The Mile High Club (2 page)

You stroke him awkwardly because you’re using your wrong hand—until you twist, hoping the flight attendant will assume this is a man you’re with, a man you know and love, and that you’re just leaning against him affectionately. You slide your good hand under the blanket and grasp him, pulling him upward from the base, watching his lap, not his face, feeling the vein throb against your palm and listening to his breath deepen and hitch.

You grind your thighs together as you jack him off. When he’s close, you dart your eyes around. No one’s looking.

You pull the blanket away and drop your head. No one can see you as you take him in your mouth.

You keep your lips tightly together, forcing yourself down his shaft and up again. You keep your fingers tight around him. You stroke again, tasting the salt of him, feeling his hand twist into your hair. You rub his cockhead against the inside of your cheek and caress it with the underside of your tongue. You suck harder, panicking at the occasional wet sound your mouth makes…and then he comes. You push your face down, letting him coat the roof of your mouth and your lapping tongue.

You swallow every drop of him.

You zip him up, replace the blanket and right yourself, unable to keep from looking at him this time. He actually licks his lips.

Now you remember all the other things the two of you talked
about—what you could do in the bathroom, the reason you wore the underwire bra, and that if you lean toward 34A he can play with your ass—and the seat belt light comes on. You’re on approach to Portland. It’s over.

Neither of you says anything.

In the airport he squeezes your hand and walks away.

You wonder if his next flight includes another woman, if he does this all the time, if he flies around the country, fucking women in 34B.

You arrive back home at midday. His email is waiting for you.

 

 

 

 

 

I
should have spent my vacation yodeling across the Alps. I had ten glorious days to take in the clean mountain air, removed from everything that lay in ruin back in the States.

Instead, I went to the little
Gasthaus
in Zweibrücken where we met when I was stationed in Germany. I listened to the native banter that I couldn’t understand back then, but could now after years of marriage to a German woman. I looked deep into the room at the table where she had sat when I first saw her: long bright blonde hair framing her triangular face, vibrant blue eyes penetrating the curling billows of smoke.

The table was empty now.

I came to the
Gasthaus
from the Zweibrücken Air Force Base, which was now closed, having been decommissioned just a few years before, in 1991.

Another cold reality.

I ordered another Park Bier and listened to the beautiful song of guttural German speech before I settled in for the night at the
Erika Hotel. The room transported me back to the night we first made love; how I peeled away her clothes to reveal her voluptuous body and released the scent of expensive floral French perfume.

I drew a nice warm bath and coiled my hand tight to my cock, closed my eyes and saw Friederike’s clear peaches-and-cream skin and vibrant
V
of gold pubic hair. I lingered in the tub, stroking to the edge of orgasm, then pulling back until my tortured cock burned red. I thought how I should be someplace I’d never been, clearing my head instead of stuffing it with memories. Of course, I returned to the thoughts of Friederike. A stubborn hot torrent exploded over my stomach, defying the water that had long since gone cold.

 

“Max Travis is on this flight?” The senior flight attendant’s smile curled softly, dreamily. I’d worked with Jason before and had thought he was straight, not that it really mattered.

“Guess so.” It was a last-minute change, a copilot I’d never flown with. Max was late was all I knew.

Jason swiveled on his tiptoes and peered into the boarding bridge hopefully.

I took my seat and absorbed myself in preparations. I anticipated the familiar sensation, the mild rush of takeoff. Regardless of any problems in my life, the love of flying transported me. Despite my ten days off, or perhaps in spite of them, I needed that passion now.

I’d be back in the States soon, where I could execute my elaborate plan to win Friederike back. Deep down I was realistic, but that didn’t stop my formulating my plot with the same precision as that with which I’d charted the flight plan.

“Sorry I’m late.” The voice was smoky, feminine, with a hint of a soft English accent.

Max Travis was a tall, athletic woman. Her skin was a warm, deep tan color, and her cheeks were dotted with large freckles. Her chestnut hair was gathered into a short ponytail. Her nose hooked downward to slender nostrils which she flared as I studied her. Full pink lips curled into a friendly smile. “I had to break every bloody speed limit.”

“No problem.”

Max peered over my shoulder, then circled around to the copilot’s seat. “I’m Max.” She reached across the pedestal and I gripped her hand. Heat emanated like a steam radiator in January.

“Dane Leonard.”

“Dane? Lovely name.” She joined in the preparations with a sense of authority—rapid economical movements to catch up with me. She nodded. “Sorry about the divorce.”

“Pardon?”

“Sorry about the divorce.”

“What makes you think—”

“Tan line on your wedding finger. That was one thick band!”

Her corneas were vibrant brown with sparkles like mica in a riverbed. There was not a trace of makeup on her face. “What makes you so sure I didn’t just recently lose weight and need it resized?”

She lifted her brow.

I turned back to the instrument panel and tapped one of the displays. “Or that I lost it yodeling through the Alps?”

She smiled to reveal slightly uneven front teeth. She laughed softly.

“Or that my wife passed away?”

Her face fell serious. She angled her torso so her face was in my line of sight. “Are you telling me you didn’t recently divorce?”

“Well, no.”

After we lifted off from Munich, the sun lay low in the sky. We’d be chasing sunset all night.

“I love flying east to west in the evening.” Max stared out over the nose of the jet.

