The Happy Ever After Playlist - Abby Jimenez Page 0,5

taxied toward our gate to the clink of seat belts coming undone. The air stopped coming through the tiny vents above us, and I got instantly hot. I peeled off my sweatshirt and plucked at the front of my black T-shirt.

Kathy leaned in and bounced her eyebrows. “You smell nice,” she said in her thick Australian accent. Then she felt up my arm. “Ooh! Linea, cop a feel of his arm on your side, he’s so muscly.”

Linea reached across me to hit her friend with a rolled-up magazine. “The man gives up his first-class seat for that military bloke and to thank him you put your mitts all over him. You should be— Oh! He is muscly!”

I chuckled. I’d been the meat in a Kathy-and-Linea sandwich for the last four hours on my flight from New Zealand to Australia. Being jammed into a center seat had been well worth the sacrifice. These two strangers were fucking hilarious. I’d been highly entertained the whole trip. Better than a complimentary bourbon and a warm washcloth.

When we began to deplane, I stood in the aisle to pull down the ladies’ carry-ons.

“Jason,” Kathy said, in front of me, waiting for her bag. “I have a daughter who’s single. She’s a nurse. She’d love those blue eyes. Ya interested?”

“If she’s half as gorgeous as you, she’s out of my league.” I extended the handle on her luggage and handed it to her with a wink.

She grinned up at me. “Cheeky bastard. Good luck with everything.” She turned and started walking. “Thanks for the autograph. I’m gettin’ on Twitter to keep tabs on you,” she said over her shoulder, following Linea out of the plane.

I smiled after her as I grabbed my backpack from the overhead and stepped back into my empty row to dig out my phone. It had been dead when I boarded. I disconnected it from its portable charger and powered it on for the first time in two weeks. It burst into a vibrating symphony of chimes and pings.

Back to the real world.

Fifteen days of backpacking. I dreaded the crap I’d have to sift through after being out of contact for so long. I’d probably have a hundred messages from my agent, Ernie, alone.

I punched in my pin and started with my voicemails as I shouldered my bag. My mailbox was full. I was four messages in and waiting for a break in the line in the aisle to get off the plane when an unfamiliar female voice came through the phone.

“Uh, hi. I’ve got Tucker here? He was running around loose in the middle of the street on Topanga Canyon Boulevard? My name’s Sloan. My number is 818-555-7629. Let me know when you want to come get him.”

Shit.

I swung my backpack in front of me to dig for a pen. I wrote the number down on my hand and dialed it, doing the math quickly in my head. It was 11:00 a.m. in Melbourne. Six p.m. in Los Angeles.

Come on, come on, come on.

“Hello?” a woman said after three rings.

“Hi, is this Sloan? My name’s Jason. I think you have my dog. Did someone come get him?”

There was silence on the other end for a moment, and I thought maybe I’d lost the call. I shuffled out of my row into the aisle and pressed for the exit in the crush of other passengers, hoping I’d get a better signal outside the plane. “Hello?” I said again.

“Yeah, I heard you.” Her voice sounded edgy. “I still have him.”

I flexed my jaw. Goddamn it. Fucking Monique.

I stopped in the stuffy Jetway and moved to the wall, holding the phone with my shoulder. I hovered the pen over my hand. “Give me your address. I’ll send someone to pick him up.”

“No.”

Huh? “What?”

“No,” she said again.

“What do you mean, no? No, you won’t let me pick him up?”

“You know, you have a lot of nerve. It’s been almost two weeks, and now you decide you want your dog?”

Two weeks? Tucker had been lost for two fucking weeks?

“I’ve been out of town. I didn’t have cell service. I had no idea he was missing. I have no problem paying for a reward. Please, just give me your address and I’ll—”

“No. He’s not your dog anymore. If he’d been at the shelter, his hold would be up and he’d either have been adopted or euthanized. I put up signs, ran his microchip, put him online, I left you a dozen voicemails. I did my due diligence.