Layover

Layover

Megan Hart

www.spice-books.co.uk

DELAYED.

DELAYED.

DELAYED.

“Come on,” Julia Radman murmured as she scanned the hard-to-read rows of flights. “Don’t be—”

CANCELED.

Of course.

With a sigh, Julia shrugged the strap of her leather bag higher on her shoulder and looked at the line of people queuing in front of the customer-service desk. None of them looked any happier than she did. Julia glanced at her watch, then at the line, and finally outside the terminal windows to the late-afternoon sun shining as golden as honey. The weather in Texas might be hot and dry, but apparently the entire East Coast was being slammed by an ice storm. Newark, JFK, Philadelphia—nobody was getting in or out.

She might as well sit down. She wasn’t going anywhere, not for a while, and standing in line wasn’t going to make the time pass any faster. She settled into one of the curved plastic chairs close enough to the desk so she could see what was going on and pulled out her iPhone to let her fingers dance over the keys. She pulled up Hobby Airport’s Web site, but there wasn’t anything there she didn’t already know. They had a nice slideshow of planes landing and taking off, but after those three minutes of her life had gone by, she had nothing to do but check the weather. Fifteen minutes later the line hadn’t moved much at all, and the rest of the plastic seats had filled with disgruntled and grumbling passengers.

“You too, huh?”

The seat next to her had been empty for a few minutes, but now a heavyset man in a long overcoat had taken it. She’d already moved over as far as she could, and he huffed a little as, he squirmed into the space between Julia and the woman on his other side.

“Where you headed?” the man continued as though she’d answered.

“Philadelphia.”

“Newark,” he told her. “Got my wife waiting for me. Grandkids, too, prolly.”

“That’s nice,” Julia said. The only thing waiting for her would be a pile of mail, a cold apartment and a goldfish named Larry.

The man sighed heavily. “I only got a coupla more years before I can retire. Let someone else take over, ya know? I’m tired of all this traveling.”

“Especially when it’s like this.” Julia nodded sympathetically.

She loved traveling, actually. Business or pleasure, she spent hours planning her trips to take advantage of local sights. She wasn’t going to end up like her parents, who always talked about the vacations they wanted to take but who’d never gone farther than Niagara Falls—the American side! The weather was making this trip inconvenient, but she wasn’t going to swear off traveling because of it.

The line had inched forward, people peeling away from it with angry faces. The ticket clerks looked harried, tight-lipped smiles giving the minimum of polite, forced cheer. Julia didn’t envy them their jobs at the moment.

“You been up there yet?” The man jerked his double chin toward the desk.

“No. You?”

“Yeah. Don’t look good, ya know? They told me I could sit and wait or I could take a flight out tomorrow. They’ll put me up in the airport hotel. Hilton, they said. But I tole ‘em, I wanna get home, ya know?”

Julia shifted in her seat to look at him. “You’re going to wait?”

He nodded. “See if Newark opens up. They say I got a coupla hours to wait. Might as well, ya know?” His hearty chuckle sounded forced and his red-rimmed eyes held no hint of humor.

Julia looked at the line and decided it was still too long to wait. “If they offer me a free night at the Hilton, I’ll take it.”

“You don’t got nobody waiting for you at home?” The man frowned. “Pretty girl like you? That’s a shame.”

Julia looked down at her hands, folded loosely in her lap. “Thanks.”

There didn’t seem to be much else to say to that. He was only trying to be nice, and she didn’t really want to get into her personal life with a stranger. How she was single by choice, not for lack of offers; how she’d decided it was better to be alone than settle for something that didn’t make her happy.

“My Maggie, now, if I’m away from her for more than a few days, I miss her something awful. And I been away for a week this time. We got the grandkids coming to stay with us over Christmas break on account our daughter and her husband are going to Mexico. You ever been to Mexico?”

“Yes. It’s nice.”

“Nice, huh?” Her newfound friend looked dubious. “I can’t even eat Mexican food. Messes with my stomach. But I can’t wait to see the kids, ya know? They been there two days awready.”

“I’m sure they’ll get you home as soon as they can,” Julia assured him.

He didn’t look convinced. “Yeah. I hope so. Well, I’m going to head over to get something to eat, I guess. You need anything?”

“No, thanks. I’m going to wait here for the line to get smaller and see what I can do about getting out of here.”

He nodded and heaved his bulk off the chair. “You have a safe flight, then. Hope you get home okay.”

Even if I don’t have someone waiting for me, Julia thought as she smiled and waved goodbye. At least he hadn’t gone on and on about it, or offered her dating advice, the way the elderly woman sitting beside her on the flight out had. Or tried to fix her up with a nephew, cousin, grandson or brother-in-law. She’d had all that, too.

What had Jane Austen said about a man of a certain age and position needing a wife? Well, Julia was of a certain age, thirty-two, and of a certain position, VP for Customer Relations at the biggest health-insurance provider in Pennsylvania, and while she sometimes thought she wouldn’t mind having a wife if that meant there would be someone to cook and clean and do her laundry, she was pretty sure she wasn’t suffering from her lack of a husband.

