Chapter 3
three
. . .
“Well, somebody needs to buy themselves a lottery ticket!”
The crew member in his smart red and blue uniform, turned away from the phone next to the partially closed jetway door and reached for the boarding pass in Heath’s quivering hand.
“One second longer and I’d have left you behind, mister.”
Heath forced himself to smile through the cardiac arrest he expected would strike him at any moment.
What in God’s name had possessed Christian to book the first flight of the morning?
Had he planned to sleep at the airport? The man hadn’t been on time a day in his life.
It was almost as if he’d known he wouldn’t actually be going.
Heath stifled a disgruntled harrumph before it saw the light of day.
Being angry at Christian was as natural as breathing, but after sprinting through the airport, his lungs were doing all they could to keep him upright.
It seemed poor form to request anything more.
Especially for someone who hadn’t bothered to show up. Again.
“Welcome aboard, Mr. Lennox. Allow me to stow your items,” said the cheery attendant at the plane’s entrance.
“Oh, you don’t have—”
She plucked the lightweight vest from the crook of his elbow and hung it in a narrow closet at the front of the aisle, then popped his small carry-on into an overhead compartment that sat conveniently empty, as though they’d expected him.
A familiar sense of trepidation crept from the shadows, calling Heath’s attention to the boarding pass in his hand. He read it twice before letting loose a quiet expletive.
Christian had upgraded them to first class.
Of course he had. Buying his way out of trouble was how he always apologized.
Or rather, avoided apologizing. Why deal with big, icky emotions like remorse or guilt when one could simply toss money at the problem and flit off to find someone new to disappoint?
Except this trip shouldn’t be an apology. They’d planned it from start to finish together, because Christian wanted to reconnect and reminisce about the good ol’ days.
Heath was a little lost on which specific days Christian considered the good ones. He personally couldn’t summon a single memory where Christian hadn’t left him standing alone in an aisle while everyone around him stared and whispered.
“Mr. Lennox? Is everything okay?” The attendant’s chipper tone snapped him out of his grumbling.
“Oh, yes. Sorry. I just—”
He rolled his lips inward and dropped into his seat with a brusque shake of his head.
Overexplaining was a terrible habit of the old Heath, the one who made excuses for people who didn’t deserve it.
From that moment on, he was forging a path to a new him.
He was no longer accepting less than he deserved.
No more pining over the unattainable. He would live within his means—and that included relationships.
He stuffed his messenger bag into the space between his feet, his touch lingering on the places where the leather was softest and the dye long rubbed away.
A gift from his father, given when he’d gone off to college, it had seen him through so many years of growth and uncertainty.
How foolish he’d been to think those years were behind him.
“Nervous flyer?”
The question, asked in a relaxed timbre, with a voice so buttery smooth it put shortbread to shame, brought Heath back to reality—and the awareness he’d just drama-flopped into someone’s personal space without so much as a “pardon me.”
“Me? Oh, no, I—”
The words fluttered away. Illusory butterflies dancing across the sliver of space separating him from the veritable goddamn Adonis in seat 2B.
“You sure?”
Brown eyes, speckled through with shards of emerald and gold, crinkled slightly at the corners as Aphrodite’s beloved gave him the smallest of smiles.
Just a little twist of the lips, but it was enough to reveal subtle indentations in either cheek and smooth the wrinkles of Heath’s brain into glass.
What had he been saying about forging fresh paths and pining?
He broke eye contact with an unconvincing cough into the crook of his elbow and redirected his attention to his bag. Retrieving his laptop and the pile of student essays he’d printed for grading was suddenly of the utmost importance. The stubborn zipper, of course, chose that moment to snag.
He muttered through a battle of wills against the inanimate object while, in his periphery, his seat neighbor watched him with growing amusement.
“I assure you I’m flyne—fine! I am fine. Not at all a nervous fie… fly-er.”
He withered. Oh, if his English Lit professor could see him now.
“If you say so,” the man responded, lips curling into the knowingest of smirks as he leaned back and let his eyes drift closed.
Good God, those lips.
“Yup!” Heath chirped, the zipper finally giving way with a jerk.
“Of course, I don’t love all the rushing and being crammed into a tight space for hours.
I mean, who does? But the actual act of airline travel?
Doesn’t bother me one bit. I have full confidence in the aeronautics experts charged with keeping things running. ”
Stop. Talking.
Heath pressed his lips together and clenched his jaw until his teeth creaked.
He’d blame his asinine behavior on lack of oxygen, but they were still on the ground.
It was by the grace of whatever god was feeling generous that day that his neighbor had dozed off.
Or perhaps died of boredom. Either way, his eyes were closed and his expression unbothered.
Sunlight stretched across the man’s face from the window at his side. It set fire to his auburn hair, revealing a light smattering of freckles across the most unfair of cheekbones. He was possibly the most beautiful man Heath had ever seen.
“So’s you know,” the man turned his head with the urgency of a blood-drunk lion lying in the sun. “I’m not gonna be much help if you are.”
He resettled, the smile returning, and Heath struggled to thread his thoughts together.
“If I’m what?”
“Nervous.”
He raised the glass at his side and gave it a gentle shake, rattling ice that had barely melted. An eau d’bourbon wafted across, wrinkling Heath’s nose and driving the message home.
Drinking had never been his thing. In the rare moments he indulged, it was with a glass of wine or something fruity and watered down. Maybe some rum in his eggnog during the holidays, if he felt especially saucy. The thought of sipping the stuff with nothing but ice gave him the shudders.
