by Ford, Mia
“Sorry about what? I can’t see that you’ve done anything you shouldn’t have.”
“No, I know,” I said. “I just can’t imagine that you girls love being on restroom duty for grown men.”
“Doesn’t bother me. It’s just part of the job, right? Besides, it’s not like I’m going to go very far while we’re up here.”
“True, very true,” I said. “Not unless you’ve got some serious skills nobody knows about, skills like sprouting wings.”
"No, unfortunately, I've got nothing like that. Can you imagine, though?"
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean what if we could? What if we could just take off and fly all on our own? I literally can’t imagine anything more amazing than that, especially on a night like this.”
“A night like what?”
“A night so beautiful,” she said. “I mean, look how clear the sky is right now! Look at all of those stars. It makes the whole world look more beautiful, you know? It makes everything, even the things that are only ordinary in the day, feel like it’s made of magic. At least for me. I’ve always loved the way it looks to fly at night, especially when we’re over the cities. There’s just something about it.”
“You know what? If I’m being honest? I’ve never thought about it that way.”
I could see her embarrassment at how quickly I dismissed her zealous description of a night flight, and part of me wanted to deck myself in the face. If I was trying to get her into bed, this was probably not the way to do it.
On the other hand, something about the way she spoke was sort of interesting to me. It was more interesting to me than I had expected it to be, just as she'd been when I had spoken to her earlier. It was enough to make me want to further explain myself, which was something I almost never did.
“I guess I don’t think about life that way,” I said. “I don’t think about flying that way.”
"You take a much more matter of fact, business approach to it, don't you?” she asked. “That would be my guess anyway, if I had to make one."
“I guess you could say that. I’ve never thought much about the beauty of the world around me while I fly. I’ve never thought about the beauty of any of it, aside from the act of flying itself. That’s what I love. The ability to do it. I love that I can fly when so many other people don’t have a clue how to do it.”
Jess laughed and tucked a lock of her almost white blonde hair behind one ear. As she looked out of the wide cockpit windows, there was a split second where I wanted to take it all back. I had told her the God's honest truth. There was no denying it. I never looked at the land below me and considered it to be beautiful. I didn't consider it to be much of anything, but when I looked at Jess looking at the world rushing by below us I could almost see what she was talking about. She looked from the dark world to me and laughed again, making me feel self-conscious for the first time in as long as I could remember.
“Laughing at me, huh?” I asked. “Can’t say that happens to me all that often.”
“No, I’m not. I promise. I was actually laughing at myself. It’s just that my daughter is always telling me that I can find the good in anything, including a cardboard box. This might be exactly the kind of thing she’s talking about.”
“A daughter, huh? I didn’t realize. How old is she?”
"She's ten, going on a hundred,” Jess said, smiling. “She's sort of a smart-ass, which is one of the reasons I adore her."
“I bet.” I smiled along with her, trying to figure out how I had so badly misread this situation. “Doesn’t seem like the worst quality a daughter could have. Does she get it from you or from your husband?”
“I don’t know. A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B, I guess.”
“And what does he do?” I asked. “Your husband, I mean.”
“He doesn’t.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“I’m sorry, why would you? That was a cryptic answer if ever there was one. He was an architect. That’s what he did. He passed away, though.”
“Shit,” I said. “Jess, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been prying. I’m sorry to bring up painful things.”
"Please, don't feel bad,” she said. “I don't. I loved him very much, but he passed away a little more than five years ago. I still miss him sometimes, but I've made my peace with it. Cancer is a really ugly thing, and he's better off now. I know that's the kind of thing people always say, which makes it mean a lot less, but I believe it."
There was silence between us then, and one that I was grateful for. I wasn't sure if I had started this conversation off with the intention of flirting, but if that had been the case, I had failed. Far from keeping things light-hearted and showing just enough interest in her to make her feel okay with jumping into my bed, I had taken things to a place I'd never meant to go.
It left me feeling unsure of where I was supposed to steer the conversation next. When I thought about it later, I was sure I wouldn't have been able to dig myself out of the hole. I couldn't ever be sure because I never had to give it a try. A beeping on one of the monitors caught my attention, and when I squinted at the night sky surrounding us, my face broke into a frown.
“Where the fuck is Stevens, anyway?” I asked.
"I'm sorry, I don't know,” Jess said. “He does this sometimes. He'll just disappear into the bathroom for a while. Why what's wrong?"
"Nothing's really wrong, Jess. Everything is going to be okay, but I would suggest strapping in though, all the same. We're flying directly into a storm, and we're going to be hitting some major turbulence any minute now. We're going to have to divert the flight path some, too, but it's going to be okay."
I got on the radio to make a similar, if less informative, announcement to the cabin at large. I kept an eye on Jess as I did so and couldn't help but be surprised, impressed, even. Although flight attendants were supposed to be able to handle things like this, doing so, in reality, was a hell of a lot different from doing so in a simulation.
