In Flight (Up In The Air #1)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mr. Spellcaster

Both officers were absent, but James, Stephan, and Melissa were still waiting when I reemerged from the jetway. James and Melissa were speaking, but James looked up when he saw me, giving me his full, intense regard.

Stephan was writing furiously. He was filling out an incident report, I was sure.

I handed James his jacket without a word.

“Do I need to fill out my own, or can I just add to yours and sign?” I asked Stephan, referring to his paperwork.

“We can share,” he told me without looking up. “I’m almost done. I got most of it down during the flight. I just left the end blank because I wasn’t sure those boneheads wouldn’t do something else that I’d need to add.”

“K,” I said, waiting in a sort of awkward silence. Even Melissa wasn’t chattering, and James just continued to stare at me without a word, as though he expected me to do something.

Finally, after watching me in silence for long, pregnant minutes, he spoke. “Can I talk to you for a minute? I need to go soon.”

I nodded, walking away from the others in silence. I half-expected Melissa to follow us, but she didn’t, just watching us with a strange look on her face.

“I have to work until this evening, but I want to see you. I’ll send a driver to pick you up at six. Give me your number and address.”

He had his phone out, waiting. I just looked at him for a moment. This wouldn’t do at all.

“I put my number in your suit pocket,” I began. “And I’ll drive to your place. What’s your address.”

He definitely looked like he wanted to argue, but I didn’t think he wanted to push his luck, so he gave me his address stiffly.

“I’ll try to get done with my work earlier, if you want,” he told me, as I GPS’d his address into my phone.

Not bad, I thought. Only twenty minutes from my house. That was downright convenient.

“Don’t do so on my account. I’m going home to take a two hour nap, and then I have some errands to run.” I ran a hand over my watch absently. “I need to replace this old thing before I get written up for wearing an eyesore. I just realized how bad it’s looking.”

I had forgotten who I was talking to, and flushed. I felt shabby enough in his presence. I certainly didn’t need to go broadcasting how poor I was to him.

His hand snaked out, grabbing my wrist to look at my watch. His fingers circled my wrist as he studied it. “You’re so delicate,” he murmured.

I barely heard him. My eyes were on his tan collarbone, still peaking out from his crisp shirt.

“I don’t know why it is, but the sight of even the smallest amount of your skin doesn’t seem appropriate to me in public. Your throat looks so naked.” I hadn’t meant to speak the thought out loud, and immediately blushed.

He looked up at me with just his eyes, not lifting his head, a wicked grin on his face. “You only think that because the things you want me to do to you aren’t appropriate in public.”

“I want to see your body,” I told him. I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I had been thinking about it almost constantly since I’d met him.

His smile dropped, and he straightened, taking a step closer to me. “You’re going to. Tonight. And I’m going to see and touch every inch of you.”

I took a step back, trying to shake away the strange spell he seemed to cast on me. Not here. Not now.

“I’ll see you tonight,” I told him, walking back to Stephan. Anything else we needed to say, we could discuss later, when we weren’t in public and I wasn’t still in uniform.

James took my dismissal in stride, nodding at the other flight attendants and then striding away toward the terminal.

I added a small paragraph of what I’d heard to Stephan’s report and signed. We headed to the bus stop.

Melissa was still trailing us, I noticed, but none of us spoke. She seemed sullen and strange, but I frankly didn’t want to know why and didn’t care.

We dropped our paperwork off at headquarters and Stephan drove us home.

We took turns driving to work. We were almost always able to carpool, and it saved us both money we could use for other things. Like watches, I thought, sighing. I really wasn’t in the mood for a trip to the mall.

“I need to run some errands after I take a nap,” I told Stephan as he backed out.

“K. I’ll come with. I could use a few things. Where are we going?”

“I need a watch.” I held my old watch out. The face was even cracked. How had I not noticed that sooner? Had it just happened? “And some groceries. And some paint, paper, and canvas.”

Painting was my favorite hobby, and I had a room full of paintings to prove it. I was dabbling with oils lately, but watercolors and acrylics had always been my strength, and were more affordable in general. I needed to stock up on almost all of my supplies.

“Perfect. I’ve been needing a frame for that mountain landscape you made me. It’s going in my living room. It’s my all time favorite.”

I smiled at him fondly. “You don’t have to do that. I won’t feel bad if you don’t hang it up. I paint things for you because I like to. You don’t have to decorate your entire house with my junk just to humor me.”

He sent me a bewildered look. “You think that’s why I’ve covered my entire home with your paintings? To humor you?”

I shrugged, feeling self-conscious. I hadn’t gone to art school, had no training whatsoever, so I always questioned if people were sincere when they complimented my work. Stephan deserved better than my doubting him, though.

“I love your paintings, Bianca. Every time I look at any of the ones I have displayed, I feel joy. They help make my house a happy, healthy place for me. I think of where we’ve come from, all that we’ve been through, and the astoundingly beautiful things you can create, and it never fails to amaze me. It makes me hopeful about the future.”

I flushed a bit, but smiled. “I painted that mountain landscape because it made me think of you. It was so strong, and stark, and beautiful. And every color I used in that painting, I got from studying you. I used the color of your hair and skin for the desert mountains, and your eyes were the sky. It’s very nearly an abstract portrait of you.”

He laughed, a carefree, joyous sound.