Of course, watching the man next to him idly tracing his fingers along the rim of his glass certainly imbued him with a deep appreciation of the aesthetic.
“I am not nervous,” he half-lied. The flight wasn’t bothering him one iota. It was sitting next to someone who looked like they’d just stepped off the Tom Ford runway at Fashion Week that had him rattled.
By the time they’d reached altitude and the Fasten Seatbelts sign had turned off, Heath wished he was a nervous traveler.
At least then he’d have come prepared with some form of distraction technique to get him through the next several hours.
Instead, he struggled to focus on the essays his students had turned in before break, which was nigh impossible with all the sucking and crunching of ice cubes happening beside him.
“Must you?” he snapped after reading the same paragraph for the tenth time and still not understanding a word.
“What?”
Heath closed his eyes and inhaled to a count of five before slowly releasing the breath.
“That,” he said, gesturing at the ice slowly drifting into the man’s mouth.
“Sorry,” he apologized around the cube, before cracking it with a chomp that made Heath cringe.
“Another Macallan, Mr. Westin?”
Heath watched Mr. Westin run his tongue across his teeth while breaking into a smile at the lovely flight attendant, who immediately smiled back.
“You read my mind.”
The curvaceous brunette leaned forward to accept the empty glass, offering a healthy peek at the dark lace undergarment hiding beneath her uniform blouse. Westin’s smile broadened, shifting into the sort that could make a person forget their own name while their underwear melted clean off.
Heath restrained his mind from trawling through the nearest gutter. Was he truly incapable of maintaining control of his faculties just because the man was flirty and gorgeous?
Yes. The answer was yes, and admitting it was the first step to recovery.
“Just water for me,” he answered the question no one had asked him, and she looked his way with a blink of surprise.
He’d had years of playing third wheel with his friends and their spouses—or in the case of Andres’ entourage, a spare tire. In all that time, he’d never felt more like an old mattress tossed into the woods by the side of the road than he did now. It left a distinctive and unpleasant aftertaste.
The attendant’s smile remained fixed, if significantly less steamy, as she registered his request. “Of course, hon. I’ll be right back with both of those beverages.”
She’d called him hon in a tone reserved for cute elderly people. Heath tried not to bristle, but it took effort.
“Wise,” said his neighbor, whose attention remained locked on her retreating backside.
Heath hadn’t been speculating on Westin’s orientation (much), but the look in the man’s eyes answered the question plainly.
“What is?”
“Not drinking. Y’know, since you’re a nervous flyer.”
“I am not—”
Heath stopped himself from going fully indignant when the corner of Mr. Westin’s mouth lifted into half a smile. Their eyes met, and warmth suffused Heath’s chest as his seatmate chuckled and shook his head.
“Damn, you’re easy.”
Stretching back his shoulders, Heath again dragged his mind away from a swirling pit of lurid comebacks.
With a casual sniff, he woke his laptop and shot the very normal and entirely unremarkable Mr. Westin his best rendition of “haughty”—eyebrow raised, lips pursed.
His neighbor chuckled in response, so Heath doubled down.
“I hate to disappoint you, but I’m fine. You can stifle any fantasies involving wrestling me to the ground.”
One day, he would learn when to stop talking.
“Your water.” The attendant placed the glass on Heath’s table before performing another exaggerated lean toward his seatmate, whose amused expression darkened to something unrepentantly hungry in reaction.
“And your bourbon, nice and tidy.” She held onto the glass a beat longer than necessary after Westin’s fingers had wrapped around it.
“I slipped an extra finger in,” she added, standing with a coquettish smile. “Think you can take it?”
Heath choked on his sip of water, shattering any pretense that he remained oblivious to the foreplay. The minx merely smiled and winked before sashaying past them to serve the rest of the passengers.
His neighbor blew out an exhale and whispered, “Damn,” as he took a healthy swig of his drink.
“I think she likes you.”
Westin smiled around his second sip. “I’m getting that impression.”
“I’d say your stay in Puerto Rico is shaping up to be exciting.”
“Maybe.”
The shift in Westin’s tone pulled Heath from the particularly egregious grammar error he’d been correcting.
He considered himself fairly astute, having years of practice deducing the underlying meaning of whatever slang was popular with his students.
The faint trace of discomfort in that maybe came across as though through a bullhorn.
Outwardly, Westin appeared just as stunning and unruffled as ever, but there had been a change in his presence. Heath could taste it almost as clearly as the gasoline aroma from Westin’s glass, which he gripped with enough pressure to turn the skin around his nail beds white.
Heath pondered the interesting turn of events. Was the love affair he’d assumed assured just smoke and mirrors? He’d known many closeted masters of illusions in his day, but Westin hadn’t tripped his sensors. Heath believed his interest in the attendant to be genuine. So what had soured the mood?
The attendant sashayed by them again, disappearing behind the curtain that obscured the galley from the corps d’elite.
Though not before she’d cast a look over her shoulder that even the most obtuse would understand.
Westin’s jaw worked side to side as he swirled the last of the liquid in the glass.
Heath sipped his own beverage, dislodging a chunk of the thick anticipation that clogged his throat.
Somewhere, a grandfather clock was ticking to the hour, and he could hear the steady rhythm in his mind while he waited for the outcome.
Staring into the amber liquid as though waiting for a sign, Westin finally muttered, “Fuck it,” and tossed back the last of the glass’s contents. Setting it onto the table with a dull thud, he stood, and Heath scrambled into the aisle to clear the way.
Radiating determination, Westin strode toward the galley, leaving a whisper of Louis Vuitton Imagination in his wake.