Turbulence

by E. J. Noyes

  By the time I’d gathered my wits, Audrey had dressed and checked that everything in the jet was shut down. I dressed and put my hair back up into an impersonation of a ponytail. A very loose interpretation.

  “Come here.” She took my face gently in both hands to kiss me. “Thank you again for this weekend. All of it.”

  I raised my eyes to hers. “No. Thank you.” A weird lump in my throat made my words squeak.

  Penny was standing by the car when we finally emerged, only fifteen minutes late. “Good evening, Ms. Rhodes.”

  “So sorry to keep you waiting.” My smile was apologetic as I tried to tamp down my undeniably frizzed sex hair.

  Audrey chimed in with a disarming smile. “Late departure,” she said smoothly.

  “Of course. Not a problem at all.” Pen took my bag from me and moved away to stow it in the trunk. The woman knew something was going on, I could see it in her expression. Smug, and also oddly pleased but trying to hide both.

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “I’ll see you later this week?”

  “Count on it.” Audrey turned toward my driver. “I’ll catch you later, Penny. Tell Loretta I said hi and I’ll call about dinner during the week.” She walked off without waiting for an answer. They knew one another?

  Settled in the backseat, I didn’t even need to ask before Penny told me, “Captain Graham and I…used to play softball together. It was me who told her there was a job opening at Rhodes and Hall.”

  “I see.” I should give my driver a finder’s fee.

  “I hope I didn’t overstep, Ms. Rhodes.”

  “Oh geez, Pen. Not at all.” I leaned forward, resting an elbow on the back of the passenger seat. “So, is she any good?”

  Penny laughed. “She’s decent in the field but can’t bat worth a damn.”

  I grinned, finding it hard to believe that lithe, athletic Audrey was bad at any aspect of sport. “Speaking of, did you watch the game?”

  My driver seemed relieved by the abrupt change of topic signaling I was done talking about how Audrey came to work for my company. “Sure did. It was brilliant. Are you ready to depart?”

  As we drove around the building, I noticed Audrey strolling toward the lot where her motorcycle would be parked. Penny’s question startled me from my blatant ogling. “Did you have a pleasant weekend, Ms. Rhodes?”

  I dragged my eyes away from my lover’s spectacular assets. “Yes. Yes I did.”

  “I’m very pleased to hear that.” She caught my eye in the rearview, then cleared her throat. Penny seemed on edge, which made me wonder if despite my reassurances she thought I was annoyed with her for suggesting Audrey apply for the pilot’s job.

  The vibe in the car had turned into a weird mix of confusion and discomfort. Rather than add to it by bringing up Audrey and Penny’s connection again, I chose to stay silent and think about the weekend. The more I thought, the more I flitted between contentment and panic. What the hell was I doing? I rested my head on the headrest and chanted to myself casual casual casual.

  As promised, when I got home I called Nat.

  “Spill. How was it?” she asked.

  “Amazing. Perfect. Terrifyingly so. Nat, she just…fits. You know? Like, everything’s comfortable.”

  “Rhodes, it may be possible that you’ve found the only uncomplicated and baggage-free woman in the country.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  With the phone between my ear and shoulder, I fixed my ponytail. “No. But I thought about it, like truly honestly thought about it.”

  Nat grunted. “Every single lesbian in the world hates you for being such a chickenshit, you know that right?”

  “Mmmm,” I agreed.

  “So stop squandering it. I’m serious. You’ve got two weeks and then I’m staging an intervention. Full page notice in the Times. AG date me, love IR.”

  Laughing, I opened the fridge and pulled a bottle of water from between Audrey’s beer and some takeout I’d forgotten to toss out. “I promise, I’m working on it. I just want it to be the right time.” I dumped containers in the trash.

  “Right time? You’re not staging a fucking moon launch, Rhodes. Just tell her.”