Boyfriends, she’d decided, were like seashells. Every once in a while you found a pretty one to put in your pocket, but most were broken, some were sharp, some had a bad smell. Her last boyfriend had been a nice guy, a sweet guy. A spineless, couldn’t-make-a-decision-to-save-his-life sort of guy. The one before that had been the opposite, a big, brawny manly man who’d delighted in treating her like a helpless, fragile doll.

She wasn’t opposed to dating or marriage. She just wasn’t going to hold her breath or put her life on hold until she found the One. Nor was she willing to put aside her standards for a quick fling, or to settle for a relationship just to have one rather than be alone, the way some of her friends had done.

The line moved forward slowly, each person seemingly needing a long, long time to get their arrangements straightened out. With one eye on the line, Julia pulled out her iPhone, doubly grateful for the distraction of the Net as she browsed her favorite gossip site and checked her e-mail, then surfed over to her account on Connex, a popular social-networking site. There she played a few moves in her online version of a popular board game and checked out the updated photos on her friends list.

The line had moved, but not much.

Idly, she skimmed through her messages from Connex. She had the usual winks and hugs from random users who’d found her profile interesting and some friend requests she deleted. She liked Connex because the blog function allowed her to keep up with real-life friends she didn’t see often, but she wasn’t there to collect “friends” the way some people were. She never friended anyone she hadn’t met in real life. She was getting ready to disconnect, when a new message arrived in her inbox. The username made her smile every time.

Onemanwreckingmachine.

His real name was Graham, and the first time she’d met him he’d been blindfolded and at her mercy.

Their companies had been merging, resulting in some new corporate policies. The week-long occupational health conference last year had been meant to strengthen relations between the corporations and bring the department heads into mutual compliance with new policies. The atmosphere had been more casual than the yearly conferences she’d attended in the past, and meeting all the new people had lent an air of excitement missing from the past years’ educational programming. Along with the traditional dry business meetings there had been a few more parties and fun events in the name of team-building.

Julia had arrived late to the conference and been ushered at once to the room they’d set aside for team-building exercises, where she took her place with the only unpartnered person. He’d been standing with one-half of the group, their eyes covered with black cloths, waiting for their partners to lead them with words through a maze created by traffic cones on the ballroom floor. Julia would never forget the way he’d turned his head at her hello, or how he’d taken her every direction without hesitation. They’d won the contest because Graham had negotiated the maze at her command without knocking over even one cone. She still had the pen engraved with the company logo.

She wouldn’t forget her first sight of his eyes, a hazy gray-blue, when he took off the blindfold. Or the sound of his name when he’d introduced himself, or the press of his palm in hers when they shook hands.

“You’re good at taking direction,” she’d said.

“You’re good at giving it,” had been his reply, and his smile had sent heat trickling all through her.

The session had continued, but if anything important happened, Julia didn’t remember it. All she thought of when she looked back to that day was Graham. She’d thought about him a lot over the past year.

Later that first day, they met in the hotel lobby at the elevator. They’d struck up a conversation on the ride up. He’d impressed her at once by referring to their transport as the Great Glass Elevator. The elevator opened into a short hall, open at either end. The rooms themselves formed a square around the lobby below. He’d gone one way, she the other, and found their rooms had been almost exactly opposite one another.

He’d waved. She’d waved back. Inside her room she’d leaned against the door and laughed to herself at how something so simple and small could feel so big so fast.

The attraction had been instant and undeniable, at least to her. Graham stood at least six-three, with long, long legs and long, long arms, and big, long-fingered hands. He alternated between well-cut suits with funky ties and casual, long-sleeved T-shirts and the type of jeans fondly known amongst Julia’s circle of girlfriends as “dirty denim.” Not that the jeans themselves weren’t clean—just that the cut and style and contents brought to mind dirty, dirty thoughts.

They’d been partnered in a trivia contest and wiped the floor with their competitors. They’d sat together at dinner. They’d talked long into the night about topics as diverse as comic-book superheroes and global warming and her love of snow, which he rarely saw in his native Texas. He had an easy sense of humor and laughed at all her jokes. They’d only known each other for five days.

A lot can happen in five days.

The after-hours events had been a bit more raucous than the daytime meetings. Casual flirtations that would never have gone further than the office seemed an entirely different animal going on away from home. Alcohol made people stupid, something Julia had determined never to be, particularly not in front of her boss’s bosses and around people with whom she had to work on a daily basis. Even with people she would never see again. Maybe especially with people she would never see again.

The conference had ended with an awards dinner on Friday night. Many of the attendees who weren’t heading out immediately for home had ended up in the hotel bar, where they drank and danced and generally let down their hair.

