Chapter 11
Austin
Private jets weren’t a new experience but they were never something I felt comfortable in. For a lot of reasons. The primary
one being that I hated flying. So far, the flight wasn’t bad, but even the slightest bump always reminded me that more could
show up out of nowhere.
Selena, the bride-to-be, was asleep in the bedroom, and her groom was in the next section over from us, quietly working on
his laptop. It left Isa and me in the lounge part of the plane. Isa spent the entire time reading and rereading the same section
of a Word document on her laptop. I couldn’t help but lean over to read it, too. It was three paragraphs comparing the long
and complicated road to becoming a surgeon to preparing a meal. In this case, paella. A lot of it probably went over my head,
but the writing was smooth and oddly moving.
“Is that your application?” I asked, trying to get my mind off the occasional bumps in the air.
“Yeah, my personal statement for the Winthrop fellowship.” Isa stared at her computer screen like she was trying to intimidate it into blinking first. “I submitted it last week.”
My face contorted, confused. It was already done? “So now . . . you’re trying to scare it?”
“I like knowing I didn’t mess up.” She read it again.
Her eyes moved along the screen, reading it one last time. She smiled and closed the laptop, like reading it for the seventieth
time was the one that convinced her it was perfect. Not that she could change it now.
“Do you cook?” I wondered.
I was never a good writer, probably because I was just as terrible at reading, so I could never really fathom how people could
weave words together into something cohesive. Especially not something as, in my opinion, nausea-inducing as surgery into
something artistic like cooking.
“No, but it is something I have always wanted to get better at.” Isa tucked the laptop away and now pulled out a small notebook,
the same one she had on her coffee table when I was at her place a week ago. The one with mostly yellow-highlighted cases.
“I’ve been trying to re-create this paella I had in Spain once.”
“No luck?”
“No time.” She sighed. Her finger ran down each individual line item and she compared them against a paper tucked inside the
notebook. It was the case logs she’d mentioned a few days ago. “I buy the ingredients, I get everything ready, and when I
have both the time and energy to actually make it, the ingredients have gone bad.”
Another bump startled me. I gripped the armrest again.
I never got used to flying, no matter how often I flew between the States and Europe or around the world.
A long silence filled the cabin. I could occasionally hear the sound of a keyboard in back, a reminder that the groom-to-be was there, working.
“So.” Isa closed her notebook and tucked it into the handbag next to her. “Is the foundation the reason you decided to leave
Farnham?”
My pulse ticked up. “Did you google me?”
“No,” she said, too fast. She leaned further into her seat. “Maybe I’ve been taking interest in the sport.”
“Have you?” I raised an eyebrow. I specifically remembered her saying she didn’t like soccer.
“I have a lot of interests.” She looked at her nails. “Well-rounded surgeon, remember?”
“Oh okay.” I pretended to believe her. “Hey, how long’s a match?”
“That . . .” Her eyes flickered around the cabin. “Depends on . . . penalties.” She smiled like she surprised herself.
“Uh-huh.” Something competitive sparked in me. It kept happening around her. I crossed my arms. “What’s offsides?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. “Well, if you don’t know already, then I think we have an answer as to why the US team
lost the last World Cup.”
“The attacking player is past the final defender . . .”
“Fine, you win. But I didn’t google you.” She put her hand up. “You do realize you were pretty famous for a while there, right?”
“Vaguely,” I drawled sarcastically.
I used to live for that fame. I loved it.
I loved the press. I loved the attention from everyone.
Anything a twentysomething guy could want, I had.
A complicated mess of women, money, notoriety.
I got so wrapped up in it that I failed to see what was important.
Then Theo got sick. I realized just how much I lost sight of in the flashbulb’s glare.
If my life hadn’t been so littered with distractions, maybe I would have seen Theo more.
I could see clearly now and I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. I had a clear path forward.
I went on. “Just like you’ll remember what offsides is if you’d just listen—”
“I can’t sit through that explanation.”
“I don’t see how you have the patience to spend a decade learning how to be a surgeon but cannot sit through learning a simple
rule.”
“Oh.” She smacked my shoulder with the back of her hand. “One of them is interesting.”
Another dip brought me right back to the anxiety I had a few minutes ago. My fingers gripped the armrest a little tighter.
Isa’s eyes flicked to the armrest and back.
“It’s actually very safe,” Isabelle explained. “And, generally, turbulence can’t take a plane down.”
“Can we not talk about planes going down?”
“Those dips that feel like free fall are only around a hundred feet.”
“How comforting.”
“Well, I know back in your day the planes flew a lot closer to the ground,” she teased. “But now, in the modern era, we’re thirty-five thousand feet up. A few feet don’t really seem like much.”
“For the record, I’m only like eight years older than you.” I swallowed the anxiety. “And do you moonlight as a pilot?”
“No . . .” She looked up in thought. “The prefrontal cortex, when busy executing command-related functions, takes priority
over the amygdala’s neuronal activity.”
I didn’t say anything. She had to know that sounded like a foreign language.
“Let me distract you,” she translated and leaned forward. Her warm breath swept across my neck. A few curls fell forward,
almost brushing against me, and suddenly it was all I could think about.
My heart continued slamming against my sternum, but for another reason. I cleared my throat. “Okay.”
“Since we’re going to be pretending to be dating for the sake of pissing off my ex . . .” she began offhandedly like she was
teaching something. “It should look somewhat serious.” She paused like she was putting it all together in her head.
“Right.”
“Let’s say we’ve been together six months. That’s serious enough to make him crazy but not so serious that anyone is going
to be asking questions about the future.”
“Okay,” I answered curtly. If she wanted to upset him, that probably meant she was stuck on him. That fact coiled around in
my head. “Anything else?”
“Well, when in settings for the wedding, we can be affectionate. But not over the top.”
I swallowed hard as the plane dipped again. “What’s over the top?”
“There’s affectionate and then there’s affectionate.”
“You realize those are the same words, right?”
“How about a code word so we know where the line is. Something that would never come up in normal conversation.” She went
quiet thinking. A little jarring in the cabin seemed to rouse the thought. “Oh.” She snapped her fingers. “How about offsides?”
“You will do anything to not learn what that really means.”
“I think it’s a more interesting use of the word.” She leaned forward so that she was only a few inches from me and put a
hand on my shoulder. “So, something like this.” She removed it and leaned back. “Although hand on a shoulder is a little friendly.”
Without waiting for me to reply, she pursed her lips and cocked her head to the side like she was performing a medical exam.
She put her hand back on my shoulder, then slid her palm flat against where it met my chest. My heart sped up with every inch
her palm moved. “That’s probably fine, right?”
I swallowed against a dry throat. “Yeah, sure.”
“And I guess for you . . .” She poked her tongue into her cheek thoughtfully. She took my hand and put it on her knee. Her
skin was soft and lush and the wave of chills that ran up my arm begged me to move my palm up her leg.
A magnetic draw pulled me, and I leaned in an inch.
“This is fine.” Isa’s unfazed voice snapped me from the daze.
I pulled my hand back like it was burnt. “Is it?”
“Sorry.” Her face reddened and she leaned back into her seat. “I didn’t mean to disrupt your Regency-era sensibilities. I’ll tuck my ankles away now.”
“I know how to be affectionate; I don’t need lessons.”
Before she could answer, the sound of someone clearing their throat interrupted us.
We both pulled back from each other. Isa and I looked toward the back of the plane. Selena’s fiancé wasn’t more than ten feet
from us.
“I can hear you.” Henry glanced up at us from behind his laptop screen, an eyebrow raised. “So, can I call offsides?”