The Island Ch. 01

It was a typical international airport; lots of stores, lots of people, lots of noise, and nowhere near enough seating. I looked up to the information board, scanning down to find my flight number and noting gratefully that it was due to arrive on schedule. I took exactly three steps forward before something hard hit me square in the forehead.

I looked down as the offending object clattered around my feet. A plastic elephant staring back up at you is not the sort of thing that will ever sit well with the kind of day I was having. I looked to my right to glare playfully at the offending, giggling little boy, maybe four years old, and his mortified-looking mother. I looked back down at the elephant... The elephant had rolled to the side to stare at some random spot on the far wall.

"Dammit, Jonny, I told you no throwing. Do I need to put him in the bag until we get there?" the mother whispered, her voice almost hissing with embarrassment before she turned to me. "I am SO sorry! I don't know why he throws it so much."

I smiled at her, giving her a little bit of a wink before bending over and retrieving the plastic toy, stepping over to little Jonny, and stooping down to eye level with him. "Your friend is not very good at flying. He crashed into my head!"

Jonny giggled

"Look, right there!" I said, making an exaggerated gesture of pulling my hair out of the way and showing him my head. "I think it's broken. Is it bleeding?"

Jonny giggled again and shook his head.

"Are you sure? It feels wet."

Jonny kept giggling and nodded more energetically than any nod deserved.

"That means.... That means your elephant LICKED ME!! Ewwwwwwwww, that's gross!" even the mother stifled a giggle at that one.

"No, he didn't." Little Jonny drawled between fits of laughter.

"Then why is my head wet?"

"I don't knowwww"

"Hmmmm.... So what is your flying Elephant's name."

"Ellie." he giggled

"Ellie the Elephant, that's a good name. Any relation to Nellie?"

"Huh?"

"Never mind. I don't think Ellie is very good at flying. Shall we listen to your mom and keep her nice and safe and let the pilots do the flying instead? It might stop her licking people's heads."

Jonny nodded with a grin, taking back the beloved toy as I handed it to him. His mother smiled warmly and appreciatively at me as I flashed her another smile in return. She mouthed the words "thank you" to me before turning her attention back to her son. I stood back up, decided that the main lounge was far too dangerous, and headed back to the bar.

Look! I am a newly single guy, in my mid-thirties, traveling alone. I planned on spending a lot of time in bars: Bars, pools, nudist beaches... Hell, if I could find a pool bar at a nudist beach, I might be at serious risk of spontaneous combustion!

Having spent most of my working life waiting for something or another to be delivered to the work site, or waiting for some form of concrete or cement to set, waiting was something I was very familiar with, and so the next ninety minutes or so passed reasonably uneventfully, if not quickly. But soon enough, the overly friendly voice warbled through the tannoy system to announce that my flight had started boarding. I grabbed my bag, paid my bar tab, nodded to the thoroughly unimpressed looking bar-boy, and headed to my gate.

A short while later, I was handing my ticket to the pretty stewardess with a little too much make-up than could be considered healthy and was directed to my seat on the surprisingly empty flight. This was technically the red eye. It may have been scheduled to depart at eight, but with a fourteen-hour flying time over the pacific, it was not the most desirable of flight options. That didn't make a huge amount of sense to me, I could hope to sleep for more than half of it, which made it ideal. Other people obviously didn't share my logic, though, because I was the only person sitting in my bank of three seats.

I always liked the window seat too.

With my bag stowed in one of the overhead compartments, I made myself comfortable, or at least as comfortable as it was possible to get on a plane, and watched the last of the passengers boarding. A short time later, the safety briefing started. I know it's a cliche on flights, and lots of people fly so often that they don't pay much attention to them. However, I hadn't flown in years, so I took note of everything being said. It didn't hurt that the stewardess giving out the briefing was fucking hot! The brunette who had welcomed me on board was somewhere behind me, further into the aircraft. She had been short, stacked, and unbearably cute looking. She looked like a girl who would giggle a lot. The one in front of me was taller, a little less busty, but had a mane of fiery red hair, flawless pale skin, and a smattering of freckles dusting her cheeks.

