attack trying to decide the lesser of two evils, but then I decided to forgo the drugs unless I hit complete panic mode and needed to sedate myself. Lord knows I’d gotten into enough trouble on mind-altering booze last night, and that was just alcohol.
You can do this. Statistics say flying is safer than driving.
Keeping the rational flight statistics I had memorized on repeat in my head, I exhaled a deep breath and stepped inside the plane. One by one, we squeezed down the aisles, and I checked my pass again to verify my seat assignment.
27G.
I glanced up and searched for aisle numbers until I saw the twenty-seven. The man in front of me took his seat and opened up the aisle. I froze in my tracks when his body disappeared and gave me a clear view.
The aisle with Ethan sitting in it.
No. Way.
The woman behind me gave me a little nudge, so I started toward my seat while hoping and praying we’d be on opposite sides of the aisle. When I got there and saw the only open seat left in row twenty-seven was beside him, my heart plummeted down to the pit of my stomach.
“Are you stalking me?” he asked with a sly grin when I stopped at his row.
“I, uh ... that’s my seat, I guess.”
His hearty laugh rolled through the plane and caused me to cringe. “Now, if this isn’t fate, I don’t know what is.” He stood to let me into the center seat.
This is hell, I wanted to answer, but instead, I remained quiet.
After sitting down and buckling my seat belt, I glance over to see Ethan staring at me with a smirk.
His brown eyes sparkled with amusement. “How’s it going, stranger?”
“Fine. Everything is fine. Just fine. I’m fine,” I answered while trying to make myself feel that way.
“That’s a lot of fines,” he teased.
At the moment, everything, in fact, wasnotfine. I was a single, marriage-wrecking, possibly jobless tramp who was perhaps going to plummet to her death in a steel tube seated next to the one person on the planet she never wanted to see again.
Nope. Not fine.
“Ethan,” I turned to him and closed my eyes, then exhaled a deep breath through my nose. “I know you probably think this is hilarious, but when I tell you that I am mortified, I meanI. Am. Mortified.What I did last night is so far from the person I truly am, and it’s tearing up my insides that I behaved the way that I did. Normally, I would be elated to bump into a new friend I met on my vacay, but right now, seeing you has my skin crawling from the embarrassment of what I did. I rarely drink, and I got super drunk and made some terrible decisions. I just want to pretend this isn’t happening, read my book, survive this flight, and get to my connecting flight in Boston.”
His playful smirk softened. “You have nothing to be embarrassed about, Ivy. You were drunk and funny. It’s no big deal.”
