Inseparable

“What about him?”

“He got sick.”

"Yikes. That's a bummer. You never really think about pilots getting sick, do you? I mean, obviously they do, but you don't really think about it. Kind of like rock stars, I guess."

“Rock stars of the sky?”

“Ugh, so corny!” Sophie groaned.

“Hey, I do my best. Do you think you could tell Emma for me? I don’t want to interrupt her fun.”

“Sure, no problem. And hey, whatever bug the pilot’s got, try not to catch it, okay? The last thing we need is for you to come home and get us all sick.”

I agreed and hung up the phone, uncharacteristically glad to be done with the conversation. What I had told Sophie, minus the part I'd left out about the damage to the plane, hadn't been a lie. The funny thing was, it sort of felt like one. I couldn't stop thinking about the way Fred Stevens had gone to the bathroom on our flight and just disappeared.

He had been gone for such a long time, and the fact that he had managed to hit his head badly enough to have to be bandaged up struck me as seriously odd. Then there was the matter of what I had smelled, of course. There was no way I could forget about a thing like that.

He had smelled of alcohol. Whiskey to be exact. No matter how many times I replayed things in my mind, I couldn't make that fact any different. I was accustomed to paying attention to things like a person's smell. I was of the opinion that it helped me to do my job better, and I had found it to be true on more than one occasion. I knew how to spot a person who had been drinking, and Fred Stevens was definitely one of them. What I wasn't sure about was how, if at all, his drinking played into our flight not being able to take off that day.

Stop it, Jess. You’re only giving yourself a case of the willies. And you don’t need any more of those, now do you?

No, I was right about that. I was already just about as nervous as a woman could be without having a total mental break down. I stood in front of the hotel's mirror, wishing it was full length. The dress I had on was nice enough, but definitely nothing sexy. I wanted to beat myself up for that fact, but at the same time, it wasn't exactly like I had been expecting to go on a date. Hell, I still wasn't even sure that I should go at all.

One second, I would feel okay about it, and the next, I would be positive that it was the worst idea in all of the world. What I should have done was blow off the date and gone and found a museum or something. It would have been the smart thing to do, and I knew it, the same way that I knew it wasn't the way the evening was going to play out.

I didn't date pilots, and yet on this night, that was exactly what I was going to do. There was something about Drew Larson that I couldn't shake off, and it wasn't just his looks. There was something solid and at the same time mysterious. although there may have been women out there that could resist the lethal combination, I just wasn't one of them. I may have been playing with fire, and I knew it, but I had no intention of pulling back.

Chapter 8: Drew

As dinner dates went, this one had to be high up on the list of successful ones. It had been a long time since I had gone on anything a normal person might consider a real date. I made a point of not dating. I made it my second job to avoid getting roped into actual dates.

Something had gotten into me on that plane, though, and I had broken that rule. Maybe it had been the adrenaline from successfully maneuvering the plane through that fucked up storm. Maybe it had been something else. I didn't know, and at the moment in the cockpit, I didn't care.

I had asked Jess to have dinner with me, and when our flight had been delayed, we'd gotten the perfect opportunity to do just that. A quick Google search had helped me figure out where to take Jess, and for three hours, the two of us had sat in a restaurant, eating, drinking, and getting to know each other better. I had fully expected to come out of the date disenchanted with her, no longer interested in her in any way. I had been dead wrong.

I had been physically attracted to her from the moment I laid eyes on her, but now, I felt a more cerebral attraction as well. To put it plainly, I liked her. I liked her for more than just her tits and ass. There was something different about her, and it was something I wanted to delve a little deeper into.

If I had stopped to think about it for very long, I probably would have hauled ass in the opposite direction of her once I noticed my added level of interest. Instead, I did the exact opposite of that. As I escorted her into the elevator of our hotel, I slipped my hand around her waist, placing it on the small of her back. She flinched but didn't pull away.

“So, any chance you’re not completely tired yet?” I asked her.

“That depends,” she answered, somewhat cautiously. Her voice contradicted the way she swayed back slightly into the palm of my hand. “Why do you ask?”

“Because it turns out I’m not tired. I was earlier. I was fucking exhausted earlier. I’m pretty sure I could have slept for two days straight. Stressful flights do that to me.”

“But not now?” she asked. “You just stopped being tired?”

"It would appear so. I was wondering, if you aren't currently wishing you could sleep for a thousand years, if you might want to continue our evening for

a bit? No hanky panky. I'm not trying to suggest anything like that, but maybe a drink? There's a fantastic mini-bar in my room. We could have another drink together if that sounds like something you might like."

What the hell was wrong with me? I had asked plenty of women to come into plenty of rooms with me. Every single time, I had asked with no good intentions. I had asked them into my room with the express intention of fucking their brains out, and I'd never been nervous during the asking. But now? For some reason, I could hardly get the words out, and once I did, I couldn't keep myself from rambling. The only reason I could come up with for the nerves was that I thought she would say no, but even that didn't explain it completely. Usually, I didn't care about a woman's response enough to be nervous, which in my experience had always helped me to get a yes.

“No hanky panky, huh? You sure about that?”

“I’m not sure why I used that term, I can tell you that much, but I am sure that I’ll respect your boundaries. I’m actually asking you if you’d like to have a drink. I’m not using the idea of a drink as a euphemism for anything. Nothing like that.”

“All right, a drink then,” she said. “I’ll have to go to bed eventually, seeing as we’re hopefully going to be flying tomorrow, but I don’t think a drink will hurt any.”