  * * *

  Audrey and I didn’t see each other until Friday of that week. Functions, dinners, late meetings and Mark taking the jet—and her—for an overnight on Thursday kept us apart. Antsy and out of sorts, I was almost pacing my apartment as I waited for her. When you’re used to getting laid nearly every day, five days feels like an eternity. There was no greeting, just hands and lips finding familiar places as we bumped into furniture and the walls on our way to my bedroom, leaving clothing like a breadcrumb trail for when we would eventually emerge.

  When we crossed to my bed, I was down to a thong and my stockings. Audrey panties only. She pushed me onto the bed, settling on top of me right away, but not before I reached between us to slip my fingers under the fabric. No surprise, she was wet already. I rubbed lazy circles, lightly sliding my fingers over her clit.

  Audrey grasped my wrist, moving my hand up to her lips. With teasing slowness, she took my fingers in her mouth, sucking herself from them. The whole time, as her tongue played over me she kept eye contact. My stomach flipped, heart thumped in my chest, clitoris begged for attention. Then she guided my hand back between her legs and kissed me. I could taste her. Oh God. I groaned.

  Our bodies reunited without thought. Quickly, slowly, hard and soft. We cried our climaxes again and again until we were finally spent. Wet with sweat. Satisfied but also totally unsatisfied. I rolled over to face her.

  She was serene, breasts rising and falling with each breath. Audrey always breathed deep and slow, as if she wanted to savor every ounce of oxygen. Perhaps not always. I could make her breathing quicken. Make her pant and gasp. Her eyes were closed, a little smile on her face. She didn’t need to talk, never felt the urge to cover silence with conversation the way I did.

  I was better at being still and silent since we’d been together…since we’d started sleeping together, I mean. I rolled onto my back, noting a cobweb over in the far corner of my room. Note to self: talk to cleaner. “How was your week?”

  “Great.” Slowly, her eyes opened and found mine. “I flew my plane up to Maine to see some friends, caught up on housework. Flew Mr. Hall around. Mundane shit. You?”

  “Work and functions,” I said bluntly. Propping myself up on an elbow, I stared at her. She stared back until I smiled, caught out. “You know, we never really talk about things we like. Hobbies and stuff.” My words were cautious. This could go either way. Either why would we or why should we. Or we’d agree that yes, we could talk about more personal things.

  “You’re right. We don’t. Do you want to talk about those things?”

  I shrugged, trying and probably failing to appear nonchalant. “I guess.”

  The corner of her mouth lifted and I had to stop myself from leaning over to kiss the curved edge of her mouth. “Hobbies. Let’s see…I used to play softball, right when I moved to the city but it’s tricky these days. You never know when you’re going to be dragged out of town.”

  “Yeah I know. Penny told me that’s how you guys know each other. What position?”

  She raised both eyebrows comically. “Second base.”

  “You didn’t even make it to third base? Wow. I find that hard to believe,” I kidded.

  She grinned. “Funny.” The grin faded a little. “Pen said we were just softball pals?”

  “Mhmm.”

  “I’m not sure why she said that, but we go back further than that.” The way she said it felt almost like she was digging up a painful memory. After a long pause, Audrey added quietly, “Maybe she didn’t know if she was allowed to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” I brushed hair back from her eyes, running my thumb along her jaw. “Hey, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s just…” She looked at me, her eyes wide and unsure. “It�
��s a little awkward.”

  My thumb moved to the edge of her mouth, smoothing out the lines that had suddenly appeared there. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s fine. I want to.” She tensed and then relaxed, almost forcefully. “Penny helped me turn into an actual functioning human again.”

  Confused, I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  She scratched her eyebrow with a forefinger. “This might lean into deep and meaningful territory.”

  “That’s okay,” I said quickly.

  Audrey studied me, as though she was deciding exactly what to say. When she eventually spoke, words I’d never expected to hear rushed from her in a torrent. “My dad died in prison, Iz. He killed himself a few months into the eleven-year sentence he was serving for the attempted murder of my mom.” The words lacked inflection, as though she was reading from a script.

