Chapter 7: Jess

It was a nice room, as far as hotel rooms went. There had been a time when I had been in love with hotels, the same way that I was still in love with planes and flights themselves. I had loved the anonymity of hotels and the fact that they were only stopping off points between the many spots on a person's travels. I had loved the possibilities they had represented and what they might mean for me some day.

A lot of that allure had worn off after a couple of years of working as a flight attendant. The anonymity that I had once loved often frightened me when I woke up in the middle of the night. It always made me long for my own little home back in Seattle. Having a daughter made the hotels harder as well. Every night that I spent in some random hotel room was a night when I wasn't at home with Emma.

It was a necessary evil associated with a job I genuinely loved, but it was still painful. Children grew so quickly, and every time I was gone, I couldn't help but wonder what part of Emma's growing up I might be missing. One of the things I hated the most was having to call her and Sophie and tell them that I wouldn't be coming home when expected. The guilt that shot through me when that happened had made me feel sort of sick to my stomach every single time.

As I flopped down on the stiff bed to make my latest call, it was no different. The phone rang four or five times, and I started to think that maybe there would be no answer, and I would be allowed to leave a voice message instead of talking to a person. It was the easy way out, and I knew it, but I was tired and feeling entirely too jittery from the way this trip had gone.

“Hey, sister, what’s up?”

“What’s up with you?” I asked Sophie, closing my eyes and preparing for the fact that she might not be too pleased with my news. “You sound a little bit breathless.”

“I’m sure I do,” Sophie said. “I’m playing tag with Emma, and she takes it very, very seriously, to say the least. Not only that, but she’s super-fast, too! I like, legitimately have to haul ass to keep her from catching me.”

"Sophie!" I admonished.

“What? What’d I do?”

"Nothing, but did you ever think about just letting her catch you? Do you really have to win against a ten-year-old?"

“Hey, my house, my rules,” Sophie said. I could hear the smile in her voice. “Besides, she won’t get any faster if I let her win all of the time, will she?”

“No, I guess she won’t.”

“Now stop trying to distract me,” she said. “What’s up with you? I can tell there’s something, big sister. I can hear it in your voice.”

“No, it’s nothing, Sophie. Nothing’s really wrong. I just…”

“You aren’t coming home today, right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I sighed, feeling sort of sick to my stomach delivering the news. “Something like that. I’m really sorry, Sophie. I would be back tonight if I could. This one is just completely out of my hands.”

“Of course, it is.” Sophie laughed, making it clear that she didn’t mind watching over Emma for another night, at least. “It’s not like you make the flight schedules, right?”

“I guess that’s true.”

“So, what happened?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Why the delay? And where did they stick you, anyway?”

“Dallas. It’s not half bad, really. I kind of like Texas.”

“Ugh, too hot. So how come you got stuck there?”

It should have been an easy question with an easy answer. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it would have been. I always told Sophie the truth about my trips and Emma, too. The only times when I fibbed a little or chose to leave things out were when I thought something might upset them. I was pretty sure this was one of those times.

The fact that I couldn't be honest only made it more difficult for me to decide what to tell my sister. The story I had gotten, the part I definitely didn't feel the need to tell my family, was that our return flight had been delayed because of damage to the plane. It was routine for the mechanics to do a thorough looking over of a plane after it had been in the air, and I knew they paid even closer attention to the planes that had been through poor weather. Our plane had been one of those, and the storm Drew had steered us through had been even worse than either one of us had thought.

There was enough damage evident to the mechanics that our flight crew had been sent back to hotels where our rooms had been re-booked. We would be returning to Seattle the next day, and most likely on a different plane altogether. That was just a standard part of my job, and one I had long ago made peace with, but there was no need to worry Sophie over it. Not to mention the fact that she tended to have a big mouth and would almost certainly have told Emma everything I told her.

“Um, Jess? Did you like, go to sleep or something? Because I gotta say, that’s not something people generally enjoy on the phone. Like, it’s not going to help you in your dating life or anything like that.”

"No," I said with a laugh, feeling out of sorts and much too tired. "And thanks for that, by the way. It sounds like you and Emma are ganging up on me about the whole dating thing."

"We actually haven't talked about it, but I'm definitely going to bring it up now. I'd also love to tell her why you aren't coming home tonight, if you think you might be up to telling me."

“Oh, right! It’s one of the pilots.”

“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.