Chapter 41 Quest
Quest
Mehar gripped the armrest so hard I thought she might rip it off the seat. We were still on the ground. The engine hadn’t even turned over yet.
“You good, Peach?”
“I’m fine. I’m totally fine. This plane is just smaller than I expected.”
“It’s a Cessna Citation. It seats eight people comfortably. It’s not small.”
“It’s small compared to the ground, Quest. The ground is very big and very stable and it doesn’t require fuel to keep me alive.”
I laughed and started the preflight checks.
She watched me flip switches and check gauges with her eyes wide like she was trying to memorize the process in case she needed to land this thing herself.
Which she wouldn’t. Because I’d been flying since I was twenty-five and I had more hours in the air than most commercial pilots.
“I need you to relax,” I said. “Put your seatbelt on and breathe. I’ve done this hundreds of times.”
“You’ve also killed people hundreds of times and that doesn’t make me feel better about your hobbies.”
“Flying is not the same as killing people.”
“Both involve someone else’s life being in your hands. I’m just saying.”
I taxied down the private strip on the estate property and lined up. “Here we go. Deep breath.”
She took a breath and held it and I pushed the throttle forward and the jet accelerated down the runway and lifted off smooth.
The estate shrank below us, the trees turning into green carpet, the house getting smaller until it looked like something from a model set.
Once we leveled off and the ride smoothed out, Mehar slowly released her death grip on the armrest and exhaled.
“See? We’re up. Nothing happened.”
“Yet,” she said. But her shoulders had dropped and the color was coming back to her face and after about ten minutes she was looking out the window at the clouds with something close to wonder. “Okay. It’s actually beautiful up here.”
“Told you.”
“Don’t be smug about it.”
“I’m always smug. It’s part of my charm.”
She rolled her eyes but she was smiling and that was enough for me. I set the autopilot once we hit cruising altitude and turned to her.
“So the penthouse,” I said. “You sure that’s the one?”
“Quest, it overlooks the casino and the river. The kitchen is bigger than my old apartment. The closet has its own closet. And the balcony wraps all the way around. Yes, I’m sure.”
“Then it’s ours. I’ll have Justice handle the paperwork when we get back.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. You picked it. That’s all I needed to hear.”
She looked at me and shook her head like she still couldn’t believe this was her life.
I understood that because sometimes I couldn’t believe it was mine either.
A year ago, I was sleeping in a hotel room avoiding two ex-girlfriends and swearing off women permanently.
Now I was flying a woman to Arizona who I’d reversed a vasectomy for and was about to buy a penthouse with.
Life doesn’t make sense and I’d stopped trying to force it to.
“There’s something else I want to show you when we get back,” I said. “Some land outside the city I’ve been looking at.”
“For what?”
“A development. Something I’ve been thinking about for years.
I call it Freetown.” I looked at the sky ahead of us while I talked because for some reason this was harder to say than anything else I’d told her.
Business plans, kill orders, I love you.
All of those came easier than this. Because this was the thing I actually cared about.
“I want to build a community. Black-owned, Black-built. Residential, commercial, a school, a grocery store, restaurants, a community center. A full ecosystem where Black families can own property and build wealth and not get pushed out by gentrification. Banks Reserve saved the family. The casino saved the company. Freetown saves the community. That’s the legacy. ”
She was quiet for a minute. I glanced over and she was looking at me with an expression I hadn’t seen before.
Not admiration exactly. Recognition. Like she was seeing a part of me I’d been keeping behind the CEO and the killer and the alpha bullshit and it was the part she’d been looking for without knowing she was looking.
“That’s what you really want to build,” she said. Not a question.
“That’s what I’ve always wanted to build. Everything else was just getting there.”
“Then we’ll build it together.”
I looked at her and she looked at me and something passed between us at thirty-five thousand feet that was bigger than a conversation about real estate. It was a woman telling a man that his dream was safe with her. That she wasn’t just riding along. She was co-piloting. In every sense.
“Okay,” I said. “Together.”
