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“I brought you a coffee. Peppermint latte. I had them hold the mocha in it for the sake of your stomach, and I hope you can manage it.” I held out the beverage to her, and she took it with the same wry smile. To my surprise, she did take a sip of the steaming liquid and thanked me.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said. “But I do appreciate it, really.”
“Anytime,” I said with a smile. “And if there’s anything else I can give you that will help you feel better, don’t hesitate to ask. It’s what I’m here for.”
“You’ve been doing a great job. In fact, I would say you have gone above and beyond with your service. I’m pretty sure you were just hired to fly the plane, and here you are, giving me all kinds of goodies to go along with the service you’re providing in the air.”
“What can I say?” I shrugged with a charming smile. “I don’t mess around. When I do something, I go all in, if you hadn’t noticed.”
She blushed a bit at my comment, and I knew she picked up on the innuendo I was saying. There wasn’t anyone else around, so I knew I could crack the joke and not have it come back to haunt me. I would be a lot more professional if there were others in the area, but I wasn’t going to hold back when it was just the two of us together.
I felt I could be myself with her, and that was one of the main reasons why I was falling so hard for her. I knew that, and I appreciated it, too.
Laurel, for her own part, took another drink of the coffee before putting it down on the table next to her. She had a notebook open in front of her, along with a variety of sketches she had drawn. It looked to me like she was trying to get a feel for the room, but with all the X’s that had been scrawled across the page, it didn’t look to me like it was going as well as it could be.
Still, I didn’t comment on that. I knew that this was going to be a harder job for her to do than the other ones, and I didn’t want to add more pressure to the moment. She was already dealing with a lot, and I didn’t want to make it worse.
“You ever think about having a family?” Laurel asked.
“What?”
“Like kids, you know? Do you ever think about what life would be like if you got married and had kids and all that? Or even not getting married but still having kids?” She looked up from what she was doing, and I felt more confused than before.
I wasn’t sure why she was asking me this, and it had caught me completely off guard.
“I mean, sure, I’d like to have kids at some point,” I said. “But I’m not looking to any time in the near future. I always thought it was better to get married before the kids came along, but if that didn’t happen I guess I would be okay with it. I’d figure it out anyway.”
“How long did you want to wait before you had them?” she asked.
Once again, I was curious to know why she was asking me about children and wondering if she was to the point in our relationship that she was trying to figure out where I stood with such things. It would be an important conversation to have, but I thought it still a bit soon for us to start talking about that.
On the other hand, if she was trying to figure out my standpoint on children and basing where she wanted to go with our relationship after that, it was fine with me, too. I wasn’t going to try to guess what the right answer was, I just wanted to tell her the truth about how I felt.
“I’ve thought about having kids, but I also want to see the world before they start coming along,” I said. “I mean, I’ve seen a good chunk of this planet already, but I don’t want to be tied down at this point. Once I get out there and see the rest of what I want to see, I’ll be a lot more likely to want to settle down and have kids, if that makes sense.”
“No, it does,” she said.
She went back to the papers in front of her, and I hoped I had told her what she wanted to hear, though I still was curious as to why she was bringing it up. But then, I also didn’t want her to feel like there were things she wasn’t able to ask me.
She might have just been genuinely curious about what I thought about kids, and whether I would be having my own one day. I knew it was getting more and more popular to live life without having kids, and that could be where she was at. But then, she might also be one of those girls who wanted to have a whole lot of her own kids, though I hadn’t gotten that impression from her so far.
Laurel was so career oriented, I figured that was where her primary focus was and likely would remain. She would probably also want to have kids someday, but not until she had a lot more of her career behind her. A stronger footing, more money in the bank, the list could go on and on, really.
She fell silent, however, and was studying her papers in front of her to the extent that I couldn’t help but think there was something on her mind. I knew she didn’t feel good, and that could be part of the reason she seemed off, but there could be something else that was bothering her, and if that was the case, I wanted to ask her about it.
I wanted her to know I cared.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “There seems to be something on your mind.”
“I’m okay,” she said a little too quickly.
“You know you can talk to me about anything,” I told her. “If something’s bothering you, I want to help.”
“I’m fine,” she said again. “Just tired. And a bit overwhelmed with what I have to do, I’ll admit. Sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” I told her. “You’re okay to feel sick sometimes. Or tired, or whatever.”
“I just didn’t mean to snap at you, that’s all,” she said with a sigh. “It’s been a long day already, and I’ve still got a lot to do. Do you want to help me out?”
