Truth or Dare (Jack and Finn Harries fanfiction)

Chapter 65 Part 2

"There is absolutely no chance you're getting on that flight."

The thick-waisted air hostess stated matter-of-factly. And maybe it was my imagination or sheer desperation that I heard a faint chance in her voice.

A chance that we were going to get on that flight leaving in twenty minutes. No matter what she said.

I moved closer over her desk, leaning in further to get close to her chubby poised face, pale with thick make up.

"Ms. Jones," I read from her name tag in a light and spirited tone.

"How long have you been working at London Airlines?" I asked with curiosity. In my voice I tried to disguise my desperation with fake interest in the long story that I was provoking from her.

"It's my thirty-first year in August," she boasted proudly.

"It was the year 1983 and you know when I joined I was a young girl, beautiful with a figure that caught many of the older pilots in a trance," Ms. Jones divulged her secrets quietly and a cheeky eyebrows pricked at me.

"I'm sure you did, Ms. Jones!" I exclaimed in a light happy shrill.

She laughed a little, and looked up into the sky and I saw happy memories flash across her eyes as they glazed.

I left her in a happy daze for a while and then coughed politely, waking her from her reminiscing.

"Ms. Jones, you have thirty-one years of first hand experience under your belt, so when you say there is no chance of us getting on that flight, I completely believe you."

"But there isn't a chance of you looking over those files again and seeing if there isn't any possibilities overlooked?"

She looked down at her screen and frowned for a long moment. Finn's impatient feet began to lightly tap out the seconds passing. Jack began to fiddle with the pages of his passport.

I continued to stare forward at Ms. Jones.

"I'm really not supposed to do this." She confided in a hushed tone as she began to click buttons and stab her thick fingers at letters on her keyboard.

I smiled largely and so did Jack, and I didn't look over to him but I hoped Finn was smiling to, because we were not only going to LA, but we were going to be okay.

We were escaping.

"Your tickets, Darling" She passed them to me and they were warm from being freshly printed and I held them tight in my cold fingers. She took our bags in her strong wide arms and placed on the conveyor belt behind her.

I was going to thank her, try to explain to her what this meant, and how important it was that we got on this flight. But she shooed us away quickly.

There was no time and I said thank you as we sprinted to the corresponding gate. I said it even though I knew she couldn't hear me.

•••

The plane was already filled with excited passengers. It seemed our tickets were the last three available and so there were two seats sitted together and then one, alone, at the end of the plane. We weren't all sitting together.

There was only a small pause of hesitation at the door of the plane before Jack took the ticket that would lead him to the lone seat.

"No," I interjected his grab, pulling the plastic-paper ticket from his hands.

"You two sit together," I smiled, a little too sadly for my liking, before moving on to the plane.

It was too soon to be sitting with Finn. The seats were too close and his arms would be resting beside mine. Too easy for me to hold. The flight would be too long. We would end up talking and maybe even liking each other again. Maybe we would share a hateful glance when a baby started to cry. Maybe he would laugh.

No, me sitting alone was the only safe option.

And as I sat in my seat, in the very back of the plane, I tried to forgot the quick glance that Finn and I had shared as I had moved down the aisle.

His eyes had made full contact, and unlike all the other blank, cold stares, his eyes had feeling.

They were fully open, with his eyebrows arched downwards to suggest... What? I tried to analyse his emotions, starving for any contact without his sharp anger.

To suggest sadness? No, I don't think so.

But maybe concern. Maybe Finn was worrying for me?

It was an eleven hour trip and I would be lying if I didn't say that every second of that flight I thought about Finn.

His tasseled hair and those lips. Soft but powerful when kissed. The way that my torso fit against his as he pulled me closer into an engrossing kiss, the kind I knew I could never forget, the kind that left you breathless and made your heart jump. The kind of kiss that I could never recover from.

I was already obsessed again. I had already fallen so deeply in love with him that I couldn't imagine being with anybody else. Down the rows toward the front of the plane I spent the hours watching his arm that was lulling over into the aisle.

•••

We hadn't really talked about what happened now.

We stood quietly and awkwardly in the departure lounge of Los Angeles Airport. It was sunny out and it was heating the interior of the glass airport. I was reminded of the feelings I had experienced waiting outside of Ibiza's airport weeks back, though it felt like a lifetime ago. I felt familiarly hot, stuffy and uncomfortable.