A small part of me felt bad for looking, still in that "spoken for and shouldn't be gawking" mentality. But a much larger part of me slapped that smaller part and reminded it - and me - that we were now young (ish), free and single, and could look as much as we damn well like, at least until it started becoming creepy.

My phone buzzed in my pocket as I watched her. I ignored it.

The stewardess must have heard it because her eyes flicked to me with a smile as she continued with a very apt part of the briefing. "Cell phones are allowed on this flight, and access to the plane's very own wifi system can be purchased from the duty-free service. All phones, however, must be turned off or put into flight mode during take-off and landing. Announcements will be made by the cabin crew to let you know when cell phones are safe to be used."

My phone buzzed again... I kept ignoring it.

The stewardess's grin widened as I cringed at the almost continuous series of buzzes coming from my jeans pocket, but she continued on with the safety briefing like the professional she was, seemingly grateful that I was still paying attention rather than ignoring her like so many others often did. She stepped forward and leaned over the back of the seats in front of me after she had finished.

"It's okay, sweetie," She smiled beautifully. "We have about twenty minutes before we start to taxi. I'll let you know when you have to turn it off."

"That would be great, thank you..." I paused for her name.

"Hayley," She smiled, holding my eye.

"Thank you, Hayley," I replied, holding hers with as much confidence as I could muster.

She winked as she straightened herself up. "I'll be back to check on you in a bit, Mister Popular," she called over her shoulder to me as she sauntered off up the aisle towards the rear of the plane.

It took every single shred of my self-control not to turn around to check out her ass as she walked away. I pulled out my phone, and unsurprisingly almost all the messages were from Sarah.

Please come home.

Where are you? We can fix this. I know we can. I am going to end things with Lewis.

You put Lewis in the hospital! What the fuck is wrong with you?? He has a broken jaw, a broken cheek, and needs 10 stitches on his head!

You told his WIFE!!! She has kicked him out! You broke up a family! I can't believe you could be so petty! Well, he is threatening to sue, so I am going to pay his medical bills!

YOU EMPTIED THE BANK ACCOUNT! I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH OF MY PAY CHEQUE TO LIVE OFF FOR A MONTH!

There was a little bit of a gap in the time between that message and the next. But the message that followed was as predictable as it was pathetic. I could almost hear her thinking, "half of that money was mine. Oh, wait, no, it wasn't. That's okay. I'll just use the credit card. Shit, I can't. It was maxed out and deactivated. What am I going to do?" What she failed to realize was that my lawyer would be salivating over the "I am going to end things with Lewis" part. It didn't matter what she said during the divorce proceedings. I had her admission, in writing, that she had been having an affair. I took a screenshot of the message thread and forwarded it in an email to my lawyer, along with written confirmation of the change of my will and my intent to get divorce papers served, before finally reading the last of her messages.

Baby, I'm so sorry, please come home. I love you.

I stifled the snorted laugh, took a deep breath, and started typing. The plane around me jolted a little as it was slowly dragged away from the gate.

Sarah, this is the last time you are ever going to hear from me without a lawyer being present. I am not coming back, I am not going to forgive you, and pretending you love me so you can keep living in the lifestyle that I provided is fooling nobody. If you loved me at all, you wouldn't have spent the last year fucking my friend behind my back. I am not going to call you names, you are not worth it, but I have no doubt that between Stacy and Bill, everyone is going to know what happened within a few days. If they want to call you a slut, a whore, an ungrateful, lying, deceitful little bitch, or any of the other names that you absolutely deserve, that is up to them.

As for Lewis. I hope it hurt, and he should consider himself lucky that I didn't hit him again. If he wants to sue me, best of luck to him, he knows how to contact my lawyer. But considering you now have no access to any of MY money, he will have to find alternative ways to cover his expenses (and your affair) until his lawsuit is processed. Yes, I told Stacy, she deserved to know what a scumbag she was married to, but don't fool yourself. I didn't break up that family, you did when you opened your legs, and he did when he climbed between them. You both knew what you were doing, and you did it anyway. This is on the two of you and only you.