I had seen plenty of girls fall apart under circumstances such as these, and I fully expected that kind of reaction out of Jess. Instead, she remained calm and silent, doing as I had told her and nothing more. When she noticed me looking at her, she smiled, just as calmly as she would have done passing somebody in the hallway.
“You good?” she asked in a soft, even voice. One of her hands reached out and lighted upon my own briefly.
“I’m fantastic. You?”
“I’m just fine,” she said. “Let’s get ourselves out of this mess so those people out there can enjoy flying as much as the both of us do.”
Wonders never fucking ceased, I thought to myself, smiling grimly. She was right, though. Whether or not Stevens was ever planning on getting his happy ass out of the plane’s tiny bathroom, that was exactly what we needed to do.
Chapter 5: Jess
I was pretty sure I had done a good job of convincing Drew that I wasn't at all afraid, which was good. It was my job to stay calm in this kind of scenario, and that was exactly what I intended to do.
Still, the calm I was hopefully projecting on the outside didn't quite match the way I was feeling on the inside, whether staying calm was my job or not. I had been in bad weather before, of course. Any attendant who had flown for more than a couple of months had to have come up against some less than ideal weather. This was probably the worst I had yet to encounter, however, and my stomach lurched inside of me as if to make sure this point was well known.
My fingers clamped down on the handles of the seat I was in, and my jaw clenched, so hard that I was lucky I hadn't accidentally bit down on my tongue instead of my teeth. The plane dropped violently. Not very far, but enough so that I could hear several of the passengers on the other side of the door cry out in surprise and fear. All the while, Drew maintained his steadfast, calm demeanor.
If any part of this was fazing him, he wasn't showing it. Every time the violent storm beating
against our vessel threatened to destroy us all, he would counter the attack and right us again. It was astonishing to me that a person could remain that calm in the face of such a powerful storm.
Any person who had worked on a plane or a ship understood that weather wasn't something to be taken lightly. People liked to believe that they were the strongest thing on earth. That as a species, there was nothing that could dominate us. People like me, people who had been at the mercy of a truly terrifying storm, knew that wasn't true. There were things weather could do to us that we couldn't undo. There were some storms some people never made it out of alive. This was something Drew must have known at least as well as I did, but looking at his face, you would never have known it. He looked as calm as he might have if he'd been watching a television show, and I couldn't help but admire it.
“How you doing over there, slugger?” he asked.
"Slugger?" I laughed, my voice sounding shakier than I would have liked, but it was the best I could manage under the circumstances. "What do you think I am, a twelve-year-old boy?"
"Nah, but you know. There's only so many terms of endearment that aren't full of sexual innuendo, right? I just went for the first one that popped into my head."
“Sure, I get it,” I said. “It’s not like you don’t have other things going on, right?”
“Nothing too big. A flight tantamount to a leisurely stroll in the park.”
"You're awfully confident, you know that?"
“I like to call it an unhealthy level of thrill seeking,” he said.
I laughed again, dizzy with the sudden movements of the plane, but also with the back and forth banter of this strange pilot and me. It was a terrifying storm to have stumbled into, but looking at Drew's determined face, I had no doubts that we would come out of it just fine. I was so sure of it that I wished I could take a snapshot of his face and pass it around to the passengers so they could see what I was seeing. There was no way this man wasn't going to deliver us to safety. That was something he believed so completely that it couldn't help but be true.
“There we go,” he half whispered, whether to himself or to me I couldn’t be sure. “That’s better.”
"Is it?” I asked. “I'm not going to lie. It feels pretty much the same, Drew."
"It sure does, but if things aren't all completely smoothed over within the next thirty seconds, I'll eat my hat."
“You aren’t wearing a hat.”
“I’ll eat something else, then,” he said with a grin. “Just wait. Just wait and see if I’m not right on this.”
I did as I was told. I held my breath, and I waited. In another couple of seconds, I saw that he was right. The storm that had seemed hell bent on driving us and all of those on board into the ground just an eyeblink ago was gone. Just like that, we were back to smooth sailing, and when I looked at Drew, he was smiling a wide, arrogant grin.
"Hey there, pilot, don't get too cocky now. You may have won the bet, but you made one big mistake."
“Did I?” he asked as he raised one eyebrow, making him look like some kind of rogue James Bond and setting my heart to pounding all over again. “And what might that have been?”
“You didn’t set any parameters for what would happen if I lost.”
"You're right, I didn't. Rookie mistake."
"Don't beat yourself up,” I said. “I have a younger sister, so I'm pretty accustomed to the intricate ins and outs of these sorts of things."
He laughed loudly, probably riding his own adrenaline high, and without thinking about it first, I leaned forward and put my hand over his again. There was a crackle of electricity when the two of us touched, the kind of shock you got after rubbing a carpet for too long, but I let my hand stay where it was. I had something to say, and I was going to say it, even if I had to give myself a freaking heart attack in order to do it.
“You were pretty amazing just now, you know?”
“Aw shucks, me?” he said, joking.
