Page 15 of Forced Proximity
But that was how I’d spent the majority of my time waiting for her to show at the airport—after I’d confirmed that she was flying out tonight. I knew everything about her life that I could find on the internet.
I’d even hacked into the DMV and gotten her driving records and her car details.
Now all I had to do was get her to talk to me.
Which felt like pulling teeth.
Until the turbulence happened.
The flight attendant—a man that I was fully prepared to get fired the moment I got home—was on his way to drop the last of the trays into the rolling cart when the entire plane dropped what felt like fifty feet.
My belly was somewhere up near my ears when everyone’s leftover drinks went flying.
I somehow managed to catch both mine and my seatmate’s glasses to keep us from wearing them, but just barely.
“Holy crap!” Dru cried out.
The rest of the passengers had very similar reactions, but it was the flight attendant wearing leftover Greek salad and marinara that had my lips tipping up.
He peeled himself off the floor just as the seat belt sign went on and the pilot came over the speaker.
“Flight attendants, take your seats,” the pilot ordered. “Passengers, prepare for a bumpy ride. We hit a storm cell.”
And he wasn’t kidding.
The flight attendants worked frantically to get everything secured. Meanwhile, the now-empty glasses started to roll around the floor at our feet. A Coke can more than half full rolled around, spilling its contents as the plane started to pitch left and right.
I bent down just in time to lift Dru’s feet off the ground before the Coke spilled all over her bare toes.
“Oh,” she breathed, eyes wide. “Thanks.”
She sounded breathless.
And freaked out.
I finished what was left of my Coke, then placed it in the seat beside me before I offered her her Dr Pepper back.
She downed it, chugging it like a beer, and followed suit.
“That rude one is wearing my leftover dinner,” she whispered.
“Deserves it,” I muttered. “Been rude all flight. It’s not my fault he decided to be rude to you. Karma has a way of making it full circle.”
She nodded. “Funny how that works. I have a sister-in-law that’s experiencing it now.”
“What do you mean?”
She started rambling, letting all of her words just tumble out of her mouth at a million miles an hour.
It was good to know she got chatty when she got scared.
“My sister-in-law cheated on my brother,” she whispered. “He caught them together and he hurt the guy that she was cheating with so bad that he’s been in a coma for five years. The man’s father was a preacher at our local church, and Romeo was deemed a pariah. My sister-in-law lost the baby she was carrying. But that would’ve happened anyway. She had an ectopic pregnancy and it exploded her fallopian tube. They weren’t able to save anything, and she had a complete hysterectomy. She had a mountain of medical bills, and then she couldn’t access the money she stole from my brother to pay off those medical bills. No one knows how to access it, actually. Romeo’s asked me to figure it out, but I have no clue where to start. You know any hackers?”
If she only knew.
“I tried finding it for a while.” Her eyes turned to me. “But I have no clue about anything computer-related. I can barely sign into my computer at work. They make me change my password too much, and I can never remember it.”
I loved the way she rambled.
