Page 75 of Come Fly with Me

“Oh please. Like you weren’t in it for the ladies,” I tease, and Jake leans down, his lips practically touching mine. He smells of bourbon and my tongue slips out and traces his bottom lip, tasting him, salty and heated.

“It had its perks just like the military, but I’m ready to trade those perks in and settle down. Stable job, steady girl, a place to call home, you know.” In between each word, Jake’s lips gently touch mine, making my entire body cover with goosebumps.

“Why don’t we go home?” I suggest and Jake smiles wickedly, knowing exactly what I’m thinking.

Even though we have a late flight out of LAX to Tahiti, we’re both up early. Being a pilot really screws with your ability to sleep in, and it seems Jake is like me and can function on around six hours of sleep.

We’re lying in bed, enjoying the stillness and quiet of the morning, knowing it won’t last, and soon we’ll both be back at it on different ends of the country, in different hemispheres, and possibly not seeing each other for several weeks.

“What did you end up getting for the rest of your route this month?” I ask, knowing that I was only able to swing our Tahiti flight together, and even that is a short one. We only have about a fourteen-hour layover, and ten of those are overnight.

Jake crosses his arms behind his head as he thinks for a few seconds. Our schedules are insane and because they change so often, I can generally only keep track of it week by week.

“After Tahiti I have forty-eight hours in L.A. and then I’m in Miami, Puerto Rico, Chicago and Las Vegas. How about you?”

“New York, Boston, Nashville, Dallas, Cancun, Phoenix and Seattle.”

“Looks like we’ll be apart for a bit again,” Jake says, and I can hear a hint of sadness in his voice. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t affecting me too.

“Maybe I can switch things around and see if someone can take my New York and Boston flights. That way we can maybe spend some time together in that tiny forty-eight-hour window.”

“I’m not going to ask you to change your flights, but if it so happens to work out that way, I wouldn’t complain,” Jake teases, his fingers playfully looping through my hair as we lie next to each other.

We spend the next hour just lying in bed and talking. Our conversations are easy, chatting about Jake’s family and mine, all the places we’ve been as pilots and where we’ve never been.

“How’d you end up in California?” I ask, knowing he was stationed in Colorado before leaving the military.

“A woman,” he says sheepishly, his cheeks flushing slightly at his response.

“Don’t be weird about it,” I say, giving his side a pinch. “I’m not so naïve that I believe I’m the only girl you’ve ever been with, Hunter.”

He laughs out loud at my use of his horrible nickname. “Shit, don’t call me that. It makes me cringe.”

“I can only imagine the nicknames I’ve been given,” I joke back. “Seriously though, Jake, if we focused on what’s happened in our pasts, I’d have never given you a chance.”

Things are simple with Jake. I never wonder if he’s judging me because of my preference for sleeping around. There’s a trust in our relationship that I’ve never felt before, and not once have I questioned what he’s doing when I’m not there. It’s a freeing feeling to trust someone wholeheartedly.

“I’m glad you gave me a chance. I was pretty sure you’d never speak to me again when that flight attendant started hitting on me and called me Hunter.”

“So you were out hunting women?” My eyebrows go up along with the inflection in my voice, a playfulness to our conversation now.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t out there flirting with every cute flight attendant, but it was just that. I had no intention of hooking up and bailing.”

“Well, that’s exactly what I did,” I say, testing the waters and wondering if he’s really as low-key casual with all of this as he acts. Jealousy is a bitter pill, and it can rear its ugly head at any moment.

“It was what was right for you at that time. We all have our moments, and it’s obvious now that all you needed was the love of a good man to change you,” Jake says, pleased with himself as he jokingly breathes on his nails and buffs them on his bare chest.

“Oh yeah, I seem like the kind of girl who can be molded, huh?”

“Fuck no, and that’s why this works. I want you exactly the way you are, in spite of your past, because of your past. You’re unapologetically you, and you make me a better person with your give-no-fucks attitude.”

I swallow hard, not sure how to respond. All my life, I’ve been told to fit into this little box of what women should be, and there were times that I wondered if my father did me a disservice because he supported every crazy non-girly thing I loved. There was no appreciation or room for a woman who wanted to be independent, who wanted to question why, who wanted to disrupt a male-dominated society.

I wanted to be a mechanic, a pilot, an engineer, but I knew what that looked like. I was asked why I didn’t just want to be a nurse or a teacher; a perpetual push in the direction of what a woman should be: a caretaker.

Men are threatened by assertiveness, by confidence and when I told my superior that one day I would be a captain, he laughed at me and patted me on the arm. It was the first time I’d heard of the term occupational segregation. I was being cast aside because of my gender.

As I sit here with Jake though, I know he’s different. He’s the person I want by my side for the rest of my life. He’s my equal.

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