I let her inside and told her to make herself comfortable. Secretly, I wished that she would decide to make herself comfortable by planting herself on my bed, but when she took one of the room's overstuffed arm chairs, I wasn't all that surprised. There were the women who told you they would come in for just a drink and tried to take your pants off the minute you got them into the room, but Jess had never struck me as one of those kinds of girls.
“What’s your poison?” I asked.
“That depends,” she said. “What are you having?”
“I’m deciding between a glass of wine or a whiskey neat. I’ll let you decide.”
“Yikes, not to the whiskey neat,” she said. “I can’t stand whiskey, especially when it’s by itself. Glass of wine it is.”
I poured us two healthy servings of red wine. My body felt like a live wire in the momentary silence. Sexual tension was something I was used to. It was even something I had learned to use to my extreme advantage. But this was something else. I couldn’t have even said what kind of tension this was. All I knew for sure was that it was making me fucking nervous.
“Here you go,” I said, handing her a cup. “Cheers.”
“What are we toasting to?” she asked.
“To an unexpected night off?”
“Sure, I could drink to that.”
She smiled at me as she took a sip, but there was something about the smile that struck me as being a little sad. It was something I could easily have blown off and ignored. Ignoring it was exactly the kind of thing I would usually have done. Instead, I found myself gearing up to ask her about it. Not that I should have been surprised. Nothing about the way I had played tonight had been like my usual pattern of behavior. So why should this be any different?
“Not your favorite toast?” I asked.
“Hm? What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just your expression when I said that. You looked a little bit sad, that’s all.”
“I’m not sad. Not really. It just gets hard sometimes, you know?”
“Which part?” I asked.
“The traveling,” Jess said. “So, I guess all of it, really. I love this job. Don’t get me wrong, but I won’t lie and tell you it isn’t a strain sometimes. Every night like this one is a night when I’m not at home with my daughter.”
“Who is she with?” I asked.
"My sister, Sophie. It's always Sophie, which is awesome. The two of them have a fantastic relationship, and I'm grateful for it, but I feel like I miss so much."
“I can only imagine how hard that must be,” I said.
"Honestly? It sucks. It sucks enough that I think about just throwing in the towel with the whole flying thing and getting a normal job. Except I know that if I did that, a huge part of me would regret it. There's no job like being in the air all of the time. I would miss it. I know I would."
“I would, too,” I agreed, sipping my wine and watching her face closely as she spoke. “Not a doubt in my mind.”
She laughed softly, blushing prettily as she did so. “God, I don’t know why I got so morose all of a sudden. You’re right, nothing wrong with a night off to do something adult, right? It’s just too bad Stevens had to get sick for us to get the forced night off.”
My face must have looked as hard as it felt when she made that comment, because her brow furrowed in concern. It wasn't like I was trying to make a big deal of it or anything, but even the mention of Fred’s name made me want to put my fist through a wall. Even if I'd wanted to, which I did, that was something I couldn't easily have hidden.
“What is it?” Jess asked. “Did I say something wrong? Is Fred sicker than they told me?”
“No, definitely not.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“He’s not sick at all, Jess,” I said. “At least, not the kind of sick you’re thinking about.”
“I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at,” she said, frowning.
So, I told her. Even talking about it made me sick to my stomach, but I told her about it anyway. Call me a vindictive son of a bitch, but I couldn’t let the lie of him just being under the weather stand. I told Jess about the drinking, which didn’t appear to surprise her much. I told her about him refusing to turn himself in after I confronted him, and that was when the surprise began to register.