Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Warner
High Life
Clover Cay could be a postcard today. If postcards came drenched in gray-blue dye, were shaken like a Polaroid picture, and replayed on a thirty-minute loop.
I’ve watched the estate shrouded in crystal clear-ish turquoise waters drift past my window three times now, teasing, heightening the mindgasms between Whitney and me, while Gibson keeps trying to land on my sliver of a runway. In the rain.
Apparently, this trip’s determined to sweep us into chaos any way it can.
Because—of course—the first time I try for a no-strings connection, it ends in a failed fuckboy attempt with a flight attendant and me stuck on my private plane with a gorgeous, emotionally mature woman I’m deeply attracted to.
Yup, that’s me.
Should I be taking this personally?
Rain streaks across the windows like drunken exclamation points, loud, sharp, slanted strokes slapping their “light winter” frustration straight onto the glass.
“Uh, it’s your captain again…” Gibson’s voice crackles over the PA, shaky and unsure. Then again, that could be the plane, jostling in the turbulent, bruised sky. “I should have you down shortly. We’re just about out of options here…”
Whitney and I snap upright in our seats at the exact same time, our eyes theatrically connecting in midair.
“Out of options?” she croaks out.
Gibson’s attempted the aviation equivalent of turning the pumps on and off, retracting and extending the gears, hoping it locked correctly.
Fail. Manually releasing the hydraulic pump?
Also failed. Opening the gear door to allow the air pressure and gravity to do its thing?
Wishful thinking. Worst yet, he attempted to “jolt” the plane—also known as banking the entire aircraft to shake the gears loose while simultaneously traumatizing the passengers.
Well, one out two was triumphantly successful.
Whitney now looks genuinely afraid for her life, and once again, I’m contemplating abandoning the wager and joining the Mile-High Club while there are still miles between us and Clover Cay’s Bahamian waters.
“Warner?” She shoots me a do something glare like this is an action-adventure movie and I’m the hero with a few thousand flight hours who’s supposed to land this plane.
Unfortunately, no such luck.
Restless, I twist around in my seat, craning my neck toward the cockpit like my tech CEO superpowers will somehow command the janky landing gear to drop, or else.
But the coast is clear.
Too clear.
The cockpit door’s closed. And Mya? The flirty, bubbly, borrowed flight attendant, who was just talking Whitney’s ear off about the Luxe Ladies premiere two weeks out and her gallery, so curious about what pieces or collections she’d be exhibiting next, despite Whitney’s five-hundred-piece puzzle on her tray table and some Sandra Bullock paused on her iPad?
The one who should’ve been studying the flight manual to learn a little something about airborne emergency safety measures instead of batting her eyelashes at me?
Yeah, she’s in her jump seat, freaking out too.
So it’s just us.
A strong wind gust outside whistles through the vents.
“No, really. What does he mean, Warner?” Whitney’s voice rushes out, streaked with panic. “Like, shouldn’t the face masks be dropping now? Are these leather seats prepared to be flotation devices? Why aren’t the lights directing us to the nearest exit?”
I whip around with steely determination coursing through my limbs just as the PA crackles to life again.
“Well, folks… Looks like we’re in a bit of a pickle. I’m going to have to declare an emergency, so I’ll be dumping fuel to reduce our weight, before we go for a belly landing. But…” Oh, just casually sliding on into home, are we? Again, he deeply sighs. “Flight attendant, prepare for landing.”
And then, it’s just us again.
The Rorschach remnants of my life flash in explosive black-and-blue montages across my mind.
My parents and Greer, living in a perpetual state of grief.
Dr. Bellamy burning a Peach Paradise candle for me.
The Echelon Tech building boarded up. And my best friend?
All broken up and regretting urging me into this charade with Whitney.
It’s freaking heartbreaking.
My attention flickers to her eyes, welling with tears as she glances at me. And yet the only thing I can think about is how utterly tragic it’d be to die without ever knowing how it feels to kiss this woman.
“Whitney?”
Her name, breathless on my tongue, stills me to my core.
She’s looking at me with an intense, dire expression, and I’m struck with an incapacitating fear.
“Yeah?” Her voice comes out shaky, low.
With seatbelts cutting off circulation to our lower halves, white-knuckled grips, and bright yellow oxygen masks now dangling between us, I lean in.
So does she. Almost like curiosity’s gotten the best of her, because what could I possibly say in this moment?
What tender last words could I come up with?
