I loved it. I needed hours with this photo.
You’ll have hours with her, and the bikini, in less than two days.
Two days.
Just two days.
Two days that stretched in front of me like an eternity.
8
The Magnitude Scale
*Mona*
Usually, if I’m booked on a flight and the airline offers a voucher to take a later flight, I am the first person to give up my seat. Discounts on air travel excites me more than well-timed puns and cookies combined.
Vouchers. Vouchers. Even the word sounds seductive.
But not this time. Nothing would induce me to give up my seat on the overbooked flight from Frankfurt to New York for a later flight, not even $800 in travel vouchers. Such was my commitment to arriving in New York as soon as the laws of thermodynamics would allow.
My plane was set to arrive around 9 PM. The plan was for me to check into our hotel, reserved under the names Abram and Mona Harris, and wait for his flight to land at approximately 6:00AM the following morning. Using the aliases had been his idea and made sense given how nuts the paparazzi had been over him in the last several months. Our hotel, called Inn New York City, wasn’t one with which I was familiar, but he’d insisted on the location. I honestly didn’t care, just as long as we were together.
The flight itself was uneventful, albeit slow, further buoying my theory that feelings influence perception of motion and the space-time continuum. Perhaps feelings were the key to unraveling the mystery of quantum gravity. Hmm.
Eventually, we landed at JFK safe and sound, and I immediately switched off the airplane mode of my phone, wanting to text Abram as soon as possible. I’d just opened my messaging app when a series of texts came through, the first one sent just after my flight had taken off, but the second one was from less than a half hour ago.
Abram: Can’t wait to see you.
* * *
Abram: Call Marie at this number when you land.
Marie?
Frowning at the last text, my heart fluttering anxiously, I called Abram’s number as instructed and turned toward the window at my right in order to achieve maximum privacy despite being packed into the very back of coach like osmium.
Three rings later, a female voice answered, “Mona?”