Caught
Penny stayed uplate that night to finish one of the more difficult editing assignments she’d taken on. Everybody thought they were writers these days.
They poured their life stories into their laptops, paid an editor, a cover artist, and a formatter, and then stuck it up on Amazon. And those who didn’t write stories were philosophers, people with deep, intense, profound messages they thought the world needed to hear.
With hopes and dreams of saving the world with their sermons, they paid people like Penny to clean it up so it could be packaged and marketed and listed with all the other books just like it in the vast marketplace of the internet.
Most never sold more than a hundred copies. Many never sold more than ten.
But people had dreams and she would do her best to help make them come true. Within reason. She wasn’t a miracle worker, after all.
She preferred suspense and coming of age. Edgy stories written in a powerful voice.
She hated the romance novels. She used to enjoy them, before… They contained too much hope for her now-jaded outlook on life.
Penny couldn’t appreciate hope. She’d hoped once and look where that had gotten her.
Looking at her screen, the memory of the afternoon’s… encounter, prevented her from accomplishing much of anything. Despite the countless times she’d pushed it aside, she couldn’t help conjuring up what had happened with Chaz…
…over and over again.
Well, not with Chaz.
They’d not done anything together– not really. In fact, he’d been very much alone and she’d been… She didn’t like to think about the truth of what she’d done.
She’d invaded his privacy. She’d… Oh, hell.
She would never look into his room again.
Ever.
Except… she wasn’t hurting anybody, was she? They’d both been doing some serious fantasizing. It surprised her that such a good looking guy had to resort to, er, taking care of himself that way.
Surely, any woman he wanted would willingly take care of his needs! He was a pilot, after all.
While Kent had been in medical school, Penny had tended bar at one of the hotels out by the airport.
She’d learned to spot pilots from a mile away. They carried themselves with a certain swagger, an arrogance, unlike other mere mortal men.
And military pilots. They were the worst.
She wondered why she hadn’t pegged Chaz as a pilot before he’d told her. It must have been his injury. It had robbed him of his normal cockiness.
But then she laughed out loud. Of course! Recalling how his fingers had dipped into the back of her shorts. And then the second time, putting his hand on her backside had been no accident!
Definitely a pilot move.
So much sexual confidence!
Her resolve to ignore the window was fading fast. It was right there! Just a few feet from her desk! No, Penny. No!
She subtracted seven commas from the last page, reformatted a paragraph, and then clicked save. It was a relief to be done with this one. It had been rough.
Closing her laptop, she stretched and glanced at the clock; 2:49 in the morning.
Over the past few months, caught up in her isolated lifestyle, time had ceased to matter. She ate when she was hungry, slept when she was tired, and did other things… well, when she wanted to.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t her vibrator beckoning her tonight.