We’re in a good place, I thought. We’d overcome so much, and left so much of the bad stuff behind. Over the years, the lingering dark shadows of our pasts seemed to be fading from us, more and more.

“Well, now I love it even more,” he said. “You know how much I love pictures of myself.”

I laughed, because it was pretty much true. Both of our houses sported portraits of Stephan, some his idea. He liked to pose for me, and he was a great subject, waiting patiently for hours if I needed him to.

Our houses were only fifteen minutes from the airport, just off of the 215 west. It was an ideal airport location, with a new track of houses and a short commute.

Seeing my small house still made me smile. I’d opted to keep the all-desert landscape that my yard had sported when I purchased the house, figuring it was for the best to forgo the grass, since we lived in the desert and we were often out of town.

Stephan had stubbornly refused to stay content with rocks and cacti, planting a small row of flowers along his front steps and a compact square of grass in the front yard. So far he was winning the battle against the desert, his grass still green and his flowers blooming as we pulled up.


“I’ll text you when I wake up,” I told him, walking the scant distance to my house.

I punched in my alarm code. I had splurged and purchased the best security system I could afford. It was important that my house feel like a safe place for me, so the peace of mind the system brought me was well worth the cost of it.

I unlocked the gated door, and the two locks on the actual door. I did the same routine on the other side, padding to the inside security panel and punching in my code.

I had thirty seconds to get the code in before an automatic alarm went off and the security dispatch station would give me a call, and put out a call to law enforcement. I had made the timer particularly short because it made me feel more secure.

I headed back into my bedroom, satisfied that the house was secure for my nap.

The last few days had been overwhelming. I barely got undressed before I was laying on my bed, and asleep in an instant.

I awoke in a near stupor, bleary eyes taking long moments to read my bedside clock. That couldn’t be right, I thought. It was showing 3:44 p.m. I had crashed just before 10 a.m, with the intention to sleep for two hours. Dammit. I’d forgotten to set an alarm.

I was digging my phone out almost immediately, texting Stephan.

Bianca: I’m so sorry. I overslept. Errands on monday?

He had responded by the time I was done in the bathroom.

Stephan: No worries. Monday sounds great. Got a hot date tonight?

Bianca: Seeing James. Not a date.

Stephan: Well, good luck, B. Let me know if you need anything. I’ll see you in the morning.

Bianca: Kk. We r leaving at 5:45am in my car, right?

Stephan: Yep

I set to work packing, and then re-packing my small flight bag for the DC turn in the morning.

A turn was when we flew somewhere, usually on the east coast for us, then turned around and came immediately back. It was the best way to work a lot of hours on our job, but it could easily be a fourteen hour or longer day if we had even a slight delay. This turn was a part of our set weekly schedule, but we often picked up extra turns on our days off to get overtime.

My mortgage was reasonable, and fit into my budget, but I was trying to replenish the savings I had depleted almost completely in order to put a down payment on my house, and then the extra costs of a few upgrades and repairs to the house.

It made me very nervous to live paycheck to paycheck, so I was quickly trying to rectify the situation. I would have three days total off for the week, and planned to pick up extra hours on at least one of them.

I hung the work clothes that I had uncharacteristically strewn all over the floor into a dry cleaning bag. I had many uniforms, but at least half of them needed a trip to the dry cleaner.

I gathered them up and put them in my car, planning to stop by on the way to James’s house. We got a small dry cleaning allowance from the company. They wanted us to look polished on the job, but it didn’t cover even half of the cost that I spent at the cleaners. Perhaps it was all of those extra hours I worked that wracked my dry cleaning bill up so high…

I showered and washed my hair. I shaved just about every part of my body, the actions giving me a feeling of anticipation that they never had before. I always shaved my legs. But I’d never done it for a man before. I felt odd, so unlike myself.

I rubbed oil and then lotion into my skin, and left my hair to air dry. I could do some painting outside while it was wet. Las Vegas in the late spring was like nature’s hair dryer.

I wore a baggy old teal-colored cotton sundress outside to paint. It was comfortable and I didn’t really care if it got some paint on it, so I often wore it and several other threadbare dresses when I painted.

My backyard was small, but it had high walls. This made it fairly private, so I could wear what I wanted. I hadn’t worn underwear. I often didn’t if I was just puttering around the house by myself, but today it felt different.

I moved my easel around, and felt the brush of my breasts against my threadbare dress in a completely new way. It was like James could do foreplay without even being present. I was priming myself for him with no effort on his part. It wasn’t fair for anyone to be that wickedly attractive. I kept picturing the way he had looked at me while he put that handkerchief to his face, brazenly inhaling it. I shivered at just the thought. I kept thinking about his spanking threats, as well. In fact, I thought of that the most.

Would he do that tonight? Would he spank me and then take my virginity? And tie me up? In what order? I squeezed my legs together just at the thought. The not knowing was a pull to me, even if it did frighten me.

If I was honest with myself, being frightened was a pull for me as well. I knew James could take me to some dark places, but I would find pleasure there, and I wanted that.

I had a board mounted with some watercolor paper that I had prepped before I left. I began to paint with an uncharacteristically short amount of prep. Usually I did a lot of sketching and planning, taking pictures and pinning them up. But today, I just painted. I knew exactly where to start.

I mixed some blue, a bright azure with a watery aquamarine and then added a touch of green. It didn’t take long to mix exactly what I wanted, a vivid turquoise blue that I shaped into a pair of eyes that I couldn’t get out of my head.