The Prophet Motive (37 page)

My mouth dropped open, as you might imagine. I gasped, I gawked, I blinked hard, I shook my head. Then I found I couldn’t take my eyes off her bushy triangle of mocha brown pubic hair.

Finally, I did. I could see she was smiling—though nervously, clearly nervously—as she delivered a soft drink to the big-haired lady.

I thought,
I’ve undressed women with my eyes before, but this is ridiculous
!

“Hey, Rob,” I said in a half-whisper. “You see that?”

He glanced up from a computer magazine and half-whispered back. “See what?” I jerked my head at the flight attendant just as she approached the silver-haired gentleman. Rob studied her, then stared back at me. “So?” He shrugged. “What about her?”

“She’s a bit underdressed, don’t you think?”

“Huh? In that ugly uniform?”

I whipped my head around for another look at the flight attendant. Less than two yards ahead of me, she was leaning across the gentleman with the silver hair, dropping off a Bloody Mary with a celery stalk in it. My head whipped back to Rob.

“Uniform? What uniform? She’s bare-ass naked.”

He cracked another huge, Seabiscuit smile. “Is this . . . some kind of joke?”

“No!” I whisper-screamed. “Of course not!”

My eyes rushed around the cabin. The big-haired lady had stopped clattering away on her keyboard, and she was calling for the naked flight attendant.

“Miss! Over here, Sugar! Clumsy me had a little accident with the Diet Coke. Could you get me cleaned up?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said the flight attendant, who scurried her milky white bottom back inside the galley.

I addressed the entire cabin in my full voice. In fact, I nearly shouted. “Will somebody please tell me why our flight attendant is naked?”

Rob stared open-mouthed at me. So did the big-haired lady. Then the face of the silver-haired man popped into view beside the seat in front of me. His wrinkled skin was chalky and saggy and sunspot peppered.

“There’s nothing unusual about our flight attendant,” he said with the certainty of a college professor. “There’s nothing strange going on here, Sir. Nothing at all.”

He gave a crisp and confident nod—as if he’d just given me the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem—and withdrew.

When the flight attendant appeared again she was still nude, still balancing the undelivered drinks on her tray. With a small cloth in her free hand, she mopped up the big-haired lady’s mess, then moved on to Rob, who received a bottle of Corona beer with a lime quarter wedged in the mouth and a napkin and bar glass.

Then she approached me. I noted her nervous smile, her sharp tan lines, her B-cup breasts, and her pinkish nipples, small and erect.
She’s cold
, I thought.
The cabin temperature feels about sixty-eight degrees, tops
.

A short-lived blast of air turbulence unsteadied her balance. Her breasts jiggled. For the first time, her nudity excited a stir in me. She leaned over me with her serving tray. Her pubic hair loomed near enough to my head to share its musty scent and fire off invisible pheromones deep into the primitive part of my brain. It wasn’t my seat that I sprung into the upright position.

She dropped a napkin down on the mahogany table by my armchair, followed by my glass of scotch on the rocks.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” I asked her, a little surprised by the deepness of my own voice.

“What?” she said.

I took a quick look around the cabin and found I doubted my own sanity. “Twist of lemon,” I said.