We flew in comfortable silence for a while after that. She put her head back and closed her eyes and I thought she might fall asleep but about twenty minutes later I felt her hand on my thigh. I glanced over. Her eyes were open. That look on her face. I knew that look.
“Mehar.”
“Hmm?”
“I’m flying an aircraft.”
“I know. You’re very good at it.” Her hand moved higher. “You said autopilot was on.”
“Autopilot assists. It doesn’t replace the pilot. I still need to monitor instruments and maintain situational awareness.”
“Then maintain it.” She unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned across the center console and her fingers worked my belt open and I should’ve stopped her because we were at thirty-five thousand feet in a Cessna and there are about a hundred reasons why this is a terrible idea.
But her hand wrapped around my dick and every single one of those reasons left my brain like they had somewhere better to be.
“Peach, I need to focus.”
“Then focus.” She lowered her mouth onto me and my hands tightened on the yoke and I stared at the horizon line with an intensity I usually reserved for business negotiations and life-threatening situations. This qualified as both.
I’m going to be honest. I almost died. Not from the flying.
The flying was fine. The instruments were steady, the autopilot was holding altitude, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky for two hundred miles.
I almost died because Mehar Ali had the mouth of an angel and the technique of a demon and she was using both at thirty-five thousand feet while I tried to maintain a heading of two-four-zero and not crash a twenty-million-dollar aircraft into a mountain.
She took her time. Slow and deep, her tongue doing things that should’ve been classified as federal aviation violations.
I kept one hand on the yoke and put the other on the back of her head because I needed to hold onto something or I was going to lose my mind.
My jaw was locked, my breathing was ragged, and every time she went deeper I had to remind myself that the altimeter was more important than the orgasm building at the base of my spine.
I came with my eyes open and my hand on the yoke and my foot steady on the rudder pedals.
Which might be the most disciplined thing I’ve ever done in my life.
She sat up and wiped her mouth and looked at me with that satisfied expression that told me she knew exactly what she’d just put me through and enjoyed every second of it.
“How’s your situational awareness?” she asked.
“Compromised.”
“Good.” She buckled her seatbelt and put her head back and closed her eyes and was asleep within five minutes. This woman. I swear to God.
We landed at a private strip outside Sedona about four hours after takeoff.
The sun was starting to drop and the sky was doing things I’d never seen the DC sky do.
Orange and red and purple bleeding into each other like somebody had knocked over a paint palette across the horizon.
The red rocks were everywhere, massive formations jutting up from the desert floor, glowing in the late afternoon light like they were lit from the inside.
Mehar stepped off the plane and stopped on the tarmac and just stood there looking at it.
Mouth open. Eyes wide. Taking in the silence and the space and the colors like a woman who had spent her whole life in cities and concrete and noise and was seeing something ancient and quiet for the first time.
“Quest,” she said. “It’s even more beautiful than the pictures show.”
“Yeah, that’s Sedona for you.”
A car was waiting for us at the strip. A short drive up a winding road through red rock canyons and we pulled up to the compound I’d rented for the week.
It sat on a ridge overlooking the valley, a modern adobe structure with floor-to-ceiling windows and a wraparound deck and a pool that looked like it was hanging off the edge of the cliff.
The interior was warm, wood and stone and clean lines with a fireplace big enough to stand in and a master bedroom with a glass wall facing west so you could watch the sunset from the bed.
Mehar walked through the house touching everything.
The countertops, the furniture, the plants on the windowsill.
She stepped onto the deck and looked out at the red rocks and the valley below and the sun dropping behind the mountains and she turned to me with tears in her eyes that she wasn’t trying to hide.
“Nobody’s ever done anything like this for me,” she said.
“Get used to it.”
I pulled her against my chest and held her on that deck while the sun went down and the desert turned gold and then orange and then deep red and then dark.
The stars came out one by one and then all at once like somebody had thrown diamonds across black velvet and the silence was so complete I could hear her heartbeat against my chest.
Tomorrow I was going to ask this woman to marry me. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of the answer. I already knew.