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Chapter Two
Chris
It was exactly fourteen minutes until takeoff, and I was cutting it close. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d had a layover, let alone traveled on a commercial airline.
Still catching my breath, I shuffled down the jetway toward the plane, fixing my well-worn baseball cap over my brow. At the entrance of the plane, I inhaled a deep breath, attempting to calm my racing heart, as I passed those really tempting first-class seats on the way to the cramped and overcrowded ones behind. Almost everyone was already in place with heads bowed over a book or cell phone. Some inspected their cramped surroundings, but no one took any extra notice of me.
No one stared. No one made a fuss, pointed, asked for a picture. Nothing.
Between the gate agent not recognizing me and this, I was sure my star status had not only fallen, but imploded into a black hole.
I shook the thought from my head. This was what I wanted, what I needed. To avoid attention.
I made my way to the back of the plane and turned toward my row, blocked by someone already in the aisle seat. “Excuse me, can I…”
A pair of startlingly blue eyes blinked up at me expectantly. “Do you need to get in?”
“Yeah.”
The young woman stood, allowing me to slide in. I settled in my seat with a sigh and, out of the corner of my eye, caught her movements as she sat back down. Opening a magazine, she leaned back into her seat, getting comfortable.
As if that was possible.
I buckled the seat belt nice and tight. Not that it mattered. If the plane went down, a thin strip of cloth across my lap wasn’t going to save me. I flopped my head back with a groan when one of the flight attendants began the safety speech over the loudspeaker.
“Hey, um, sir, are you okay?”
I slanted my gaze to my neighbor. “I’m a little…”
“Don’t like flying?”
“No. Not really.” Understatement of the year. I didn’t normally fly without assistance with some drug or alcohol, but I’d learned from my first flight that they didn’t serve drinks until we were up in the air, and those tiny bottles of vodka were crazy expensive. Didn’t stop me from ordering the limit, two, but still. Flying coach was for the birds.
“A few more hours, that’s it,” I whispered to myself.
“What?”
“Nothing, only trying to calm down.” This was why I took private planes on the rare occasion I had to fly anywhere, so I could get drunk or high and no one would care. Though, Wes clearly didn’t want to give me even that luxury of having a panic attack in private.
“You can talk to me, if you want. I mean, if it’ll help,” my seatmate said.
“Okay,” I agreed, my body rigid and unmoving, save for a bouncing knee.
The engines roared as the plane taxied toward the runway, and my blood pounded in my ears.
“I’m reading this magazine. Do you want to take a quiz? It’s to find your workout personality.”
I glanced to her hands which held brightly colored pages with ads for sneakers and sports bras before I faced front again where a flight attendant demonstrated how to put on an oxygen mask.
That must have been enough of an answer for her because she cleared her throat. “What are you most likely to be doing on a Saturday night? A, unwinding with a book and bubble bath. B, going for a run to outdo your best time. C, challenging your friends to a game of poker or Scrabble.”
Obvious choice. “High stakes poker, C.”
“Poker,” she repeated, checking off the letter with her pen. “At work, you have a reputation for being… A, the independent and sometimes hard-nosed one, who strives for personal best. B, the laid-back one to organize projects on your own. Or C, the social butterfly who energizes everyone.”
“Social butterfly, I guess.” As if that wasn’t the exact reason I’d been sent on this sojourn.
