Page 2 of The Backtrack
And she didn’t feel well. She felt nauseous from this whole situation and the confusion that flashed across Damon’s face.
“Oh,” Damon said. “Let’s, uh, let’s bounce, then.” He ran a hand through his hair and avoided her eyes.
As Damon turned toward the driver’s side of the car, Sam instinctively reached for him. Maybe she should just do what her heart wanted and kiss him. Because what if not kissing him meant he wouldn’t want to be her friend anymore?
But then, she also knew Damon. Knew that he wanted to stay close to his family. Knew how much he loved Tybee. And knew that if she didn’t break him now, she’d do it when she left.
Sam pulled her hand back and hoped that he could forgive her. She held on to his CD so tightly she was sure it would snap in half, but it didn’t. In fact, the CD seemed to pulse in her hand with the throbbing of her heart. As she walked herself to the passenger side of the car, she tried to forget how the light in his eyes dimmed just before he’d turned away from her.
1
Sam Leto’s calling in life was flying planes. And unlike other pilots, she still got the same rush of adrenaline each time she pushed the throttles up for takeoff. What she wasn’t as good at, however, was playing the “What If?” game with her copilot, Rachel.
“Cabin crew, any updates from the galley? Specifically Row L?” Rachel asked the flight attendants via the cockpit intercom. Her voice bordered on giddy.
Sam waited, hoping Rachel’s bet was wrong. The “What If?” game, as their in-flight crew had so aptly called it, was when they paired unexpecting passengers together to see what could happen. What if they moved the chic lady in Row D next to the nerdy cute guy in first class? What if the guy with the noisy cat had a seat change to be next to the single mom and her precocious tween? The possibilities were endless, and the odds of a successful match weren’t in their favor. But still, they played the game regularly.
“After the rejected takeoff, we’ve been in a steady holding pattern,” flight attendant Javier relayed.
Rachel grimaced at Sam, but Sam raised a triumphant eyebrow. They’d taken a bet—Sam voted that the match between a tattooed short king and a woman who was Lilly Pulitzer’s number-one fan wasn’t right, and Rachel bet that they would hit it off.Rejected takeoffwas code for a rough start, and asteady holding patternmeant they hadn’t progressed.
“But...” Javier continued.
“Ohhh, there’s abut!” Rachel clapped. Sam frowned.
“Happy to report that the antics of an unaccompanied minor have brought Row L a friendly runway of opportunity for small talk. They’re sharing a snack from the meal cart and, if I’m not mistaken, have exchanged phone numbers via the complimentary cocktail napkins.”
Sam’s mouth fell open in surprise, then she tightly closed it. She hated being wrong. “Dammit,” she said.
“I told you!” Rachel victoriously fist-pumped the air. “You owe me food court fries. What if we’d swapped 3C instead of 2L? This love connection would’ve never been made.”
“Ormaybe she’ll end up in a relationship with this random person and miss out on thereallove of her life, all because you shoved them together.” Sam rolled her shoulders, which always started to hunch when they got toward the end of a long flight.
“Leto, you’re in a real mood today.” Rachel opened the flight manual and pretended to study the page with their descent route. “First you eat all four of those pains au chocolat, and now you’re getting cynical on me. More cynical than usual.”
At the mention of the pastries, Sam glanced down and her stomach cartoonishly rippled under her crisp, white button-up pilot’s shirt. She loosened her pink leather belt in a sad attempt to fix the situation, but it absolutely didn’t.
Rachel gave her the kind of grossed-out expression one might reserve for accidentally touching a wad of gum under a table.
“I’m fine,” Sam lied. She was inarguably not fine, and let out a breath as she sat back in the pilot’s seat. Out the window, just past the nose of the plane, was a perfectly blue sky with one fat gray cloud.
“I did plan to share.” The nonstop flight from Paris to Atlanta required a little sugar boost—more than the banana in her daily oatmeal could offer—so she’d gotten enough for both of them. “But I’m stressed about the trip is all.”
The next few days were going to be hard, to put it lightly, and she hadn’t been this anxious in a long time, including the recent emergency landing she’d had to make. The emergency, as it turned out, was a passenger whose support chihuahua had food poisoning from an airport tuna roll.
Rachel gave a gentle shoulder punch that brought Sam back to the present. Rachel was her very best friend these days—not only because they spent hours together trapped in a small room, but because she always knew how to yank Sam out of her own head. “Are you seriouslythisterrified of taking vacation?”
Sam blinked several times. She’d told Rachel that she was finally cashing in some overdue time off with an all-inclusive beach retreat at a luxury resort. Not a complete lie, but...a pretty big one. Because when they landed, Sam would rent a car and drive four hours to Tybee Island in Georgia. And even though Tybee wastechnicallya tourist haven—with a stretch of sandy beach, seafood shacks and quaint cottage rentals—it was also where Sam had grown up, and the trip would be anything but a vacation.
She was going back to Tybee—a place she’d worked hard to leave—because her grandma wanted to move into a senior living facility.A raisin ranch, as Grandma Pearl had jokingly called it, but Sam supposed was true. Her grandma’s memory had started to crack at the edges. The last time Pearl visited Sam in Paris, she’d forgotten the name of the airline Sam flew for, and then misplaced the word for paper towel. And while Pearl had lightly joked about the slips—I never hold grudges, because I have a bad memory—she suggested the transition to a smaller place without any prompting from Sam. Sam wasn’t completely sold on the idea of Grandma Pearl joining a retirement home, though, so she was going home to spend the week cleaning out the house and to see if Pearlreallyneeded to leave.
The other, more complicated, reason that Sam was so out of sorts was a text from Damon Rocha.
Damon, her childhood best friend whom she hadn’t seen since she left Georgia after flight school eleven years ago. The guy who knew everything about who she’d been when she lived in Tybee, and who had tried to kiss her so long ago. That almost-kiss was a moment Sam still lingered on.What if she’d kissed him?Would her life be completely different? She thought about that way too much, even though she was a grown ass woman who’d kissed plenty of people since then and could eat four pastries for breakfast if she wanted.
Though that last choice was, admittedly, the wrong one.
Fly safe.
