by Whitney G.
It’d only been a few days since I made up with Gillian, and I knew we had more work to do to get on the same page—to remain on the same page, but I was actually determined to make this work.
The second I landed in Tokyo, I called Jeff to make sure the flowers I’d ordered yesterday were still set to arrive at her place on Eastern time tomorrow.
“Yes, I placed the flower order, Mr. Weston.” Jeff laughed as he answered the phone. “All eight bouquets. That is what you’re calling about isn’t it?”
“I called to discuss the weather.”
“I thought so.” He laughed again. “I like the way love looks on you, Mr. Weston. You’re far more tolerable this way.”
“I was tolerable before,” I said. “I’ll see you when I get back. And thank you.”
“You’re quite welcome.”
I ended the call and stood up to leave the cockpit, greeting the departing passengers farewell for the first time in as long as I could remember. I didn’t even get annoyed when they took their precious-ass time to take selfies in the aisle with the flight attendants.
When the last one deplaned, I walked down the jet-bridge and felt my phone vibrating against my pocket. Gillian.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Hey...” Her voice was faint for some reason. “I was hoping to get your voicemail.”
“Why is that?”
“I wanted to leave you an important message.”
“Are you drunk, Gillian?” I sighed. “Are you and your roommate playing some type of game tonight?”
“No...” She cleared her throat. “I need to tell you something, the same something I tried to tell you when we made up that day.”
I stopped walking as I entered the terminal, rolling my bag over to the windows. “So it is something bad?”
“No, it’s just bad timing.”
“You’re not pregnant.”
“No...” She laughed nervously. “No, I’m definitely not pregnant.”
“And you also said you didn’t fuck anyone else while we were apart.” I felt my jaw clenching. “Are you about to tell me differently?”
“No, that’s not it either. I’ve only slept with you since we’ve met.”
I tapped my fingers against the handle of my luggage, mentally rewinding the past months we’d been apart and the months prior that we’d been together. I thought about the times she’d given me her “Cliff’s notes” of long stories, her bad days that always involved her family, and figured she was probably blowing whatever it was out of proportion.
“I take it this is going to be a long conversation?” I asked.
“Yes.” Her voice was damn near a whisper now.
“Okay.” I walked toward the transportation dock. “I’ll call you once I check into the hotel.”
“You promise?” There was worry in her voice. “You promise to call me as soon as you check in?”
“Yes, Gillian. As soon as I check in.”
“Okay, good. I’ll be waiting.”
“Talk to you in twenty.” I ended the call, extremely confused. I walked past baggage claim and outside, catching sight of the rest of the flight crew getting onto the shuttle van.
“Excuse me, Captain?” A man walked up to me, his camera in tow. “Can you please take a picture with us?”
“With?”
He nodded, pointing at his toddler daughter who was wearing a blue and white dress. “My daughter begged me to ask. It would really make her day.”
“Sure.” I stood still and waited for his daughter to stand next to me.
He held his camera above all of us and I actually smiled for change.
“Thank you!” He picked his daughter up to show her the picture, dropping his newspaper onto the ground.
“I’ll get it,” I said, stooping down to grab it. I started to hand it back to him, but my fingers instinctively tightened around the edges once I realized that this was yesterday’s edition of The New York Times. Once I realized that my so-called “anomaly” was on the front page.
What the fuck...
TERMINAL C:
BOY FUCKS GIRL
(Well, Vice Versa...)
GILLIAN
~BLOG POST~
PRESENT DAY
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE time we last broke up and the moment he showed up on my doorstep, the previous weeks of tears were long forgotten. The endless coffee runs and all-nighters that ended with crumpled Kleenex beside my laptop all faded, all went away the second he wrapped me in his arms and begged me to take him back.
And even so, when he bared his truths to me, when he told me he loved me and our sex meant more than “just sex,” I wanted to tell him that this time, during our longest break up, my life hadn’t been solely filled with crying and pain. There were days when I didn’t cry in-flight, nights when I wouldn’t let myself waste a single second thinking about him. And in those times, I’d channeled my energy into something else.
I was going to tell him.
I really was...
WRITE LATER,
**Taylor G.**
No comments posted.
GILLIAN
~BLOG POST~
PRESENT DAY
TWENTY CALLS TO HIS home phone since last week.
Thirty texts to his cell since last weekend.
Twelve emails to his personal and work addresses this morning alone.
Not a single response from him, though...Not even a rude and well deserved “This text isn’t about fucking.”
I EVEN CAUGHT HIM IN the airport today, an hour after I formally submitted my two weeks’ notice.
I was taking one final glance of the newest runway, when I spotted him walking through the terminal. Still turning heads with his every step, still making damn near every woman blush as his cockiness radiated off him in waves, his eyes met mine and my entire world stopped.