Julia and Graham had shared a booth with several people neither of them actually worked with. There had been drinking and music and flirtation she couldn’t ignore. His thigh had pressed hers beneath the table. She had reached to brush a nonexistent piece of lint from his collar. They hadn’t been alone but nobody else had mattered.

Last call came and with it a decision. They’d taken the Great Glass Elevator together, tension thick and sweet as honey between them, but when the doors opened and let them both out, Julia had mumbled something about it being late and turned. She’d walked away.

Would he have said yes if she had asked him to go with her back to her room? She would never know, because she hadn’t asked. She’d wanted it desperately, fiercely, the need of it a physical force that had dried her throat as it moistened her palms and dampened between her thighs—but she hadn’t asked.

Their flirtation had begun casually and grown exponentially each day, until that last night there should have been no doubt of her intentions or his. But despite the fact he had looked into her eyes and she could almost feel the heat his gaze was giving off as if it was an actual flame—despite all of that, Julia, in that last moment, had faltered. Chickened out. Because he might have said no. More frightening, he might have said yes.

And then what would she have done? Taken him to her room, used his tie to bind his hands or to cover his eyes. Ordered him to service her with his tongue until she came. Ridden him like a motherfucking pony until he screamed her name. The possibilities had been as endless as her fantasies, but they all came back to one single theme. Graham Tremaine on his knees in front of her, doing whatever she pleased.

It was what she wanted, but not what she allowed herself to take. After five days she liked him too much to risk disappointment. She hadn’t even held out a hand for him to shake, afraid that simple touch would give away the sheer force of her desire and embarrass her. She had simply wished him good-night and turned on her heel to walk away without daring to even look back. She hadn’t dared look across to see him going into his own room, either. She’d swiped her key through the lock and gone inside, closing the door tight and leaning against it again, her heart pounding as if she’d run a mile with wolves chasing her.

She’d never seen him again.

She had his business card and his company email address, but had been unable to manufacture a business-related reason to use it. A couple weeks after the conference, though, he’d friended her online at Connex. No message, just the friend request in her inbox.

She hadn’t accepted it right away. For four days she’d looked at his user picture and thought about his smile and the feeling of his hand in hers. She’d hovered her cursor over the “accept” button and pushed it aside, until finally she clicked on it. Nothing amazing had happened. Her computer didn’t catch on fire. Neither did her pussy. A few days later he sent her an e-mail and she answered, bland messages fraught with unspoken emotion—at least on her part, every word agonized over to make sure she said neither too much nor too little.

Unlike most of the users on the network, Julia was careful to keep her Connex blog bland and impersonal. She had no illusions about the anonymity of the Internet, and she didn’t fancy the idea of just anyone being privy to her particular kinks. Yet every once in a while when writing about what she’d done over the weekend, the places she’d gone and the people she’d been with, something managed to slip through. Subtle, or at least she hoped, but there for anyone who might understand it to interpret it.

Sometimes he commented on what she had to say. Sometimes he didn’t. Julia checked his page often, reading his infrequent but always dryly humorous blog entries and unashamedly looking at the photos he posted of trips and holidays. Sometimes she didn’t comment to him and sometimes she did, but eventually their semi-occasional-casual blog replies had turned into a semi-occasional-casual instant message.

And then, more than that.

They chatted online more days than they didn’t, though it was all still mostly bland and friendly and eventually, Julia began to think the heat between them had been in her imagination. It had to be, didn’t it? Because Graham, for all his following her on Twitter and forwarding her LOLcats, never said anything that could possibly be considered flirtatious.

At least until they’d talked about cake.

She’d written about diets and self-discipline and the seduction of chocolate cake. She’d been thinking about sex when she wrote it, about how it seemed she always wanted what was bad for her the way she always wanted chocolate cake rather than a piece of fruit. She wanted long nights and red flags instead of fields of flowers and poetry, and what kind of woman wanted that?

There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you want and having it, Graham had replied.

As in having my cake and eating it too?

As in a woman who knows what she wants and takes it instead of worrying about whether it’s good for her or not is sexy.

The conversation had veered away after that, but Julia had thought a lot about Graham’s words over the past few months. She’d known what she wanted for a long time, but taking it was something else entirely. She’d tried, in the past, but it was hard finding men who weren’t intimidated by a strong woman.

And now here she was in a Texas airport, her flight cancelled and an undetermined layover trapping her here, and who was the only person in the entire world she knew who lived in Texas?

Graham Tremaine.

Who was, she saw, with a jolt of anticipation, online right now.

Maybe it was the extra-large cup of coffee she’d consumed while waiting to find out if she’d make the next leg of her trip home. Maybe it was the devil-may-care attitude that seemed to have taken over many of the travelers whose flights were being canceled due to the horrible weather back East and were looking at spending the night camped out on the airport floor. Or maybe it was something as simple as the long, lonely passage of time and the anonymity of the Internet that made it possible for her to take the step she’d been unable to make when faced with it in person.

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