Page 30 of Love at First Flight

Dex hadn’t cried when Ava rejected him, or even when Rachel left. It was more of a dark, bitter pit of emptiness moving into his chest. At some point, this dark pit had moved out again. He hadn’t noticed when it happened, only that it had. What Selah was experiencing was something else entirely, and he didn’t feel great about her leaving until he knew she was okay. “I think you should stay... just for a little bit. Until you’re feeling okay. Wanna eat some food? Get something to drink?”

“Did the pizza come?”

In fact, the food delivery driver had shown up about five minutes after Selah had started crying. The woman had looked unsure at what she should do in such a situation, choosing to walk delicately to Dex’s porch, gently setting the pizza box down and then quietly getting back in her car.

“The driver left it on the porch. It’s probably cold by now, but I can heat up some slices for us. Come on.” He led her back to his house, one of his arms still wrapped around her shoulder, not wanting to let go yet. It was amazing how holding her felt entirely natural.

“Oh God. Really? So, the delivery driver saw me being a mess too?” She rubbed a hand across her cheeks.

“I shielded your body. She probably thought it was me.”

She released a stuffed-up, watery laugh at this. “God. Sorry.”

Dex had to let go to pick up the pizza box and opened the door for her. He immediately turned off the movie and got her situated on his couch again. As he heated a plate of slices in the microwave, he brought her a glass of water, and she downed half of it. He pushed the puzzle in progress to one end of the coffee table—they hadn’t gotten far, anyway—and put down the heated slices with some napkins. They each grabbed a slice, and she didn’t fight him when he relaxed against one end and brought her with him. In fact, her head settled right on his chest and his free hand rubbed along her bicep as they each ate with one hand.

“You wanna talk?” he asked carefully.

“I’ve just had a really bad day.”

“Apparently. Must have been a real doozy. Was it even worse than tipping the basket over and landing on one of your passengers?”

“Oh God. Are you ever going to forget that?”

“Nope. Your website promised a once-in-a-lifetime experience and, boy, did you deliver.” He’d probably never forget anything relating to her. Every memory was being locked inside a special chest in his brain.

He took a huge bite from his slice and thought it over. “If you’re not going to give me details, I’ll just have to guess. Let’s see. Some big VIP, let’s say the governor of Oregon, booked an important flight for some kind of PR thing and you didn’t have the balloon completely hooked in. So just as you were about to take off, the balloon detached from the basket and you all had to watch it swirling about like a helium balloon losing air.” He demonstrated this using his pizza crust as a stand in for the balloon in this story.

She laughed and lowered his hand with hers to stop the pizza crust from continuing to make wild loop-de-loops. “Come on. I don’t even think that’s possible unless you’re talking about cartoon physics.”

“Okay, then. Maybe this is about a flock of birds with a bad case of diarrhea and they flew over the balloon and—”

“Stop! I’m eating! I don’t want this to even have a chance to enter my imagination.”

“I’m just going to keep guessing until—”

Selah sat up and he instantly missed the warmth of her body pressed against his, but at least her mood was improving. “Okay, fine, I’ll tell you. During the tour today, this old lady passenger was taking pictures with her phone, and she put it over the edge of the basket and...” She whistled as one of her hands demonstrated a death spiral downwards.

“What? Why would she even risk that?”

“You work with the public too. You tell me. And then she was likeWell?And I saidWell, what?She actually expected me to immediately land the balloon, so she could go get her phone.”

“Are you kidding? That phone had to be toast, anyway.”

“Right? And I’m just going to randomly land a balloon somewhere with no ground crew? No, I don’t think so.”

Dex couldn’t help grinning at how animated she was getting in retelling this story. It was a completely different side of her. She was lively, full of energy, and hilarious.

“And she was yelling at me because why didn’t the basket have smaller baskets on the outside to catch things? Because this kind of thing must happen all the time. Then she came up with some wild theory that I probably had some side hustle in collecting people’s dropped items and making money off of it by selling them. She kept saying,My pictures! What about my pictures?Apparently, that phone had three years’ worth of pictures on it and she hadn’t downloaded it to her computer yet or put it on theflashything her son gave her.”

“Come on!” Dex was laughing hard, and Selah was as well. Every additional sentence made the story more ridiculous and funny. “Did she call it a ‘flashy thing’?”

Selah wiped a tear away from the corner of her eye. “Yes! And she kept yelling at me that now she no longer has the photos of her third grandson’s birth and unless I’m going to make her kids have another baby, I’ve just ruined her whole lifetime of memories.”

Dex almost choked on his pizza. “Stop.”

“So, yeah, anyway, I’m expecting to hear from her lawyer any day now and need to start practicing for my deposition.”

“She’s not really going to sue you, is she?”

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