Chapter Three
Elijah
I stared at my phone impatiently, checking its notifications and triple-checking that I had turned it off airplane mode.
I knew my service had to be working because I’d received a picture from Bonnie about sugar cookies, and my response to her about how I couldn’t wait, also letting her know that I had landed, sat delivered but not read.
Odd. Bonnie always made sure she was reachable when she knew I was landing.
She told me her anxiety couldn’t handle it.
She’d even set alarms due to the conflicting timezones.
Something wasn’t right. I clicked the call button, only to be sent straight to voicemail.
Maybe something happened to her phone. Maybe she forgot to charge it.
She did that sometimes. Especially if she was distracted by something.
I couldn’t help the grin that slid over my face as I thought about her.
Bonnie. She had knocked the wind out of me like a tornado, and I’d never been the same.
Would never be the same. She was so vastly different and perfect compared to the people I had to spend my work days with.
They always compared flights and flight log times, how many hours they could work, or how high their paychecks were.
I used to be just like them until she showed me that there was more to life.
“E? Did you get my message from earlier?” Tiffany—or Tiff, as she preferred we call her—sat down next to me in the shuttle to the hotel for the night.
Luckily, her and a few other friends I spent most of my flight hours with were on a different flight that time, so the journey was peaceful.
Unfortunately, we always ended up at the same hotels, due to contracts.
Her presence usually annoyed me, but her words had me hopeful because I hadn’t gotten a text from her, so maybe something was actually going on with my phone.
“No, I don’t think so.” I kept my focus on the passing streets.
Since I had met Bonnie, I really started distancing myself from my friends that I more so considered coworkers at best, and spent most of my time following her, mainly in her shop or with her friends.
They were so laid-back and couldn’t have given two fucks less what I did for a living.
I felt like, for once, I wasn’t competing.
“Well, check, silly!” She laughed and touched my arm, and I had to hold back my flinch.
We had slept together one time years earlier, and she never seemed to want to let me forget it.
Always a sly smile here, a remark there.
I found it better to ignore her and the others I worked with rather than make it an issue.
Flights were long, and work was work. I didn’t want to cause an issue where there didn’t need to be one.
I pulled up my messaging app and saw I had a few notifications—one in the group chat I barely checked anymore, and honestly I couldn’t remember the last time I responded to, and then, in a separate thread, I had one just from her.
She loved to message me separately when I didn’t answer, as if it were some inside joke, but I figured if I never responded, she’d eventually get the hint and stop.
I clicked on the group chat first, and it started with Justin.
Justin: LOL, dead.
I scrolled up to see that they had been making fun of me due to Bonnie, calling me a stick in the mud, mocking that my masseuse girlfriend had a tight leash on me, and alluding to the things she could do to my body being the reason I was with her.
I shook my head—always them and their nonsense.
I barely even read the messages anymore, and even if I did, it was to get rid of the notifications.
I paid attention to absolutely none of it.
Nothing they could say bothered me. I knew the truth; she was everything.
And people like them would never understand that, so why bother?
“So, your room or mine?” Tiff asked again, and I had to fight the urge to roll my eyes.
The only time I spent with my old friends anymore was for an after-flight drink.
It usually got me out of dinner without them giving me too much grief, which always made my work days even more unbearable—and they were already spent counting down the hours until I could get home.
I’d been thinking about a change of jobs for a while, maybe becoming an instructor.
Tiffany’s whining about something had me daydreaming of my girl because even the memory of her could tune anything out.
Where the fuck is Bonnie? Is it my phone?
“Could you text me again? I need to check something.” I didn’t bother to even act somewhat sorry that I was completely ignoring her. She huffed at me and narrowed her eyes at me before doing what I asked.
“You’re sitting next to me right now, asking me to text you? My room number is 213. Your room or mine tonight?”
The message popped up instantly on my phone, and I frowned, still not bothering to answer her question. I hit Bonnie’s contact again and pressed the call button, only to be once again sent to voicemail. Again and again.
“Earth to E?” She waved her hand in my face. While Tiffany was a mild irritation before, I was now wondering what would happen if she somehow fell out of the shuttle bus’ emergency exit. By accident, of course.
“Listen, I can’t get a hold of Bonnie,” I told her, my voice rising. Whether it was in panic or annoyance, I wasn’t sure, but I just continued to hit the call button again and again.
“Would you like me to try?” she asked. For a second, I thought what a terrible idea that was, but my fear that something catastrophic had happened outweighed my reason. I grabbed the phone she held in her outstretched hand and plugged in her number.
Ring… “Hello?” the voice that eased all of my anxiety said, and I was so fucking relieved that I couldn’t process why Tiffany’s phone rang through and mine didn’t.
“Bonnie? Baby? What’s going on? Why didn’t you answer my calls?” I all but shouted at her when I didn’t mean to. I was just so worried.
The click without a response was deafening.
What? What is happening?
“I need to go back to the airport. I need to get home. Now,” I hollered in Tiffany’s face as she looked at me, stunned.
“What’s going on, Elijah? You’re acting like a mad person. Didn’t she just answer?” She looked down at her nails like she was inspecting the polish.
“Yeah, but something’s not right. I don’t understand, and I need to get to her.”
“What you need to do is calm down. You can’t just go back home. You have to fly a plane. You have a job to do. I’m sure whatever this is can wait.” She nodded at me as if she was bored, as if she didn’t feel all the air being sucked out of the shuttle.
“What I need to do is get to Bonnie,” I told her. I tried to get up and past her to ask the shuttle driver to take me back to the airport now.
“Sit down, Elijah. You’re making an ass of yourself. You can’t just leave. Not in the middle of scheduled flights. Get it together.” She looked at me, a bit miffed, like she couldn’t understand why I was two seconds away from crawling out the window of a moving bus.
Rational thought started to take over, and I knew she was right. I couldn’t just leave in the middle of a flight. It didn’t work like that. And even then, I’d need to get a flight home, and that wasn’t guaranteed.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something horrible had happened—something horrible I’d done.