She checked her phone. “Your father’s flight should be landing soon,” she said. “And we are due for a nice family dinner.”
I checked my phone because I’d promised Mackenna I’d meet him by the docks.
My mother was pacing. She’d never paced before. A feeling of dread settled on me. Like when you see those dark clouds hover across the sun, blocking it from your view. When the phone rang, and my mother answered, I knew.
She started crying. I started crying too.
“He was on board. He was on board with his assistant. He wasn’t flying from Chicago, he was coming back from Hawaii.”
“What? Why?”
“Because . . .” My mother wiped her tears, and all the emotion fled from her face. “Because he’s been lying to us.”
The phone began ringing nonstop when people started to find out that my father had died. I knew that wasn’t the only thing they must’ve been talking about—they were talking about the fact that he was with his assistant too.
I stole out of the house, an hour late, and I ran into the darkness, and then I saw the figure out in the street, watching my house as though making sure I was all right, knowing he couldn’t go in there.
“Kenna!” I flung myself at him, trying to hold back my tears. “That flight. He was on it. He was on that flight.”
“Shh.” He rocked me. My safe haven. I closed my eyes and held on to him. “He lied to us. He’s been lying to us all along.”
“I’m sorry,” he rasped, kissing my eyelids. “I’ll always be here for you. I will never lie to you. . . .”
I jerk upright when the flight attendant announces she’s going to shut the plane door. The orchestra flies in the back, the singers up front. There are plenty of seats available—hell, they chartered the whole plane. Jax takes one seat and sets his stuff on the empty one beside him, and Lex takes another. And Mackenna is talking with the two flight attendants now. He’s twisted his cap around and looks young and delicious while wearing it backward. He looks like he used to look . . . when he was seventeen.
I’m trying to steady my nerves when he startles me by dropping down on the seat beside me, prying off his cap, and jamming it into the seat pocket in front of him, as if there weren’t a thousand and one bacteria in there. He leans on the armrest, his weight turned toward me. Is it his inborn fate to torture me?
“You lost? There are a dozen empty seats here,” I say.
He looks at me intently. “I want this one.”
Shaking my head, I grab a little manual from the seat pocket in front of me and start flipping through it. I will not lose my senses in front of him. No. Way. And yet I’m acutely aware of the alien noises surrounding me. Shuffle of feet. The engines. The shut of the plane door, his breathing.
His breathing.
I focus on that and try to match my breaths to his, all the while hoping he won’t notice. I could use him to relax. Or distract myself.
Soon we’re being offered drinks. I pull out my pillbox and keep it discreetly tucked into my palm as he stretches his long legs.
“Whiskey, sugar. And bring her the same,” he says, gesturing at me as he pushes his seat back. The manual says that during takeoff, the seat must be in an upright position, but he clearly doesn’t give a shit.
He never coddled me. Even when we were kids. He treated me as an equal. I rarely cried, but when I did, he just waited for me to stop. If I fell, he just pulled me up and acted like I wasn’t supposed to cry, so I didn’t. He knew I had trouble expressing emotions, and when my father died, I bottled them up completely. I stopped crying at all, and Mackenna was all right with it.
I think.
He never pressed me to talk about it. He’s staring at me now, and I can see him trying to assess the situation, without pity and clearly without any intention of coddling me, so I blurt out, “I still hate airplanes.”
His eyes gain a concerned glimmer. “I have an idea for you. Tell Lionel to fuck off and get off the plane then. We can both forget about this.”
He’s wearing probably the most serious expression he has, and for a moment I consider it. We kissed in the closet—then I pretended to be asleep so he could spoon me last night. Things are awkward today. I really don’t want to have the temptation of him all day, every day, for over three weeks. But the money could get me independence and Magnolia a secure future.
“I won’t back out. I signed a paper. Like I told you, I’m poor and purchasable,” I grumble.
“Then I’m disappointed. If anyone seems unconcerned with worldly goods and the mundane, it’s you.”
“Spoken like a douche bag who swims in dollars.”
