Harry
“I hate commercial flying,” I told her, trying to keep the conversation going. She looked a little peaked. Maybe she was still scared, even though we were now well up towards our cruising altitude? “But it’s actually very safe. It’s a trust issue, I guess. A control thing.”
“Putting yourself into somebody else’s control? The pilots? The air traffic control folks? The aircraft maintenance people?”
“Exactly. The ironic thing is, I’m a pilot myself.”
“No way!”
“Seriously. Not a commercial pilot, of course. But I have a private pilot’s license. I learned to fly because I was afraid. Thought it would make my silly anxieties vanish if I knew all the ins and outs of what could actually happen in the cockpit.”
“But it didn’t work?”
“It works fine when I’m the guy at the controls. Cool as a cucumber then. I’ve got enough hours that I know how to handle the plane. Of course, I don’t fly the big jets, but I’ve played around with all the commercial models on the sim. You know about aviation sims?”
“I know that airline pilots have to practice handling emergencies using computerized simulations. Is that what you mean?”
“Yep.” She was well-spoken, another thing I liked about her. Educated and intelligent. “I have a good friend who runs sims for commercial pilots, and occasionally if there’s a free slot, he’ll run one for me. Hell, I almost landed my Airbus in a sim of the famous ditching in the Hudson.”
“Almost?”
“Yeah, I kinda fucked it up at the last minute. Caught a wing, cartwheeled and landed upside down. Most of my passengers drowned.”
“Wait, this was a simulation, right?”
“Yeah, I failed. But I’ve passed a lot of others with flying colors.”
She giggled. “Remind me not to fly with you.”
“Hey, I’m a good pilot. Very safe.”
“So you’d feel okay if you were in the cockpit flying the plane?”
“Safer, yeah. It’s the computers flying the plane, though. The pilots are probably playing iPad games up there. Or sleeping.”
She shivered. “Are you kidding me? Don’t tell me that. The only time I feel relatively okay is when we’re at cruising altitude. But I like to think the pilots are watching the gauges and doing important stuff, not playing computer games.”
“I’m sure our guys are paying close attention to whatever the hell is happening on the flight deck.”
She looked dubious. Maybe a little edgy. My bad. I’d been talking to help her relax, or maybe to help me relax, and instead I’d made her more nervous.
“What you need is a way to distract yourself. So you won’t think unhappy thoughts about what our pilots are doing.”
“I know, but the more I try to think about not thinking about something, the more I think about it.” She paused and gave me a knock-out smile. “If that makes any sense at all.”
“I know exactly what you mean. I just read an interesting article about that. You need to counter your fears with stronger stimuli.”
“Like what?”
“Well, one suggestion is that if you’re really nervous about flying, you should bring a laptop that’s loaded with porn.”
Okay, I knew this was a bad idea as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I forged onward anyway: “When you’re watching porn, your hormones get unleashed. They’re powerful enough to counteract the brain chemicals that induce anxiety. So one feeling overwhelms the other.”
The color had been creeping into Emily’s lovely face as I spoke. Now she turned to look out the window, leaving me wondering if I had left my brain on the runway. Mentioning porn to a strange woman on an airplane. Shit, I had been off the market for far too long. I used to be way smoother than that.
Then she surprised me. She turned back to me, and there was a mischievous gleam in her eyes. “I see you have a laptop. Since you’re both male and a nervous flyer, I’m willing to bet it’s loaded with porn.”
“I plead the Fifth. But I notice you’ve got your Kindle in the seat pocket,” I teased her. “What have you got on there? A lot of hot romance novels to read on the plane? Some of those are pretty erotic.”
“How would you know?” she laughed. “Do you read them?”
I thought it best to change the subject. “It’s just that I do think reading helps.”
“I was hoping to sleep,” she reminded me, gesturing to the now-abandoned blindfold that was nestled in the seat pocket. I had a brief fantasy of her lovely body spread out on my bed, naked and writhing, that blindfold covering her eyes so she couldn’t see what I was going to do to her next. My cock twitched. Who needed porn?
The flight attendant had started serving drinks, and since we were in first class, we ought to get the good stuff for free. “Have a drink,” I suggested. “I hate to drink alone.”