Chapter 30
The private jet is … insanity. I’ve never seen anything like it, all gleaming and space-age on the tarmac, waiting for us like we’re royalty.
“Holy shit,” Sadie whispers, wide-eyed, staying close to me, as though we need to face this together as we climb the stairs and get our first look inside it.
My only experience with flying was the helicopter. I’ve never been on a plane before … or, needless to say, a private jet. I might have expected a regular plane, like you see in movies, but smaller. This is more like a flying penthouse.
A crew member greets us in a crisp navy uniform and the air of someone who takes the business of making rich people comfortable at thirty thousand feet very seriously.
It’s one thing being staff. I’ve been staff all my life. But having staff is a whole new level of things to get used to.
Inside, there are actual lounge chairs, the kind you’d find in a five-star hotel lobby.
Whiskey-colored leather, wide, facing each other in pairs with mahogany tables between them.
Glossy real-wood panels line the walls. There are reading lights that look like they belong in a boutique hotel bedroom, casting an opulent golden glow.
A huge flat-screen TV is perched above a long, plush-looking sofa that runs the length of one side.
Several closed doors at the rear of the plane have tiny gold beds embossed on the doors. Bedrooms, I’m assuming.
I take a window seat and Sadie sits next to me.
“May I offer you Moet? Evian?” asks the crew member, offering flutes on a tray. “Dinner will be served en route.”
Sadie takes champagne. I take sparkling water.
Dallas has turned his phone back on and it’s absolutely lighting up. I can hear it buzzing in his pocket as he comes over to me, taking a minute to lean down and kiss my lips. “How’s my Amelie Thibodeaux? You okay?”
“I’m good,” I smile.
I’m as good as a person can be when they’re leaving the only home they’ve ever known, is meanwhile staring down the barrel of the possible consequences of badly botching their first attempt at birth control while simultaneously proceeding to voraciously indulge in oodles of hot sex for two days straight—with you, and you’re doing things to my body even now I can’t control—and now I’m embarking on at least ten different adventures at once and every single one of them terrifies me even more than it excites me, thanks for asking.
He’s making sure I’m as comfortable as I can be and I appreciate that. He’s distracted. He takes a second call from someone named Todd. Then one from someone named Rhett. The brother on the ranch in Montana, I remember. Then one from Boone. Another brother.
They must really care about him. That must feel so nice.
Sadie elbows me. “‘My Amelie Thibodeaux’? Are you kidding me? What kind of voodoo magic spell did you cast on him, girl, and can you teach it to me?”
“Very funny.”
Over the intercom, the captain tells us to fasten our seatbelts and the engines start up. Dallas takes a seat on the couch, as though not to bother us with the incoming stream of phone calls.
He watches me the whole time, though, and I can hear him giving one-word answers to a barrage of questions that probably have to do with the fact that he disappeared for an entire weekend. With a mysterious woman, no less. “Yes … no … yes, she’s with me now.”
I’m amazed by him all over again this morning.
He has that same look in his eyes as he fields questions that he did when we were alone together.
Like nothing else matters and it’s only the two of us in this whole world.
I think we’re both remembering—in vivid detail—the searing intimacy of our weekend.
His dark hair has that lightly windblown thing going on and his eyes look more green than blue from this distance.
His muscles barely strain against his beautiful clothing and every detail of him seems somehow ideal.
He’s so hot and handsome he could be a Greek god who decided on a whim to fly down from Mount Olympus for the day and hang out with the mortals to see what fielding phone calls and dealing with schedules feels like.
“We’re moving,” Sadie gasps, gripping my arm. She’s never flown on a plane either.
I don’t feel nervous about the flight itself, since I doubt a safer mode of transport has ever been created. It just seems like every screw and every bolt has been crafted with precision.
The engines hum and the smoothness of the flight gives me vertigo because it hardly feels like we’re moving at all.
Once we’re off the ground I notice Sadie’s watching me, her smile observant, her sunglasses off now. “You look different.”
“Different how?”
“You’re always gorgeous but today you’re, like, gorgeous gorgeous.”
I laugh it off. “I don’t even know what that means. And you are too.”
“You look like something’s … I don’t know,” she says, “… switched on. Or maybe something’s switched off. That scared part of you that you never let go of. The holding-yourself-together-with-both-hands part.”
I know what she’s talking about, of course. “Maybe you were right. Maybe getting out of New Orleans is what I needed.”
“It is, Ami. Look at you.” She gestures at me, at Dallas, at the luxury jet we’re currently ensconced in, like we’ve morphed into Kardashians.
And then we’re suddenly high above the city, the crescent of the river catching the afternoon sun. It looks different than it did in the helicopter, though. It looks smaller. Sadder. Less colorful.
Then the clouds take it and the city is gone.