Page 43 of Shared By the Pilots

“You make an extremely good point.”

“You’re not worried we’re moving too fast,” I asked, “are you?”

With a mouthful of eggs, he kissed me on the cheek. “Not even a little bit.”

I grinned at him as I finished my breakfast.

*

The private terminal at the Houston airport was beginning to feel more like my home than the commercial terminal. I waved and said hello to Rita, the woman who ran the check-in desk. I swung by the lounge and got another coffee, along with a strawberry tart from the dessert buffet. I chatted with two of the other pilots I knew, then headed out to the tarmac.

This was my sixth flight. Most were day trips, with anywhere between four passengers and fourteen. Luke was already in the cockpit, going through his pre-flight checklist. Bernie Langston had been nice enough to make sure Luke and I flew together whenever our schedules aligned.

“Morning, gorgeous,” he said as I poked my head in.

“Morning yourself, Captain Dricksen,” I replied, bending down to kiss him. “Who do we have for our flight to Cabo today?”

“It’s a solo passenger. Heading down there by himself.”

I gave a start. “Just one?”

“It happens sometimes,” he replied while making a check next to an item on his list. “Should make your job easier, I would assume.”

I returned to the terminal to fetch the client. Rita pointed him out to me: he was maybe in his fifties, with hair that was gray, but thick. His skin had the leathery look of someone who spent a lot of time out in the sun. He was wearing Air Force One sneakers that looked like they should be expensive, except they were dirty and scratched. When I introduced myself to him and shook his hand, I noticed a turtle tattoo on his forearm.

As I led him onto the plane, I wondered if it was a bad sign for Excelsior to make the flight with only one passenger. Surely the airline wasn’t making a profit. Unless he had bought up the entire flight just for himself.

He doesn’t look like someone who would do that.

I put it out of my mind as we took off. As I served him, I pretended he was someone famous, like Elon Musk, or the new Chancellor of Germany. He was friendly, but quiet, and only ordered a Diet Coke. He turned down the snack basket too.

We landed in Cabo and I wished the passenger a pleasant stay. As I stepped off the plane, a strong wind carried the smell of ocean spray to us, even though we were miles inland from the water. I grinned to myself; I really did love this job.

A member of the ground crew opened the storage hatch on our plane and began unloading suitcases onto the tarmac. It was like a clown car; they just kept coming, until there was a pile of at least a dozen of them. The ground crew started to load them onto the luggage cart, but our lone passenger stopped him with a few words in Spanish. Then he loaded the suitcases onto the luggage cart himself, holding each piece with both hands and carefully placing them.

“That’s a lot of luggage!” I said. “Are you moving down here?”

The man looked flustered that I was commenting on his luggage. “Yes, well, I, uh…” He shrugged, then pushed the luggage cart toward the edge of the tarmac, where a pickup truck was waiting. A man there opened the bed of the truck, and then the two of them began loading the truck with the bags.

“Can you imagine living here?” I asked Luke at lunch. We were sitting at a table in downtown Cabo, close enough to the water to feel the salty spray on our faces. “Maybe when I retire someday.”

“The thing about a place like this,” Luke said while gesturing with his margarita, “is that it’s great in small doses. I’m afraid if I moved here, all the things I love about it would become commonplace.”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.” I downed the rest of my margarita and ordered another. “I would love living near the ocean. I meanreallyliving near it—not like where we are in Houston. That doesn’t count.”

Luke leaned back in his chair and gazed out at the sea. He looked gorgeous in his short-sleeved pilot uniform, sun reflecting off his tan skin. “It’s not my first choice, but there are certainly worse places to live.”

“What’s your first choice?”

“The Alps,” he said without hesitation. “A small ski village in France, or Italy. Like Chamonix, or Courmayeur. But I wouldn’t want to live there in the winter. I don’t care about skiing. Those valleys are stunning in the summer, when the snow melts and wildflowers grow everywhere.”

“Yeah, okay, that sounds amazing,” I said. “I take it you’ve been?”

He shook his head. “My grandpa told me about it. He fought in Europe in the second world war, then took my grandma back there on their honeymoon. I have a photo of them in Chamonix, France, with Mont Blanc towering behind them. Sometimes, when I’m bored, I’ll pull up Google Maps and look at the area. Drop a pin for Street View and look around.”

“I could eat cheese and drink wine every day for the rest of my life,” I said wistfully. “Okay, so you’ve never been there. What’s stopped you?”

“Opportunity,” he replied. “I wouldn’t want to go for only a week. I would want to spend a whole month there. Long enough that the locals treat me like one of them, and not a tourist. But it’s tough taking that much time off from the airline.” He sipped his margarita. “When I’m retired.”

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