and switches on the control panel. When she pulled on the throttle, the engine roared impossibly loud. We finally began to move forward again, first at a slow creep and then with incremental bursts of speed.
A quiet—or at least I hoped it was quiet—gasp escaped my mouth when the front of the plane lifted off the ground. The rear wheels followed suit and the ground fell away. As we made our initial ascent, the plane tilted to one side and then the other before finally leveling out.
I exhaled noisily and the sound of my breath echoed in my ears.
“We made it!” Anissa cheered. She removed her hands from the yoke and shook them around. “Look, ma! No hands!”
I slapped her shoulder. “Stop messing around!” I hissed.
Her head tucked into her raised shoulders and she had enough sense to look sorry. “Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll behave.”
I peered out my window and looked straight down. We weren’t so high that I couldn’t make out highways and the shape of various buildings and parks. “How high up are we?”
Anissa pointed at one of the circular gauges. “10,000 feet. But don’t even think about joining the Mile High Club. I’ve got too much work to do over here.”
I snapped my eyes in her direction. There was no way Anissa could have known about the bingo card and its challenges. I tried to laugh at what I was sure she’d meant as a joke, but it sounded more like a choking noise.
“So, uh, where are we going?” I asked.
“I’m on the lam.” She contorted her voice into a strange, old-timey accent. “We’re making a run for the Canadian border.”
I stared at the instrument panel, but it was all Greek to me. I thought I might have recognized a wind speed gauge and maybe a speedometer, but nothing looked obviously like a compass to tell me where we were going. The giant blue lake beneath us, however, said due north.
I was confident she was only teasing me, and yet, I really didn’t know this woman. I’d had sex with her, sure, but what did I really know about Anissa Khoury?
I sat a little easier in my seat when I remembered that Kent technically knew where I was—not specifically in a Cessna 172S somewhere above Lake Huron—but he’d been the one to procure Anissa’s home address for me. When I didn’t show up for work the next day and they discovered my empty apartment, the next place they’d look would be Anissa’s house.
“Are you okay over there?” Anissa’s voice in my ears snapped me out of the Dateline episode I was silently scripting.
I forced a grin in her general direction. “Everything’s great.”
“I’m not stealing you away from something, am I?”
Stealing. She was stealing me.
I barked out a too-loud laugh. “No. This is great. Thanks for taking me up.”
I nearly jumped out of my jump-seat when a hand touched my knee. Anissa flashed me another encouraging smile. Her twin dimples were almost enough to pacify my nerves.
“Do you want to give it a try?” she offered.
“Flying?” I held up my hands in surrender. “I’ve never done this before,” I needlessly reminded her.
Her smile was patient and placating. “I promise I won’t let you crash the plane.”
I hesitatingly placed my hands on the black yoke in front of me. “What do I do?”
“Just point the nose where you want to go.”
I grabbed more firmly onto the yoke and the plane tilted to one side, not dramatically, but enough to make me audibly squeak. I immediately let go.
“Small corrections,” Anissa gently instructed as she leveled the plane back out. “Wanna try again?” she offered.
I swallowed and wiped my palms on the top of my thighs. I flexed my fingers once before I set my hands again on the yoke and let my fingers curl around its edges. I didn’t move. I didn’t do anything for fear of making a mistake; I held my arms and hands rigidly static.
“Exciting, right?”
“Terrifying,” I corrected.
Anissa laughed. “It’s okay. I’ll take it from here. I’ve made you work enough for one day.”
I gladly released the yoke and returned my attention to the surrounding scenery beyond my window. From this height and angle, the terrain below better resembled the Caribbean than the state of Michigan. The bright sun made Lake Huron sparkle. Small islands and shallows looked like the coral reefs of an exotic land.
“It’s beautiful,” I thought aloud.
“I was worried you might get bored,” she admitted. “Don’t you see this every day at work?”
“Not really.