“Me, too.” I recalled how Friederike and I used to sit together to watch the sunset, and how I’d tell her that the sunset could open out below while I lingered at its edge, its descent suspended when I was traveling to the west. I recalled further how Friederike’s interest in my stories of flying faded as the years wore on.

“So, how did you know I was divorced?”

“I know that look.” Max tilted her head.

The lazy sun glowed a gentle orange, casting needle strips on organized waves that prepared their assault on the continent as we penetrated the coastline.

“She split with you.” Not a question: a declaration.

“No.”

Max leaned forward and forced her face into my line of sight. My jaw tightened. I couldn’t restrain a nervous smile.

“You split with her?”

I paused then shook my head softly. “Well, no. She split with me.”

“As you were ‘never home?’”

“What, are you a head shrink?”

“Hardly.” Max scanned the instruments.

I looked at her left hand. “Well, I don’t see a tan line on
your
finger.”

Max turned her head just enough that her left eye could catch me in its periphery. “The wounds will heal nicely if you’ll let them. They don’t all turn to scar.”

Max tried to engage me in conversation from time to time. I feigned interest and gave noncommittal grunts. I got some of what she was saying. She’d lived all over, but considered Manchester, England, to be the home of her youth. She was the daughter of a distinguished pilot in the RAF and had been flying since she was a teenager. She’d fallen for and married an American soldier—ironically, an Air Traffic Controller. She did not say how it ended, just that it had and she remained in the States, a naturalized citizen. Just like Friederike, whose face I now conjured on the windshield, leading me to a hard sigh.

“So, you’re formulating the plan to win her back.” Max looked out over the nose of the 767. Again, not a question, but a statement. It was getting irritating.

“Of course not. We signed the final papers.”

She turned her body into my line of sight the way she had each time I fed her a line. “I hope you don’t fancy yourself a poker player.”

I blurted a laugh and looked over my left shoulder, south over the Atlantic. She remained in position until I looked back in her eyes.

“No, I know better.” My right hand was resting on the yoke, though we were on autopilot. It eased toward her. I tried to stop it, really I did, but the backs of my fingers brushed down her cheek. She was soft and smooth, and warm like a fever. My cock got heavy. I pulled my hand sharply away as if she were Sister Mary Margaret about to rap my offending knuckles.

She tilted her head curiously, then leaned back in her seat. “You have nice hands.”

Sunsets vary from place to place, time to time. They are a by-product of humidity, altitude and—well, to get clinical might take the mystery and magic out of sunsets. But there are those
who say that man’s flying has taken the magic out of watching birds. Not true. It is the magic of flying that yields some of the most stunning sunsets. Through the malleable terrain seven miles above sea level, strips of clouds carpeted and danced with the pulsing glow of this lingering sunset.

There wasn’t a trace of turbulence; it was as calm a flight as I’d ever taken—physically.

After the long, pensive silence, she rested her hand on the pedestal between us, first pretending that there was a purpose to where she had placed it. We both knew there wasn’t. Still I hesitated, until she rolled her palm upward.

I laced my fingers in hers.

I hadn’t gotten turned on from holding hands since Leann Dormand in eighth grade. And as powerful as that was, it didn’t compare to what I felt with Max now. I had a hard-on that reverberated deep into my body. I’d never felt a need quite like it, even after long separations from Friederike in our best days when I was in the Air Force.

Max gripped tight and swallowed hard as she took me in from her peripheral vision. She held her breath when I squeezed. Her breathing became audible over the din. She turned her torso quickly over the pedestal as if it were an ambush.

It worked.

I propelled toward her despite my better judgment, like reverse thrust, hard brakes on a short runway and our teeth clicked. Her breath, tinted with ginger and orange pekoe tea, breezed into my mouth and spiced my coffee. My tongue entered her, and hers retreated coyly. The sharp points dodged and parried like fencers’ foils. I grasped her strong neck with my left hand and pulled her tighter. Her clean soapy scent released with hints of her sweat. Our heads rotated in perfect time, side to side, as if we could somehow deepen the kiss like driving
a screw into wood. We popped softly as my mouth left shiny prints around her lips.

“I—uh—sorry.” I turned toward the instruments as if something needed attention. Something did need attention: if we were to continue and get caught, it would be an immediate dismissal.

She wiped the beads of sweat from her brow with the back of her thumb and looked away.

The autopilot controls seemed to wink at me. “Um—I was a good pilot in the Air Force.”

“I believe that.” Again her eye turned just enough that her dark pupil formed a tight ellipse. I realized how exceptional her peripheral vision was. The way she looked at me was extraordinarily powerful. It felt like an eye-to-eye stare from a foot away.

My hard-on had started to soften, but now it came back with a vengeance. I fumbled for words to explain. “I mean—not a great pilot. But the great ones sometimes said they’d want me on their wing in a pinch, because I was smart and reliable. They’d trust me to remain cool and make the right moves.”

“Maybe you were great, and you underestimate yourself.” Max smiled softly.

“No, I’m a realist. I know what I am. It’s what makes me a good airline pilot.”

“I bet you’re a great airline pilot.”

I wasn’t feeling like one. I understood risks and knew how to minimize them. I calculated approaches with geometric precision. Max turned her face toward me again. Again I rubbed my fingers along her cheek. I allowed my thumb to trace her lower lip. She closed her eyes. The quiver in her breath pulsed the tip of my thumb.