Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 68735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
Well that only served to intrigue me more.
But also, the look on her face was making me nervous.
“Okay,” I said. “First you might want to tell me before what goes further.”
Her eyes rolled. “You know what, Audi.”
I knew what.
I just wanted to make sure that she knew what.
That she knew where this was going.
“Creole…”
She let out a huff of impatience and grumbled, “Before you and me go further as a couple. I see, as well as you do, where this is headed. I want those things more than my next breath. To be blatantly honest here, I’ve wanted this thing between us for so long that it’s ridiculous.” She looked me dead in the eye before she said, “That’s why it hurt so bad. I’d put you on this pedestal. You were slotted in as the top person in my world, and then I thought you left me to the wolves. That’s why I reacted so badly.”
I moved forward and cupped her cheek. “You reacted badly because you were hurt in the worst imaginable way a woman can be hurt. You deserved to be mad at the world. And I deserve that anger. I should’ve looked harder. I was…”
She placed her hand over my mouth. “We’re not going there. I know both of us feel like we’ve fucked up, but neither one of us really has. We deserve to be happy. We deserve a life together where we’re both not scared. Now, let me tell you about Patty.”
Patty.
I didn’t know who the fucker was, but I was already dead set on hating him.
I jerked my chin toward the two jump seats in the front of the plane.
She took the closest seat, leaving me the one closest to the plane’s exit door.
I looked around. “Where are all the other flight attendants?”
She grimaced. “They don’t like me so they hang out in the back.”
“Ahh,” I said. “Jealous?”
“Whatever they are, I don’t know. Like I said, they don’t talk to me. I’m persona non grata.”
Instead of asking her to expand on that, because I knew they had a reason for not liking her and she knew it, I asked, “Patty?”
She blew out a breath.
“I met Patty a year after I had Damon,” she started.
Anger and jealousy instantly surged through me, unwarranted and seriously uncool.
Yet, I couldn’t stop myself from having the feelings despite knowing that I had no right to my anger and hurt.
“Who’s Patty?” I asked carefully and, hopefully, neutrally.
She smiled at me and patted my hand. “He’s a really good friend.”
“What kind of good friend?” I asked before I could stop myself.
She was quiet for a long moment before she said, “The kind that cured me of anything sexually related.”
That had me instantly shutting up.
“Like I was saying, I met Patty nearly two years after…” She trailed off. “We met at a rape survivor support group. He was twenty-one and had survived being sexually assaulted by two ladies at a college party…kind of like me.”
“Fuck.”
The sickness in this world…
“He was roofied. He was aware of everything, just seriously unable to do anything about it,” she continued. “And when we met, we kind of gravitated toward each other because we were both the youngest in the room. My mom begged me to go to this, and I was seriously against it. I didn’t want anything to do with it. When I got there, I spotted him immediately because he looked just as miserable about being there as I did.”
I leaned back in the chair, taking her hand with me.
“He’s…” A sound bonged, and Creole got up, giving me a single raised finger telling me to wait.
I did as she got up and answered the call light someone had just pressed.
She came back with an empty tray and cup and put them away before returning to the seat next to me.
She placed her hand back in mine when she said, “We hit it off. Not in a romantic relationship kind of way, but in a bone-deep friendship kind of way. We bonded over our own tragedies and became really good friends.” She looked at me. “Laney kind of loathed him because I called him one of my best friends. She hated him on principle until she met him. Then she liked him a lot, too.”
I smiled. “If Laney liked him, he must be a solid person.”
Laney had always been the best judge of character.
“I know,” she leaned into me. “It took us a year of friendship before we decided to figure out how to get us back to normal, functioning human beings again. I was in desperate need of some normalcy because of Damon’s diagnosis. And Patty had issues of his own to deal with at home. We just felt like we needed to fix ourselves and start the healing journey.”
“He helped you have sex again,” I guessed.