I’m so sorry this is the way it ends? Sorry about your life?
Or I know I said two days, but actually, I meant eternal damnation?
No, no, maybe only in proximity to impending doom am I ready to tell her that she’s exactly who I’d have chosen for my second chance at once-in-a-lifetime love.
Figures.
Only, it doesn’t.
Because I don’t say anything.
The inches between us dissolve. And then we touch.
With only our lips. Brushing lightly, at first. But the spark catches quickly, sudden and fierce, like tinder scraping on the surface, and I can’t hold back.
Her mouth is warm and eager, so intense, setting off a fuse in me that surges over my skin, singeing every vein and vessel, until I’m overheating from the inside out.
She moans softly, her full, pillowy lips against my low growls as we fall into hungry, open-mouthed kisses, so desperately insatiable, like we can’t get enough.
The way she’s so breathlessly devouring me, tongue searching, tasting, exploring… My body’s distress-signaling.
Mayday, mayday. Brace for impact!
She steals my air, leaving me spent and lit up from the inside with something dangerously close to… feelings.
How hard can two days on this island be?
Apparently, the universe took that as a challenge. Twenty-four hours later, Whitney and I are somehow alive on Clover Cay to tell the tale—just, apparently, not to each other.
Somewhere between lodging my tongue in Whitney’s throat and the great belly landing, my fight-or-flight instincts sent me into hiding. Because, really, what’s there to say to explain my end-of-the-line thought process? I thought I was dying, sorry?
Absolutely not.
As it stands, my plan, day one of the wager, all of it, has basically gone to hell in a handbasket. She stayed holed up in her first-floor guest room through lunch and dinner yesterday, and I’ve been avoiding that entire wing of the estate.
Which is why it’s semi-bright and early Saturday morning that I’m hiding on the second floor of the library, pacing and, once again, trying to figure out how to deal with the consequences of my unhinged actions to get this trip back on track.
Or, at least, that’s what I was trying to work out when my estate manager, Nacheline, found me near the collector’s editions shelves, and proceeded to pry the whole story out of me.
Fine. She asked once, and instead of sparing her the info dump and calling the tele-therapist I pay for sound advice—because I’m too embarrassed to admit I started this stupid hit-it-and-quit-it wager with Cord—I word-vomited everything.
So, yeah… here I am.
“Lord, and then what happened?” She’s all ears and hush-hush whispers, peeking into the hallway, taking her lookout duties seriously.
So far, I’ve brought Nacheline up to speed on the Artery’s interest in Sherry’s collection, the Restroom Rendezvous—which, unsurprisingly, the way clickbait journalism works these days, she already knew about—all the way up until the moment the captain announced we’d be sliding into home, and Whitney and I were knocking on death’s door.
And she’s regaled me with three childhood stories, shared two memes, and interrupted me a minimum twenty times.
We’re getting there, though.
I really need more guy friends to unpack my life disasters without judgment.
But for now, she’ll have to do, since she’s the only person around that I didn’t accidentally kiss in a near-death panic.
What the hell were you thinking, Warner?
“Honestly, I thought that was it.” I clasp my fingers behind my head, looking at her, even though my mind’s back on that terrifying flight. When did my life turn into a knockoff Indiana Jones movie? “You know how people always talk about an out-of-body experience? It was kind of like that, only…”
I breathe in a lungful of air.
Everything’s still so vivid. The panic. The fear, in slow motion, prickling over my ice-cold skin. That strange calm I felt, grappling with my demise.
I actually accepted my fate.
And Whitney was sitting there, tear-streaked and beautiful as ever, looking like she needed me to tell her everything would be okay. How could I not kiss her?
Just once.
“Damn, I messed that shit up,” I mutter.
“Oh my goodness. You were having a panic attack.” The bright, rhythmic lilt of Nacheline’s Haitian accent thickens the way it always does when she’s excited. “I read about a woman. She had a heart attack and swore she spoke to her mother who’d passed years before.”
Oh.
I narrow my gaze slightly. “Uh… this was a little different.”
That’s not at all what this was.
Looking at Whitney, in that moment, it felt like a huge existential slap, waking me up.
Being with this woman, feeling emotions I haven’t felt since even before Sherry passed—why would I jeopardize a chance to be close to this woman for something as insignificant as meaningless sex and Legends tickets? For bragging rights?
“Nacheline, let me keep going,” I say, needing to get this out.