smiled up at her while Mr. Fancy Pants complied with the request.
When we were alone again, he lifted his paper coffee cup to his lips and gulped the liquid down, never once breaking his gaze. Then, "How did you do that?"
3
Ash
The whiskey, it wasn't a good idea. Not a good idea at all.
I knocked back the rest of it anyway.
I peered at the woman beside me, the one who'd played a probability parlor trick while I tried to figure out whether her eyes were both the same color. All that staring and I still didn't know whether they were dark blue or dark green, or whether the cabin lighting was tricking my mind into believing one was blue and the other green. It was annoying. There was no need for complications in eye color. Nor was there need for staring. I never would've stared at someone the way I was staring at her if whiskey hadn't been involved. "How did you do that?"
The aircraft rolled away from the terminal. Her lips quirked up. "Which part?"
I leaned back, resting my head against the seat. "Start from the beginning. How do you know half of this flight is business travelers? Where are you sourcing that data?"
She stifled a laugh as she unzipped the purse slung across her chest. "Where am I sourcing my data," she murmured, now busy rifling through her bag. "Come on, man. Do I look like LexisNexis? I'll solve that problem for you too. No, I don't look like LexisNexis but I do know that business travelers account for something like fifteen percent of all air passengers. When taking into consideration the time of day, day of the week, and day relative to holidays and other travel-ish events, it's reasonable to conclude this flight has a much higher concentration of business travelers than the fifteen percent, even if I can't remember where I saw that statistic. It was probably one of those graphs on the bottom corner of the USA Today cover."
"That's reliable science," I quipped. The pilot broke in with a muffled update about our position in the takeoff line. I heard but I didn't process. My shoulder fucking hurt and her eyes were annoying. "And the ratio of locals to visitors? Was that an infographic on Facebook?"
She—Zelda, her name was Zelda like legends and Fitzgeralds—leveled me with a glare. "What's the real reason I'm a hard pass? Because it doesn't matter whether I find a pen and show my work all over the back of an arm-long CVS receipt right now. It doesn't matter whether I can remember where my stats come from. It only matters that you passed before I logic'd through the odds of us sitting next to each other on this flight."
I still had my coffee cup tucked against my chest like a shield…or a security blanket. I wasn't sure there was a substantive difference between the two, not in my current predicament. "While that was—uh—bizarre, I'm looking for a specific skill set."
Zelda's brows creased as a flash of understanding crossed her eyes. "Yeah, about that. Which job did I apply for?"
She had a streak of blue hair right behind her ear. I noticed it only when she tucked her hair back. I'd noticed it sixteen times. "Auditing assistant."
Her eyes widened but she chased that reaction away with a shrug. "All right, well, you tell me what the job involves and I'll tell you why I'm perfect."
"That's not really how—no. No." We weren't doing this. It was a bad idea and I was far too distracted by blue hair and mismatched eyes and my fucking shoulder to deal with this. "Look, I'm sorry you heard what I said. It was—it wasn't professional. But this isn't a good fit."
I shifted my attention out the window just as her fingers slipped through her hair, dragging it over her ear a seventeenth time. The terminal faded from view as the plane taxied down the runway. Denver faded as we took off. I studied the sky, the clouds, the mountains until hearing the loudspeaker's chime. I had my laptop out of the seat-back pocket and open on my tray table before the flight attendant spoke.
And I found myself staring at Zelda's résumé once again. Motherfuck.
"Let me see if I can get this too," she said, both hands held up in front of her as if she was about to conjure magic. And she could. I hated to admit it but I knew she could. "You prefer things to