“No, seriously, you were. I’ve seen plenty of pilots, and not all of them would have kept their head as well as you did. I would say most of them wouldn’t have. The way you handled that was pretty fantastic. You’re very skilled.”
“Don’t give me too much credit, Jess. You don’t know me yet.”
"I don't have to,” I said. “Not to know I'm right about this. That took skill, and it took guts. I appreciate those things. If all of those passengers out there understood how well you just handled that storm, they would say the exact same thing."
“Have dinner with me,” he said.
“Wait, what? Did you—?”
"Did I just ask you out? Is that what you were going to say? Because if it is, then the answer is yes. I know you weren't coming onto me just now. I'm not an idiot, but I don't care. When we land, have dinner with me. If you think you might be interested, that is."
All of the reminders I'd given myself earlier about the fact that I didn't date pilots went flying back through my head. All of those self-delivered warnings were not only still true, but something told me that Drew Larson came with a whole other unique set of warning bells of his own. He was too good looking, for one thing, and I had a pretty good idea that the same thing that had allowed him to maneuver that storm meant that he was reckless in other parts of his life. These were all things I knew, all things I understood very well, and yet when I gave him my answer it went against all of these sound judgments.
“All right,” I said.
“All right? That’s a yes?”
“It’s a yes.”
“Don’t look so excited,” he said, grinning and squeezing the hand I was still half holding. “I promise I’ll try to keep it from being too miserable a time.”
A knock on the cabin door put a stop to any further flirtation that might have taken place between the two of us. Both Drew and I looked up at the video screen at the same time and saw the elusive pilot, Fred Stevens, standing there, one hand clamped firmly down on his forehead.
“What the fuck?” Drew muttered, his frown returning instantaneously. “What, he thought it might be time to rejoin us now that all the danger is over?”
"I'll let him in,” I said. “Hopefully, the second half of the flight isn't quite so eventful as the first half."
There was a pang of regret at having to leave the cabin and Drew, but I shook it off as best as I could. This was my job, after all, not a dating service, and it was probably a very good thing for me to get away from Drew and clear my head some. I pulled the cabin door open and then held both of my hands up, staving off the full weight of Stevens as he lurched forward and almost knocked me completely over.
"Woah there,” he said. “Sorry about that, honey. I had a little mishap, and I'm feeling a little woozy. Might have to let the boy here take over the rest of the flight, if he thinks he can handle it."
"He can handle it," I answered quickly, watching Fred Stevens with a wary eye. "Are you sure you're going to be all right? It looks like you took a nasty hit to the head."
“I did indeed, my girl. Fortunately, one of your lovely colleagues took it upon herself to repair me. Nothing that a little bit of time won’t fix, right? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to take my seat back.”
I hurried back to where my designated seat was. The storm appeared to be over, but that didn't necessarily mean it was. Being belted in seemed like the smartest move while it was still an option. That was part of it. The other part was that I was feeling sort of woozy myself, but for a reason unrelated to what I'd just experienced.
My head was spinning because of what I'd noticed as I'd passed by Fred Stevens. Or, to be more specific, what I had smelled. It was always possible that it was my imagination, but when the two of us had passed by each other, I was almost positive I had smelled liquor on his breath.
Chapter 6: Drew
“Thanks, kid,” Fred said, as we landed. “You did a good job with this one.”
“Don’t. I already told you, Fred. Don’t do that.”
“What, I can’t call you ‘kid’ now?”
“You know that’s what I’m talking about,” I said.
"All right, don't get your panties in a bunch, Larson. I just like nicknames, but if they really piss you off that much, I won't use them anymore. Or I'll try, okay? That's the best I can commit to. I'll try, but you should try to lighten up some. You take things so seriously. You gotta lighten up."
“Don’t you think you’re already doing that enough for the both of us?”
“Woah!” Stevens half-laughed, half-shouted. “What’s this shit? You mad at me about something else? Is that it? You mad that you had to handle the second half of this shit on your own?”
Stevens was right about one thing. I was mad. I was fucking livid, actually. Everything about the way Fred Stevens had behaved, from the moment I'd met him, right up until that exact moment, had been unprofessional as shit. It had been bad, even leading up to him taking his little bathroom break, but after that? The things he'd done were bad enough that he didn't deserve to be speaking to me at all, let alone be making jokes or trying to belittle me.
A man who couldn't even keep his shit together during a single flight didn't deserve to do anything but sit there in shame. The fact that Stevens was arrogant enough to talk to me like I was some whiney little boy took my level of anger from high to dangerous, and the amount of self-restraint it took for me to keep from strangling him was enormous.
If I didn’t love my job so much, there was a good chance that I would have hauled off and decked him anyway. There would have been consequences, but it would have felt fucking fantastic.
I didn't even want to look at him, I was so disgusted. I didn't want to be anywhere near him, and yet there I was, stuck in a tin box sitting right beside him. If he'd known what was good for him, he would have kept his mouth good and shut, but something told me that Fred Stevens wasn't the kind of man who did the things that were good for him. I didn't know him, but I had learned enough to know that much.