  My stomach dropped. “Oh…Audrey.”

  Her smile was shaky. “I told you I had experience with tigers. He’d been emotionally and physically abusive my whole life and one day he, uh took it to a whole new level, stabbed her and then tried to kill himself. I came home from school and—” She cleared her throat. “Well yeah.”

  I leaned in and kissed her cheek softly, snuggling into her side. I wanted to be as close as possible, to pour my support and compassion into her if I could. Trying to imagine what she’d seen and been through made my chest hurt, like my heart didn’t know what to do with all these feelings. “Your mom’s okay, right? You’re okay?”

  “Mhmm, all good.” Audrey’s arm came around me and I felt her chest expand with her long inhalation. “Anyway, I met Penny when I was eighteen, not long after I started dating her niece Kimberly, in college. Long story short, I was pretty messed up after my childhood stuff, kind of uncontrollable. Penny was like the authority figure I’d needed my whole life. Someone who was strong without stealing that strength from others.”

  I nodded, knowing exactly what she meant.

  Audrey was staring at the ceiling, her voice faraway. “I love my mom so much and she’s sweet and nurturing, but she was trying so hard to just deal with her shit with my dad too. I’d run wild for most of my life, had some weird emotional stuff from what happened. Pen helped me in a way Mom couldn’t.” The rest of her story came out in a rush, the words running together. “Kim and I lived with Penny and Loretta for almost three years and then Kim got cancer and died when I was almost twenty-one.”

  I blinked at the abrupt ending to her story. What do you say to something like that? There was nothing except another quiet, “I’m sorry.” I smoothed my hand down the center of her chest, between her breasts, as though I could soothe some of her past hurts away.

  “Mmm.” Audrey kissed the top of my head. “So it’s more than just Pen and me playing softball together.”

  There were dozens of questions and emotions spinning through my head but I couldn’t make sense of them to say anything other than, “I didn’t mean to make you talk about it if you didn’t want to.”

  “It is what it is, Iz.” She laughed softly. “Sorry, that sounded funnier in my head. What I mean is, yeah it all hurts but at the same time it was a while ago. People move on, they change.”

  The silence between us stretched, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Audrey’s hand was on my back, sweeping slowly up and down my spine. I pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before now?”

  “I didn’t know you were curious.” She sounded surprised.

  I glanced up at her. “I am. I just didn’t know how to ask.”

  She laughed quietly. “You ask by saying, ‘Audrey, would you tell me about your past?’”

  “I’ll remember that for next time.”

  Audrey leaned back slightly to look down at me. “You know, a couple of days after you came for dinner that first night, Pen called me. I basically got the ‘you treat her right’ speech.” She cleared her throat. “And the ‘moving on’ speech.”

  “Moving on?” She’d shifted slightly away and I pulled myself closer to her, conscious of the evenness of her tone as she tried to sound nonchalant. She hadn’t shut down but it felt like she’d closed herself off and I wanted to show her I was here with her.

  “Yeah. I haven’t…dated much since Kim. A few casual relationships here and there. A month or two but never anyone I wanted to spend an extended amount of time with.” She shot me a quick glance then smoothed her expression over to a neutral one as though trying to cover up the implication of what she’d just said.

  Or was I imagining it? Was she trying to tell me something, or was it wishful thinking? Trying to lighten the mood a little, I said, “I couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to spend time with you.”

  A short laugh escaped her mouth. “You only get to see the good things. The things I want to show you.”

  I kept eye contact with her. “You’ve never struck me as someone who has a lot of bad qualities.” Unlike me, who has them in spades.

  “No? Well I’m doing a good job hiding them from you then,” Audrey teased. Though there was still an undercurrent of discomfort, it felt as though she’d begun to open up again.

  I ran my fingers softly over her hip. “I already know you’re impatient, sometimes wonderfully snide and occasionally humorous at inappropriate times.”