He lifts his whiskey to his lips, and I realize he’s holding out another glass for me. I take it from his grip, making sure our fingers don’t touch. He lifts one finger, though, as if to purposely make sure we do.
I scowl. He smiles. As if he knows that little touch sent a current racing through my bloodstream, vein to capillary.
On the other side of the plane, Lionel stares at me like he’s seriously in love with me, and then, unfortunately, the plane starts moving. I have no idea how long it takes the pill to kick in, but I better down it. I’m so nervous, my body feels charged and buzzy.
My dad. I imagine him in a seat like this one. He was flying back home under perfect conditions, and he never arrived. I was staring at my homework when we got the call.
“Want to talk about it?” Mackenna asks.
“Not with you,” I mumble, grabbing and skimming through a catalogue before jamming it back into the pocket of the seat in front of me. I wish Mackenna would go away right now, when I’m not at my best. “Please go away,” I breathe.
“Please just let me be here for you,” he says. There’s no mockery in his voice. Nothing but sincerity in his eyes.
The fortress guarding my emotions goes rubbery, and this frightens me so much, I nearly beg, “No, you. Please. Go away.”
We engage in a staring contest.
For a moment I think I’m going to lose.
Then he murmurs, “You can count on me, Pandora.”
Before I can remind him why I don’t anymore, he unlatches his seat belt, and I want to take it back when he stands up and crosses the aisle to another seat.
This is why they say you have to be careful what you wish for.
I mourn the loss of human life next to me the instant he’s gone. Not human life—him. The loss of his challenging, exciting, and infuriating presence.
He knows how my father died. How he was on business and the plane just crashed. Like in a movie, and in your worst nightmare. He’d been with his assistant. Not on business. I lost my father the same day my mother realized he’d betrayed her. Betrayed us.
With another woman.
I couldn’t mourn, because my mother felt I was betraying her. Because he’d betrayed her. The only emotion she was okay with me feeling was anger. If I started to get a trembly chin, my mother would snap, “Don’t you dare cry over him! Look at how he left me! Look how he abandoned us!” And so I always made sure I snapped my mouth shut and never did cry. Anger was safe. I was allowed anger. Lots of it. And when Mackenna left me too, it became all I knew.
The nerves have my senses hyperaware as the plane turns to takeoff position. I hear every sound of the engines roaring, the clink of ice in Mackenna’s glass several seats away. His smell lingers in the empty seat, strangely comforting me.
I pop the pill into my mouth, grab the whiskey glass, and down it.
One cameraman is up in front, watching me, moving his camera. I swallow and stare out the window, my nails digging into my seat as the plane positions itself on the edge of the runway. I feel the camera on me when I hear a voice murmur, “Give her a fucking break and aim that somewhere else,” and then I feel the lean, hard body of Mackenna plopping down next to me.
“Suppose it does fall,” he says.
“Excuse me?” I sputter.
“Suppose the plane can’t lift and falls.” He cocks an eyebrow at me.
I glare at him, and he remains sober, his eyes roaming my face. “I wouldn’t mind dying today.”
“I would. My father died this way. It’s my worst death imaginable.”
“Worst death would be alone, with no one to even listen to your last words. Or drowning, that could—”
“SHUT UP!”
He stretches out his hand. “Take my hand, Pink.”
“Thanks, but no.”
“Fine. Thumb wars?”
“God, you’re such a baby.”
“You’re a coward. Come on, fucking use me for something. Want to fight? Fine. Want to hold my hand? Even better. Not sure? I bet you can’t pin my thumb under yours no matter what you do.”
Gritting my teeth, I clutch his hand, because I know—and he knows—I desperately need the contact. A frisson runs through my body, and I wish I had the strength to deny him, but I’m shaking. And he looks strong. Like nothing can touch him.
My boyfriend.
My ex.
The only guy I’ve ever had sex with. Ever wanted. Ever loved.
He holds my wrist and tugs. “Come closer,” he urges. The tenderness in his eyes makes the walls around my heart wobble.
“What? We’re playing with our thumbs, not our tongues,” I say defensively.