I suggest you talk to your boss about getting more shifts at the diner, because you will never EVER receive another dollar from me. I have wasted enough of my life, my time, and my money on you. You are on your own. I am going away for a while. I will be back to finalize the divorce. Goodbye.

The rest of the messages were from other friends within our little social group, all of them expressing shock and disgust at the situation despite me having a strong suspicion that more than one of them had known all along. Another was from Stacy. It was short but essentially thanked me for confirming what she had suspected for a while, although she was heartbroken on my behalf that Lewis had been doing it with Sarah. She had never been particularly fond of Sarah. I had known that for a while but could never work out why. It turns out that she was a much better judge of character than I was. She also passed on her love from herself and her daughters. "The Wives Club," as I had teasingly called them, the wives and partners of the men in our friend group had sent a few messages offering their sympathy and support. I didn't know most of them particularly well, yet they still seemed more sincere than my own friends. They had been horrified by the revelation and had immediately and harshly banished Sarah from their midst.

I still abjectly refused to feel bad for either Sarah or Lewis.

I turned the phone off and tucked it into my pocket. Given the hour of the day, the news would have spread by now, and fielding the endless barrage of calls and texts was not how I wanted to spend my first few hours of freedom. I was acutely aware that I should be heartbroken. I should be inconsolable. My life had crumbled to dust around me in a few short hours, and yet all I felt when I thought about it was... numbness. I wasn't even particularly angry. It was as if part of my mind had just slammed the door shut in the faces of those emotions and point blank refused to deal with them for now.

I knew they would come; those tears as I drove away from Sarah had shown me that the emotions were there. I also knew that when they finally did come, it would be brutal. I would be mourning the loss of my relationship with Sarah, the loss of my friendship with Lewis, and the unforgivable betrayal by both of them. The shame and embarrassment of being the guy that it had happened to. The weeks and months of people pussy footing around me, dreading the next time I would inevitably bump into them, wondering if they were together at that very moment - well, not that moment, I knew Lewis was in the hospital getting his face fixed, but later moments were anyone's guess. My foreseeable future was going to be spent trying to drag myself out of the pits of despair and depression, constantly wondering where I went wrong, why it had happened, and why the two people closest to me in my life had decided that I meant that little to them. Wondering if I should have found out earlier, wondering - knowing what I knew now - if I had been blind, stupid, or naive not to see it sooner.

I wasn't there yet, but I knew I would be. So - there and then - I decided I was going to make the most out of this trip, forget about home and everyone in it. I was going to live for as long as I could until I had to deal with that life falling apart.

I turned my head and stared out the window as the plane started to accelerate down the runway, smiling to myself as I felt that whole-body lurch as the change in momentum forced me into my seat when the aircraft tilted and then left the ground. As an engineer, I had a decent understanding of how it all worked, and every single time I thought about it, the same thing popped into my mind.

It was pretty fucking cool.

**********

It is a little-known fact that there are lots of movies that are not allowed to be shown on aircraft. Ones about plane crashes are the obvious example. But there are limits to how far that logic seems to go, or at least how well thought out that seemingly good concept is. For example, when Concorde crashed in Paris on July 25th, 2000, they showed it on the news... in the airport... where it had just taken off from. That's right... There were people who had crammed up against the glass at Charles DeGaulle airport to gaze upon the iconic aircraft, who were still in the airport terminal an hour later when the news broke, watching in horror as they realized that the plane they had just seen, and the 105 people they had watched boarding it, were now gone. All that remained of them was a field of flaming wreckage outside a Parisian hotel a few dozen miles away...

And then those people had to board a plane.

