“Wait, you’re married?” The stewardess asked, clearly baffled.
“Do you want a signed autobiography, or can we go?”
Belle leaned on my arm. She put the back of her hand to her forehead. “Should I throw up on her shirt or her shoes, honey?”
The stewardess was still stammering to come up with a response when we moved past her for the bathrooms.
I shoved Belle inside the small room. She giggled, and I yanked the door shut behind us.
Belle put her palms on the wall behind her, looking up at me until I could see the whites below her eyes. I was reminded that she was running from something, which gave me a slight pang of guilt for doing this with her. She was doing this because she needed an escape, and I wasn’t sure if that made me the bad guy, or if it meant I should thank my luck and enjoy the fuck, as they say. Actually, I wasn’t sure anyone said that.
“Do you do this often?” she asked.
“Take off your dress… with the pockets.”
She looked like she wanted to press me for an answer, but she lowered her eyes and slid one shoulder free from the beige dress she wore, revealing a white bra strap.
I enjoyed watching her shimmy out of her clothes until she was standing a few inches from me in a white bra and panties. She wasn’t the kind of woman to spend her life in the gym or making sure she didn’t put too much dressing on her salad, and I found that only made me like her more. I liked that she was normal. Normal. It felt like coming up from the water to catch a quick breath, except I knew once this was over, I’d be plunged back into that world whether I liked it or not.
She crossed an arm over her stomach, but I took her by the elbow and pushed it away, looking down at her. “I’m going to enjoy this.”
“Just to clarify,” she said. “We’re going to… I mean, do you have a condom?”
I had one tucked in the back of my phone case. I pulled it out and showed it to her. “To clarify?” I asked, idly running my hand across the smooth skin of her shoulder and sliding it toward the softness of her cleavage. “What else would I bring you in here for?”
“Some guys have weird fetishes. What if you wanted to watch me pee?”
I laughed. “Yeah. that’s not my thing. I brought you in here to fuck your brains out before I’m off the market.”
She hesitated. “Wait. Are you with someone?”
“No. I’m about to be. But until tonight, I’m a free man.”
Belle shook her head, frowning. “No, I mean you’re getting married? So you’re engaged?”
I sighed. “No. I can’t go into all the details. But just trust me. I’m not in a relationship right now. I’m all yours. For now.”
We both were quiet for a few moments, and my words seemed to take on more meaning than I’d intended.
Finally, she reached behind her back and undid her bra.3BelleI lost my mind. I’d left it in my seat back in first class by the window. Whatever I was doing now, whoever was doing it—that wasn’t me. I wasn’t the girl who hooked up with guys I just met. I wasn’t the girl guys wanted to hook up with on sight. I especially wasn’t the girl who brushed aside a very real concern that I was helping someone cheat on their significant other. But for some reason, I believed Chris when he said it wasn’t what I thought, even if that made me a gullible idiot.
None of the above was me. I was the one guys saw platonically. That’s why I got into the whole Lance mess in the first place. So what the hell was going on? Was there some mysterious glitch in the matrix that was making Chris Rose—Chris freaking Rose—mistakenly see me different?
He towered over me in the small bathroom, but the way he was looking at me was doing wonders for my self-confidence. I was standing in an airplane bathroom covered in God only knew what kind of nastiness in nothing but my panties. A mega-famous NFL quarterback was a few inches from me, and now he was stripping his shirt off.
Maybe the plane crashed on takeoff, and this was heaven.
Yeah. I decided to go with that. It wouldn’t be very Christian of me to not enjoy myself in heaven, right?
In the distance, I could’ve sworn I heard the sound of a higher being threatening to smite me for involving religion in my mental gymnastics.
Chris’ body was covered in tattoos, and the combination of endless muscles, dark black ink, and the shine of the overhead lights bouncing off the ridges of his abs made me feel like I was going to pass out. If this really was heaven, why hadn’t anyone thought to lead with this part in the Bible? Sure, trumpets and singing were great, but… Okay, yeah. I was definitely going to be smote any minute now, and not just by the towering hunk of muscle undressing in front of me.