I could’ve punched him for saying that, for souring the bright expression on Bonnie’s face. But I understand. He’s right. We have to cherish the time we have left.
Which is why, against the advice of that same doctor, I spoke to Henry and arranged this flight. It was Sue-Ann’s greatest wish—to pilot one last flight before she really and truly gives up the ghost of her old life, and admits she’s too old to fly anymore.
Henry made me install all kinds of failsafes in the chopper, controls that allow him to take over at a moment’s notice if anything goes wrong in midair, or if Sue-Ann messes anything up. But it was worth the price of renovations to see the look on the old woman’s face now, as we lift off the ground of northern California and into the sky.
Sue-Ann whoops at the top of her lungs, beaming, and for a second, I glimpse the way she must have looked decades ago, helming airplanes and helicopters alike, young and beautiful and full of life. No wonder Bonnie’s grandfather fell so hard for her. No wonder he loved her passion for flight, and worked alongside her to make her dreams happen.
I wrap my arm around Bonnie and pull her close to me, squeezing her shoulders. Bonnie gets that same light in her eye when she’s working at the hospital. She’s just starting out volunteering now, bolstering her hours as she continues to finish her classes. I finally convinced her, only a couple of months ago, to quit her terrible diner job and focus on school full-time. She was stubbornly set on supporting herself entirely through school, so it took some convincing on my part to make her see sense. She has a goal in mind: nursing. Any time she spends at the diner or working some crappy part-time job to reach that goal is less time she’s spending actually working in what she loves. If she trusts me and lets me help her out, pay for some of her tuition (“it’s just a loan,” she tells me forcibly every time. “I’m paying you back every cent later”), then she can reach her goal that much faster.
What I don’t know how to explain to her, what I always fail to find the words to express, is that she has already paid me back those loans a thousand times over. I don’t need money. I have plenty. What I never had before was a home to come back to. A reason to stop making more money, and start spending it. Start enjoying myself.
You can’t take it with you, after all. That’s what Bonnie and her grandmother are both so fond of reminding me, when they chide me into taking a vacation.
Hell, last month, Bonnie even managed to talk me into a weeklong vacation in the Bahamas. I have never taken a full consecutive week off in my entire life. I probably still wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t, unbeknownst to me, pulled my computer and cell phone out of my suitcase at the last second and then rushed us to the airport before I noticed.
I grin at the memory, and Bonnie finally notices I’m staring at her. She leans in to nudge her head against mine.
“What?” she asks over the headset.
“Nothing.” I lean down to kiss her softly. “Just enjoying the view.”
She snorts. “Liar.” She prods my chest, but then settles against my side with a happy sigh. I enjoy the angle, not least because of the view it provides me straight down her shirt, to the lacy red bra she’s wearing, part of a new set I picked out for her last week. Oh, I’m going to do terrible things to that bra later . . .
But for now, I just hold her tight to my side and watch the late-summer landscape of NoCal drift past beneath us. I never knew I could feel like this. I never knew life could be this easy, or a relationship this simple. Being with Bonnie feels like finally learning how to breathe, after years spent struggling to catch my breath.
It’s crazy to think back from where we are now to how this all started. To me and her on that crazy website, just clicking one another’s names by happenstance. I saved the photo of her ad on my desktop—I never told her that, but if she ever checks my computer, she’s probably seen it floating past on the screensaver at some point. It was a picture of her smiling, those bright green eyes like emeralds, those blonde curls cascading around her face. It was her eyes that pulled me in, made me click. Made me start to fantasize about being her first.
I’d never been one for the corruption fantasy, but something about her innocent smile made me recognize that there was a tiger hiding beneath. I got so crazy turned-on by the idea of buying her virginity, being the first man to take her, make her mine.