I handed her my ticket, and she pursed her lips while reading it over. “Mr. Foray, your seat is the aisle seat not the middle. Now if you don’t get off this man’s lap, I’m going to have you removed from the plane.”
“Dex, just sit in your seat,” Perry said beside me. I glanced at her. She was pressed up against the window and looking at us with a mix of revulsion and embarrassment.
“Fine,” I said, and quickly climbed off of him, settling down in my seat and fastening the belt. “Just trying to take one for the team.”
The stewardess watched me for a few beats, giving me one last evil eye, before she moved down the aisle.
“Dex, you are something else,” Maximus said to me, looking a bit shaken. Perfect.
“Once you have a Dex in your lap, you can’t go back,” I said. I looked over at Perry. “Ain’t that right, kiddo?”
“No comment,” she said, and pulled out the in-flight magazine. Yup. Fun trip ahead of us.
After that risqué start, the rest of the flight was fairly uneventful. I started calling Maximus “Vegetable Lasagna”, a Seinfeld reference that was obviously over his head, and did my best to talk to Perry when I could. Too bad the oaf didn’t leave his seat once, not even to go to the bathroom. The rest of the time I just sat back and listened to the new Slayer album, feeling more connected to Perry by listening to her favorite music.
My luck changed once we switched planes in Houston. Maximus was sitting further up on that plane, while Perry and I got two seats together at the back. The flight was quick, too quick to convince Perry to join the mile-high club with me in the bathroom, but long enough to drink a few Bloody Marys in preparation for the Big Easy. Again, I was getting a bit excited at the idea of going to New Orleans and started wishing that it was just Perry and I there, taking the sights in as tourists. Man, what I’d give to go on an actual vacation with the woman. No ghosts, no work—just us, booze, and sex.
“How you doing?” I asked her as the plane began its descent. It was already dark outside, the city a mystery beneath us. I wasn’t a nervous flier but I guess she was because she grabbed on to my hand and squeezed it hard. I squeezed it right back.
“I’m okay,” she said. “Kind of excited.”
“Me too.”
“Nervous.”
“Fear of flying?”
“Yeah, I mean I’m okay, it’s just not my favorite thing in the world. But I’m also nervous about the next few days…or week…or however long we’ll be here.”
I peered at her closely. “Bad feeling?”
She managed a smile. “Well, I never have good feelings before we do a show. I don’t know, I guess I just don’t like how Maximus is involved. I don’t trust him.”
“That makes me ridiculously happy to hear you say that.”
“You don’t trust him either, I know that much.”
I laughed dryly. “I’ve never trusted him. But I gotta tell ya, I was worried about you.”
She gave me an odd look as the plane rumbled, landing gear coming down. “Worried how?”
I chewed on my lip, knowing I’d gone too far to hold anything back but the truth. I turned my attention to the runway lights outside the window.
“I know what’s done is done but the fact that you and Maximus…that he…”
“You know I wasn’t even myself when that happened.”
Right. She’d said that several times, but that didn’t stop it from hurting; it didn’t erase that it happened.
“Anyway, I guess I worry that you might still have feelings for him.” There. I said it.
She squeezed my hand again, and this time I couldn’t tell if she was trying to assure me or herself as the plane made contact with the ground, bouncing us along before the brakes were applied with urgency.
“Dex, I don’t have feelings for the man. Especially not after what he did to me. He turned on me when I needed him the most and I’m not going to forget that.”
“He has his excuses though, about why he did what he did,” I pointed out, playing devil’s advocate for some reason.
“I still don’t know what they are. He said he was trying to help me in the end, but he nearly got me carted off to the hospital. It was because of him that the whole mental thing started with my parents, that was what put the idea in their heads.”
I wasn’t too sure about that part. As much as I hated Maximus and loved to blame him for everything, I knew Perry’s parents were against her from the moment I first met them. I didn’t mean that they wished her harm, that they didn’t love her. But they didn’t understand her and they were afraid of her and that made them dangerous.
“So you think he’s going to do something like that again? Because baby, you know I am not going to let a single thing happen to you. I’m going to be with you, be in you, as much as I can.”
We deplaned fairly quickly and met Maximus out at the gate. I looked around the airport, a lot smaller than I thought it would be, with all of the stores closed. When we stepped outside to line up for a cab, I was met with the unmistakable smell of swamp—musty, damp, and earthy.
Maximus smiled to himself. “My Lord, is it good to be back home.” He breathed in deeply and for a moment I was almost happy for him. Almost. I wasn’t. It just reminded me again that we were on his home turf and he was the one calling the shots. But I refused to let his love for his state cloud my own opinion of it.
We got in the cab and had one hell of a chatty driver who talked to Maximus like they were old buddies. The Senegalese cabbie moved to the city just after Katrina blew through, attracted by the cheap housing and the underdog spirit of the rebuilt city. Maximus hadn’t been back in the city since right before Katrina hit. Apparently after we cut ties in college, he had come to NOLA and lived there for three years, just working at a bar. That’s what he’d told the cabbie, anyway.
The cabbie dropped us off on a narrow, bumpy street in the French Quarter, telling Maximus that some districts had gotten worse post-Katrina and warned us to stay out of them like our lives depended on it. He said he wouldn’t even drive through certain areas, no matter how much the fare was.
We thanked him for his warning, pulled our bags out of the cab, and looked up at our accommodations. Perry and I had been flying blind so far but Maximus did alright in this department. We were staying in an old three-story house with a wide front porch, gas lamps and wrought iron balconies. It looked straight out of a plantation or perhaps just straight out of the French Quarter itself. That was the thing I’d instantly discovered about the city—it looked exactly as you’d imagined it. I looked behind me at the flickering lanterns that lined the street, the brightly painted houses beside quaint bars where I was immediately tempted to drink my face off, the hidden courtyards; it was like stepping into a movie.
“I feel like I’m in Disneyland,” Perry said, looking up at the house with a big kid smile on her face.
“You, missy, have to stop being so damn cute,” I told her, bringing her to me and kissing her on the lips.
Maximus cleared his throat. “Glad you guys like it, it’s a bed and breakfast with the tastiest beignets you’ll find in the city. Well, aside from Café Du Monde, if it’s still there.”
I pulled away from Perry and eyed him. He didn’t look too pleased at our PDA, and I was wondering when he’d start questioning what was happening in our relationship. Obviously he knew that we were together now, and judging from the beady look in his eyes, he obviously didn’t like it. Tough tits, ginger.
The look got even worse when we went to check in and I told the pucker-faced, extremely spritely receptionist that we would only need two rooms, not three.
“I see,” she said, studying Perry and I. “I wasn’t aware that there was a couple staying here.”
“Neither was I,” Maximus said under his breath.
“Sorry,” I told her, jerking my head in his direction, “this one here made the booking without consulting us first.”
She adjusted her glasses. “Yes, well, since it was such a last minute reservation, I’ll just cancel the room without penalty. Probably better that way anyway—it is the haunted room.”
“Haunted room?” Perry spoke up, looking frazzled.