I rushed over to him, anxious to explain myself, but he looked right through me and continued walking. I even ran after him—calling his name, but he glared at me with eyes that held hurt and betrayal. Eyes that once held nothing but overwhelming, chaotic love for me.
“Please listen to me,” I said. “Please let me explain.”
He didn’t. He held up his hand and forced a smile. “I don’t take photos with passengers, Miss,” he said. “I’m sure any of the other pilots here would be happy to help you. Have a good day.”
Then he walked away.
I haven’t seen or heard from him since.
Write later somewhere else,
**Taylor G.**
1 COMMENT POSTED:
KayTROLL: So...Do I still need to comment on these posts now that we’ve met up in person? Let me know!
GATE C39
GILLIAN
Eight Weeks Earlier...
I STARED AT MY BLANK screen and held back tears. Time wasn’t healing anything between me and Jake, and every second without him was only making things worse.
It was taking everything in me not to call and reach out to him, and I knew I was being foolish by picking the lines with the absolute worst routes so we wouldn’t cross paths, but I couldn’t bear to see him in person right now.
Our last argument still left me feeling raw and allowed me to see that we’d finally reached the end of our relationship. There was nowhere else for us to go, and we needed to stay the hell away from each other before we ended up being even more messed up than we already were.
Unable to write a long blog post, I simply wrote, “I think this really was the end for us,” and hit publish. Before I could shut down my laptop, there was a soft pinging sound. An immediate comment from my personal troll.
(KayTROLL)—I’m pretty sure he’s thinking about you just as much as you’re thinking about him. Just my two cents. If I were you, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it.
I’D NEVER RESPONDED to his troll-ish comments before, but with Meredith out of town and no one else to vent to, I typed a response.
(Taylor G.)—No, I think
this was finally the end for us. It feels different this time.
(KayTROLL) You always say that. Then two days later, you go right back. (I’m not holding my breath on this one. Sorry.)
I GROANED, TYPING. “Well, CLEARLY this time is different because it’s been more than two days. It’s been damn near TWO MONTHS to be exact, so quite honestly? Fuck you and your “two cents.” Since you clearly don’t have a life, go find yourself another random and obscure blog to bother on a daily basis, please. I don’t have anything else for you.”
There was one more reply before I logged off. A brief, “LOL. Still a hothead, I see. :-)”.
I couldn’t think of a decent biting rebuttal, so I slammed the laptop shut altogether and fell back against my sheets. I needed to figure out a way to be re-assigned to a different home-base city as soon as possible.
As I was thinking of the best possible excuse for a transfer, my phone rang. My mom. I immediately silenced her call. I didn’t need any additional doses of negativity right now.
It rang once more minutes later, but my finger hovered over the silent button. It wasn’t my Mom attempting a second call. It was a number I hadn’t seen in forever. One I’d avoided and loathed for years.
“Kennedy B”...
HER FULL NAME WAS KENNEDY Bronson, and she was once my literary agent.
She scooped me up fresh out of graduate school—admiring my talent, promising me what every aspiring author secretly wanted: A book deal.
She swooned over my words with her infectious personality, and pitched my ideas to publishers while I interned under an esteemed editor at The New York Times.
Back then—just a few short years ago, life as a writer was good.
Publishers were handing out book deals like brownies—baking them early in the morning and holding them out for whoever wanted a taste in the afternoon. Magazines were hiring the eager-faced girl with ambition and a smile, and newspapers were printing about their infinite number of internships because there was so much that needed to be written. So much that needed to be said.
No one really cared who you knew, it was what you wrote. And as for me, small town girl from the outskirts of Massachusetts, even I wasn’t looked at like the know-nothing girl from a city no one gave a second-thought about. I was a fast-rising editor at one of the biggest papers in the country, and according to my supervisors, I was going to be lead editor within just a few years.
I arrived to the office two hours early every morning—coffee for the superiors in hand, just to show them how hard I was willing to work. I did the work no one else wanted to do, completed the research that everyone else found mundane, and double checked the facts even after they were cleared by our legal team.
Six months into my job at The New York Times, I was assigned to write about the sudden troubles and countless crashes in the aviation industry, how most of the airlines (except Elite) couldn’t buy good publicity.
First, there was the Asian flight that disappeared over the Indian Ocean—so suddenly and mysteriously that no one could (and have yet to) figure out what happened. Next, there was a series of unexplainable crashes at American airports—all apparently triggered by pilots’ lack of emotional stability. And lastly, there was the final straw that thrust the industry into an uncontrollable tailspin: An American pilot, flying for a foreign carrier, deliberately crashed his plane into the side of a mountain, killing all one hundred and fifty passengers on board.
I reported on each of these stories, exhaustively writing and rewriting the facts, and then I realized that, maybe, all of these things needed further research. Maybe they needed to be a book. And maybe, just maybe, I should figure out what Elite was doing right to avoid the issues that plagued every other airline.
