Quest
Mehar gripped the armrest so hard I thought she might rip it off the seat. We were still on the ground. The engine hadn’t even turned over yet.
“You good, Peach?”
“I’m fine. I’m totally fine. This plane is just smaller than I expected.”
“It’s a Cessna Citation. It seats eight people comfortably. It’s not small.”
“It’s small compared to the ground, Quest. The ground is very big and very stable and it doesn’t require fuel to keep me alive.”
I laughed and started the preflight checks. She watched me flip switches and check gauges with her eyes wide like she was trying to memorize the process in case she needed to land this thing herself. Which she wouldn’t. Because I’d been flying since I was twenty-five and I had more hours in the air than most commercial pilots.
“I need you to relax,” I said. “Put your seatbelt on and breathe. I’ve done this hundreds of times.”
“You’ve also killed people hundreds of times and that doesn’t make me feel better about your hobbies.”
“Flying is not the same as killing people.”
“Both involve someone else’s life being in your hands. I’m just saying.”
I taxied down the private strip on the estate property and lined up. “Here we go. Deep breath.”
She took a breath and held it and I pushed the throttle forward and the jet accelerated down the runway and lifted off smooth. The estate shrank below us, the trees turning into green carpet, the house getting smaller until it looked like something from a model set. Once we leveled off and the ride smoothed out, Mehar slowly released her death grip on the armrest and exhaled.
“See? We’re up. Nothing happened.”
“Yet,” she said. But her shoulders had dropped and the color was coming back to her face and after about ten minutes she was looking out the window at the clouds with something close to wonder. “Okay. It’s actually beautiful up here.”
“Told you.”
“Don’t be smug about it.”
“I’m always smug. It’s part of my charm.”
She rolled her eyes but she was smiling and that was enough for me. I set the autopilot once we hit cruising altitude and turned to her.
“So the penthouse,” I said. “You sure that’s the one?”
“Quest, it overlooks the casino and the river. The kitchen is bigger than my old apartment. The closet has its own closet. And the balcony wraps all the way around. Yes, I’m sure.”
“Then it’s ours. I’ll have Justice handle the paperwork when we get back.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. You picked it. That’s all I needed to hear.”
She looked at me and shook her head like she still couldn’t believe this was her life. I understood that because sometimes I couldn’t believe it was mine either. A year ago, I was sleeping in a hotel room avoiding two ex-girlfriends and swearing off women permanently. Now I was flying a woman to Arizona who I’d reversed a vasectomy for and was about to buy a penthouse with. Life doesn’t make sense and I’d stopped trying to force it to.
“There’s something else I want to show you when we get back,” I said. “Some land outside the city I’ve been looking at.”
“For what?”
“A development. Something I’ve been thinking about for years. I call it Freetown.” I looked at the sky ahead of us while I talked because for some reason this was harder to say than anything else I’d told her. Business plans, kill orders, I love you. All of those came easier than this. Because this was the thing I actually cared about. “I want to build a community. Black-owned, Black-built. Residential, commercial, a school, a grocery store, restaurants, a community center. A full ecosystem where Black families can own property and build wealth and not get pushed out by gentrification. Banks Reserve saved the family. The casino saved the company. Freetown saves the community. That’s the legacy.”
She was quiet for a minute. I glanced over and she was looking at me with an expression I hadn’t seen before. Not admiration exactly. Recognition. Like she was seeing a part of me I’d been keeping behind the CEO and the killer and the alpha bullshit and it was the part she’d been looking for without knowing she was looking.
“That’s what you really want to build,” she said. Not a question.