  “Guilty.” She captured my hand and lifted it, brushing her nose along my palm. “Do any of those things bother you?”

  “Not in the slightest,” I murmured. After a beat I added, “Thank you for telling me.”

  Finally, she raised her eyes to mine and the naked emotion in them was like a punch in the gut. “Thank you for letting me.”

  We lay comfortably together and I tried to process what I’d just learned. Here I was thinking I had father issues. The whole thing made her seemingly eternal good nature even more incredible.

  “I can feel you thinking, Iz.” There was a note of humor in her tone.

  “It’s just…you’re so calm and easygoing. How do you move past something like that? I’m still shitty at the guy who cut me off in the lobby this morning.”

  Audrey shrugged. “Supportive friends and family, plus a really good therapist helped me discover what I needed to let go of.” She pulled our joined hands to her mouth and kissed my knuckles. “And what I should try to hold on to.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The half-eaten tube of antacid tablets had rolled just out of reach. Stretching over papers strewn on my desk, I managed to flick them toward me. I palmed another two into my mouth, and tried to suck quietly as Shane Preston’s panic hit a high note. I should charge him for treating my indigestion. I should charge him for my blood pressure issues. I should charge him for being an annoying wanker.

  After a veiled insult about my competence, I crunched the antacids between my molars, not bothering to cover the sound. “Shane, please. Let me assure you everything is fine.”

  I had to strain to understand his response, babbling and ranting about shit he really didn’t understand regardless of how often I explained it. He constantly misinterpreted me. He misinterpreted Mark. He probably misinterpreted breathing. In the end, I gave up and told him I would come see him the next day to show him exactly what I meant. I made a note to slip a commission rate increase into Preston’s next contract and buzzed my assistant.

  “Clare, I need to be in Oklahoma tomorrow midafternoon, probably returning around ten or eleven p.m.” Knowing Shane, he would want to discuss every penny of his portfolio over dinner stretching into late drinks. Goodbye relaxing time with Audrey tomorrow night.

  I turned to the window just in time to see all my plans flying out of it. I had a function tonight, would be home late and the last thing I’d feel like doing tomorrow was seeing one of my most challenging clients.

  Clare appeared in my office. “Uh, Mr. Hall has a meeting in Portland tomorrow and then he’s continuing to Las Vegas for the weekend, Ms. Rhodes. The jet won’t be
back until Sunday.”

  Portland? Why hadn’t I heard about it? Mark hated Friday meetings. Fuck Mark and his meeting and weekend trip and taking Audrey. Fuck Shane Preston. Fuck everything.

  Cautiously, Clare told me, “Your shared calendar should have updated with Mr. Hall’s schedule, Ms. Rhodes.” She was telling me, respectfully, that if I looked I would have seen that Mark had gotten in first to use the jet for his meeting.

  I squeezed the bridge of my nose. “Okay. Can you arrange a corporate jet, please?” There was no other way to work it.

  “Of course.”

  I shoved papers and my tablet aside and grabbed my purse. “I’m going out for a while.”

  “You don’t want me to get you lunch, Ms. Rhodes?” Clare always seemed put out when I went out to forage for myself and I could never quite figure out why. I’d have thought having some extra time without my bothering her would be refreshing.

  “It’s fine, thank you. I’ll grab something while I’m out.”

  I tugged the collar of my Burberry trench up around my ears. Air. I needed air. Not fresh air because there was no such thing around here. Plain, smoggy, fumey but non-recycled air conditioning Manhattan air would have to do. I don’t know why but as I was striding down the sidewalk, I dialed Audrey. We hadn’t seen each other since last Friday, six days ago when she’d given me that precious piece of her past. Damned functions and dinners, and late meetings.

  She was breathless when she answered, “Hey, is everything all right?”

  “Mhmm.” Except for the scooter that just cut in front of me. I gave the departing figure a middle finger and rushed across the street. “This isn’t a bad time?”

  “Not at all. I’m just out for a run.”