“That’s what I’ve always wanted to build. Everything else was just getting there.”
“Then we’ll build it together.”
I looked at her and she looked at me and something passed between us at thirty-five thousand feet that was bigger than a conversation about real estate. It was a woman telling a man that his dream was safe with her. That she wasn’t just riding along. She was co-piloting. In every sense.
“Okay,” I said. “Together.”
We flew in comfortable silence for a while after that. She put her head back and closed her eyes and I thought she might fall asleep but about twenty minutes later I felt her hand on my thigh. I glanced over. Her eyes were open. That look on her face. I knew that look.
“Mehar.”
“Hmm?”
“I’m flying an aircraft.”
“I know. You’re very good at it.” Her hand moved higher. “You said autopilot was on.”
“Autopilot assists. It doesn’t replace the pilot. I still need to monitor instruments and maintain situational awareness.”
“Then maintain it.” She unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned across the center console and her fingers worked my belt open and I should’ve stopped her because we were at thirty-five thousand feet in a Cessna and there are about a hundred reasons why this is a terrible idea. But her hand wrapped around my dick and every single one of those reasons left my brain like they had somewhere better to be.
“Peach, I need to focus.”
“Then focus.” She lowered her mouth onto me and my hands tightened on the yoke and I stared at the horizon line with an intensity I usually reserved for business negotiations and life-threatening situations. This qualified as both.
I’m going to be honest. I almost died. Not from the flying. The flying was fine. The instruments were steady, the autopilot was holding altitude, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky for twohundred miles. I almost died because Mehar Ali had the mouth of an angel and the technique of a demon and she was using both at thirty-five thousand feet while I tried to maintain a heading of two-four-zero and not crash a twenty-million-dollar aircraft into a mountain.
She took her time. Slow and deep, her tongue doing things that should’ve been classified as federal aviation violations. I kept one hand on the yoke and put the other on the back of her head because I needed to hold onto something or I was going to lose my mind. My jaw was locked, my breathing was ragged, and every time she went deeper I had to remind myself that the altimeter was more important than the orgasm building at the base of my spine.
I came with my eyes open and my hand on the yoke and my foot steady on the rudder pedals. Which might be the most disciplined thing I’ve ever done in my life. She sat up and wiped her mouth and looked at me with that satisfied expression that told me she knew exactly what she’d just put me through and enjoyed every second of it.
“How’s your situational awareness?” she asked.
“Compromised.”
“Good.” She buckled her seatbelt and put her head back and closed her eyes and was asleep within five minutes. This woman. I swear to God.
We landed at a private strip outside Sedona about four hours after takeoff. The sun was starting to drop and the sky was doing things I’d never seen the DC sky do. Orange and red and purple bleeding into each other like somebody had knocked over a paint palette across the horizon. The red rocks were everywhere, massive formations jutting up from the desert floor, glowing in the late afternoon light like they were lit from the inside.
Mehar stepped off the plane and stopped on the tarmac and just stood there looking at it. Mouth open. Eyes wide. Taking inthe silence and the space and the colors like a woman who had spent her whole life in cities and concrete and noise and was seeing something ancient and quiet for the first time.
“Quest,” she said. “It’s even more beautiful than the pictures show.”
“Yeah, that’s Sedona for you.”
A car was waiting for us at the strip. A short drive up a winding road through red rock canyons and we pulled up to the compound I’d rented for the week. It sat on a ridge overlooking the valley, a modern adobe structure with floor-to-ceiling windows and a wraparound deck and a pool that looked like it was hanging off the edge of the cliff. The interior was warm, wood and stone and clean lines with a fireplace big enough to stand in and a master bedroom with a glass wall facing west so you could watch the sunset from the bed.
Mehar walked through the house touching everything. The countertops, the furniture, the plants on the windowsill. She stepped onto the deck and looked out at the red rocks and the valley below and the sun dropping behind the mountains and she turned to me with tears in her eyes that she wasn’t trying to hide.
“Nobody’s ever done anything like this for me,” she said.
“Get used to it.”
I pulled her against my chest and held her on that deck while the sun went down and the desert turned gold and then orange and then deep red and then dark. The stars came out one by one and then all at once like somebody had thrown diamonds across black velvet and the silence was so complete I could hear her heartbeat against my chest.
Tomorrow I was going to ask this woman to marry me. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of the answer. I already knew.
42