At some point, there had to be someone within the airport administration who thought that showing graphic and gruesome pictures of a plane crash to the people waiting to board planes was not the best of ideas. But nope, they showed it anyway. The same thing happened a little over a year later on 9/11. The pictures of that horrific event were being broadcast live into airport lounges when the second plane hit... air traffic was not grounded in the US for another few hours and not in other countries for most of that day. More than a few countries didn't ground flights at all, Russia, China, and India being the largest examples. They still let their passengers watch the news, though. Do you have any idea how many flights took off worldwide that day, whose passengers and crew had just watched the events at the twin towers unfold? Neither do I, but my guess is that it was a lot.

It is odd what you think about on a plane.

I was just grateful when the opening scene of Finding Nemo faded onto the screen. You know the one where that fish gets to watch his entire family being massacred by a predator and then is mocked for an entire movie about being a little bit overprotective of his only surviving child.

I should have brought a book.

***********

"And how is Mister Popular?" Hayley said with a smile a few hours later as she plopped herself down onto the seat on the other side of the aisle, her feet in the walkway and her elbow propped up onto the armrest.

"Most people call me Dan." I chuckled back to her.

"And what about the people who don't call you Dan?" She smirked

"They call me Mister Popular."

She laughed, a magical, almost musical sound that pulled a bigger smile onto my lips just from hearing it. "Quiet flight tonight?"

"Oh yes, the red eyes are always quiet, but this one is especially easy. Just the kind I like." she smiled with a nod, looking up and down the center aisle of the plane. "So, I'm guessing with how busy your phone was and traveling alone, you are flying on business?"

"Noooo, I'm not nearly important enough to get air miles." I joked back. This wasn't exactly true; I was extremely important and was already dreading the number of emails I would have to wade through when I got home; I just never needed to travel.

"Oh, so traveling for pleasure?"

"Let's just say I am escaping for a while."

"Now that sounds like a story. Nothing like an emergency vacay to push the reset button" She smiled, tucking an unruly lock of that brilliant red hair behind her ear. "We are usually rushed off our feet on these long-hauls, but I do like to chat to our passengers, if I get a chance, on the quieter ones."

"Then consider me your company for the evening," I answered, my smile seemingly permanently attached to my face and my mind wondering if I was actually flirting or not.

"I may take you up on that," She smiled back, partway between flirty and professional. "Is there anything you would like to drink for now?"

"I think I am okay, but there is something I have to ask, something I have always wondered about."

"Go ahead, Sweetie."

"The mile-high club." I started, letting her giggle a little before continuing. "Is that really a thing?"

"Actually, yes, not as much of a thing as you may think, but yes, it is one." She laughed. "And no, I'm not a member."

"There's always time," I quipped confidently. "So what do you do when that happens?"

"Nothing." She shrugged, trying to hide a little bit of a blush from my comment. "Despite what you may have heard, there is not a single rule saying that having some nookie in the bathroom is not allowed... Unless the 'fasten seatbelts' sign is on. And even then, they are only guilty of not following crew instructions, it is a slap on the wrist at worst. As long as they don't do any damage to the facilities, we let them get on with it."

"They're not breaking any public decency laws?"

"Well, no. Technically speaking, aircraft are private property, so it is not in the public domain. Also, they are in the bathrooms, so they are not really public either. More than that, it comes down to jurisdiction. Crimes on a plane are usually dealt with at either the departure point or the destination. So unless it is something serious, like violent offenses, most places don't want the headache of dealing with a misdemeanor that may have happened in a different state, maybe a different country, and lots of times, over international waters. I don't think any of the lovebirds I know about have ever had any charges brought."

"Wow. I honestly didn't know that. I bet you make sure they know they were caught, though, right?" I smirked

"Oh absolutely, that's half the fun." She grinned as she stood. "Gotta let people have their fun, and nobody likes being interrupted before they can finish, but we have to get our jollies as well." She laughed again. "Are you sure I can't get you a drink or something?"

"Will you be joining me?"

She looked up and down the aisle, seemingly judging her workload before answering. "Tell you what, if things calm down in an hour or so, I will join you."

"It's a date." I flashed my best smile, silently wondering about the ease at which this flirty demeanor was coming out with her.