I sent the idea to Kennedy and within months, a handful of publishers asked for more additional details. Some passed, some never got further than the initial interest, but three large publishers did. After all the deals were laid on the table, we went with St. Martin’s Press, since they seemed the most enthusiastic about the idea.
For six months, I was supposed to go undercover as a flight attendant—to try and get the real scoop about Elite Airways and the airline industry. And at the end, we’d “add a bit of a fiction to it for liability’s sake,” but it was going to be marketed as “the closest true account ever printed.”
The book was to be titled, The Truth Behind the Mile High Club, but my author name wasn’t going to be my own. It was to be “Taylor G.” since “Gillian T.” and “Gillian Taylor” were “far too plain,” “not commercial enough” and “way too pretentious.”
Everything was set.
Or so I thought...
Unfortunately, it was a lot harder to get hired as an Elite Airways flight attendant than I’d originally anticipated. I failed the interview session three times, so I had to temporarily settle for being a part time gate agent. It also turned out that publishers have a short term attention span—especially when the introduction of e-books and Kindles began to cause change.
Slowly, the publishers laid off editors— claiming this had nothing to do with the rise of digital media. But then the magazines and newspapers began to hand out pink slips, and Fifth Avenue, once with one of the biggest stream of writers, became a dried up gorge of heartbroken dreamers.
What was once celebratory and new hire parties in the morning, became the clearing of desks and teary-eyed phone calls in the evening.
I paid no mind to that at first, though. I was still safely tucked in my internship, and working as a gate agent a few times a week; all while writing feverishly for six hours a night.
When I completed the first draft of my book, the editor at the publishing house decided that it only needed a few tweaks, so it was given a release date that was nine months away. I was promised a small promotional tour, advertising in all of the best bookstores, and a pretty big print run for a debut author.
All amazing things that never happened.
Two weeks after I submitted my final version of the book, Kennedy called me to say that the publisher was pushing the release of Mile High Club back. A pilot had just successfully landed a plane in the Hudson River and everyone was calling him a hero and praising him for successfully saving all one hundred fifty passengers and five crew. Releasing my book within six months of such an incident wouldn’t be well received by the public.
I didn’t panic. I knew things like this happened all the time. Besides, at that point, I’d finally passed the first round of the never-ending flight attendant interview process, and the publisher was offering me an advance to write a sequel.
On Christmas, the day I planned to call my family and tell them all about my huge, secret accomplishment and the book’s late January release date, Kennedy called and said two things: 1. “They have to push the date back again, Gill. Turns out they are in some type of pricing war with Amazon, so they can’t put your book up for pre-order. Also, your book may not be in Barnes and Noble until later. They’re not giving much shelf space to authors who don’t have established fan-bases.” 2. “But! I was just at a conference and I met this huge indie author who has just sold a million copies of her book! She also just got picked up by your publisher!”
I plucked an ornament from my miniature Christmas tree and attempted not to sound disappointed.
“I was telling this author about you and your story, and she’s agreed to blurb it!” She practically squealed. “She’s also going to ask her editor to feature your first two chapters at the back of her first printed book! If that’s okay with you, that is.”
The bitter taste of disappointment immediately evaporated and I cried, agreeing with a loud “Yes!” I now felt that there was a silver lining to all of the previous setbacks.
Just a few weeks later, I received the blurb from the smash indie author, Brooke Clarkson. It read, “The Truth Behind the Mile High Club is a beautiful, eye opening, and poignant debut. Ms. G’s prose unravels like a silk yarn and will keep you up all nig
ht!”
I printed her words on a poster and framed it in my apartment, high above my desk so I could see it every morning before work. By then, I’d made it past the fourth round of flight attendant training and I was sure I’d be employed by the time I started writing the sequel.
Mile High Club was finally slated to come out in the spring, a full year and a half from when it was originally guaranteed to publish. My boss at The Times had planned a release party, a few early review copies were being printed, and I was still waiting to tell anyone about it; I needed it to be in my hands and real first.
However, just as I was getting excited about the many possibilities of being a published author, the very paper I worked for ran a dream-de-railing headline that altered any hopes I was clinging to:
Smash Indie Author, Brooke Clarkson, to Publish New Book: The Mile High Club Unveiled
I GRABBED THE PAPER and simply skimmed the article, hoping this was some type of joke, but it wasn’t. Her book sounded just like mine, and before I could ask my agent why I was never informed about this, my boss at The Times slammed an advance copy of Brooke’s book onto my desk.
“Raymond is out with the flu and won’t be able to review this in time,” he said. “It’s not due to release for another three months, but he apparently stalked the publisher, insisting that we get a copy. You mind doing a short write up?”
The question was rhetorical. He walked away shortly after asking.
I stared at the book for an hour before flipping open its dust jacket, wanting to believe that her cover was only an homage to mine. That maybe, just maybe, there were only so many photos of planes worthy of being on the cover of a mass printed book.
